Part 2— The Climate Story That Actually Includes You
Overview
Imagine you are lost in the woods. Someone hands you a map — but this map has no trees, no rivers, no paths. Only arrows, numbers, and charts. Would it help you find your way? Probably not. You’d feel stuck, even paralysed, because the map has been cut away from the real forest.
This is what happens when climate communication gives us only targets, graphs, and technical terms. The map is mistaken for the territory. Numbers replace relationships. The plan is confused for the living system.
We’ve seen this pattern before:
Tobacco was reduced to “cancer rates,” hiding the tobacco industry.
Climate was reduced to “CO₂ levels,” hiding fossil fuels and deforestation.
Cost of living was reduced to “inflation,” hiding profiteering and housing speculation.
In each case, the obsession with numbers cut away the pattern that connects. People were left confused, not because they lacked intelligence, but because the story itself had been stripped of relationship.
Now imagine instead that someone in the forest says to you:
“Follow the river. Look for the tall oak tree. Stay together.”
Suddenly, you know what to do — because the guidance is rooted in the living world around you.
The same shift is needed in how we talk about climate. When governments and NGOs talk about climate strategies, they reach for two big words: mitigation and adaptation. They sound serious, official, even comforting. But there’s a problem: these words are too big, too abstract. They leave most people wondering — where am I in this story?
This isn’t just a language quibble. When the words we use are abstract, they pull the problem away from our hands and place it in a distant, technical box. That distance makes us feel powerless, when in reality the most important work begins close to us — in our homes, our communities, and our shared lands and waters.
Let’s walk through what these words mean on paper, and what they miss — and then let’s talk about how the story shifts when we use language that actually includes you.
Mitigation
The official definition says mitigation means “reducing emissions and stabilising greenhouse gases.” Sounds neat, but here’s the catch: it makes greenhouse gases themselves sound like the root cause, as if the problem began in the air.
But the truth is different. The real causes are deeper — fossil fuel extraction, deforestation, industrial exploitation. The gases in the sky are consequences, not causes.
So mitigation isn’t about tinkering with numbers in an emissions chart. It’s about stopping the drivers of harm: ending new coal and gas projects, halting deforestation, shifting to renewable energy and ecological farming. When we act at that level, greenhouse gases stabilise naturally. Suddenly, the story isn’t about abstract molecules — it’s about choices we can see and change.
👉 Everyday example: when a supermarket cuts ties with coal-powered suppliers.
“The primary disadvantages of abstract nouns are that they make communication vague, confusing, and dull by obscuring meaning and action, but they are also challenging for language learners to process due to their lack of sensory context. Overuse of abstract nouns weakens communication by preventing the use of stronger, more active verbs and can lend a false sense of importance or be used rhetorically for unclear or even unjust purposes. ”
Adaptation
Adaptation is defined as “reducing the risks posed by climate change impacts.” But this frames climate change as if it were an independent actor attacking us. Risks don’t come from “climate change” floating in the sky. They come from drained wetlands, bulldozed forests, reckless housing sprawl, and fragile communities left without care.
Adaptation, then, is not about shrugging at a force of nature. It’s about repairing relationships: restoring wetlands to hold floods, planting forests to cool our towns, redesigning cities for shade and water security, and strengthening the community systems that protect the most vulnerable.
👉 Everyday example: when your council plants trees to cool a hot street.
When we talk this way, adaptation stops sounding like grim survival. It becomes renewal — work that everyone can take part in.
A Shift from fatalism to agency
You may have heard the phrase, “Some climate change is unavoidable, so adaptation is essential.” On the surface, it seems pragmatic. But listen closely: it quietly tells us the crisis is unstoppable. It breeds resignation.
What’s truly unavoidable is not “climate change” itself, but the responsibility to protect households, workers, and ecosystems. And protection is active: safe housing in flood-prone areas, local food systems for resilience, shaded streets to prevent heat deaths.
This is the shift from fatalism to agency. The question isn’t how much change must we endure? but how much protection can we design together?
Opps! Fragmented Levels vs. Woven Webs
Official documents say adaptation occurs “at all levels — individual, community, business, government.” But this makes action sound like a stack of separate boxes, each doing their own thing.
In reality, adaptation is a woven fabric. Councils can restore wetlands with communities. Governments can end fossil fuel approvals while farmers shift to regenerative practices. Households can plant trees that support city-wide cooling. These aren’t isolated levels — they’re threads, interlaced, strengthening each other.
This story is much more honest: no one is left alone with their recycling bin, no business is siloed from its town, no government can outsource responsibility. We are in this together.
Empty Nouns vs. Living Verbs
Finally, the ultimate tautology: “Mitigation and adaptation are complementary strategies for responding to climate change.” This sentence uses nouns to chase its own tail. It offers no doorway into action.
But verbs change everything. Stop expanding coal and gas projects, and protect people from increasing heat. Restore ecosystems. These aren’t abstract categories; they are living processes. And verbs invite you in. You can see yourself in the planting, the protecting, the repairing. The work becomes human-sized, close, and real. Even better if we name the mines and forests
🌿 What We Lose in Abstraction, What We Gain in Care
This obsession with abstract numbers shows up again in carbon credits and offsets. They treat emissions (the symptom) as the disease, while leaving the real drivers intact. Just as “light cigarettes” did not dismantle the tobacco industry, offsets do not dismantle fossil fuel dependency.
On paper, they trade tonnes of CO₂. In reality, they too often mean monoculture plantations that erase biodiversity, land grabs that dispossess Indigenous peoples, or soils and rivers further degraded. The map is mistaken for the territory once again: a carbon ledger replaces the living forest.
Real solutions lie not in accounting tricks, but in structural change and relationships — phasing out fossil fuels, protecting forests as living communities, and restoring kinship with land and water.
Bhagat Kabir Ji warned of this centuries ago: the world can read endless books and still miss the wisdom. Today, we collect endless data and still miss the relationships. Wisdom is not in the numbers, but in the prem — the care—that binds them together.
Closing Reflection: A Story With You In It
When strategies are reduced to nouns and numbers, they sound serious but feel distant. People hear “mitigation and adaptation are essential” and are left asking, but what do I actually do?
The truth is, you don’t need to live in a fog of abstractions. You are already part of the verbs: protecting rivers, redesigning food systems, ending coal approvals, planting trees, caring for neighbours in the heat. This is the climate story that actually includes you — not as a spectator of “mitigation” or “adaptation,” but as someone whose everyday choices and relationships restore the world we depend on.
Because the real story isn’t about abstract nouns. It’s about us — stopping harm, repairing ties, and creating conditions for life to thrive. And when we speak that story, people don’t just understand it. They step into it.
This is part 2 of a series of posts on the topic. Please subscribe below to receive the next post in your email. I’ll release a new post every Friday.
With gratitude and hope,
Ramandeep Sibia
