This text is taken from the Courrier de la Planète. Click here to subscribe.
When the eight participants enter the room, two large tables covered with brown paper (where they can scribble at will) await them. The place is conducive to learning: it is a classroom of a former school in Montreal, which has retained its blackboards, lockers and cast iron heaters. On this Thursday morning, a “Climate fresco” is organized there.
Facilitator Sophie Lallemand hands a pack of cards to the small group, including The duty is part. “Human activities”, “CO₂ emissions”, “sea level rise”: the cards must be placed in a logical order, where causes and consequences are linked. Two participants discuss: is the greenhouse effect a precursor to the rise in global temperature, or is it subsequent to it?
The first cards take place on the large table. The sequence is not linear: “A consequence can have several causes, and a cause can have several consequences”, says Sophie to reassure the “frescoers”. Traps are scattered along the route of the new initiates: does the melting of the ice caps cause a rise in the level of the oceans? No more than melting ice cubes make a mojito overflow…
“I have an ecological conscience, but very few arguments to defend or explain my point of view,” says Véronique, a 30-year-old who works in an organization in the Plateau Mont-Royal, during the initial round table where everyone explains the reasons for his presence.
Created in France in 2018, the Climate Fresco is spreading like wildfire around the world. In Quebec, it was Sophie Lallemand — who is hosting today’s event at the Ateliers d’éducation populaire du Plateau — and Camille Defoly who gave the initial impetus to the movement in 2020. There are now more than 350 trained facilitators in the province and about ten times more people who participated in Montreal and Quebec, but also in Rimouski, Laval, Longueuil, Sherbrooke, Beloeil, Montebello…
“I had been passionate about ecology for 10 years, but I was in big cognitive dissonance. I started my career in advertising, I worked in the supply of truck parts, in human resources,” says Sophie. When she “frescoed” for the first time, connected by videoconference to a given workshop from France, it was the crush. She now leads workshops on a voluntary basis, but also offers them for a fee in workplaces, which allows her to live from her ecological vocation.
In business, some participants admit “not at all wanting to be there” and “having no choice”, reports Sophie. “But these people, when I see a little sparkle in their eyes and they come to thank me warmly at the end of the workshop, then I know that I have really changed the game”, observes she proudly.
A million “frescoers”
Back to current event. Véronique erases an arrow drawn too quickly between two cards. Mélodie traces a new one, between “calcification problems” and “pteropods and coccolithophores”. The fresco becomes more complex, the cards multiply, arrows zigzag in all directions to connect them. “It’s normal for it to look like that,” says Sophie. The last card, “permafrost”, gives an example of a feedback loop: we heat up the planet, the permafrost melts, it releases methane, this methane heats the planet, and we start again…
At the end of the activity, the two teams observe that humanity is causing climate change, and that this same humanity is suffering the consequences. “It starts with Man, and it comes back to Man,” sums up Karina. “I was appalled by my ignorance, observes Véronique. I knew most of the elements on the maps, but the connections between the maps were generally unknown to me.”
The two groups then meet in front of a blackboard. It’s time to think about solutions. Participants write ideas for individual and collective action on Post-its. Sophie distributes these ideas on the board according to two axes: are these solutions easy to implement, and are they effective in reducing greenhouse gases? She always relies on the opinion of the group, and guides it gently, but without imposing one solution rather than another.
“The consequences of climate change stress me out a lot,” says Mélodie. What can we do? What consoles me is that, since human activities are involved, it also means that we have the potential to change the rules of the game. The Climate Fresco could indeed shake the status quo thanks to the strength of numbers: at the end of this month, after less than five years of existence, the association will have offered the workshop to more than one million people in the world.