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DISCOVER YOUR PURPOSE: Lessons from Six Climate Reality Leaders

ARE YOU READY TO BE INSPIRED? Six of our amazing Climate Reality Leaders share their personal stories of victory in the name of climate justice.

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MAKE CLIMATE SOLUTIONS A REALITY

You know the climate is changing, and now you want to make a difference. But how?Trained by The Climate Reality Project Founder and Chairman Al Gore and renowned climate scientists and communicators from around the world, our Climate Reality Leaders shape the conversation on climate science in forums from family dinners to international summits to tell the story of the climate crisis and build a twenty-first century movement for solutions.

Our past e-books have helped you learn about the science, impacts, and solutions of the climate crisis. And no one out there does a better job of taking all of that information and putting it to use to solve what is far and away the greatest challenge of our time than the Climate Reality Leadership Corps.

There are now more than 10,000 Climate Reality Leaders in more than 135 countries. Here are some of their stories.

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HEAL THE PLANET AND ITS PEOPLE LIKE DR. SUSAN PACHECO

Dr. Susan Pacheco attended the second-ever Climate Reality Leadership Corps training event held in 2006 in Nashville, Tennessee. By 2013, US President Barack Obama had recognized her with the honor of being a White House Champion of Change.

How did she get there?

As an associate professor at the University of Texas Health Science Center, Dr. Pacheco specializes in pediatric asthma, allergies, and immunology. And since training in Nashville, she’s used that position to educate her students, the broader Houston community, and medical professionals throughout the United States about the threats to human health associated with climate change.

Dr. Pacheco founded the Texas Coalition for Climate Change Awareness, a network of individuals from diverse backgrounds united around the common goal of educating themselves and their communities about climate change in the state. She’s been working with the American Academy of Pediatrics’ Council on Environmental Health to publish a policy statement and technical report on the impact of climate change on pediatric health. She’s published two op-eds in the Houston Chronicle and one in popular Hispanic paper La Opinion about the importance of the Clean Power Plan and EPA regulations for ozone. And perhaps most importantly, she’s working to educate doctors just beginning their careers by bringing the impacts of climate change on public health into the medical school curriculum, starting with her own students at the University of Texas McGovern Medical School.

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FIGHT FOR CLIMATE JUSTICE IN YOUR OWN BACK YARD LIKE

JILL MACINTYRE WITT

Why did Jill Macintyre Witt become a Climate Reality Leader in San Francisco in 2012? She wanted to stop the construction of the Gateway Pacific Terminal, which would have been North America’s largest coal export terminal. If everything went according to the plans then circulating, the terminal would have been built just north of her hometown of Bellingham, Washington, meaning trains spewing coal dust chugging through the streets she knew and carrying coal destined for Asia.

To many, the thought of people in a town of just over 85,000 – in a county of slightly more than 200,000 – taking on the fossil fuel industry in a local fight with global implications might sound a little, well, ambitious. If not outright crazy. But that’s exactly what happened.

Jill, drawing on her training as a Climate Reality Leader and work with 350.org, got serious about organizing local opposition to the terminal, coordinating marches, holding public comment workshops, getting candidates opposed to the terminal elected, building coalitions, and educating others in Bellingham about what was at stake. (As just one indicator of how committed she was as a Climate Reality Leader, she gave over 25 presentations of the very slideshow from An Inconvenient Truth that had inspired her in the first year of her crusade alone.) And by bringing people in Bellingham together with others from across Whatcom County as well as local indigenous neighbors, the Lummi Nation, she helped stop the coal project dead in its tracks in 2016.

For a lot of people, the line “Think global. Act local.” is mostly just a slogan they see on bumper stickers. For Climate Reality Leader Jill MacIntyre Witt, it became a personal mission.

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BRING LIGHT INTO THE DARKNESS LIKE PHURPA LAMA

In 2013, Phurpa Lama traveled to Istanbul, Turkey, to train with former US Vice President Gore as a Climate Reality Leader before returning home to Nepal. Nepal is a country of villages, where around 81 percent of the population lives in rural areas. Over three-quarters of its people depend on climate-sensitive agriculture and forest resources for their livelihoods, and around one-quarter currently live without any access to electricity.

While getting basic necessities that many of us take for granted was already a challenge for many in Nepal, it became something else entirely on Saturday, April 25, 2015, when a 7.8 magnitude earthquake struck the nation.

On that day, Phurpa was talking about climate change with a group of indigenous women in Chautara, Sindhupalchok, a remote mountain village. He was right in the middle of his presentation when the earthquake struck. Everywhere he went, Phurpa saw people struggling to cope with the loss of loved ones and the destruction of their homes and livelihoods. But there was another thing he noticed. In the darkness of villages without electricity, in places without light, people were finding it even harder to rebuild and move forward. The reason was simple: people couldn’t keep working on much-needed repairs when the sun went down. They also couldn’t charge their phones and check on their loved ones. When they did have light after sunset, it was often because they were using dangerous kerosene lamps, which bellowed soot and were made even more dangerous by the frequent aftershocks rippling through the ground.

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BRING LIGHT INTO THE DARKNESS LIKE PHURPA LAMA

For Phurpa, it was a light-bulb moment. He’d spent years working on climate concerns – so when his grandmother asked him to bring her kerosene, he realized he could do something better. Something that wouldn’t choke her home with thick soot or start a fire if more aftershocks came. Something that could help Nepal recover more quickly from disaster in the future. “Stopping fossil fuel-based lighting became my first priority,” he says, “for human health and our environment.”

In a matter of weeks, this spark of inspiration became Phurpa’s solar initiative, Light Up a Life for a Better Nepal. He already knew how to talk to people about the climate crisis, and with the challenges of disaster recovery all too evident, he knew donors and the international community would be open to new and innovative approaches. So he set out to find the funds and resources to bring solar lamps to rural areas of Nepal. To date, the project has deployed over 70 small solar lamps to households and 15 larger solar units to schools, monasteries, and community centers in the Sindhupalchok District. And in the meantime, Phurpa is currently working with partners to raise the funds to build a sustainable community center in the village of Kakani powered entirely by solar energy.

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CHALLENGE THE SYSTEM LIKE ASIF IQBAL

Asif Iqbal began his career in 1999 working with grassroots organizations to deal with the local impacts of the climate crisis in Pakistan.In the years that followed, he worked on 70 projects across 11 districts in the country’s Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, helping design and implement initiatives to develop drinking water supplies in hilly areas, enhance agricultural practices in the face of rising temperatures, and support young entrepreneurs. Asif could see the work he was doing was making a real difference, but he could also see that the realities these projects addressed – more frequent or severe drought and flooding, to name only a few – would continue as long as the root cause behind them remained untouched. Spurred by this realization, he packed his bags in 2009 and headed for Melbourne, Australia, to train as a Climate Reality Leader.

Asif took these lessons home and quickly got to work, creating Climate Project Connectors, a network to spread the word and create a movement for climate action in communities across Pakistan. From day one, the biggest challenge the group faced was educating people on the science and urgency of the issue in a part of the world where the government doesn’t see climate change as a priority and issues like security and poverty jostle for national attention. For Asif, addressing this challenge became not just a cause but a moral obligation as – just a year after returning from Melbourne – he watched devastating floods hit Pakistan, inundating a fifth of the country and affecting 20 million people.

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CHALLENGE THE SYSTEM LIKE ASIF IQBAL

So Asif moved forward, sharing his message online, in person, and in the media, and the results are plain to see. He made his first climate presentation in 2009 to an audience of nine. A few years later, he was speaking to millions as part of 24 Hours of Reality, and the Climate Project Connectors has become a national-level network with members regularly appearing on television and radio and reaching out to university students, military personnel, journalists, non-governmental organization staff, and more.

Critically, Asif’s approach is paying off — in a very big way. When the current government led by Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif took office in 2013, it demoted the Climate Change Ministry from a cabinet-level organization to a division without the ability to make key decisions. For a country frequently on the list of nations most vulnerable to climate change, the symbolism was crystal clear: climate action simply wasn’t a key concern.

Once the potential for a global climate deal in Paris was on the horizon in 2015, Climate Project Connectors saw the opportunity for Pakistan to play a key part in negotiations and launched a full-court press with letters to Prime Minister Sharif, coordinated outreach with partner organizations, personal appeals to leading figures, and media campaigns. Public awareness grew, and due in part to these efforts, Pakistan restored the Climate Change Ministry in January 2014, signaling a new focus on action.

Asif is the first to admit that keeping momentum going can be a challenge. But he’ll also point to the strength of the volunteers he works with and the amazing potential and leadership qualities of the young students he speaks to as reasons for hope. And you only have to look at his own journey – one from a young boy watching the climate crisis hit his village to an activist leading his nation’s fight against it – to know that progress is not a question of if, but when.

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MAKE AN IMPACT LIKE PAUL REALE

Paul began his career as an engineer at Bell Laboratories.

His passion to address climate change led to a dramatic career shift. He trained with former US Vice President Gore in Nashville, Tennessee, became a US Green Building Council (USGBC) Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED)-accredited professional, and launched a green startup called GREEN ALLOWANCE.

“I left energized,” Paul said of his Climate Reality Leadership Corps training. “I was committed to making an impact, with dozens of new people in my network to help and inspire me along the way. Most of all, I left with hope.”

His combined talents of deep technical understanding, passion for the cause, and refined communication skills have led to a full career in the New York real estate industry. Paul has taught building energy codes, green leasing techniques, and climate-friendly building operations to thousands of real estate professionals, architects, engineers, and building operators, and given talks about the climate crisis to thousands of people over scores of events. Paul currently works in applied research at CUNY Building Performance Laboratory and supervises graduate students at City College’s graduate program in sustainability in the urban environment. He trains and consults in teaching techniques for Urban Green Council, and manages energy efficiency projects in the private sector.

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FIND YOUR PURPOSE LIKE REVEREND TERRY GALLAGHER

Like many Climate Reality Leaders out talking to all kinds of audiences about the climate crisis, the Reverend Terry Gallagher is used to hearing people just dismiss the subject as alarmist hype.

But when that happens, he smiles a little more than most Leaders would. Why? Because he used to do the exact same thing.

So how does a climate change denier and ordained minister end up a Climate Reality Leader?

During Terry’s 32-year career in the chemical industry, he began to hear about the climate crisis but refused to listen. The notion, he admits, “didn’t fit my worldview at the time.” His attitude on the topic was simple: “I ain’t gonna engage with you alarmists, so take your green and go away.”

And when yet more environmental regulations came down to dictate what kind of emissions the plants he worked at could produce or how they could process chemicals, he did what everyone else did – grumble loudly and comply. Having to deal with these regulations, however, was his first step down the road to becoming a climate activist. Before long, he began to see that running his plants this way wasn’t just better for the environment – it was also leading to better product quality, safety, and yields. And it got him thinking.

Meanwhile, just as Terry’s career as a chemical executive was taking solid shape, life intervened, and

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FIND YOUR PURPOSE LIKE REVEREND TERRY GALLAGHER

he again heard the calling to a life of purpose and Christian ministry that had sounded decades earlier. Only this time he answered. He entered the seminary to study and train as a minister and ultimately left his career in industry behind.

Terry traveled to a remote Colombian village in the Andes Mountains as part of a Christian peacemaker team standing in solidarity with gold miners protesting the threat of eviction by the Colombian army. When his team arrived, they were taken on a tour to see the mine and the process of refining gold there. The rest of the team saw a community scratching a living out of the hillside and was awestruck. Terry, having run chemical plants for decades, saw the chemicals they were using and saw a community poisoning themselves, their children, and their land for generations to come – all without realizing it. Horrified, he began talking to the villagers about how running this mine was devastating their health and destroying the environment all around them. But as he did, he realized that this kind of practice (and the selective blindness that went with it) was far from limited to a village in the Andes.

He knew he had to do something.

When Terry returned from Colombia, he knew the direction his ministry would take, focusing on ecological justice and waking faith and secular communities to the environmental crisis unfolding all around the world, and he needed to prepare.

Terry found in the Climate Reality Leadership Corps a “great source of positive energy and hope” and a community that shared many of his values and concerns for ecological justice. And while much of his outreach since training has focused on engaging the Christian community, he encounters many of the same challenges other Leaders do when speaking to secular audiences. Even still, he remains hopeful that things will change. In part, because when he talks to Christians about what the climate crisis means for their children and for millions suffering around the world, the message begins to sink in.

And once people understand the urgency of the situation, they want to know what they can do.

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HERE’S WHERE TO START

When you speak, your friends and family members listen. Learn how to turn this respect into results and lead your community in working for climate solutions.Climate Reality Leaders are all over the globe, spreading the word about the truth of the climate crisis and the solutions we have today and making a global challenge a personal issue for citizens on every continent.

The climate crisis is the greatest challenge of our time. Join the citizen leaders with the courage and commitment to meet it.

BECOME A CLIMATE REALITY LEADER

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ABOUT THE CLIMATE REALITY PROJECT

Founded and chaired by former US Vice President and Nobel Laureate Al Gore, The Climate Reality Project is dedicated to catalyzing a global solution to the climate crisis by making urgent action a necessity across every level of society.

Today, climate change is standing in the way of a healthy tomorrow for all of us. But we know that practical solutions are right in front of us. We can create a healthy, sustainable, and prosperous future by making a planet-wide shift from dirty fossil fuels to clean, reliable, and affordable renewable energy. At Climate Reality, we combine digital media initiatives, global organizing events, and peer-to-peer outreach programs to share this good news with citizens everywhere and build overwhelming popular support for policies that accelerate the global transition to a clean energy economy.