THE GREEN BRAIN
Here is a preview from Anthony Leiserowitz, Director of the Yale Project on Climate Change and a principal investigator at the Center for Research on Environmental Decisions at Columbia University.
In this podcast (edited by Jessica Sain-Baird) Dr. Leiserowitz addresses the schism between concern and engagement. He explains why statistics and distant images are not wholly effective ways to galvanize people around environmental issues...but why we persist in drowning people in information anyhow. Rational facts and detached data are what Dr. Leiserowitz calls “necessary but insufficient.” (Note: I mention the term “affect” in my question. Affect is basically a scholarly way to say feelings and emotions.) One of my favorite insights from this interview: “We did not evolve as a human species to deal with the incredibly complex problems of the society that we live in.” Dr. Leiserowitz points out, “We’re still using the same minds that we were using 200,000 years ago.”