Last week I attended a moving memorial service for a friend and former colleague Max Edkins, a climate warrior who helped lead the World Bank's Connect4 Climate (C4C) Initiative. Max was a beloved father, filmmaker, activist, and scientist who tragically lost his life in the now infamous Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 that crashed on March 10, killing the more than 150 people on board. The auditorium was filled with World Bank staff, his family, former classmates, friends, and a cross section of people involved in almost every facet of the climate justice movement. Max was an indefatigable advocate and changemaker who combined deep knowledge of environmental science with a charming personality and natural communication skills. He understood that people's hearts and minds will not be won over with facts and figures alone — instead the climate crisis needs to be felt and understood through the lens of real people's struggles and triumphs. Max understood that telling the stories of people's connection to our glorious but fragile planet has the power to transform, and he was determined to give the microphone to the people living in places where the impacts of climate change are already the most destructive.
In 2011 Max won a short film competition sponsored by C4C with a film titled The World Has Malaria. In a clever and disarming way the film explains the cause and impacts of climate change through a one-minute dialogue between a group of Maasai farmers in Tanzania. In recent years, the Maasai have experienced more frequent and extreme droughts that have left cattle, a critical source of their livelihoods, dead. In the video a man uses a soccer ball to explain how the burning of fossil fuels, primarily in the global North, is putting more and more carbon dioxide into the blanket that protects the earth, causing warming and, ultimately, climate change. The Tanzanian farmer responds with a straightforward but compelling metaphor: "So now the world is like someone who is suffering from malaria."
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