Necessity → Hobby → Action: A Story in the Climate Emergency.
By: Evan Lam
Tags: Hobby, Reading, Climate Action, Entrepreneurship, Complexity

Necessity → Hobby → Action: A Story in the Climate Emergency.

Whatever got me here, it wasn’t studying in an institution. The first time I ever picked up a textbook and truly read it was because I had to start a business. I had touched plenty of textbooks in high school but it was always out of obligation.

This time, it was out of necessity. My business partner and I would end up with over $60k to seed our startup. For two, 23-year old guys who were often on the fringes of social circles, schools, and our families, this was more money than we’d ever been responsible for. It was both surreal and exhilarating.

You don’t screw that up.

So, I read an agroecology book from front to back, a scientific manual on soil science and several published papers (which I could barely understand) within the space of a few months. This is light work for a PhD; I’d spent the last six years as a professional cook. The only degree I have ever received is an Associate’s Degree in Culinary Arts. It was more complex than I had the capacity to grasp and much of it still is.

Aside from the lessons in trade, entrepreneurship and markets, what has endured is an interest in complex systems innately coupled with the natural world. It is important to note that our business also carried Hawaiian values within it’s legal and cultural DNA. That’s a story for another time.

I spent the years after closing this business experimenting. I joined the Sunrise Movement after wading through a deluge of climate crisis anxiety. I read a critique of the European culture of science in Auckland written by a Maori scientist around the time of cloning Dolly the Sheep. In August 2020, I joined a learning community called Complexity University by taking a chance on a well written Instagram ad. They started in 2020 and have been the catalyst for about 21 tons of emissions abatement with thousands of people from across the globe. I volunteer with them, so take my endorsement as being mostly useless to you. All of this stemmed from reading things I barely understood while enduring the confusion of the bad choices I made while trying to understand them.

It was like walking through a neighborhood, where you’ve never been, and finding it full of cul-de-sacs.

Yet, here I am.

I feel we’re at the crux of the most complex, uncertain decade of our time. The ecology of our planet is changing and we can barely grasp a portion of the effect it’d have on our world. Humans are still very far from a more accurate picture of nature’s workings and interconnections. I believe there are portions of this world forever lying outside the realm of human reason or perception and that’s actually a great thing.

It is hard enough to tell yourself the truth about your family. It is questionable how much insight we can have on the effects of climate change in the soil, the water and weather which we are still learning about. The next decade could both be better or far worse than we have the capacity to imagine.

That realization taught me the following.

It can be far more useful, and productive, to understand what I don’t know rather than declaring what I do.

The Climate Emergency is mind-bogglingly complex, intense and massive. Testing solutions to it is, in part, defined by my ability to let them go when they don’t work in reality. Working in complex situations means I have to be able to let go of my ideas and prototypes, carry them into a complex system and see what I’m holding when I emerge from the other end. Then adapt and keep moving.

I’m more likely to tell myself stories than I am to tell myself the truth. Eliminating this habit is difficult, continuous work but it is critical to setting a fundamental internal standard which then enables the possibility of being effective in reality. There are many ways to accomplish this; your path will not resemble mine. So far, it’s included years of meditation, insight from multiple spiritual traditions (none of which I practice) and a handful of psychedelic experiences.

Very often, there are consequences outside of my sight. What I can do is to acknowledge those as I strategize and restrict myself from making any plans that rely on unknown consequences. This is harder than it sounds.

To any of you, on the wide plains of the internet, who’s contemplating risking failure or embarrassment for the pursuit of a far goal like impacting averting climate disaster…I say reach for it.

We need you.