Michelle meets Gaia #18 Collaboration: There’s no Planet B

Michelle was a little girl at the time of the first moon landing. She doesn’t remember much of the news coverage of Apollo 11. But it was more than just a moment of history for her. It was a moment of new opportunity, one of a dream coming true. She never wanted to go into space herself, but the fact that humans could go to the moon and return safely opened a lot of dreams for a lot of young people. For those of you who missed it, Apollo 11 was the spaceflight that first landed humans on the Moon. Commander Neil Armstrong and lunar module pilot Buzz Aldrin formed the American crew that landed the Apollo Lunar Module Eagle on July 20, 1969.

It was kind of sad to hear of the passing of Michael Collins recently. Michael Collins was the pilot that Apollo 11 while it was Neal Armstrong that got all the headlines by being the first human to step on the moon.

“There is but one Earth, tiny and fragile, and one must get 100,000 miles away to appreciate fully one's good fortune in living on it.” - Michael Collins, NASA astronaut, command module pilot for the Apollo 11 mission to the moon (1930-2021). Here is how the famous astrophysicist Carl Sagan described this view in a lecture he delivered at Cornell University in 1994. ij.php (dailygood.org)

To ensure new collaborations consistent with scale and urgency of these challenges – inside and outside of the industry, companies are being challenged to prove progress on climate goals, So many new initiatives (from UN, EU, G20, API, industry (OGCI), NGOs, tech companies and management consulting firms (Sustainability Playbook – Microsoft and EY), switchedon.org (Scott Tinker), API Sustainability Gaia (Johanna Dunlap) are started up that Michelle can’t keep track of them all.

Michelle has always tried to find a solution that helped to create a good, ”win-win”, compromise. Where most of what all sides wanted was achieved and no one went away from the table upset. She knows from experience that this is not the path to gain popularity. When all sides criticize her equally then she feels like she found a reasonable middle ground. these days, many people head for the extremes not the common ground. While more things bring us together then separate us, many want to dwell on divisive opinions. Is climate change one of those issues?

One example of this challenge to find the middle ground is the debate on methane emissions. There is a lot of discussion that is moving from scientific journals to public media on this subject. To a large extent, the new spotlight on methane is simply the reflection of the visibility of methane emissions, thanks to recent breakthroughs in satellite imaging and image processing. That is ironic in that methane is invisible and odorless but new imaging technique can make it look dramatic. New methane detection capacity shows worrisome disparities between old-fashioned bottom-up estimates of methane emissions and new top-down atmospheric measurements. Reconciling the two is clearly a top priority. That is the challenge for Michelle and her peers.

The phrase “the road less traveled” means a choice made in one’s life that is unconventional, a choice that leads one in a different direction than most people. The connotation is of a choice that expresses individuality and leadership. The expression the road less traveled is a paraphrase of a line in Robert Frost’s poem. The Road Not Taken by Robert Frost

Michelle always like that poem. Despite the flack she keeps getting, she still wants to find the common ground. Her mother keeps reminding her of the time as a child she wanted to broker the peace between the family pets. She carefully brought their dog into close contact with their cat so they could become friends. All she got from that encounter was a scratch on one arm and a bite on the other. So much for compromise.

Gaia had been encouraging Michelle to listen to other perspectives, even the very strong environmental activists. So, she asked Linda for a suggestion of where she might find such a group. Linda had attended many of these meetings but she was a bit cautious about the idea of a general manager in an oil company attending one of these meetings. But at Michelle’s insistence, she found a meeting nearby and gave her the information on when and where the meeting was to be held. It turned into a really bad idea.

At first all was well; Michelle found the meeting and she sat in the back intending on listening to the speakers. But when it came to question time, her general manager DNA came out and she rose to question some the facts that had been offered that she knew to be false. Her true identity soon came out and the criticism rang from the rafters. One moment she thought they were going to physically throw her out of the room. With her reputation bruised and battered, she made a quick retreat vowing to talk to Gaia about how in the world could she find a compromise with people that didn’t’ want to listen to her.

It turned out the next week, she found herself in what she thought was safer ground, an industry conference on the new climate regulations coming from the state oil and gas commission. the passions ran high at that meeting as well and the blunt criticism of the environmental position was as extreme as the anti-industry fever ran in the previous meeting. Michelle hadn’t learned her lesson yet. She rose to try to explain and defend some of the more pragmatic elements in the new regs and told the audience of her peers how her company would work to comply with those new rules. Well, you would have thought she was going to get physically thrown out of that meeting as well. From Michelle’s perspective there was a lot of common ground to build on, but all she found was the extreme elements shouted by the loud voices in the room. Once again, like her mother told her, she came away with bruises on one hand and bites on the other. It looks like collaboration is an unnatural act, the road less travelled in the poem.

Michelle really needed another chat with Gaia, this was not going well. Somehow Gaia knew that Michelle needed a conversation, some support and another pumpkin latte. They met again at the same coffee shop. Michelle was pretty discouraged. Gaia didn’t have the magic answer for her but she was a really good listener and told Michelle she was proud of the actions she was taking. That helped a little. She assured Michelle that collaboration was a process, sometimes a long process. Taking the road less traveled had stretches of some a very lonely journey but she couldn’t give up. People needed protecting, jobs and the economy needed protecting and the earth needed protecting. Michelle wasn’t going to win any rewards by taking this path, but she just might convince enough people to do the right things to move the needle in the right direction.