Where are this generation’s climate leaders? We sit down with author and activist Tim Flannery

Mammalogist. Paleontologist. Environmentalist. Explorer. Author. Australian of the Year. It’s fair to say Tim Flannery FAA (Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science) wears a lot of hats.

Now we can add documentary filmmaker to the mix. Tim’s new documentary, Climate Changers, debuted at this year’s Sydney Film Festival and was a finalist for both the Documentary Australia Award and Sustainable Future Award. Fundamentally, the film asks the following question: Do we, as a species, have what it takes to escape this mess? It’s a desperate, globe-spanning search for climate leaders, both established and emerging, and follows Tim’s journey in the lead-up to Glasgow’s COP26.

We sat down with Tim to figure out what makes a great climate leader—and why the search hasn’t always been straightforward.

Adventure.com: What exactly do you mean by ‘climate leader’? What sort of qualities are you looking for?

“A climate leader is someone who puts their concerns for climate change front and center of whatever they do. The qualities that the best climate leaders have are very consultative. They lead by example. They’re the kind of people others naturally want to follow. Not the Trump, beating-their-chest style of leader—quite the opposite of that.

I think that’s the most effective means of being a climate leader. Humility. Listening with an open mind, which means being open to the idea that other people might change your mind. You have to be aware of that possibility. If you enter a conversation with people, it has to be a genuine two-way dialogue. And that’s an increasingly rare skill.”

“I think what frustrates me the most [about collective climate action] is, it’s always behind the ball.”

In your documentary, Dr. Saul Griffiths says we haven’t seen a Churchill, or a Roosevelt, or a JFK-type figure emerge yet for climate change. Why do you think that is?

“Look, I think it’s partly that we’re just now entering that period where climate change is disrupting a great many lives. It has to get personal first. And not enough of us have had that moment, where we realize, ‘No, either we’ll change or the world around us will change forever’.

And once people realize that I think we’ll see more leaders emerge. But then, it does take time for people to rise through the political process. And the political process often selects against leaders like that. Leaders who put party loyalty first, over principles, tend to rise more quickly.”

Did the climate leaders you spoke to have anything in common?

“Interestingly, they’d all had a moment of crisis. So for Jo Dodds, President of Bushfire Survivors for Climate, it was nearly losing her house in Australia’s Black Saturday bushfires. For Al Gore, it was having his son in hospital, hovering between life and death for a month, as he sat by the bedside, pondering what was important in the world. For NSW Treasurer Matt Kean, it was coming out of the hospital with his newborn son into the terrible bushfire smoke of 2020.

Al Gore, in the documentary series, called it the ‘anticipatory sense of loss.’ That feeling of your world slipping away. When he was faced with losing his son, he thought, ‘What am I doing in the Senate? What’s going to be my lasting legacy?’ And for him, that was his climate work.”

You were chairman of the Copenhagen Climate Council during COP15, back in 2009. Do you still believe in COP?

“I still think it’s a very necessary part of the whole thing, and every COP is different. The best ones integrate nations and industries with the community, and I’ve always thought the community should have an equal role. But really, the core process only moves as fast as society gives it a license to move.

What we saw at COP15 was the fragility of consensus on climate change. It was where, for the first time, people were aware of the problem, but their knowledge wasn’t deep. Their commitment was probably pretty shallow. They didn’t really understand what was required to move forward. But before that meeting, there wasn’t even any willingness to move. And the fossil fuel industry was terrified about that, so they put out the Big Lie, ClimateGate, and tried to derail action.

What frustrates you about our collective climate action?

“I think what frustrates me the most is, it’s always behind the ball. It’s behind the game. It’s a bit like, you can meet some people who lead an unhealthy lifestyle—they’ll smoke a pack of cigarettes a day, they’ll drink as much alcohol as they want, they won’t ever exercise, and their diet is meat pies. And for decades, they’ll be OK. Until they’re not. And suddenly they’re very sick, and it’s almost too late to do anything. And that’s when they decide to take action.

It’s the same with climate. We need that preventative medicine, which is sometimes hard to swallow. Truthfully, we needed it a decade ago. We needed it at COP15. Today, you know, we’ll be taking the medicine, but we’re already well down the path toward serious illness. So we’re going to have to live with the symptoms. It’ll be some decades before we can rectify the situation.”

After everything you’ve seen, are you still a climate optimist?

“Well, I’m neither an optimist or a pessimist, really. I’ve got this attitude that we’ve got to keep on doing whatever we’re doing in the face of mounting loss. But we also need to keep our mental health in order.

You know, I look back on my parents’ generation; they were both born during the Great Depression. The first 10 years of their lives were spent in extreme poverty. And then the war came along, the threat of Japanese invasion. I mean, my mother was digging trenches in her school grounds in Melbourne. And through all of that—the Korean War, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Cold War—the thing I remember most about my parents was happiness. They managed to maintain their positive outlook. It’s not something we hear a lot about these days, working towards human happiness. But it’s so central.

I recently read a biography of British naturalist Jim Corbett, who spent seven years saving this village in India from man-eating tigers and leopards. He slept out at night for weeks at a time, basically offering himself up as prey. And he said the greatest joy humans can experience is the cessation of enormous pain. The second greatest is the cessation of terror. And before he died, Corbett said we must remain brave—we must do our utmost to ensure the greatest happiness among those we leave behind. And I think that message holds true for the climate battle.”

That seems like a pretty timely message in the face of climate anxiety.

“Absolutely! And young people are particularly vulnerable to that. The despair when they feel powerless in the face of all this change. So we do have an obligation to increase happiness. And in the face of all of this uncertainty, and all the bad things, I still think we can do it.

I hope, with this documentary, a certain percentage of people will watch it, go home and deeply reflect. They’ll think, ‘Yes, that’s me. I could be a climate leader.’”

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You can learn more about Tim’s documentary, Climate Changers, at climatechangersmovie.com. You can also request a screening at your local cinema, or host a community screening through the website.

Climate Changers will be screened throughout Australia over September and October 2023. You can check screening dates here. 

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