Interview: How to Get People To Care About Climate Change

Per Espen Stoknes, a Norwegian psychologist and economist, has been doing a lot of thinking about a question that has bedeviled climate scientists for years: Why have humans failed to deal with the looming threat posed by climate change? That question is the focus of his recent book, What We Think About When We Try Not To Think About Global Warming, in which he analyzes what he calls the psychological barriers that have made it difficult to deal realistically with the climate crisis. In an interview with Yale Environment 360, Stoknes talks about these barriers and about how the discussion of climate change needs to be reframed. “We need a new kind of stories,” he says, “stories that tell us that nature is resilient and can rebound and get back to a healthier state, if we give it a chance to do so.”

Read the interview.