Sixteen years ago, Nancy Vidler had a problem. No, she had a challenge. The cottage community where Nancy has a property overlooking Sunfish Bay in Port Franks, Ont., on the southeastern shores of Lake Huron, was dealing with phragmites, an invasive grass that had taken root on the beach. It was choking the area’s wetlands and replacing much of the native vegetation, including the nearby Carolinian forest ecosystem. The challenge wasn’t the phragmites themselves. A committee had been formed to address the invasive when it first appeared in 2009, and the group knew that applying a regulated and approved herbicide could work. Herbicides have their detractors, those who think it’s a scorched-earth strategy that threatens other plants, animals, and the waterways. So Nancy’s challenge became convincing her community to rally behind this somewhat controversial (although thoroughly regulated) solution.
Anyone who’s ever sat through a PTA or a lake association meeting—or almost any meeting at all—knows that getting consensus is no simple task. It’s a lesson many of us learn, whether we’re trying to galvanize our lake around softening shorelines or get our neighbour to stop running their PWC close to a loon nest. Convincing people is hard work—particularly when it comes to environmental issues.
As climate change policies become politicized, all of us concerned by a warming planet feel increasingly abandoned, which makes grassroots organizing that much more important. Protecting the lake can feel proactive—a chance to be for something instead of against something. But then comes the challenge of convincing our neighbours, some of whom, overwhelmed by the scope of the crisis, retreat to the lake to get away from it all. But it’s not impossible to create allies if we implement some tried-and-true strategies.
Take it from Nancy, who indeed managed to persuade the seemingly unpersuadable. Or consider the advice of Amy Castator, who has made a career out of helping people learn to have difficult conversations. Castator lives in Toronto and is the director of Project Neutral, a charitable group that creates programming across Ontario around climate literacy and education. Their course, Talk Climate to Me, is aimed at helping us discuss this polarizing topic. “Many of us feel like we need to know all the facts and be prepared with responses,” says Castator. This attitude is one that anticipates opposition and makes assumptions about the other person that may not be true. We may think someone with a weed-free lawn doesn’t care about pollinators, or that a hardened shoreline means that aesthetics matter to our neighbour more than the fish. Consequently, too many of us end up delivering a lecture rather than having a conversation. “That can create an immediate disconnect between yourself and the other person,” says Castator.
Persuasion begins long before we open our mouths. Castator urges us to consider our own state of mind before approaching someone about a potentially contentious issue. We might need to do some deep breathing or take a walk. It’s the right time for the conversation when we feel calm and connected to the other person. And when we can be open to whatever we’re hearing—even if it’s not the response we are hoping for. “Listen with curiosity rather than listening to respond,” she says. “We should go into these conversations anticipating that we won’t agree on everything. But we can agree that we like each other as human beings and that we want to have a good relationship with each other—and that is a good starting point.”
Renée Lertzman is a climate and environmental psychologist and strategist who, like Castator, thinks this prep work is paramount. “I have a simple framework that I’ve developed that can be very useful,” she says. “The three As.” Applying the three As—anxiety, ambivalence, and aspiration—involves imagining what those three As are for others and trying to put herself in the other position. Lertzman knows how hard this is, which is why we can fall into yelling, telling, and selling: “This is what we need to do, this is what’s at stake if we don’t do it, are you with us or not?” She still fights the urge to yell, tell, and sell, noting that “no one’s perfect at this.”
But Castator and Lertzman insist that a good dialogue starts with asking permission to have a conversation, considering another’s point of view, and then listening carefully to their perspective. It leads people to be “more open-minded, receptive, and willing to engage with possible solutions and scenarios,” says Lertzman. Without it, you’re more likely to face resistance, which comes “from a fundamental sense that I’m not being respected and that my concerns don’t matter.” As soon as that happens, “It’s game over. There’s nowhere to go.”
So you’ve sorted through the three As, you’ve listened, you’ve resisted yelling, telling, and selling. What’s next? When do you get to change people’s minds?
Lertzman says it’s not about changing people’s minds. “Only they can do that.” But you can convince them to be open to change. She is a fan of motivational interviewing, a methodology used in the public health sector (where experts are routinely trying to convince us to eat better and exercise…things few of us want to do). In a motivational interview, you must quash your “righting reflex.” Even if it’s coming from a good place—we’re trying to save a planet here!—Lertzman reminds us that “nobody wants to be told what to do.” With motivational interviewing, we reflect back what we’re hearing— “I hear this, but I also hear this.” From there, we can move to, “So would you be open to…?” Or, “What might you be willing to consider?”
Nancy did exactly this when, early on, she hosted a community information session at the Port Franks Community Centre. She invited people to share their concerns about the phragmites problem and the proposed herbicidal solution. It was “jam-packed,” she says, and she had experts on hand. “It was the first opportunity cottagers had to express their opinions. Our goal that night was that everyone left with their questions and their concerns addressed.”
While it’s not a cottager example, Montana Burgess’s experience in the Kootenays in B.C. holds lessons for all of us. Burgess is the executive director of the non-profit Neighbours United, which was trying in 2016 to start a conversation with residents of more than a dozen towns to vote for transitioning to 100 per cent renewable energy by 2050. For the most part, Neighbours United got buy-in. But then they bumped up against Trail, B.C., a city of about 14,000 that “had a smelter right in the centre of town,” says Burgess. The smelter provided good, stable jobs, so when Burgess and her team showed up to talk about a renewable energy transition, “it was conflicting.” While renewable energy wasn’t a direct threat to the smelter, it nonetheless “felt like jobs versus environment,” she says. And Neighbours United couldn’t get enough folks to support their position.
Burgess had heard about deep canvassing, an approach that had reduced prejudice against same-sex marriage in staunchly conservative areas in the U.S. “And so I thought, Why is nobody using this on climate or the environment?”
Deep canvassing can be a heavy lift. It’s a more structured, formalized approach to the strategies Castator and Lertzman use. “We had to figure out how to have productive conversations that grounded people in their lived experiences,” says Burgess. That meant helping people recognize what they wanted (clean air, a future for their kids) was in conflict with what they were against (clean energy) due to cost or a fear of change, for example. It took Neighbours United about a year and a half to get the script right and then door-knock and make phone calls. “We had to figure out how to move them through their cognitive dissonance,” says Burgess. With the help of dozens of volunteers and more than a thousand one-to-one conversations, they achieved a real victory. Not only did the region agree to 100 per cent renewable energy, but “we changed the conversation in the community permanently,” says Burgess. In a town where less than half the citizens had considered climate change a threat, “climate change,” she says, “is no longer a dirty word.”
“There’s this phrase about going slow in order to go fast,” says Renée Lertzman. “The paradox is that when we approach things from this energy of ‘Hey, we’re in this together, and let’s really listen to each other,’ that’s when things can go fast, right? But it takes time to build trust.” Nancy Vidler didn’t have a name for her approach but had unwittingly borrowed from both motivational interviewing and deep canvassing. It’s been 16 years, but today, Port Franks’ success in eradicating phragmites has become a model for the province. And the most impressive part? Everyone is still talking to each other.
Leslie Garrett divides her time between her family cottage on Lake Huron, Ont., and the island of Martha’s Vineyard, Mass.’
This story originally appeared in our May ’25 issue.
Related Story This Ontario group is using genetic testing to combat invasive phragmites
Related Story 4 grants for local nature projects in Ontario cottage regions
Related Story A water quality testing program for Ontario’s cottage lakes is in jeopardy