July 29, 2013 
This article in the Daily Beast offers some very practical advice for climate change communicators: how to adapt the successes of the marriage-equality movement to our campaign work.
“The Gay-Rights Playbook: How to Fight Climate Change Now,” written by an experienced gay-rights activist, offers seven major points of commonality between the two causes. As she points out, many of the same message strategies can be used for both: personalization, positivity, and focusing on values.
The Gay-Rights Playbook: How to Fight Climate Change Now
by Lisa Bennett
Jul 10, 2013
There is little question that the gay-rights movement is the most successful social crusade in recent American history. (The Supreme Court rulings sanctioning same-sex marriage only put the icing on that cake.)
So how can that success inspire the most essential fight of our time—a climate movement big enough to demand that Congress do what’s needed to avoid catastrophe by leveling the playing field for renewable energy?
On the surface, this may seem an odd comparison of very different issues. After all, gay rights is perceived as deeply personal and climate change as inextricably global; gay rights as relevant in the here and now and climate change as a largely future occurrence; and gay rights as having one clear demand equality — while climate change seems to require that we change everything.
Yet consider the similarities: just two decades ago, when people like me came out as gay, we encountered denial, fear, shaming, stereotyping, silencing, and a cultural debate over whether our experience was natural.
Today all the same dynamics are at play around those who “come out” with their concerns about climate change: denial, fear, shaming, and stereotyping that leads, of course, to silencing. And all of this leaves us with little more than a stale debate about whether climate change is natural.
We are, in other words, in the pre-Stonewall age on climate change. But we don’t need to be.
Read more here.
ecoAffect 
Comments are closed.