Here’s a “Your Dot” contribution from Jacob Tanenbaum, a computer technology teacher from Tappan, N.Y., who sent the following thoughts after reading “On Birth Certificates, Climate Risk and an Inconvenient Mind“:
Our lack of ability to perceive and react to climate is not just simply a problem rooted in social norms. It goes far deeper into the evolutionary structure of the human mind. We are an animal that evolved over time somewhere in southern Africa. Our minds are set up to quickly and effectively assess an environment and perceive danger in it. This is what Macolm Gladwell calls “thin slicing” and it is very effective in many situations. What we consider higher thought processes appeared far later in our evolutionary path. When we are facing danger, it makes sense that we rely on those higher processes far less than we rely on our “gut instinct” –- those older processes that kept us safe for so much longer in our species’ history. So how does this help us understand our reactions to something like climate?
Consider this:
1. Once we are accustomed to something, change is very difficult. An animal that understands its environment can pick out subtle changes that indicate danger more effectively. An animal in new environment perceives difference, and so danger, everywhere it looks. Our reaction to climate must involve significant change in how we live our lives. This is difficult for any animal. Even us.
2. Our understanding of danger is event driven. The presence of a predator, or a fire or a storm or flood are all events. Climate is not an event, it is a trend. Weather is an event. To understand climate, you must suspend the belief that what you see outside your window is all that can be a threat to you. To understand climate you must look at the numbers over a long time and a large geographical space. That is how you can “see” a trend. This, unfortunately, may be antithetical to the way that the human animal understands danger since the threat is not immediately in front of us in a way that causes our lower thought processes to perceive a threat, pump us full of adrenalin, and push us to react.
3. Since our understanding of danger is event driven, it makes sense that our understanding of danger is also temporally driven. We are best wired to react to events that are immediate in nature and short in duration. We are wired to react to an event quickly and to make whatever adjustments are needed so that things return to what we perceive as normal. We want a short burst of adrenalin to help us get away from the threat and back to our “comfort zone.” Climate, again, asks us to suspend this part of our understanding of danger and may, again, be antithetical to the way in which we are wired to think about danger. We must react now to avoid a threat that may be several decades away. We must suspend our belief that what we perceive as normal may not be OK. We do, after all, live in an environment that has already undergone change, and our normal way of life is causing that change.
If you couple those facts with a media campaign that encourages denial as well as a media and political structure that largely reflects the way that we are wired and you have a perfect storm. So what we are really being asked to do as a species is evolve. We must evolve the ability to rely on more recent brain constructs, rather than our more primitive ones, to assess and react to danger This means we must evolve in our understanding of danger, of risk, of time, and in our ability control what we have created. But, of course, about half the U.S. does not believe in evolution, so asking us to continue the process may be beyond us. These are the things that keep me up at night.
Tanenbaum’s commentary on climate risk and response, or lack thereof, leads back to the recent Edge.org question: Do we need to bolster our cognitive toolkit?