I’ve spent my career studying how people make decisions under uncertainty. And one of the most consistent findings in behavioral science is this: people don’t respond to abstract threats. They respond to what feels real, immediate, and personally relevant.
Which is why I’ve been thinking a lot about where the climate and environmental movement goes from here.
We have the data. We have the science. We have, frankly, the receipts — floods, fires, species collapse, public health crises that are measurably worse because of climate change. And yet, large swaths of the public remain disengaged, and political polarization around these issues is intensifying, not receding.
I don’t think that’s a science problem. I think it’s a distance problem.
When we frame climate as a global, decades-long existential crisis, we are — neurologically, behaviorally — asking people to care about something their brains aren’t built to prioritize. The threats feel far away. The solutions feel abstract. And so people tune out, not because they’re indifferent, but because we haven’t given them an entry point that connects to their actual lives.
That came into sharp focus during a live recording of the Scientista Podcast — the kind of conversation that’s harder to have in a studio, when there’s an audience in the room and the stakes feel real. Whitney Strauss of the AdvoCare Foundation and Dr. Elizabeth Gray, CEO of the National Audubon Society, were both on stage, and Elizabeth made a point that has stayed with me: birdwatching surged in popularity during the pandemic because people needed connection to nature, and they found it outside their back doors.
That’s not a niche hobby. That’s an entry point.
The same is true for children’s health, which cuts across political lines in ways that “emissions targets” simply don’t. When you connect environmental degradation to asthma rates, to the safety of what’s in your kid’s food and water, to the landscapes your children will inherit — you’re no longer asking someone to care about a policy abstraction. You’re asking them to care about their family. And that is a conversation most people will have.
Trusted voices matter here too. The data on this is clear: people don’t change their minds because an expert told them to. They change because someone they already trust — a doctor, a pastor, a hunting guide, a pediatrician — made a connection they hadn’t made before. The messenger is the message.
None of this is a retreat from the urgency of the science. It’s the opposite. If we want people to act with the urgency the moment demands, we have to stop talking to the version of them that exists in a policy white paper — and start talking to the version of them that’s standing in their backyard, watching a bird they’ve never seen before, wondering what’s changing.
Because something is. And most people, if we meet them there, already know it.
