Abril Garrido Chivato
1 min readDec 13, 2020

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Your experience in Kenya is very interesting! It does take on a different gravity when one sees climate change’s impact vs. hearing about it.

I’ve lived abroad during my formative years and traveled many places since then. I’m not a climate PhD, but traveling did cultivate an open-mindedness and ability to see the bigger picture and connection. I can accept expert viewpoints and the data that backs them up — even if I don’t see it myself daily.

I think hyper-individualism, anti-intellectualism, and the “rat race” in the US is our undoing. If people have time to watch Pornhub or scroll through TikTok, they could educate ourselves about climate change — and well, anything. But people are so stressed out by toxic work cultures, Hunger Games style economy and society, and loss confidence in leadership, that they’re highly disinclined to go out of their way to learn more about sucky inconvenient truths. And when presented with climate truths, many people disbelieve experts as a badge of honor.

While there’s a consciousness about race in away that is unprecedented, that is still a long way from understanding it and how it ties to climate action; how the “cut your nose off to spite itself” is not sustainable technique for long term survival.

Unrelated: what took you to Kenya? Look, I’m trying to get my Spanish passport back and do the nomadic thing.

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