A climate of empathy?

I wonder if we are any closer to this now than we were say 10 years ago. Empathy is not very newsworthy so its difficult to say. When Barrack Obama got elected one of his regular sound bytes was around the belief that we have more in common to unite us than differences to divide and set us apart. I think that’s true on almost any scale but it does not sit well in politics, media or drama that prefer stories of goals set poles apart. If there was one issue where the empathy idea is most true then its climate change. This is because its worldwide context put us all in the same boat. So any positive or negative step for any one place and people is a positive or negative step for every other at the same time. The more you understand this the more you should be able to look at every other place with the same understanding care or empathy that you would your own. Trying to help towards a climate of empathy was the first thing we agreed as the kickoff to this project. Some of the ideas to make this happen were far too big to try and tackle but in many ways the spirit of this is alive and well in the #thisplace concept. However it relies on getting enough individual answers to the question “what’s worth saving in this place,” to log and compile in order to show how much they all have in common. You can add yours here…