Cancel the Banquet NOW! Climate Change Won’t Be Fixed from the Conference Room
On May 1903, the President of the United States arrived in California exactly the way presidents are meant to arrive: on time, overprotected, and underexposed to reality.
Theodore Roosevelt stepped off the train flanked by handlers, lobbyists, and well-fed men who believed the future could be negotiated over Wine-Dinner and Desserts . A banquet awaited him. Speeches. Linen napkins. Policy influence, garnished.
And then Roosevelt did something profoundly unpresidential.
He cancelled the dinner :))
Weeks earlier, he had written… not to a senator or a tycoon, but to a slightly feral, famously unhygienic naturalist named John Muir. Muir owned no power, no land, and no deodorant. What he did own was a dangerous idea: the wilderness is not a resource; it is a relationship.
Roosevelt’s request was radical in its simplicity:
“Take me camping.”
No politics. No press. No ‘Formal Meetings’
When the President finally spotted Muir in Yosemite….. battered coat, mountain beard, smelling like pine resin and inconvenient truths, he smiled like a man about to escape a very boring party.
Then he dropped the bombshell:
No banquet.
No hotel.
No entourage.
He rode into Yosemite National Park with one old wanderer and a pair of wool blankets.
For three nights, the most powerful man in America slept on frozen ground beneath the Grizzly Giant. No tents. No press releases. Just silence, stars, and a forest that had been around long before “economic growth” became a religion.
Muir didn’t pitch policy. He didn’t say “sustainability” and ’17- SDG’s’ or ESG’s, even once (thankfully!).
He just pointed to the.
Overgrazed meadows. Logged trees. Broken systems.
“Remove forests,” Muir explained, “and rivers forget how to flow.”
Kill rivers, and cities follow, eventually, and then suddenly.
On the second night, it snowed. Hard. Rangers panicked. A frozen president is bad optics.
At dawn they found Roosevelt buried in snow, brushing it off his moustache…
and laughing.
That laugh changed history.
Three years later, Roosevelt protected Yosemite permanently. Then he went further, 230 million acres protected. Forests. Parks. Wildlife refuges. Entire ecosystems saved because one man skipped dinner and listened.
No innovation summit did that.
No billion-dollar grant.
No climate tech demo.
Just exposure.
It is a wicked problem.
And here’s the part we keep refusing to hear:
A wicked problem cannot be solved by innovation alone.
It can only be resolved by changing the mindset of people who are creating it.
You cannot out-innovate a mindset that believes nature is optional.
You cannot carbon-capture your way out of arrogance.
You cannot AI your way past denial.
Climate change is not failing because we lack solutions.
It is failing because we lack humility.
Roosevelt didn’t invent conservation tech.
He caught a cold under a tree… and learned.
On our journey along India’s borders for the cause of ‘Change_Before_Climate_Change’, Roopesh Rai and I saw the same pattern Muir saw:
- Systems fraying quietly
- Communities adapting without jargon
- Nature negotiating patiently, until it doesn’t
No dashboard will save us if we refuse to step outside our boardrooms, conferences, and carefully filtered optimism.
The Uncomfortable Conclusion
History doesn’t turn when powerful people innovate harder.
It turns when they listen longer.
Yosemite still stands because once, a President chose dirt over dessert.
Climate action will begin when leaders choose exposure over insulation.
The wicked problem of climate change will not be solved by cleverness.
It will be resolved only when we…. like Roosevelt…
leave the banquet,
enter the wilderness,
and finally stop ignoring the problem and start listening to it.
Sometimes, the future doesn’t need another solution.. It needs A road winding through forest, hills, rivers mountains and villages .
And the courage to feel the cold.
Jayant Mahajan works where Management, technology, and sustainability meet, usually right before things get complicated. With industry experience in business management and digital transformation, he brings real-world messiness into the classroom (on purpose). As an educator, he designs future-ready curricula around data thinking, governance, and ethics, because technology without judgment scales mistakes faster. Through his Change Before Climate Change mission, Jayant helps institutions act early by fixing skills and incentives, so climate action becomes good management, not emergency management. Bridging policy, practice, and purpose, one syllabus at a time.
