Environmentalists are empathetic and compassionate, passionate and perseverant. They are also undervalued. But they have trouble with strategic communication. As I mentioned in my first science communicator blog post, people who care about the environment need to be more tactical. Rather than try to convince voters to protect the environment for the greater good, they need to appeal to more selfish, individualistic concerns. Instead of helping voters understand the more impactful ecosystem services that nature provides, they focus on clean air and water, which most Americans already have. That’s not entirely wrong, clean air and water are still under threat from the modern Republican Party. The Supreme Court continues to repeal essential water protections for millions of Americans. It will forever be important to maintain environmental victories already gained, but the biggest fights are for the future. And in order to win those fights, the arguments of environmentalists have to shift ...
The most dangerous thing about climate change is that it has the potential to destabilize numerous systems in our world. If left unchecked, it could completely upend weather systems and patterns, food production, oceans, economies, disease patterns, wildlife migration patterns, global trade, governments, and mental health. When poorer countries are slammed by climate disasters it can easily turn their precarious existence from poor to desperate, causing widespread hopelessness, anger and desperation. This becomes fertile ground for climate terrorism. Climate terrorism is when a few people in a country deeply affected by climate change commit an act of violence in retaliation for climicide. Climicide occurs when a small group of wealthy oil executives in rich countries continue pumping out fossil fuels despite knowing the devastating effects. Climicide is such a disturbing phenomenon because fossil fuel companies like Shell, Exxon, BP and Chevron have known all along exactly what the bu...
The United States failed spectacularly in its response to the COVID-19 Pandemic, due to a lack of political leadership. A similar lack of leadership happened during the last global pandemic in 1918, when an outbreak of bird flu occurred during WWI. We know the effect the pandemic had on the public; less well-understood is the effect the pandemic had on American politics and international affairs. Not only did the virus incapacitate President Woodrow Wilson, causing him to concede to French Premier Georges Clemenceau on the Versaille Treaty and setting up the perfect political and economic conditions for Hitler’s rise, I hypothesize it also caused the death of President Theodore Roosevelt. Theodore Roosevelt became ill after his son Quentin died in combat in France in the summer of 1918, just after the first wave of the pandemic. Then on January 6, 1919, during the third wave, his butler woke up to the former President’s labored breathing, and watched as he passed away. His doctors susp...
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