Our Brains Weren’t Meant to Deal with Climate Change
Photo Credit: Shankar Vedantam/NPR
“Hidden Brain host Shankar Vedantam takes you on vacation with him to Alaska. You’ll hike on top of a glacier, drink from a cool stream, and talk with fellow tourists from around the world. But the trip comes with an upsetting observation: Glaciers in Alaska are retreating. The Mendenhall glacier, visited by tens of thousands of tourists each year, has receded more than a mile and a half in the last half century.
‘It’s sort of just collapsed in on itself,’ says John Neary, director of the Mendenhall Glacier Visitor Center.
Many see the glacier’s retreat as an ominous symbol of climate change. But not all. Shankar talks with tourists who are skeptical that climate change is even occurring. And so the question: Is there something about the human brain that makes it hard for us to grapple with climate change?’
