Well, She Got My Attention! Kamala Harris Talked about Climate for Earth Day

Kamala Harris speaking at the 2021 Leaders' Summit

Wildfires, heatwaves, cluttered islands, and hurricanes! If that doesn’t get your attention, nothing will. On Earth Day, April 22, 2021, Vice President Kamala Harris spoke at the Leaders’ Summit on Climate, a virtual meeting of dozens of world leaders.

No part of a speech is more important than its beginning and end. Public speaking textbooks tell students to begin their speeches with an attention-getter. A stirring quotation, a story, a clever analogy, or, better yet, a startling fact can draw the audience’s attention to the speaker and her message. Harris began her brief speech with a series of startling, if not horrifying, facts about climate change’s terrifying progress:

“Here in the United States, the storms hitting our Gulf Coast are worse every year. The wildfires in my home state of California have grown in intensity. And of course, no nation or region is immune. Whether it is Western Europe, where heatwaves have made it very difficult to stay indoors while risking a health risk, or the Pacific Islands, where rising sea levels threaten to encroach on the land and homes of lifelong residents, or in Central America, where last year, two major hurricanes devastated entire communities.” [italics added]

Earth from a million miles away

The startling facts that Harris cited were not only horrifying, but specific. She did not begin her speech with some boring, tedious generality like “climate change is hurting us.” To secure her audience’s attention, to drive home the Summit’s worldwide importance, she emphasized a series of growing climate problems. As a resident of the Gulf Coast, I found her first startling fact, the Gulf Coast storms, especially incisive. I lived through some of those storms.

Also, Harris cleverly mentioned climate hazards from across the world. Yes, she began with climate hazards in her own nation, but her brief paragraph traveled across the world. This was, after all, an international summit.

Kamala Harris: "Investing in the Potential and the Greatness”

Harrison Ford's September 2018 Climate Speech

Stevie Wonder's Hurricane Harvey Speech: Music and Speech Together

Speech professor Alan Monroe based his famous Motivated Sequence on the ideas of psychologists William James and John Dewey. The Motivated Sequence points out that audiences act according to what gets their attention. A speaker talking about climate change, on Earth Day or any other day, must begin by focusing people’s attention. As she launched the climate summit on Earth Day in 2021, Harris’ startling, even horrifying facts directed the audience to the crises that faced us. Those crises still face us today, three years later, on Earth Day, April 22, 2024.

How a speaker can get people's attention 

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P.S.: Enter "climate" in the search box on the right for other posts about climate change speeches. 

by William D. Harpine

Copyright © 2024, William D. Harpine

Image of Earth: NASA
Image of Kamala Harris: White House YouTube channel

Bill Clinton's Speech about the Columbine Massacre Asked Us to Reflect

Bill Clinton

“We know somehow that what happened to you has pierced the soul of America.”

Those were President Bill Clinton’s words in his speech to survivors of the Columbine High School massacre. A month earlier, on April 20, 1999 (25 years ago today) two Columbine High School students had killed twelve of their fellow students and a teacher. After an hours-long standoff with a tepid police response, the two shooters committed suicide.

A Speech About Values

Many subsequent post-massacre speeches and angry statements for and against gun control have filled the news. In contrast, Clinton focused on the United States of America’s moral focus. Maybe that is where we needed to focus all along. He asked his audience (his audience was not just the students and parents in front of him, but also the entire nation) to think about what is right and what is wrong, to look for ways to overcome darkness, to find ways to reconcile differences, to overcome grievances and to do the things that are right to do. Clinton talked about the future:

“… a future where what we have in common is far more important than what divides us.”

Clinton’s message speaks to us in 2024. In no other nation on earth, rich or poor, big or small, democratic, communist, or fascist, do mass school shootings occur with the horrible ferocity that has become commonplace in the United States. The satirical website The Onion comments after almost every school shooting that there is “‘No Way to Prevent This,’ Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens.”

Maybe, as liberal speakers have often said, the problem is too many guns. In response, conservative speakers ask whether we need more good guys with guns. Neither approach will solve the problem, though, until we recognize what is right and what is wrong.

. What is right and wrong is not just a matter of how one acts, but of what moral values a person holds dear. That was President Clinton’s message.


Joe Biden's Emotional Gun Control Plea: "Enough!"

Wayne LaPierre's Speech Opposes Gun Control with a Dark Vision

That is why, in this brief speech’s key passage, Clinton talked about overcoming the “dark forces” that make people into murderers, as well as the forces in human society that prevent us from working together:

“These dark forces that take over people and make them murder are the extreme manifestation of fear and rage with which every human being has to do combat. The older you get, the more you’ll know that a great deal of life is the struggle against every person’s own smallness and fear and anger and a continuing effort not to blame other people for our own shortcomings or our fears.”

All human beings, as Clinton reminded us, struggle with dark forces. Can we overcome the “smallness” of our thinking? Can we not recognize that fear leads to anger, but we can control our fear and anger?

Yes, Clinton briefly mentioned that the nation needs to keep firearms out of dangerous peoples’ hands. That, however, was not his main point. His main point was for us to examine our morals.

Clinton’s larger, moral context persuaded few people at the time, and would probably persuade fewer today. We cannot move forward with reasonable gun control until we understand our fear and anger. We cannot resolve school violence until we view education as something greater than getting good scores on computer-graded multiple-choice tests. A few generations ago, schools knew that part of their job was moral education: to teach tolerance, to make people aware of their history and culture, and to instill such all-American values as freedom of expression and religion. My intermediate school principal called our school campus “a plant,” as if the school were an industrial operation, rather than a cultural institution. I have not heard that bizarre term recently, but our nation has still not figured out what functions it wants schools to serve.

Anywhere Could Become Columbine

Clinton’s Columbine speech was not, however, just about one school in Colorado. Clinton reminded his audience that:

“We know if this can happen here, it can happen anywhere.”

Indeed, Clinton remarked about the “fundamentally strong values and character” of the people of Jefferson County, Colorado. He was right about that! Yet, for that solid community, “Columbine” is forever engraved on American memory as a symbol of violence, social disorganization, and moral failure. Indeed, school massacres have become a nationwide affliction, as fear and anger continue to tear apart many of the United States’ seemingly most stable neighborhoods. When they happen, we say that they are “another Columbine.”

Any number of policies might help. Should we control gun ownership by people who are known to be dangerous? We might ask, how do teenagers build bombs in their parents’ garage, and no one notices? What about school bullying? Can we recognize mental health issues before they lead to disaster? Do we need better trained, more organized police? Progress on all those fronts continues to be slow, if not nil, twenty-five long years later.

Emma González at the "March for Our Lives" Rally

Clinton’s Larger Purpose

Public speaking’s highest purpose is to awaken our moral sensibilities.

So, Clinton pointed out that before we can solve the detailed issues of policy, we must settle a more fundamental point. Clinton’s Columbine speech cried out for us to reflect. Clinton was right that the United States needs to determine what it stands for. Unfortunately, we seem to have wandered even farther from that determination than we were 25 years ago. Do we stand for each other, or do we want to destroy one another? Heaven help us.

by William D. Harpine

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Research note: Ceremonial speeches (the old term is epideictic speech) often talk about values, while subtly encouraging the audience to think of actions that fulfill their values. I have written about epideictic rhetoric a number of times; here is a free preprint of one of my papers on the topic. For more, click on “William D. Harpine’s Publications” at the link above. 

Copyright © 2024, William D. Harpine

Image: National Archives, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons