Creating the Climate Voter: A Conversation with Tia Nelson

An interactive map on the Outrider Foundation‘s website went viral even before the organization had a chance to promote it. Appropriately titled “What Happens In A Bomb Blast?“, the interactive allows users to visualize the impacts of a nuclear bomb being dropped on their community. Users choose among the bombs the U.S. dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki or the weapons in the Russian and North Korean nuclear arsenals. More than 2.5 million people in over 150 countries gave it a try before Outrider began marketing it. “It’s turned out to be powerfully effective communications device and wildly popular,” says Tia Nelson, a managing director of the foundation.

Tia Nelson knows a great deal about effective communications. For decades she has been a fierce environmental advocate, working for the Nature Conservancy, the State of Wisconsin, and now the Outrider Foundation, which was launched in 2015 with twin goals, both very ambitious: to “end the threat of nuclear war” and “reverse the course of global climate change.” A veteran of the first ten United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change negotiations, Nelson leads the Outrider’s climate efforts. Even after last week’s release of the grim report from the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, she remains hopeful. She believes in the power of individuals—not just their consumer choices, but their ability to influence national and global politics. She believes it because she’s seen it happen. Her father, Senator Gaylord Nelson, founded the first Earth Day in 1970, probably the biggest public relations success the environmental movement has ever had.

We sat down to discuss Outrider’s mission, the importance of science communication, and how citizens can push climate change onto the political main stage.

Stream or download the conversation here. Interview highlights follow.

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Interview highlights:

This transcript has been edited for length and clarity.

Peter Jurich: Could you tell us a little bit about the Outrider Foundation?

Tia Nelson: We were founded approximately three-and-a-half years ago. Previously our founder, Frank Burgess, and his family had a small foundation that supported local causes that were near and dear to their hearts. Then Frank decided to be more strategically focused on two big, existential risks to humanity—one being nuclear weapons the other being climate change. He hired me as the director of the climate program and Dr. Tara Drozdenko as director of the nuclear program. We have a small small team interested in engaging inspiring action among individuals to help address these great challenges.

PJ: Your website has two particularly striking interactive features—one about climate change and the other about nuclear weapons. Could you walk our listeners through the climate map?

TN: The University of Wisconsin’s Center for Climatic Research—one of the oldest climate research centers in the country—helped us develop some scientific background. There’s a section called “Climate Change 101” and another section called “Your Climate Change Questions Answered.” So we lay a foundation of scientific information about climate change and how we know it’s happening. There’s a fascinating timeline in there that I think most people would be surprised by. The phenomena of climate change—the idea that fossil fuel emissions emit carbon dioxide which accumulates in the atmosphere and warms the planet like a blanket—this is a concept that was put forward over a hundred years ago. It’s an old notion that has certainly become better understood over time, but it’s really interesting to look at that timeline of discovery scientific discovery.

But beyond that basic background are two features: one is an interactive where you can geolocate yourself in a region of the country and see localized climate impacts. This is a critical part of effective climate communications. I think environmentalists have for a long time done a fairly poor job of conveying the threats of climate change in a way that’s relatable to the average American. Whether you live at our coasts or in America’s heartland, climate change impacts all of us. So we wanted to create an experience where the user could, no matter where they live.

PJ: What are some things that people can do outside of just voting for environmentally friendly politicians? There are only so many elections. What do we do the rest of the time?

TN: Obviously voting is hugely important, and there’s some fascinating work out there by organization called the Environmental Voter Project, led by Nathaniel Stinnett, who’s done an abundance of research. Forty-five percent of eligible voters voted in the last midterm election. But barely 20% of eligible environmentalists turned out for it. So just showing up and voting is hugely important.

But there’s so much more one can do. There is an organization literally for every perspective. I love the Citizen Climate Lobby. They’re Republicans and Democrats working together and are present in every congressional district in the United States, working to build bipartisan support for putting a tax or a fee on carbon pollution—the best and fastest way to reduce carbon emissions. The Climate Reality Project, which Al Gore started, runs citizen training. There’s an organization of young evangelical Republicans voting on climate change. Regardless of how you want to enter this conversation or what type of engagement you want, there’s an organization out there for you.

The only way we’re going to build the political will for action is by voting, by being more engaged, by writing our Congressman, writing letters to the editor, showing up at community meetings, talking to our neighbors.

Right now what I’m most excited about working on at Outrider is our climate solutions video series. We’ve partnered with the Years of Living Dangerously film producers to create short-form climate solutions videos that engage and inspire action on the part of individuals in really surprising ways. We just produced a video on food waste. Until I read Paul Hawken’s book Drawdown: The Most Comprehensive Plan Ever Proposed to Reverse Global Warming, which ranks the top hundred climate solutions, I had no idea that if food waste were a country, it would be the third-largest emitter of greenhouse gases in the world, after China in the United States. So we put a video out on social, and it’s been our most successful to date. We have also done a video encouraging people to join the Citizen Climate Lobby. We’ve done another on encouraging people to make the choice to avoid single-use plastic whenever possible. (It’s a huge source of greenhouse gas emissions to say nothing of sullying our oceans.) To address a threat as large and significant as climate change, we need individuals and communities and corporations and policy makers—all levels of society—to engage. There is really a number of things that we can do—indeed that we have to do—to solve the climate crisis.

PJ: Would you tell us a little about Outrider’s nuclear weapons web interactive?

TN: That particular interactive went viral when we launched our website. It was viewed by over 2.5 million people in 150 countries without us doing any marketing of it. We worked with historian Alex Wellerstein, who developed a online tool in 2012 called NUKEMAP. We collaborate with him and a digital designer to make his maps a bit more interactive and user friendly. Users can select from either of the bombs that the United States dropped on Nagasaki and Hiroshima or select from the Russian nuclear weapons arsenal or the North Korean nuclear weapons arsenal. Then they punch in their zip code and detonate the bomb of their choice and see the geographic scope and the human impact. It’s turned out to be powerfully effective communications device and wildly popular.

PJ: Your father is, of course, Gaylord Nelson, who was a former U.S. senator and governor of Wisconsin, as well as the founder of Earth Day. In what ways do you think the public discourse surrounding nuclear disarmament and climate change is different today than when he was alive?

TN: That’s a great question. Just from my personal experience, nuclear disarmament was pretty commonly discussed because of the escalating tensions with Russia and and the Cuban Missile Crisis. I remember in first grade doing duck-and-cover drills. But Ronald Reagan had a summit with Gorbachev to discuss the reduction in our respective nuclear arsenals. What helped make that conversation possible was the political pressure from the nuclear freeze movement that had resonated across the country and it started right here in Wisconsin. It made a significant shift in the national discourse on the morality of nuclear weapons: why do we see chemical weapons as an immoral threat to citizens and yet we see nuclear weapons as something that makes us safe? That isn’t rational. 

While the scientists knew at that time of the first Earth Day in 1970 that emitting carbon dioxide was warming the planet, it was not a foremost issue on people’s minds. That was a good 22 years before the President George Herbert Walker Bush signed the Framework Convention on Climate Change in Rio. I was present for that. It was the first international agreement for countries to come together and seek to address this global risk. 

PJ: I recently saw an infographic that listed not having children as the prime way one can help combat climate change. What are your thoughts on that?

TN: The issue of population and climate change comes up fairly often. It’s certainly an issue that my father talked quite a bit about. I have come to think of it differently than some of my colleagues in the environmental community. By that I mean, for example, right now we’ve got approximately 7.3 billion people. (I don’t think it’s useful to project beyond 2050, as we’re pretty bad at long-term projections. Paul Ehrlich’s “population bomb” didn’t go off.)

There is no right number of people. The world can support 7 billion vegan monks quite easily. The world probably can’t support 7 billion Peters and Tias, because we consume a lot of stuff. Population may level off at a little over 9 billion by 2050. Currently about half of the world’s population is living in poverty. I am much more concerned with how we lift 3.5 billion people out of poverty and provide them minimum standards of living without busting our natural resource budget than I am in having a conversation speculating about the future impact of population. That’s my personal opinion. I take great umbrage with sitting around listening to a bunch of affluent people from developing countries—all of whom have cell phones in their hands and computers in their homes and in their offices, all buying single-use plastic, all well fed, driving cars, flying in planes, and enjoying all of these rich choices as consumers. I’m much more interested in finding a way to communicate to people that they’re part of the problem. And that they can be part of the solution, that there’s better choices that we can make that are more sustainable, that use less resources, that make it possible for poor people to have minimum standards of living.

PJ: Keeping the public informed and engaged is a very important part of of your work. But is it possible to oversaturate an audience with bad news to the point where they tune you out? If so, how do you combat that?

TN: The answer to that question is yes. Not only is it possible, environmentalists have done a phenomenal job of getting people to tune out by talking in catastrophic terms. We know that in the last ten years there’s been more advancement in the figuring out how to create effective climate communications, in that field of behavioral science, than there has been in climate science itself. We know gloom and doom is demotivating. So, at Outrider, our goal is to inspire people to believe they can be a part of the climate solution and then show them a pathway by which they can do that. Meet them where they are. Explain the issues. Help them see that they have a role to play.

Featured image: Tia Nelson. Courtesy of the Outrider Foundation.

Tia Nelson is Managing Director for Climate at the Outrider Foundation. She spent 17 years with The Nature Conservancy, as a senior policy advisor for Latin America and then as director of the Global Climate Change Initiative. For this work, she received the Environmental Protection Agency’s Climate Protection Award in 2000. She later returned home to Wisconsin to serve as Executive Secretary to the Wisconsin Board of Commissioners of Public Lands, which included a gubernatorial appointment as co‐chair of Wisconsin’s Task Force on Global Warming. Linkedin. Twitter. Contact.

Peter Jurich is a graduate student in the Department of Life Sciences Communication at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Twitter. Contact.