Pushkin.
I never thought of myself really as a deep naturalist. I'm not the kind of person who studies bees and bugs and lizards. I'm not a studier of nature, but I love it.
This is Adam Eric.
I think a lot of that had to do with my growing up in a rural place and having just nature spilling into the garden.
Adam grew up in Swaziland, in southern Africa.
There were monkeys jumping in the trees and birds and all sorts of things, and it was just so proximal to me.
But Adam left the monkeys behind and moved to uc San Diego to start a neuroscience lab. As a world expert on the neurobiology of movement, he spent a lot of time thinking about things like Parkinson's disease, and that meant that other big issues took a back seat.
I didn't know, of course, that we had an ecological crisis. I knew, of course, about what was called global warming then and now we referred to usually as global heating, and I think in the nineteen nineties I remember being quite worried about it, but I was just so busy, kind of building my career and doing things I loved and enjoyed and being a parent and writing papers and doing experience of my lab that I was just so consumed with that that I didn't have any space or bandwidth.
I'm guessing you might relate to this Like Adam. You've probably heard of global heating and seeing all the extreme weather events that result from it, the wildfires, the droughts, the storms. It might really worry you, but you still feel like you don't have the bandwidth in your daily life to do much about it. Yeah, you might switch to driving a hybrid or change your light bulbs, but doing anything more feels like it'll be a major pain,
a continued overload on your already hectic schedule. Sound familiar well, As we'll see in this episode, Adam decided to throw himself fully into the fight against climate change, and far from making him miserable, this choice set him on an unexpected path to purpose, connection and even more happiness.
You're part of something very beautiful, and it's extremely gratifying to me and makes me feel better.
Honestly, you're listening to the Happiness Lab with doctor Laurie Santos. Tales of our gradually warming planet have been a background hum for decades. Neuroscientist Adam Aaron certainly wasn't relaxed about the build up of greenhouse gases, but it wasn't at the front of his mind either, and.
I think frankly, I also didn't realize how serious it was until about twenty eighteen.
Twenty eighteen was the year of a famous report by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. It outlined what would happen if the world left temperatures to keep rising. The report explained that if we acted quickly and kept the heat bumped to only one and a half degrees celsius, things would be very bad, but allowing a far more likely jump of two degrees celsius would be catastrophic.
For example, the differen between one point five celsius and two celsius is like seventy percent of coral reefs being completely destroyed by ninety nine percent. So I you know, we want to keep the coral reefs and all the marine life that depends on that, we need to keep eating. To two cells is what beneath to celsius, and.
Coral reefs won't be the only casualties of unchecked warming. Ice caps would disappear in sea levels would drastically rise, so say goodbye to coastal cities and small island nations. The report's list of catastrophes went on and on, and I.
Just thought, oh my god, you know this is dramatic stuff. If you haven't really sobbed and cried and really sat down and had your body racked by sort of thinking about how grave this isn't the threat our little planet is under here, then you haven't really seen it. And I think a lot of people haven't really seen it.
Our planet that IPCC report said will be totally devastated unless we enact rapid, far reaching and unprecedented changes in all aspects of society.
When it dawned on me how serious this isn't, how fast this is moving, and what the threat is, this triggered considerable anxiety on myself that much of what I hold dea that plants, the animals, the whole biosphere is under threat, and that, of course is also trigger for me to get much more engaged.
But what forms should this engagement take? Adam was all read doing the sorts of things that many of us do, like driving an electric car and eating a bit more sustainably. What else could he fit around a full time job.
Now I was a well regarded world expert at a sort of twenty year career.
Doing this, Adam was in a quandary. The dire warnings demanded that he act to help save the planet, but how could he abandon his life's work, his students, and his lab. It was then that he came across the activist phrase find your own frontline.
Find your front line is a lovely idea. You look around and you say, what are the front lines? What are the places of society or the institute's I live in? Where actually can make a difference.
Adam's front line was his university and its students. His neuroscience class was packed with eighteen to twenty year olds, so Adam nervously approached his boss with an idea, Can I.
Teach a class on the psychology of climate change? He said? Okay.
Things started slowly. The first class only had a dozen students, but Adam's concise global heating message cut through.
It is absolutely essential that we all strive right now to at any increase. Every fraction of a degree is very significant.
Pretty soon the class swelled to more than one hundred students, and inspired by Adam's example, many went off to find their own frontlines, joining demonstrations to push for local climate action.
And it's extremely gratifying to me. I'm quite exciting to see students taking the trolley downtown and getting in front of the city council and railing against the city councils to do something better for the climate, and getting their sense of civic engagement and recovering their voices.
But Adam didn't just wave his students off on their protest marches and then return quietly to his lab. He wanted to recover his voice too. He wanted his climate concerns heard by both his bosses and his peers.
So if you're a university professor, your frontlines are the academic Senate, the faculty governance, the administration, your ability to influence your colleagues, your ability to influence the institutions you're part of the Society of for Neuroscience. Thirty thousand people jump on planes every year and flight to a yearly meeting, which is preposterous, frankly, and so part of your frontline is trying to do something about that. Make the meeting harps big or make the meeting e.
Each thousands of students showed up to join the climate movement.
Less than a year after his environmental awakening, Adam took a lead in one of the biggest climate strikes his university had ever seen. As part of a global Day of Action, he joined hundreds of UCSD students, faculty, and staff who left their desks and took to the streets to push for change. By joining other concerned citizens and demanding action on climate change, Adam found a vital ingredient for happiness, a practice we talk a lot about on
this show, Social Connection. Adam began to feel a deep sense of belonging with his fellow activists. He was part of a group and couldn't let them down by skipping protests.
I feel I need to go, I need to be there, I need to turn up. I feel that the group won't do so well without me.
I'm the first to admit that global heating is really scary. It's terrifying to doom. Scroll on social media and see starving polar bears and burning forests. The anxiety that comes from confronting climate change can feel parallel. When Adam first read that brutal IPCC report. He too admits to being scared, but facing the problem directly with like minded friends has helped him overcome that fear.
You get together with five or six or eight people and you talk about it, you immediately feel better. You have agency together, We're going to do something about it. We're hearing each other.
Adam's activism gave him a ton of satisfaction, the same satisfaction he used to get from his neuroscience research. Organizing against climate change gave him a new community, but also a sense of purpose, which is vital to our well being. But all this rewarding green activism began demanding more and more of his time and attention.
So I think there was a gradual process of getting more and more concerned about this, so sort of a gradual letting go of one kind of career in shifting to something else.
Adam made the difficult decision to close his neuroscience lab, turning his back on decades of hard work and dedication. Activism became his new full time occupation.
Even though it's been challenging for me to make this shift and to kind of jettison my court Korea, I do feel a strong sense of purpose and I feel what I'm doing is very meaningful.
I find Adam's story inspiring, but realistically, most of us aren't going to emulate him.
People running around putting food on the table, or taking their kids to soccer practice and just barely struggling to get them in out of school and feed them, They're not going to have time to do this.
I'm guessing most of you listening right now can't realistically quit your jobs to join the climate fight. But what can we learn from Adam's journey? Are there smaller ways we can each find our own front lines and reap the joy and purpose that Adam did. The Happiness Lab will be right back.
We are like a little boat going down the river right now, humanity okay, and we can get to the side of the river. We could get to the bank.
Climate activist Adam Aaron reckons we still have time to avert total disaster if we collectively agreed to start paddling very hard in the right direction rather than letting the rapids sweep us away.
Now. The problem is if we keep dilly dallying, then we're going to hit the waterfall and we will incur these very large geophysical tipping points, we could set in motion things that are so enormous that then may become a sense. Then in that timeframe, in ten years roo we'd be like whoops.
Adam's new book, The Climate Crisis explains the sorts of actions that can save us from that feet, things like a switch to wind in solar power and the rapid electrification of our homes and transportation, and Adam says such actions aren't the stuff of science fiction. All these positive steps are totally doable.
It's just that there's not enough people coming out saying we want you to do that. And if they did, and they droves, we'd get it.
So why aren't citizens taking to the streets to push for this green revolution. Sure, there are some people who refuse to accept the science.
They don't believe bubble heating is happy, they don't believe it's human cores. They don't believe the impacts will be grave or are grave. And that characterizes one set of people.
But Adam says there's also a second kind of climate skeptic, one that he worries about even more.
This is people around me here in californ Any probably people around you where you are, who definitely believe we have a problem. They may know quite a bit about it, they may feel threatened by it, they've got young kids, but they're just not going to act, and so they are skeptical about response.
Response skeptics know a crisis is looming, but assume their individual actions won't matter all that much. These skeptics might think that only people with money or power can make a real difference, and that ordinary people are wasting their time and energy trying to do something meaningful. Did you ever go through periods of response skepticism yourself when you started like just that it's too big or my actions don't matter.
Well, I go through that all the time, little micro moments, and you know, sometimes frankly, I recognize the speed and scale of what is needed is so enormous, and the timescale is so short that I have my doubts, And so I think it is a fluctuation between feeling at moments hopeful and seeing a way forward, and seeing policy wins, and seeing a sense that yes, we have the technology we need, Yes we pretty much have everything we need, Yes we could do these things principle, And sometimes I
see evidences happening, and then other moments in the day it's like, oh, this is overwhelming.
It is easy to lose hope. But whenever Adam feels his optimism weakening, he looks to all the campaigners of the past, abolitionists, suffragettes, civil rights activists.
You have to kind of be acquainted somehow with the history of social movements, the history of how political and social change is made by groups of people advocating locally. But we have lots of fantastic examples to look at. I mean, you think about the same sex marriage struggle. You know, in twenty fifteen, the Supreme Court rules boom, it's law of the land. Now, that's preceded by decades of town by town, city by city, in fact, conversation
by conversation. If you look at the suffragettes fighting for women's rights, I mean, people forget that until nineteen seventy five, a women in the United States was the property of our husband. That wasn't so long ago, right, We've made enormous changes, you know. A really nice example of how local leads to national change is, of course, the Nixon era.
Nixon was a deeply conniving politician, certainly no environmentalist, and yet he brought the most far reaching environmental legislation probably the world's ever seen so that the United States has ever seen in the early nineteen seventies. Now, what happened was that town by town, city by city, people came out and started confronting polluters and pollution and clamoring to the point where it became so onerous on the corporations
that the corporations required the federal government to create standards. Now, I mean, that's a very nice history to look at.
And movements that start in your own backyard can truly be felt around the world. History shows social change doesn't tend to stop at national borders, you know.
In one sense. Obviously, the struggle to arrest or prevent really bad global heating is a global struggle, right, and it needs to happen everywhere, but particularly in the United States, because we have our hands on a big level here, and if we get policy wins locally, we trigger change nationally, and what the United States does influences the whole world.
A sober analysis of much of the great legislation, much of the great social change made the United States and many other countries, starts with a recognition that it often starts locally by local actors. And groups of people pushing for something.
The reason individuals can have such a huge impact comes down to something psychologists call behavioral contagent. Let's say you switched to an EV, put solar panels on your roof, and go to a climate march. Research shows these activities can serve as honest signals to the people around you. When we see people behave in certain ways, we implicitly assume that those behaviors are the accepted community norms, and once certain actions are seen as the norm, more and
more people adopt them. Adams is the climate fight has seen lots of great examples of behavioral contagion.
Basically, five or six people in Massachusetts about fifteen years ago got together and brought this policy idea. And the policy idea was that when you pay some of your electricity bill, let's make sure that some proportion of electricity bill go to a not for profit that tries to make sure that that money is actually used to procure renewables. And that's called community choice aggregation. Now there are now one hundred and twenty million Americans that have community choice aggregation.
It jumped all around the countries of policy issue. Now that's a nice example of contagion.
Of course, no matter how passionate and persuasive you are, you can't win them all. But Adam says, the struggle itself can still make a difference.
Sometimes we fight for things, and often we lose legislatively and we don't get the constructional win, or it may not come for years. But in the process of struggling, we have an enormous impact on people's consciousness, and that is incredibly important and valuable.
If you started this episode as one of those response skeptics, if you accepted that climate change was happening but didn't think you could do anything about it, I hope you now feel empowered by Adam's story and ready to make at least some small changes.
I don't expect everyone needs to do something that draumatic, you know. I don't think everyone should drop everything they're doing and become climate activists immediately. I mean, look, activists
are always going to be small in number. Right now, I'm estimating that we're about one in a thousand here in San Diego, and I hope we can get to five and one thousand, But we can't expect that ever, perhaps to be too big, And I don't expect everyone needs to do something that draumatic, and people can of course get engaged at night or on the weekend a little bit during the day on the stuff while keeping
their key careers going. And I think, by the way, it's important to do what you love, you know, I don't think everyone should drop everything they're doing and become climate activists immediately. I mean, during World War Two, when people are fighting the Nazis, we wanted people to develop radar and develop techniques, but we also wanted the people just keep starting sixteenth century Renaissance literature, and no matter what happens on planet Earth and how bad this gets,
we want the best of humanity to flourish. And of course that is creative, wonderful things that people study and do because they're curious about it. So I simply don't feel that everyone should drop what they're doing.
Not everyone's going to be an activist, but I've got an activist then what Well, just as he did back when he was a college professor, Adam suggests that you too, look for your frontline.
Just about everybody in their profession or in their space has got frontlines on this. I mean, if you're a teacher, you can teach. If you're an architect, you can absolutely be part of a revolution in new building design. But if you're in a different situation society, you might fork aunt, will work for a nonprofit, or you might be a
retired person. Almost everybody has the capacity to identify frontlines professionally or in their personal life where they can actually be a communicator on the climate crisis.
Climate scientists have done an excellent job explaining the devastating consequences of our collective inaction. As I researched this series, I was terrified by all the predictions. Things right now are very bad for our planet. It could get a lot worse if we don't act quickly. But Adam says there are hopeful stories for what our future could look
like if we put in the work. He thinks we all need to become more positive climate communicators and to share these optimistic visions of what society could be like if we changed our ways.
There are ways of our living with much less carbon intensity, with much more kind of sharing and common purpose that actually would be very healthy for people. And I think this is a really important topic to explore, and World War two is perhaps a good example of that in the United States, people, we are prepared to tolerate rationing.
You know, air conditioners and metallic devices were requisition for the warf Shoes and clothes were made from four or five items on standard production line specified by the government. There was no pleasure driving of cars. You had to have four people in a vehicle with a proper purpose and to prevent price gouging. That was rationing of all sorts of clerosene and food. And people not only tolerated to some extent, they thrive. And of course that's an
exceptional situation. It was an emergency with a common sense of purpose. But people rally and we see that over and over again.
It's comforting to think that our grandparents and great grandparents faced a similar existential threat and made exactly the kind of lifestyle changes we need to accept today. Many older folks look back on those warriors fondly as a time of unity and cooperation. It just goes to show that being an engaged citizen has a ton of happiness benefits. When you fight for a good cause, you'll inevitably form bonds with fellow activists. You'll get a sense of belonging
and a powerful feeling of purpose. You'll experience the reward of doing good for your fellow humans. Just ask Adam. He may have given up his comfortable former life and thrown him into the scariest threat facing humanity, but he's happier.
Sometimes I have losses and sometimes I have wins, and sometimes I'm encouraged and sometimes I'm discouraged. But generally speaking, I have a strong sense now of purpose and it makes me feel better.
Honestly, so, even if only for your own well being, it might be worth making twenty twenty four the year to do a little more for the planet. You can find your own front line. Maybe that's going to a climate march, or pushing your local government to electrify new buildings, or becoming a green trendsetter in your neighborhood, or just sharing the special Happiness Lab series on climate Hope with
the people you know. The actions you pick might be big or small, but the science shows it's likely there'll be more contagious than you think. And above all, Adam says you need to drop that response skepticism, just commit to getting involved without worrying. If little old you can really make a difference.
I think of Wendell Berry, who says, you know, we don't have any right to ask whether we're going to succeed or not. The only right we have is to ask what's the right thing to do on Oh, what's the right thing to do to keep living on by the earth. It's not a question of big be hopeful. It's a question of being the right thing to do and having dignity.
That's the end of the short season about how we can navigate the climate challenge a little happier. To be sure, global heating is a difficult and depressing topic, but I hope you've found some hope and optimism in these episodes. And if you've learned nothing else from the guests I've spoken to, it's that even in dark times, we need to remember the happiness essentials of social connection, a sense
of purpose, and doing good for others. The Happiness Lab will be back soon, and we're shifting gears in store for February, the month of Saint Valentine's Day, We'll be looking at love.
Oh.
I think on our second date, John said, you know, I was in another relationship, but I've told her I'm not going to see her anymore. I immediately had a pianic tat. It was like really already, But five months later he proposed
So make a date and listen again to the Happiness Lab with me, Doctor Laurie Santos