Annotated Bibliography – Jay Ousley
In this class climate change has become a pivotal part of the literature we read and the media that we consume. When researching I wanted to find an understanding on the human response and reaction to climate change as a whole. What does research look like on that? What does it mean to respond to climate change? And why do we as a society either dive completely in, to completely understand climate change and what humanity has done to create the climate we live in today, or completely avoid the concept of climate change. Either refusing to believe that it’s real or refusing to accept its severity out of fear.
- Human Responses to Climate Change will Seriously Impact Biodiversity Conservation: It’s Time We Start Planning for Them
The Society for Conservation Biology. https://conbio.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/conl.12083.
In this article author, James E.M. Watson uses this article to explain human-driven climate change and the lengths we go to as an attempt to prevent and lessen the effects of climate change can do little to stop what we have already set in motion. Watson addresses what they feel to be the most vital and overlooked group to be impacted by climate change as a whole…the human adaptation and response to it. This article presents human perseverance in the face of climate change while also acknowledging the fact that humans are the cause. This author works to implore their audience to see other effects that are caused by climate change. For the audience to not only think of what climate change will do to the earth but what it will do to the beings that inhabit it as well. The article addresses the possibility of animal response, but mostly works to implore the audience to think about humanity. And to understand how humanity is an ever changing group that has been known to adapt in so many different ways. Watson believes that the main focus needs to be shifted to humanity as a way to predict and strategize plans for a future that can continue to sustain human life, that attempts to avoid the expected irrational responses of humans. Watson believes that if scientists were to focus on humanity’s possible response now, that we could come up with a rational solution now, rather than allowing for and fearing for an irrational solution to make itself present as time goes on.
- Integrating Human Responses to Climate Change into Conservation Vulnerability Assessments and Adaptation Planning
NYAS Publications – Nyaspubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com. https://nyaspubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/nyas.12952.
This article presents what climate change conservation is and its strengths and weaknesses. It opens by showing the audience what the fundamental parts of climate change conservation are. I find this source to be interesting as it explains what the purpose of climate change conservation is and what it means as a whole. “The primary focus of climate-smart conservation to date has been to assess and plan for the direct impacts of climate change” it presents climate change conservation, not exactly in layman’s terms, but it’s digestible and the way the essay as a whole is phrased treats the reader as an equal rather than them being talked down to. The entire article continues on to talk about how humanity is the cause of climate change and aims to help the reader in understanding how we as a society plan to conserve the environment for as long as we can, once again acting as though the reader is an equal rather than someone to talk down to. This article compares to the last one presented as it addresses the human responsibility for climate change but this one differs as it focuses on this fact more and how to fix the mess that has been caused. The last article focused more on how humanity would grow in response to climate change, but this article focuses on how humanity will grow the environment that surrounds it.
- Neuroscience and Climate Change: How Brain Recordings Can Help Us Understand Human Responses to Climate Change
Author links open overlay panelSusieWang12aPersonEnvelopeBerryvan den Berg3a, et al. “Neuroscience and Climate Change: How Brain Recordings Can Help Us Understand Human Responses to Climate Change.” Current Opinion in Psychology, Elsevier, 10 July 2021, https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2352250X21000956.
This article presents how neuroscience and climate change understanding can go hand in hand. It tells of how neuroscience researchers are able to understand and extrapolate their research to not just research topics but social constructs as well. The article presents the idea that neuroscience isn’t just science, it connects to so much more. It presents facts and data, from mappings of the brain during responses to situations and uses the data from those responses to understand the biological human response to climate change. To quote the article “one of the few published environmental neuroscience studies is a quantitative EEG study of climate imagery, which showed participants pictures of climate change and measured the power of theta and gamma frequency ranges, both of which have been linked to working memory and attention.” The article goes on to show figures and explain more on how neuroscience and the study of the brain itself can illustrate the climate change response in humans.
- The People Paradox: Self-Esteem Striving, Immortality Ideologies, and Human Response to Climate Change
Dickinson, Janis. “The People Paradox: Self-Esteem Striving, Immortality Ideologies, and Human Response to Climate Change.” Ecology and Society, The Resilience Alliance, 22 Apr. 2009, https://www.ecologyandsociety.org/vol14/iss1/art34/.
In this article the author presents the idea that an understanding of climate change and the human response to it is based on a person’s own viewpoint of themselves. Should one believe he is above the world and too powerful to die, he then believes that therefore, climate change cannot be real. The human capacity to understand the world around it is rooted in an understanding of themselves. To have a disassociation from who you are as a person and to believe yourself to be a god is to be disassociated from all that is around you as well. The article states that people only wake up to this idea and begin to believe in climate change when terror begins to affect them. When fear breaks them out of their idea that they are all powerful and they understand their own mortality, then they are able to fully fathom the truth of their lives around them and what has been done. Humanity’s disassociation from its own mortality creates a belief that the world will continue on forever and that in so, so too will humanity live on forever. Only through an understanding of fear and being presented the truth does humanity then understand what it has done to the world around it and the effects that it will have to deal with.
All of the articles presented helped to explain to me that there is no one true “human” response to climate change. There is a biological response, a call to action, a desire to only look towards the future of humans, there are many different ways to respond and react to climate change. No one way is “the right way” there are many varying ways to react, however there still needs to be an acknowledgment of its existence. In each article there was an acknowledgement of the existence of climate change and each article presented how climate change was the fault of humans. We cannot deny that fact, in order to continue to live in the world we do, we must acknowledge that we only have it for so much longer.
