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<\/a>Human Nature: Nine Ways to Feel About Our Changing Planet<\/a> by Kate Marvel<\/a>\nMy rating: 5 of 5 stars<\/a><\/p>\n
I heard Kate Marvel talking on BBC radio recently, about her book and what she felt about climate change, and how globally, the general \u2018powers-that-be\u2019 seem to be ignoring the urgency required to do something about it. She did not sound gushy and overly high-minded but extremely well qualified as a climate scientist to speak with authority and feeling on the subject. Having now bought the book I am so pleased to say it was well worth it and anyone with a brain and similar concerns should also \u2018get it\u2019 – in both meanings of the phrase!
Her approach, from an emotional aspect, is somewhat unique in a way, notwithstanding other writers like Rachel Carson, David Attenborough et al., in that she was a cosmologist by profession, later turning to modelling the Earth\u2019s climate under many different conditions. \u2018Human Nature\u2019 brings to its readers clearly and scientifically the problems behind the climate crisis. However, Marvel uses each of its nine chapters to illustrate the personal feelings, such as wonder, anger or guilt etc., that one may be subject to due to these problems. Certainly she bravely attests to all nine in her own case, understandingly and perhaps particularly as a mother of children herself. The narrative is wonderful, often personal, amusing and more often bitingly sharp. Here are a couple of quotes from the book to illustrate it:<\/p>\n
Early on in it: “Climate is the long-term average of weather: the background conditions in which it happens…Weather is what humans experience over our short lives. Climate is a matter for the gods.”<\/p>\n
A little later: “The most frightening thing about climate change is what it will make us do to each other.”<\/p>\n
And towards the end of the book: “There is no such thing as ‘human nature’. Anyone who says so knows very little about humans, and nothing at all about nature. We all contain, if not multitudes, at least a few squabbling contradictions.”<\/p>\n
Marvel argues convincingly that studies reveal that over millions of millennia the temperature of our planet has often risen and fallen; risen and fallen… But since humans arrived and changed things it has continued to rise and rise\u2026 and rise\u2026 The Earth was never meant to warm and warm, as it has now been shown to do for so many years.<\/p>\n
This book is her chart for action that must be taken if we are to leave it a more suitable planet for its future residents, and is highly recommended by this reader.<\/p>\n