Tedx Talks — On Being Human

“There’s nothing quite like having a coal train in your front yard to make you feel powerless,” said Sierra Crane-Murdoch '02, a Middlebury graduate whose clean energy research and advocacy earned her the Brower Youth Award and the Middlebury Fellowship in Environmental Journalism. In interviewing an executive largely responsible for leveling the mountain near her home for its coal, she was reminded that even those with irreconcilably different points of view must resist the urge to “dehumanize” one another.

Where others in her position might have turned a deaf ear after hearing progress defined as the development of box stores, Crane-Murdoch made a genuine effort to understand his context as an individual. Watching him walk away and knowing the impact that her published words could have on his job, she saw him not as a faceless adversary, but a fellow person trying to make it in the world. “At that point, he was just a man with a family,” she said. “He honestly believed what he was doing was honorable and good.”

She especially emphasized the importance of patience when it comes to any kind of negotiations, pointing out that current methods of communication place an unrealistic emphasis on instant gratification. “This is going to take a long time, and I know that,” she of her environmental efforts. “Whatever I do next is going to be a little more deliberate and a little slower and definitely more human.”