Reimagination

By Kate McIntosh

What is you relationship like with nature? Are you two going steady? On and off? Do you connect over endearing eel videos and David Attenborough narrated documentaries? Do you keep your distance until, like your mom on Mother’s Day, you begrudgingly call up your blue planet and wish it a Happy Earth Day? If you were looking at a live oak, would you swipe right or swipe left? At the beginning of the semester, we discussed the debate between the intrinsic and instrumental value of nature. Van Dyke explains that “whenever humans begin to perceive nature and natural objects as good in their own right, they begin to treat them with greater respect” (Van Dyke 2008). From John Muir to Gifford Pinchot to Aldo Leopold, we find that even preservationist and conservationist attitudes towards nature range on a spectrum between intrinsic and instrumental. The environmental views and beliefs of 323 million Americans shoot off from that spectrum in all directions like 4th of July fireworks. Is it possible for Americans to address climate change without understanding our own highly personal and culturally specific relationships with the natural world? Is there a better way to talk about climate change that can help us reimagine how we relate to and make decisions about the earth?

The psychology behind skepticism and outright denial of climate change has been studied by many social scientists. Per Espen Stoknes, a Norwegian psychologist and the author of What We Think About When We Try Not To Think About Global Warming, points to long-term surveys of wealthy democracies which indicate that people were more concerned about climate change in the 1980s than they are now. The irony of these findings is that the current sea of climate studies is teeming with data that did not exist a quarter of a century ago. Scroll through one page of an IPCC report and you have enough evidence to counter numerous denialist arguments. And yet, conclusive studies do not often seem to bridge the gaps between denial, skepticism, acceptance, and action. For Stoknes, this meant that discussion of the climate system needed to shift to a discussion about people’s responses to climate science. Confirmation biases and psychological barriers are erected due to a variety of factors which Stoknes identifies as distance, doom, dissonance, denial, and identify. Rejection of climate science, he contends, is also a cultural phenomenon, not a global one. Developed western nations can distance themselves from the realities of climate change while countries such as Thailand and the Philippines cannot (Shiffman 2015).

Stoknes’ advice to addressing climate apathy and various psychological barriers is not scientific. It centers on how we tell stories. A 2012 study of American climate change beliefs found that 63% of Americans believed that climate change was happening, but only 49% of those people thought it was mainly due to human activities (Howe 2013). Why the disconnect? Studies have shown that 80% of news articles relating to IPCC assessment reports are written in a catastrophe frame (Shiffman 2015). Stoknes argues that the way climate change is written about and discussed can evoke fear and guilt which often leads people towards apathy and denial. Instead, “we need new kinds of stories, stories that tell us that nature is resilient and can rebound...we need stories that tell us that we can collaborate with nature… we need stories about a new kind of happiness not based on material consumption” (Shiffman 2015). In other words, we need stories that allow us to reimagine our relationship with nature. Maybe responses to climate change need to come with a cultural revolution, one in which storytellers, mythologists, artists, and musicians are just as prominent as climate scientists.

Howe, Peter, Geoff Feinberg, Connie Roser-Renouf, Edward Maibach, and Anthony

Leiserowitz. "Climate Change in the American Mind." Yale Project of Climate 

Change Communication, April 2013.

Shiffman, Richard. "How Can We Make People Care About Climate Change?" Yale 

Environment 360, July 9, 2015.

Van Dyke, Fred. "Perspectives and Questions for an Inquiry into Conservation Biology.

Conservation Biology: Foundations, Concepts, Applications, 2008.