A weekly reckoning with life in a warming world—and the fight to save it

Chip Somodevilla/Getty

Which is more effective: hope or fear? This is a huge question when it comes to climate change and how to convince people to support policy that helps decarbonize society. Liza Featherstone’s latest column, out yesterday, tackles this topic.

Fear gets a bad rap, but it can be brutally effective, Liza noted. To take a recent example, the delta variant seems to have overcome many Americans’ doubts about getting vaccinated, leading to spikes in vaccination rates. “Vaccine-hesitant pockets of the country turned hot spots are at the vanguard,” The Washington Post recently reported, “including Louisiana, which experienced a 114 percent increase in uptake, according to the latest data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.”

But fear only works in very particular instances—such as when it’s accompanied, Liza wrote, “by a specific call to action.” Fear over the most recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report, for example, was probably counterproductive, since the report failed to “name the enemy” (fossil fuels) or give people something to do, as discussed in last week’s newsletter.

Support Our Journalists

Our writers and editors are bringing you vital reporting, explanation, and analysis to understand the current climate crisis—but they need your help.

Here’s a special summer offer to subscribe to The New Republic.

—Heather Souvaine Horn, deputy editor

Try The New Republic for just $10

At the same time, “naming an enemy can be risky if fear is emphasized at the expense of a positive message,” Liza added, pointing to a striking example from World War II, when the Roosevelt administration was trying out different propaganda techniques to see what would lead the American public to support war against Nazi Germany:

FDR’s Office of War Information, helped by social scientists at Columbia University, found that overemphasizing the badness of our enemy could backfire. Imagery and radio broadcasts by the U.S. government depicted the Nazis as bloodthirsty, demonic, barely human. The U.S. government then discovered, using early market research techniques including the very first focus groups, that these portrayals were too frightening. Focusing on the enemy’s depravity, especially the ruthless killing of civilians, tended to discourage Americans from wanting to fight the Nazis at all: Any sensible person would want to avoid a confrontation with such an enemy. In contrast, a more positive message, emphasizing American rationality and democracy, and optimism that we could prevail and work together, tended to carry the day.

We’ve seen the same problem with climate change: If we become too afraid, we’re paralyzed.

The trick is to hit that sweet spot of fear and hope. This dovetails nicely with a beautiful piece from atmospheric scientist and climate writer Katharine Hayhoe in Time last week. “In a world that seems increasingly out of control,” she wrote, “we are desperate for hope: real hope, a hope that acknowledges the full magnitude of the challenge we face and the very imminent risk of failure.”

People think they need hope in order to act. But it’s actually the other way around, Katherine argued: “Action engenders hope.”

She went on to suggest several ways readers could act, even if no one can single-handedly push climate legislation through Congress. Both Liza’s column and Katharine Hayhoe’s are worth reading in full.

—Heather Souvaine Horn, deputy editor

Advertising

Stat of the Week

That’s the rough number of people in the American West whose water supply comes at least partly from the Colorado River.

Good News

Hybrid car sales are surging, which many are interpreting as good news for the eventual switch to all-electric vehicles.

Bad News

On Monday, the U.S. federal government declared the first-ever water shortage on the Colorado River, triggering mandatory water usage cuts. Read more about the climate crisis–driven drought in the region and the even more severe cuts to come here, here, here, or here.

Elsewhere in the Ecosystem

Culture shock: how loss of animals’ shared knowledge threatens their survival

The Guardian published a fascinating piece about the case for preserving cultural as well as genetic diversity when trying to save endangered species. “Cultural diversity gives a species a larger behavioural toolkit when facing new challenges,” reporter Zoe Kean wrote. It all sounds pretty human-like. Some examples:

Understanding who holds cultural knowledge in a population can be key, says Brakes, who cites African elephant herds as an example. “The age of the matriarch in the herd has a significant [positive] influence on the fertility rate of the younger females,” she says. “The [matriarch] female’s experience of where water holes are, where good foraging is, and also which other social units are friendly has a demonstrable knock-on effect on the fertility rate of the younger females in her herd.

By the early 1970s, habitat destruction and the pet trade had reduced the golden lion tamarin population to as few as 200 individuals. Captive breeding, overseen by 43 institutions in eight countries, increased their numbers to the point that conservationists were able to reintroduce the tamarins into the wild from 1984. But initially, the reintroduced tamarins had a low survival rate, with problems with adaptation to the new environment causing the majority of losses. High casualties are typical of such efforts, says Brakes.

So the tamarin researchers developed an intensive post-release programme, including supplementary feeding and the provision of nest sites, giving the monkeys time to learn necessary survival skills for the jungle. This helping hand doubled survival rates, which was a good start. However, it was not until the next generation that the species began to thrive. “By giving them the opportunity to learn individually in the wild and share that knowledge, the next generation of tamarins had a survival rate of 70%, which is just amazing,” says Brakes.

Zoe Kean | The Guardian