Published: November 2024
In April 2023, I was teaching a mediation training when Ft. Lauderdale was hit by an extreme rain and flooding event.[i] Not a hurricane. Not a tropical storm. Not a king tide. Rain.
The Director of the 17th Judicial Circuit ADR Department was in my class, getting phone calls from her employees: “I can’t leave my building. Everything is under water and only the tops of the cars on the street are visible.” Two colleagues had homes damaged in the floods. One had to be rescued from her house in the middle of the night.
Downtown Fort Lauderdale and the Broward courts shut down entirely. Seeing images of the closed courthouse, I began to think about how climate change affects our legal institutions: courts, lawyers and litigants.
The summer of 2023 brought more distressing headlines: July 4, 2023 – hottest day on Earth in 100,000 years. Florida’s coastal waters reached 101 degrees Fahrenheit. The coral reefs are dying. The north Atlantic current is collapsing. We are experiencing the 6th mass extinction. The 14th homeowner’s insurance company leaves Florida.
These events and headlines were overwhelming and terrifying. Those feelings – being overwhelmed and terrified – are recognizable as symptoms of amygdala hijack, an activated survival instinct that left me feeling frozen, unable to fight or flee.
My mediator’s curiosity helped me get unstuck, to shift from fear and paralysis to constructive action. While searching for a way to engage more effectively with this complex issue, I learned two concepts: “eco-anxiety” and “eco-grief.”
- “eco-anxiety: extreme worry about current and future harm to the environment caused by human activity and climate change.”
- “eco-grief: psychological response to loss caused by environmental destruction or climate change.”
Naming the problem helped me reframe and understand the mental health challenge. We all experience climate-related disasters (either in person or as witnesses through the media) but our feelings of powerlessness often lead us to push them aside, believing the problem is too vast to solve.
In the language of conflict resolution strategies, we hope to avoid the danger by not moving. Perhaps it will pass us by and go away. Perhaps it will solve itself. Perhaps someone else will fix it. It only takes the cooler breezes of autumn to put the hot summer aside as a past memory, no longer dangerous.
That was 2023. Then, in 2024, the “1 in 1,000 years” flooding event happened again.
Modern life makes us blind to the patterns of nature until they intrude on our comfort. Those of us with means can better insulate ourselves or recover from the impacts, but that does not apply to many of our neighbors, who are $400 away from a financial crisis.
Our daily lives are consumed by the urgency of work, family and immediate concerns. The unrelenting cycle of crises, combined with compassion fatigue, leaves us paralyzed and powerless. In the language of mediation, we lose our capacity for self-determination on the bigger issue.
Mediators are agents of hope, experts in breaking impasses and inspiring change. We listen, reframe and engage people in hard conversations and problem-solving. We help people find areas of agreement and envision alternative futures.
In the realm of conflict resolution, “ripeness” refers to a window of opportunity for resolution. The best time to address climate change was twenty years ago, but the second-best time is now. As things stand, substantial and large-scale efforts are required to reduce carbon emissions by 2030 to avert catastrophic consequences.[ii]
Dr. Katharine Hayhoe, a climate scientist and educator, has said: “The most important thing we can do to fight climate change is to talk about it.”[iii] My own “climate awakening” has led me to commit to these conversations, make individual changes in my life, get educated and connect with others in this endeavor.
Faced with eco-anxiety and eco-grief, we must punch through the paralysis and channel our emotions into action. Climate change is no longer a distant threat. It’s here and now. Avoidance will not help us. This threat will shape the world we leave to future generations. It will fuel conflict after conflict. Lawyers and mediators have skills that empower us to be agents of change.
Can we do it? Yes. Will we do it? That answer depends on all of us.
Resources:
Drawdown: The Most Comprehensive Plan Even Proposed to Reverse Global Warming, by Paul Hawken. (2017)[iv]
2024 Law Firm Climate Accountability Scorecard, Law Students for Climate Change Accountability[v]
“Judge sides with young activists in first-of-its-kind climate change trial in Montana” Associated Press. Aug. 14, 2023.[vi]
Ana Cristina Maldonado practiced as a full time neutral for 13 years, concentrating her practice in family, dependency, real estate, insurance and commercial cases. She has mediated over 2,500 mediations and trained over 400 mediators. As Chair of The Florida Bar’s ADR Section (2024-2025) she has championed the diversification of the field of dispute resolution. Cristina has a B.A. from Amherst College, a M.Sc. in Conflict Resolution from George Mason University and her J.D. from St. Thomas University. She is fluent in Spanish and Portuguese. Currently, Cristina teaches at Nova Southeastern University Shepard Broad College of Law. She is the parent of a 6th grader, future member of the Class of 2031.
For additional ADR tips and resources, go to www.palmbeachbar.org/alternative-dispute-resolution-committee.
[i] https://www.buzzfeed.com/alexalisitza/27-photos-flooding-fort-lauderdale
[ii] https://www.climaterealityproject.org/blog/2030-or-bust-5-key-takeaways-ipcc-report
[iii] https://www.ted.com/talks/katharine_hayhoe_the_most_important_thing_you_can_do_to_fight_climate_change_talk_about_it?subtitle=en
[iv] https://www.amazon.com/Drawdown-Comprehensive-Proposed-Reverse-Warming/dp/0143130447/ref=sr_1_1?adgrpid=1332608657102994&hvadid=83288111967509&hvbmt=be&hvdev=c&hvlocphy=45536&hvnetw=o&hvqmt=e&hvtargid=kwd-83288383171452%3Aloc-190&hydadcr=22535_10434988&keywords=project+drawdown&qid=1697121114&sr=8-1
[v] https://www.ls4ca.org/scorecard
[vi] https://www.npr.org/2023/08/14/1193780700/montana-climate-change-trial-ruling