How can we effectively communicate that we're moving beyond climate change to a state of climate crisis? The trapped heat energy on Earth is equal to a million Atomic bombs going off every single day. Today we talk to someone who's been mobilizing the public mind for over 50 years.

David Fenton, named “one of the 100 most influential PR people” by PR Week and “the Robin Hood of public relations” by The National Journal, founded Fenton in 1982 to create communications campaigns for the environment, public health, and human rights. For more than five decades he has pioneered the use of PR, social media, and advertising techniques for social change. Fenton started his career as a photojournalist in the late 1960s – his book Shots: An American Photographer’s Journal was published in 2005. He was formerly director of public relations at Rolling Stone magazine and co-producer of the No-Nukes concerts in 1979 at Madison Square Garden with Bruce Springsteen, Bonnie Raitt, James Taylor, Jackson Browne, and other artists. He has also helped create JStreet, Climate Nexus, the Death Penalty Information Center, and Families for a Future. He sold Fenton a few years ago to work on climate change full time. He is the author of The Activist’s Media Handbook: Lessons From 50 Years as a Progressive Agitator.

"When I say 'Make America Great Again', everybody probably cringes and I do too, but we have to learn from that. That is actually how the brain works. It works through being exposed to the repetition of simple, easy-to-understand messages that have an emotional, moral aspect. That's how the brain learns. It doesn't learn from facts. It doesn't learn from figures. It doesn't learn from policy pronouncements. And it certainly doesn't learn from complexity. 

Here's an example. People need to be conscious of the difference between internal and external communications. So, if you want to say that you believe in intersectional environmentalism, that's valid within your group. But if you use that in your public communication, no one understands what the hell you mean by that, not at all. Second, you're branding yourself as an other. You're not part of their world. You don't understand them. You have some weird agenda of your own, and you're incomprehensible. I hope my book makes a contribution to helping activists learn the difference between what the communists used to call an internal line and an external line. You know, the communists had a lot of things wrong, but that they were right about.”

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All photographs © 1968-2022 David Fenton