Seeds
Listening to people talk about climate—their fear, confusion, and lived experience—may be more than storytelling. It may be a way to rebuild legitimacy where institutions have stopped listening.
It’s been a very busy week.
After a shorter stretch focused on the boat refit, I used the four-day Easter weekend to reengage the community.
On Friday, I published a post on LinkedIn summarizing the Living with a Changing Climate postcard experiment. I made a few mistakes—I didn’t think about the long weekend, and I forgot to include a visual—but the post still took off. It didn’t go stale over the weekend. After three days, it’s approaching 10,000 views.
What’s interesting is where those views came from. Mostly outside my direct network. MIT and Stanford are the most represented organizations. Boston, San Francisco, New York, Washington DC—the usual centers of influence.
I received a number of intellectually demanding comments.
I shared the same post in a large Facebook group focused on climate science—over 30,000 members. The conversation moved so fast I couldn’t keep up. Within a day, there were more than 100 comments. Some were thoughtful essays. Others were… less so. But beyond the noise, something meaningful came out of it: new subscribers, and two excellent stories I can publish.
I also had more personal conversations.
I scheduled a Teams call with a young man in Wisconsin who had tried to send me a postcard but struggled to make it personal. That conversation led to a picture expressing the shock of experiencing the disruption of the Milwaukee State Fair by a flood.
I had face-to-face conversations too—over coffee, in the marina, in passing. It felt a bit like customer discovery, except I’m not selling anything. More seriously, it’s a way to understand where people actually stand with respect to climate.
Somehow, YouTube—apparently reading my mind—served me a lecture by Robert Reich at University of California, Berkeley. He traced economic and political developments since World War II to explain the conditions that led to the Trump election.
What made his perspective interesting is that he distanced himself from some decisions made during the Obama administration, even though he had served as Secretary of Labor in this administration.
His argument, as I understood it, is simple: over time, both political parties ended up speaking primarily to power—because power was in the room. The people most affected by globalization, automation, and financialization were not. The result wasn’t just flawed policy—it was a loss of political legitimacy that we’re still living inside.
The vote to “shake things up” wasn’t irrational. It was a response to that loss of legitimacy.
What struck me is how closely climate maps onto this.
The climate conversation has largely been conducted by scientists, policymakers, corporations hedging risk, and activists—all operating within institutional frameworks. Meanwhile, the lived experience of ordinary people—their fear, confusion, grief, adaptation—has been almost entirely absent from the official discourse.
That absence is exactly the gap Ice Frontiers is trying to fill.
Which raises an uncomfortable question.
Is Ice Frontiers political?
Not in the traditional sense. But listening to people—seriously listening—has become a political act.
Collecting personal testimony about what people are actually experiencing—not what they’re supposed to feel, not what fits into an NGO narrative—pushes back against the same dynamic Reich describes. The difficulty people have speaking personally about climate—the hesitation, the awkwardness—isn’t incidental. It’s a symptom of that institutional gap.
When I look at the 2008 financial crisis, the Gilets Jaunes protests, FDA decisions on biosimilars, or climate inaction, I don’t primarily see ideology. I see institutions that have stopped listening to the people they nominally serve—and have lost legitimacy as a result.
Reich made this point about the financial bailout: even if the technical case for saving the banks was defensible, the political cost of doing it without visible accountability to ordinary people was enormous—and lasting.
Joe is still pissed 20 years later, not just because of what happened, but because no one acknowledged that he hurt and it mattered.
Climate governance is repeating that mistake—maybe at a larger scale.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change produces reports that are technically rigorous but politically inert. The Conference of the Parties produces language that rarely connects with lived experience. The gap between institutional language and human experience is almost total.
So I’ve been wondering if what Ice Frontiers is doing is something institutions have forgotten how to do.
Listening—and making that listening visible in policies.
So I think of these conversations as seeds.
The Ice Frontiers purpose is simply to plant something—without control over where it lands, or what it becomes.
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