Your Brain On Climate

Well... is it? Nearly half of young people say the future of the planet brings them mental distress. Not just young people either. More and more people of all ages are feeling something that feels like the thing we call climate anxiety. And for good reason: things not very brill, planet-wise.  But is climate anxiety something distinct from other worries? Is it just the latest snowflakey expression of more generally held worries about the future? Is it a mental health problem, or a social problem, both or neither?  And - whatever the hell it is - is it something we can really do anything about, short of actually stopping climate change? Joining me on this episode is academic, telly psychologist and prolific author Professor Geoff Beattie. Geoff's latest book, Understanding Climate Anxiety, is about - well - what it says.  We explore: is climate anxiety real? If so, how big a problem is it and for whom? And how can we help others (or ourselves)? Let me know your thoughts on the show - hello@yourbrainonclimate.com. Please rate, review and subscribe, and share the show on socials. Please consider chucking this humble indie podcaster a few quid at www.patreon.com/yourbrainonclimate. Owl noises = references: 13.16. Aaron Beck there, the father of CBT. 15.22. My piece for NEF about climate anxiety back in 2020, when I was in the midst of a proper wobble about things. 19.28. Values / Action Gap. I did a podcast all about that. 22.45. That survey of 10,000 young people in different countries, as covered in BBC. 35.40. Study: young people's climate anxiety may be more complicated. 44.09. James Pennebaker was one of the (academic) originators of the idea of 'disclosure' in psychology: that talking about stuff makes you feel better. The show is hosted and produced by me, Dave Powell. You can follow the show on instagram @yourbrainonclimate, and I occasionally put up a Substack. YBOC theme music and iterations thereof, by me.  Show logo by Arthur Stovell at https://mondial-studio.com/. 

Climate change: fast in a geological sense, but slow in a second-by-second human-perception sense. Our brains stop paying attention to things that change (relatively) slowly. This is 'change blindness' - and it's why we need laws and leadership that prioritise our shifting climate, because our brains struggle to. In this MICRO episode, a snippet of my 2022 chat with neuroscientist and author, Professor Anil Seth. You can listen to the full interview here or in the back catalogue. Please do consider chipping in a couple of quid over at http://www.patreon.com/yourbrainonclimate. And a written review would be ace. Please thank you please. The show is hosted and produced by me, Dave Powell. The show is over on Instagram at @yourbrainonclimate. YBOC theme music and iterations thereof, by me.  Show logo by Arthur Stovell at www.designbymondial.com.  

I'm afraid that you are going to die. Sorry. You can imagine afterlives and  amass great hordes of wealth, but you're still made of human stuff, and thus will die. Humanity's inability to get its head around this most inconvenient of truths is probably behind most of the silly pointless stuff we do, from rampant consumption to wars to spaceships to conjuring up Gods. Joining me on this episode of Your Brain on Climate is Molly Conisbee - author of No Ordinary Deaths, a social history of how we've lived and died through the generations. Molly says we can learn a huge amount about how societies choose to live by how they deal with death - and why coming to terms with the fact that we will all (probably) cark it might lead us to do better by the climate in the here and now. We learn how our relationship with death, the afterlife, and messy mortality, has changed hugely over the years. When we're ever more botoxed and scared of aging, and billionaire-backed scientists are actively trying to cure death, are we running ever more away from the most human - and beautiful - thing of all? Let me know your thoughts on the show - hello@yourbrainonclimate.com. Please rate, review and subscribe, and share the show on socials. Please consider chucking this humble indie podcaster a few quid at www.patreon.com/yourbrainonclimate. Owl noises = references: 28:07. God on the rise with young people. 29.09. Yougov tracked people's belief in ghosts etc.  30.07. Roger Clark's Natural History of Ghosts. 34.51. Stefan Zweig's The World of Yesterday.  39.12. A wiki on Ernest Becker's Denial (not Fear!) of Death. 56:40. Make a death / memory box,  The show is hosted and produced by me, Dave Powell. You can follow the show on instagram @yourbrainonclimate, and I occasionally put up a Substack. YBOC theme music and iterations thereof, by me.  Show logo by Arthur Stovell at https://mondial-studio.com/. 

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 pessimistic people in an eye tracker and got them to read bits of text about the state of the planet? OWL NOISE: Read more about Geoff's brilliant work on optimism here. Please do consider chipping in a couple of quid over at http://www.patreon.com/yourbrainonclimate. And a written review would be ace. Please thank you please. The show is hosted and produced by me, Dave Powell. The show is over on Instagram at @yourbrainonclimate. YBOC theme music and iterations thereof, by me.  Show logo by Arthur Stovell at www.designbymondial.com.  

Climate change sucks, not least when it causes violence - which it does more than you'd think. In a hundred ways it can add stress and trauma to brains already under huge pressure, and when that's all finally a bit much - well, the worse demons of our nature can, and do, come out. Grim. But are we doomed? Does it have to be like that? Can environmental peacebuilding turn climate violence into an engine of cooperation? Or is human nature a more powerful force when the chips are down, which they increasingly are? Joining me this episode is environmental journalist Peter Schwartzstein. We discuss his remarkable book of reportage from the world's climate and confrontational hotspots - The Heat and the Fury: On the Frontlines of Climate Violence - and what lies behind his termite theory of climate violence. Let me know your thoughts on the show - hello@yourbrainonclimate.com. Please rate, review and subscribe, and share the show on socials. Please consider chucking this humble indie podcaster a few quid at www.patreon.com/yourbrainonclimate. Owl noises = references: 15:33. Peter's piece for Columbia Journalism Review about how climate change is scuppering climate journalism. 16:43. A review of Why We Sleep, by Matthew Walker. 21:09. Alessandro Massazza joined me last year, discussing climate change & mental heat. 39:15. Steven Pinker's Better Angels of our Nature. The show is hosted and produced by me, Dave Powell. You can follow the show on instagram @yourbrainonclimate, and I occasionally put up a Substack. YBOC theme music and iterations thereof, by me.  Show logo by Arthur Stovell at https://mondial-studio.com/. 

Comedy opens the mind and helps us cope with the sheer strangeness of being alive. But is climate change a suitable topic for comedy? In this micro episode of Your Brain on Climate, I chat to Stuart Goldsmith - stand-up par excellence and host of the Comedian's Comedian podcast - about what he's learned from trying to to do jokes about the state of the planet. If you liked this episode, here's the full chat with Stuart from back in 2023. I use a clip from Stuart's set on Live at the Apollo earlier this year. Please do consider chipping in a couple of quid over at http://www.patreon.com/yourbrainonclimate. And a written review would be ace. Please thank you please. The show is hosted and produced by me, Dave Powell. The show is over on Instagram at @yourbrainonclimate. YBOC theme music and iterations thereof, by me.  Show logo by Arthur Stovell at www.designbymondial.com.  

How should you bring up baby in the age of climate breakdown? Should you tell them what's happening or not? And given how messed up is the planet we're passing on - is it even fair to *have* kids? In a YBOC first this episode is a 3-way chat. Dave meets Nina Alexandersen and Sophia Cheng - respectively someone who became a climate activist through fear for her kid's future, and someone whose activism made them very ambivalent about becoming a mum, until something changed. We talk about all things motherhood and parenthood - like what it does to your brain, and whether you still have as much time to care about things like climate change.  And we discuss people who don't want to have kids because of the state of the planet: are they doing the right thing, or missing out on something core to being human? See here for some of Sophia's project's stories of motherhood in a crisis, as discussed in the show. Let me know your thoughts on the show - hello@yourbrainonclimate.com. Please rate, review and subscribe, and share the show on socials. Please consider chucking this humble indie podcaster a few quid at www.patreon.com/yourbrainonclimate. Owl noises = references: 18:57: More on matrescence. And 19:09: Matrescence, including Lucy Jones, in Time Magazine.20:02: Lucy Jones wrote a brilliant book about foxes.  23:33: The (wrong) finite pool of worry hypothesis talked about in this from Vox. And 24.57: Sisco et al take apart the finite pool of worry idea.26.15: Steve Akehurst discusses the importance of keeping climate in the news. 29:10: A discussion of Joanna Macy's Three Dimensions of the Great Turning.38:55: Jo McAndrews's work. 45:55: Alice Brown, then of the Birthstrike movement, on Sustainababble. The show is hosted and produced by me, Dave Powell. You can follow the show on instagram @yourbrainonclimate, and I occasionally put up a Substack. YBOC theme music and iterations thereof, by me.  Show logo by Arthur Stovell at https://mondial-studio.com/. 

We vote in our self interest, right? So how come people living on islands disappearing because of climate change - and they know it - keep voting for Donald Trump? The answer to that goes to the heart of our climate politics. But it also tells us something very important about how different people think about climate change and what should be done about it, even when they can see it literally killing the place they love. This episode is a fascinating chat with anthropologist Dr Karl Dudman. He talks all about his time spent with the unique communities of Down East, North Carolina - a fiercely proud,  strongly Republican, and very maritime patch of the US Coast. Karl explains with empathy how Down Easterners talk about the sea level rises, hurricanes and changing fishing patterns that feels like the last straw in a community whose centuries-old identity is falling apart.  Let me know your thoughts on the show - hello@yourbrainonclimate.com. Please rate, review and subscribe, and share the show on socials. Please consider chucking this humble indie podcaster a few quid at www.patreon.com/yourbrainonclimate. Owl noises = references: 04:33 - Karl's brilliant blog on the Conversation.07:53 - Yale's climate opinion maps. 09:33 - Google Maps link to Down East, as if you can't find it yourself. 23:48 - Miranda Fricker's epistemic injustice. 33:34 - Danna Young's appearance on YBOC.34:18 - more on affective & negative polarisation40:19 - the original paper on solastalgia by Glenn Albrecht et al.40:55 - Arlie Russell Hochschild's majestic Strangers In Their Own Land41:23 - OK I can't find a great link for the aesthetics of embodiment. A bloke explained it to me. 42:40 - Revisionist History episode on country vs rock music.  44:04 - some stuff about methodological symmetry in here.51:25 - my chat on YBOC with Jonathan Rowson. 52:17 - the not uncontroversial original essay by David Goodhart on somewheres vs anywhere. The show is hosted and produced by me, Dave Powell. You can follow the show on instagram @yourbrainonclimate, and I occasionally put up a Substack. YBOC theme music and iterations thereof, by me.  Show logo by Arthur Stovell at https://mondial-studio.com/. 

I'm out in the garden looking for that pile of jobby I found the other day, and it made me think back to my chat in episode 17 with Erica McAlister all about flies (and fleas).  Erica is the London Natural History Museum's expert on all things dipeteric (flies) and siphonapteric (fleas), and an extremely funny and nice person too. Reaching for that fly-killer? WAIT A MINUTE. Must we call kill all pests? (Must we even think of them as pests in the first place?) If you like the show please do consider chipping in a couple of quid over at http://www.patreon.com/yourbrainonclimate. And a written review would be ace. Please thank you please. The show is hosted and produced by me, Dave Powell. The show is over on Instagram at @yourbrainonclimate. YBOC theme music and iterations thereof, by me.  Show logo by Arthur Stovell at www.designbymondial.com.  Poo definitely not by Maggie cat. 

An episode all about the subtle art of talking bollocks. We live in a golden age of bullshit. It can seem that our politics is riddled with it. Corporate climate communications are drenched in it. And despite the looming eco-crisis, perhaps our own brains are too. In this episode, Dave meets author Mike Berners-Lee to chew over his new book, A Climate of Truth. It's a brilliant balance of home truths about the state of things, with unputdownable optimism that humanity can - and must - do better. What distinguishes glorious bullshit from mere lying? How do we get more honesty about the state of the world into our politics and our own lives? And in the age of Trump and Boris, how realistic is it to hope that any of this will change in time to face up to, and head off climate disaster? All this, and Macavity the cat too. If you liked this episode, check out episode 19 on Honesty, with Rupert Read. Let me know your thoughts on the show - hello@yourbrainonclimate.com. Please rate, review and subscribe, and share the show on socials. Please consider chucking this humble indie podcaster a few quid at www.patreon.com/yourbrainonclimate. Owl noises = references: 14:34 - Harry Frankfurt's 1986 'On Bullshit', later turned into a book. 18:55 - Quassam Cassim's brilliant term, 'epistemic insouciance'. 21:22 - the Political Lies website: Boris and much more. 25:13 - in case you don't still remember, here's what naughty Volkswagen did. 25:39 - the always superb You Are Not So Smart podcast, here talking about that study that showed you prefer sharing fake news that makes you look good. 34:10 - Julian Kirchherr's paper on bullshit in sustainability literature. The show is hosted and produced by me, Dave Powell, who you can find @powellds on Bluesky and X/Twitter, although I don't use the latter any more. YBOC theme music and iterations thereof, by me.  Show logo by Arthur Stovell at www.designbymondial.com.