Description
Book Synopsis'The antidote to climate anxiety is action. Make your first action reading this book.' OSHER GUNSBERG
'Rebecca Huntley has given us a great gift: an essential guide to understanding ourselves and each other as we face the climate crisis. Let's take down the walls that divide us. Collectively, with compassion and courage, we can make real change happen.' KYLIE KWONG
'Explains whether and how we will choose to solve the climate problem. Immensely important analysis in a great read.' PROFESSOR ROSS GARNAUT
A self-help book for the climate era, for readers of Ross Garnaut, Tim Flannery, Hugh Mackay
Why is it so hard to talk about climate change?
While scientists double down on the shocking figures, we still find ourselves unable to discuss climate change meaningfully among friends and neighbours - or even to grapple with it ourselves.
The key to progress on climate change is in the psychology of human attitudes and our ability to change. Whether you're already alarmed and engaged with the issue, concerned but disengaged, a passive skeptic or an active denier, understanding our emotional reactions to climate change - why it makes us anxious, fearful, angry or detached - is critical to coping on an individual level and convincing each other to act.
This book is about understanding why people who aren't like you feel the way they do and learning to talk to them effectively. What we need are thousands - millions - of everyday conversations about the climate to enlarge the ranks of the concerned, engage the disengaged and persuade the cautious of the need for action.
Trade Review'The antidote to climate anxiety is action. Make your first action reading this book.' OSHER GUNSBERG
'Finally, an answer to the paralysing fear we sometimes feel. Rebecca Huntley shows us a way forward - by engaging our hearts as well as our heads.' RICHARD GLOVER
'Rebecca Huntley has given us a great gift: an essential guide to understanding ourselves and each other as we face the climate crisis. Let's take down the walls that divide us. Collectively, with compassion and courage, we can make real change happen.' KYLIE KWONG
'Explains whether and how we will choose to solve the climate problem. Immensely important analysis in a great read.' PROFESSOR ROSS GARNAUT
'A book on how to talk about climate change is merely another reading option for the committed. A book about being vulnerable, facing fear, despair as well as guilt that moves to hope, love and naming the deeply felt things is compulsory reading. This book is one such book. Rebecca Huntley, esteemed for her objective surveys that tell us what ordinary Australians think, jumps a fence. The detached observer practises her craft by becoming the subject of her craft. Her vulnerability is not indulgent sentimentality but works to chart the risks that climate change brings to the people and things she loves most in the world. In so doing she powerfully reminded me of what is most at stake. Indeed,
How to Talk About Climate Change in a Way That Makes a Difference does us all a great service.' TIM COSTELLO, EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR OF MICAH AUSTRALIA
Table of ContentsIntroduction: A change of heart, or How I became emotional about climate change
Chapter 1: The problem with reason, or Why we need to stop arguing about science
Chapter 2: Start being emotional, or The importance of feelings over facts
Chapter 3: Green girls, or What we can learn from teens about how to talk about climate
Chapter 4: Guilt, or My plastic coffee cup killed the green sea turtle
Chapter 5: Fear, or Do wildfires change minds and votes?
Chapter 6: Anger is my frenemy
Chapter 7: Denial, or The need to be innocent
Chapter 8: Despair, or The support group at the end of the world
Chapter 9: Hope, or How to get out of bed in the morning
Chapter 10: Loss, or Bury me in a carbon sink
Chapter 11: Love, or Do it for the birds
Conclusion: It's the right time to talk about climate change
Acknowledgments
Notes
Further reading and resources
Index
