 |
| |
|
|
|
In her essay against climate doomerism, researcher Hannah Ritchie argues that a certain type of optimism is the only useful attitude in the climate fight. While pessimism may be a reasonable reaction to images of collapse, only optimism offers solutions.
“Scaring people into action doesn’t work. That’s true not just for climate change, air pollution, and biodiversity loss, but for almost any issue we can think of. We need optimism to make progress – yet that alone isn’t enough. To contend with environmental crises and make life better for everyone, we need the right kind of optimists: those who recognize that the world will only improve if we fight for it.”
While pessimists are too often fixated on the current moment, optimists tend to zoom out and see current challenges in the context of a long arc of progress: “The news isn’t a reliable barometer for the overall state of the world. I’ve found that pessimists look at the news, while optimists look at the data.”
Ritchie borrows a conceptual framework to put our collective attitudes to the climate emergency in four categories. Imagine a chart with two axes: on the vertical one we go from pessimism to optimism; on the horizontal axis we go from ‘the future is set and I can’t change it’ to ‘the future is changeable and I have agency’. This leaves us with four distinct categories/quadrants:
In the lower left, you have unchangeable pessimists who believe we’re all doomed. This kind of thinking is marked by paralysing anxiety and despondency. ‘It’s too late and there is nothing we can do.’
In the lower right, the changeable pessimists have similar anxieties but act mostly in their own interest and promote extreme, unrealistic environmental solutions that would leave many far worse off.
In the upper right, we have the unchangeable optimists who assume the world will continue to get better regardless of how hard we work to change it. A central driver for this category is the unwavering belief in techno-solutionism to save the day. ‘Someone will come up with a fix.’
The final and – according to Ritchie – only useful category is that of the changeable optimists: people who believe the future can be better, but only if we all work really hard to get there.
“These people might not always put high odds on a better future – they may, in fact, think there’s only a slim chance of success. But the act of trying creates possibilities that no one knew about before, which build a concrete case for optimism.”
She distils the key take-away into a quote from a colleague of hers: “‘The world is awful. The world is much better. The world can be much better.’ All three statements are true. We can acknowledge the progress that we’ve made but remain dissatisfied that we haven’t made more.”
Ritchie’s view is quite human- and Western-centric, but it’s hard to disagree with the fact that neither despondency, nor complacency have anything valuable to offer in the climate crisis. In her words: “Optimistic but dissatisfied is the road to progress.”
– Kai
|
| |
|
DD relies on word of mouth
If you’re enjoying DD, chances are your friends and colleagues will, too! Help me reach more readers by sharing the link to this issue with others:
densediscovery.com/issues/251
You receive this email because you subscribed to Dense Discovery, a weekly newsletter at the intersection of design, technology, sustainability and culture. Writing to you from Melbourne is Kai Brach. Do you have a product or service to promote in DD? Find out more about advertising in DD.
|
| |
Explore the World of Collage SPONSOR
|
|
Collé, an email publication exploring the world of contemporary collage, highlights an artist from around the globe in each edition, giving readers a window into their creative practice. Sign up today to receive their weekly editions.
Collage by Agata Rek
|
|
| |
Apps & Sites
|
|
What a beautiful concept! The Week is a self-managed group workshop with the goal to overcome climate angst and build momentum. You meet with a self-selected group of people three times over the course of one week. In each session, you first watch a specific documentary on the climate crisis which you then work through in a group setting. A DD reader recommended it, saying they participated as a team at work and it left a strong, positive impression on them. A smart way to collectively process climate-related anger and anxiety and find a way to get involved.
|
|
|
Poddy is a new social platform for meeting podcast hosts and listeners alike. Create your profile, share podcaps and podcasts, and connect and communicate with others.
|
|
|
You tell the Prospre app (iOS & Android) what sort of food you like and it will automatically generate a personalised meal plan and shopping list, taking into account your caloric goals. Their extensive database also tracks over 150 nutrients for 300,000+ food items.
|
|
|
This free and open-source web app lets you build a custom exercise program: select the equipment you have available and the muscle groups you’d like to target and the app generates a program with instruction videos and the option to record your weights.
|
|
| |
Worthy Five: Emily Mabin Sutton
|
An activity worth doing:
Understand your own biases. I love the Harvard Implicit Bias tests and take them once every few years. They are not only insightful, but provide a guide to specific areas you should work on.
A quote worth repeating:
“Every criticism, judgment, diagnosis, and expression of anger is the tragic expression of an unmet need.” by Dr. Marshall B. Rosenberg. It flips the perspective from taking offense at someone’s outrage, to being curious about the root cause of a person’s anger as a defense not an attack mechanism.
A book worth reading:
Noam Chomsky’s How The World Works offers a mind-blowing fact on almost every page, with many surprising facts about US and international politics. One I found especially fascinating was that our financial investment in productive activities compared to speculation (which used to be 90/10) has flipped in the last fifty years to overly skew toward speculation.
A concept worth understanding:
Correlation is not causation. It’s really easy to assign causes where they are simply random spurious correlations. This excellent site highlights the many ways data can be made to imply meaning it doesn’t have.
A word worth knowing:
Treppenwitz is a German word meaning ‘stairway joke’. It’s a word for the joke or comeback you think of way too late – on the stairway as you’re leaving the building. I often experience the pain of a missed Treppenwitz.
(Did you know? Friends of DD can respond to and engage with guest contributors like Emily Mabin Sutton in one click.)
|
|
| |
Books & Accessories
|
The rise of ultra-processed food
The omnipresence of ultra-processed food is staggering (see also DD241). For the first time in human history, most of our calories now come from food that, arguably, isn’t really food at all. “There’s a long, formal scientific definition (for ultra-processed food or UPF), but it can be boiled down to this: if it’s wrapped in plastic and has at least one ingredient that you wouldn’t find in your kitchen, it’s UPF.These products are specifically engineered to behave as addictive substances, driving excess consumption. They are now linked to the leading cause of early death globally and the number one cause of environmental destruction.”
|
|
How foresight empowers humanity
Co-authored by three cognitive scientists, this book is an exploration of how humans evolved the cognitive capacity to think about the future and how this ‘mental time travel’ allows us to plan for and shape tomorrow. “Journeying through biology, psychology, history, and culture, the authors show that thinking ahead is at the heart of human nature – even if we often get it terribly wrong.”
|
|
| |
Overheard on Mastodon
|
|
This meeting could have been a nap.
|
| |
Food for Thought
|
|
Charting four ways to think about the climate crisis, researcher Hannah Ritchie makes a case for a particular type of climate optimism that she believes is the only way to contribute to real progress. “‘The world is awful. The world is much better. The world can be much better.’ All three statements are true. We can acknowledge the progress that we’ve made but remain dissatisfied that we haven’t made more.”
|
|
|
I’m still working my way through this multi-part introduction to how computers and AIs work. I love how Simon Carryer uses imperfect, but very easy to understand analogies to make data processing and algorithmic decision-making more palpable. “Like the techniques of knitting and weaving had been known many years before they were industrialised, the mathematics that underpin artificial intelligence are not, for the most part, particularly new. Also like textile crafts, they are simply manipulations of the geometric properties of a raw material. For textiles, this is thread. For artificial intelligence, this is data.”
|
|
|
I quite enjoyed this essay about the ‘unremarkable’ life of the author’s grandfather and why having had an ordinary life is a rather remarkable, almost rebellious thing to admit these days. “All around us are these lives – heads down and arms open – that ignore the siren call of flashy American individualism, of bright lights and center stage. I’m fine right here is the response from the edge of the room, and that contentment is downright subversive. How could you want only that? the world demands. There’s more to have, always more.”
|
|
| |
Aesthetically Pleasing
|
|
Huntz Liu is a Taiwanese-American artist who works primarily with cut and layered paper, creating mesmerising geometric and three-dimensional shapes.
|
|
|
They look like renders, but are actually paintings by UK artist Lee Madgwick. His work shows neglected buildings and other remnants of human life. Eerie and quietly beautiful. (via)
|
|
|
Photographer Brian Kaiser highlights and celebrates the colourful, quirky people and subcultures of the American Midwest. I just watched The English, and so I particularly liked his photo series Midwest Cowboy: “The ways cowboys have been depicted in popular culture, and who has been excluded from those depictions is directly linked to the inaccurate stories America tells itself about race, gender, exceptionalism, expansion, and destiny. A growing body of literature and images have sought to expand and challenge these incomplete depictions, to correct the record and broaden the definition. This body of work looks to do the same.”
|
|
|
With its high contrast style and short sharp serifs, Brillante is tailor-made for captivating titles. It comes in three widths, five weights and a variable font.
|
|
| |
Notable Numbers
|
|
Cycling UK says liveable neighbourhoods, updates to the Highway Code and other road safety measures – including the rollout of more 20mph (30km/h) zones – are likely what have led to a 24% drop in cycling casualties, the lowest number of such fatalities since 1993.
|
|
|
New research adds to existing evidence that eating more plant-based foods – that are also planet friendly – may help reduce a person’s risk of death from cancer, heart disease and other chronic illnesses by 25%.
|
|
|
As part of an awareness/marketing campaign, all 2,150 branches of a leading discount supermarket in Germany temporarily raised the prices of a selection of its products to reflect their real cost on people’s health and the environment. Mozzarella went up by 74% and fruit yoghurt increased by 31%.
|
|
| |
Classifieds
|
|
Analytics can be scary and difficult to use. Without it, you can’t measure progress and learn which decisions are good. Mixpanel is imagining a more exciting future for analytics.
TABLERONE browser extension saves and manages tabs. Stop losing time because of distractions, clutter, and grunt copy-pasting. Organise a lifetime of browsing into a digital library.
Want to stop being so burnt out at your job? Have more satisfying friendships? Have clarity about what you want in life? Check out this free newsletter for practical ideas.
Nervous System Mastery is a five-week bootcamp that will equip you with evidence-backed protocols to cultivate greater calm and agency over your internal state.
|
|
Classifieds are paid ads that support DD and are seen by our 43,000 subscribers each week.
Book yours →
|
|
| |
The Week in a GIF
|
|
Reply or tweet at DD with your favourite GIF and it might get featured here in a future issue.
|
|
| |
| |
