Show Notes
Thing about humans is, we like to look on the bright side of life. Without optimism, we'd not have evolved out of the trees in the first place. Our species has optimism bias. But we're all different, and some of us are a little bit too wired to be over-optimistic - and vice versa. This has big impacts for the messages we see about climate change. In this MICRO episode, a snippet of my forthcoming chat with Professor Geoff Beattie. What did he learn when he put optimistic and pess...
More from Your Brain On Climate
Fast fashion: terrible for the planet, awful for its workers, and hypercharged by the infinite marketing potential of social media. But we love to look cool (well, I don't, but you take the point). And let's face it, there's something very appealing about getting your clothes for very cheap. So in this episode I ask one of the country's leading experts on the psychology, culture and systems behind fast fashion: what's to be done, where does the power lie... and is it really possible to...
**Warning: this episode contains swears** My guest on this episode of Your Brain on Climate says it's time environmentalism grew some teeth. He wants YOU to actively disrupt destructive activity – to sabotage the machines that are destroying the Earth – because asking politely isn't getting us where we need to be fast or fair enough. But yet hardly anyone is prepared to do stuff like this, despite rising temperatures and a planet on fire. So I ask: what does it take to get people taking disru...
Come with me for a walk around Crystal Palace Park in London - home to the world's first ever life-sized models of dinosaurs, built in 1854. It's hard enough imagining what last Tuesday was like, never mind what living things might have looked like millions of years ago - so no wonder the Victorians got loads of the details wrong. But can you imagine how mind-bending it must have been to learn for the very first time that longer ago than we can imagine, there were zonking great lizards ...
You're a mature, rational adult who can face massive, existential problems head-on, right? Or is your brain more like a medieval dungeon: a deep dark place in which you chuck things you don't want to think about, and throw away the key? Uh-oh. My guest on this episode, the esteemed psychologist, TED talker and author Dr Renée Lertzman, thinks it's the latter - and she thinks it's about time you got them complex thoughts out. Renée tells me why most traditional climate chat is mor...
Why do people who care about climate change still jet off on planes (including, occasionally, me?) This is an excerpt of me attempting to answer that surprisingly complicated question on Joel Walker's Look Near First podcast - where Joel asked me all about the psychology and culture of flying. How come despite knowing about climate change, and the damage aviation causes, those who fly keep on doing so - even if they're ostensibly really concerned about the planet? And if facts don't do ...