Or: how chinwags can save the world. Imagine I could give you a superpower. The ability to make people trust you who currently don't. To help them change their own mind, on their own terms. And to maybe even heal society, perhaps just a little bit. WELL I CAN. It's called 'having a grown up conversation', and it's perhaps the most underrated thing we can all do about climate change.Joining me to talk about all things chatting, nattering and deep canvassing is the charming Alex Evans, founder ...
So much of our silly short lives is spent chasing after trophies or money or glory. Success! But it's never really enough. We just want more trophies and more more money and one day we die and so does everything else, the end. As a culture, we've got success wrong. Today's guest says we should instead see success as learning to lose ourselves in things - whether that's playing the piano, or sport, or listening to jolly interesting podcasts. Pursuing, and cherishing, a flow state - the o...
Frazzled? Go for a walk in the woods. It'll calm you down, fill your nose with lovely smells, and reset your eyes to room temperature. But why? According to today's guest, humans evolved to need to chill out in natural environments. It gives us nice chemicals like serotonin, is good for long term mental health, and generally resets our stress alarms. This is the idea of Biophilia, and it's rather nice. Joining Dave this episode is Dr Lauren Hall Ruddell - a journalist and naturali...
Some people think climate science is made up. This annoys other people. But calling each other dullards is unhelpful, and it misses the deeper questions. What determines who and what we trust, including science? And what can be done to make people and politics - particularly, Lord help us all, American politics - a bit less squabbly about it all? Joining Dave this episode is Laur Hesse Fisher, programme director for MIT's Environmental Solutions Initiative. Laur's an expert ...
WE need to take action on climate change. WE need a revolution. WE need to unite and tackle the problem. Etc. But who is this "we"? Politicians and campaigners love to invoke it. It has powerful rhetorical force. But does this confusing "we" give us any sense of what each of us can actually do? Is it a linguistic problem or something more profound about how our brains think about collective agency? And how the heck do "we" actually go from not doing enough, to doing so? Joining Da...
Are we responsible for how we behave? If so, should we feel bad about it? And if the answer to those two is 'yes' and 'yes' respectively, how do we change our behaviour? How much of 'behaviour change' is about nudging or encouraging individuals to change, versus how much is banning bad things and making good things easier and cheaper? And are simple answers stupid? (Spoiler: yes.) Joining Dave this month is the esteemed Professor Lorraine Whitmarsh MBE. Lorraine is Prof of Environ...
Try running for a few miles, and then a few miles more, and then several hundred few miles more. That's proper endurance that is, the kind demonstrated regularly by Damian Hall: ultrarunner, climate activist, author, and all-round lovely chap. He's the holder of the men's record for the 268-mile Spine Race, so he knows a thing or two about keeping going when things look grim. And when it comes to climate change, heaven knows we need a bit of that. What can running very long dista...
The climate crisis needs all the ideas and imagination it can get. But today's guest says that liberalism - the system many of us live in, which cherishes individual freedom above pretty much all else - is a straitjacket on our imaginations, and our ability to think and act big. If it really is harder to imagine the death of capitalism than the end of all life on Earth, does that explain why most visions of the future are so, well, crap? Joining Dave this ep is Dr Christopher Sha...
Our ideas about climate change are filtered through layers of Stuff, and for us in the West quite a lot of that Stuff is inseparable from being gits to other countries for centuries. We've nabbed land, exploited populations and perhaps most enduringly of all, seen the world as basically being for 'us' to do with as we want. That Stuff dies hard, and, this episode's guest argues, shapes how we think even about what climate change is, never mind how and in whose interests to solve it. Joi...
The death of everything: no ROFLing matter. Right? Well probably yes. But can chuckles save the planet? Does laughing at humans being silly confused bags of water help the climate fight or take the heat out of it? And just why is so much climate comedy, well, crap? Joining Dave this episode is a right proper comedy mastermind, Stuart Goldsmith. Stuart's spent aeons both behind the mic as a stand-up, and peering at other comics via interviews in his legendary The Comedian's C...
You can't handle the truth! Or maybe you can. But does the truth set us free, or bum us out? Do we all have a duty to say it like we see it - particularly on things we're not seeing clearly enough, like climate change? How much honesty can our flimsy little brains bear? Joining Dave this episode is Dr Rupert Read. He's an academic, author, agitator and activist, and used to be one of Extinction Rebellion's biggest thinkers and strategists. As well as a new book - 'Do You Want To K...
It's all very well demanding that everything happens NOW, but we're actually going to do - or not - about climate change is all about negotiation. What happens inside those fusty negotiating halls? How does one negotiate well and get what one wants, whether on climate or things more domestic? And does the climate have the time for us to negotiate our way out of a paper bag? Joining Dave this episode is Camilla Born MBE. Camilla's been at more top tables than you've had hot dinners...
Yup, buzz-buzz-swat-buggers. Now, I can't guarantee you're going to come out of this one in love with flies (and fleas), but maybe you'll think a wee bit differently about 'em. About what we need to do to our brains to make small buzzing things our chums, not our nemesis. And why needing to do it is pretty dang essential for not wiping out everything that lives, including ourselves. Joining Dave this week is the legend that is Dr Erica McAlister, the London Natural History Museum's expert on ...
Yes you probably WOULD walk by on the other side, wouldn't you, and don't say you wouldn't, because you would. Alas, a trio of brain wirings add up to the so-called Bystander Effect: our tendency to stand in a crowd of people watching someone flail in a canal, hoping it's not us that has to get our frock wet to jump in and save them. In this episode Dave learns all about the Bystander Effect with Dr Gerdien de Vries from TU Delft. What is it? Why is it? And can working out what'll...
Time travel! No not like Marty McFly, but in our heads. Backwards via memories, albeit imperfectly. And forwards, to make plans for the future and think about all the ways they could go wrong and then make new plans and then etc. Foresight is profoundly human and completely innate to your brain: just try and sit still with your thoughts for a bit, and you'll see how often you think about what comes next. Without foresight, no skyscrapers, art, podcasts or health service. No ...
All I need to say to you is "Your Brain on Climate is a lovely cake of a podcast" and you'll drool and tell all your friends to subscribe immediately. Or something. No look: our brains LOVE metaphors. We think in stories and our brains like making connections between different ideas to make sense of the world - particularly things we can't always touch and feel, like climate change. Metaphors can constrain, divert or unlock our creativity, so we'd better get smart about the metaph...
We play when we're kids to try new things and learn how the world works, and when we think no-one's looking we do it as adults too. Play's important for our development and so you should probably do it or you'll turn out a wrong'un. But Dave's guest today says play is also a way to smash the Very Serious Rules of how to think about climate change - rules the following of which demonstrably are not working. If play = creativity, and creativity = necessary, is it time to lark about ...
Right then. Everything you perceive - including what climate change is to you - is a construction of your brain. And your brain is winging it. That's the reality of human consciousness, and everything I thought it was is completely wrong. So how do our brains perceive things, like buses? Are there even buses? (Yes, there are buses.) Have our conscious noggins evolved enough to cope with the reality of climate change? If not, er - can they, sharpish? And can the very f...
We love it when someone gets what's coming to them - whether it's an individual we know personally and dislike, someone from a group we hate, or someone we just generally think is a wrong'un. That's schadenfreude - literally, "joy damage". Grubby, wonderful feeling. But what does schadenfreude do for us, psychologically? Is it a good and useful thing or a harmful thing? And can it be harnessed - or should it be feared - when trying to do something about the climate crisis? Joining Dave this e...
When things get scary, we like hero(+ine)s. We kind of automatically create them - like there was always a hero-shaped hole in our stories that was just waiting for someone to pop into. Why? Are we really hardwired to look for heroes? Do they all wear capes? And for something as complex and fiddly and *wibbles hands expansively in the air* as climate change, is it a good or a bad thing that we cast Greta, David Attenborough and whoever comes next as a climate hero? Do we need new types ...