Your Brain On Climate

Long Time, with Ella Saltmarshe

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Episode notes

Time. You work on a human timescale, but the planet doesn't.  Sometimes we can think long term but mostly real life gets in the way: but the decisions we collectively take will have a huge impact on life on Earth now, and for generations to come. 

What are the biases that peg us to short term thinking? How can we shift our perspective to the day after tomorrow, and how can that help everyday life? And what do pigeons have to do with it? 

Joining Dave this episode is Ella Saltmarshe, Director of the Long Time Project and co-founder of Internarratives. She's also the host of the Long Time Academy podcast and a general all round nice egg.  We talk about how to be a good ancestor, and yes: how to talk to pigeons. 

Owl noises: 

• 14:25 - Here's present bias in a nutshell. 
• 20:55 - a New York Times article by Seligman about Homo Prospectus. 
• 28:40 - Decca Aitkenhead's Times article on taking smartphones off her kids.  
• 29:02 - Jonathan Haidt's campaign to stop kids having smartphones.  
• 38:46 - Artist Katie Paterson.  
• 39:51 - A Guardian review of Martin MacInnes's In Ascension. 
• 40:20 - Here's the Marshmallow Laser Feast collective, including Treehugger.   
• 43:48 - The Joseph Rowntree Foundation's Imagination Infrastructures project. 

Your Brain on Climate is a podcast about human psychology vs the climate crisis: what we think, why we think it, and how it all adds up to a planet-sized emergency.  Contact the show:  @brainclimate on Twitter, or [email protected].

Support the show on Patreon: www.patreon.com/yourbrainonclimate.

The show is hosted and produced by me, Dave Powell, who you can find @powellds on Twitter.  Original music by me too.

Show logo by Arthur Stovell at www.designbymondial.com.