DAVID FENTON - Founder of Fenton Communications, Author of The Activist’s Media Handbook: Lessons From 50 Years as a Progressive Agitator

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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.

"The linguists and the cognitive scientists have established that as you're exposed to language from childhood and over your lifetime, it forms literal circuits in your brain. They call them frames. So in order to communicate successfully with people, the best way is to use language that activates existing frames. So for example, when I say we need to get to net zero by 2050, nobody knows what I'm talking about. There's no existing circuitry to process that language. What the hell is net zero? Is that less than zero? Now, if I say we have to stop pollution because pollution is heating the planet, we've formed a blanket of pollution around the earth that is trapping heat that used to go back out to space. And then everybody knows what I'm talking about because they know what pollution is. That's an existing mental frame. And by the way, no one will defend pollution. You won't find anyone that thinks pollution is a good thing. So it's a universally negative frame in all languages. And then when I say it's like a blanket around the earth, there's another existing mental frame. Everybody knows what a blanket is and how it works. It traps your body heat so you don't get cold. So that's what we're doing to the earth. And yes, all that trapped heat energy on Earth has to go somewhere. So it goes to create stronger storms and droughts and floods and melts the ice."

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All photographs © 1968-2022 David Fenton