—Systemic change begins with personal change—
Prof. Kimberly Nicholas is a sustainability scientist at Lund University in Sweden. She has published 60 articles on climate and sustainability in leading peer-reviewed journals; writes for publications such as Elle, The Guardian, Scientific American, and New Scientist; and is the author of the Los Angeles Times bestseller UNDER THE SKY WE MAKE: How to be Human in a Warming World, and the monthly climate newsletter We Can Fix It.
She gives lectures and moderates at about 75 international meetings and organizations each year across public policy, civil society, arts and culture, the wine industry, foundations, and academia. Her work has been featured by outlets including the BBC, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, WIRED, National Public Radio, Public Radio International, Vox, and USA Today.
Born and raised on her family’s vineyard in Sonoma, California, she studied the effect of climate change on the California wine industry for her PhD in the Interdisciplinary Program in Environment and Resources at Stanford University.
Kimberly has, by dramatically reducing her flying, improved her life, living more deliberately and consistent with her values. I met her when she was a panelist at an event on promoting hurting people less by flying less. I invited her as someone to explore her journey of reducing her flying. In our conversation, the shared how she went from learning the possibility to promoting staying grounded. Many stages overlapped with mine, from the analysis paralysis of not starting to finding more travel experience despite less flying, or rather because of it. She shared how you need to act to see what we have to do, not just to change ourselves but to change culture. After being in room where Paris Agreement was signed, she realized, we have to do what the signatories agreed to. It means action, not just talk. She realized that every nation, company, and individual has to live sustainably (to which I add: we'll love it even though from our current perspective it looks like sacrifice). The point of acting on important issues is to know how to lead others. Science, facts, and lecturing had their role, but have to act on emotions to motivate and sustain action. Much of what she said was music to my ears.