num_pages: 192
description: Longlisted for the PEN America/E.O. Wilson Prize for Literary Science WritingWell worth the read. . . . [A] prescient handoff to the next generation of scholars. The Washington PostFrom one of the worlds foremost thinkers (Bill Moyers) a profound hopeful and timely call for an emerging new collective consciousness to combat climate changeOver his long career as witness to an extreme twentieth century National Book Award-winning psychiatrist historian and public intellectual Robert Jay Lifton has grappled with the profound effects of nuclear war terrorism and genocide. Now he shifts to climate change which Lifton writes presents us with what may be the most demanding and unique psychological task ever required of humankind what he describes as the task of mobilizing our imaginative resources toward climate sanity. Thanks to the power of corporate-funded climate denialists and the fact that with its slower incremental sequence [climate change] lends itself less to the apocalyptic drama a large swathe of humanity has numbed themselves to the reality of climate change. Yet Lifton draws a message of hope from the Paris climate meeting of 2015 where representatives of virtually all nations joined in the recognition that we are a single species in deep trouble. Here Lifton suggests in this lucid and moving book that recalls Rachel Carson and Jonathan Schell was evidence of how we might call upon the human mindour greatest evolutionary assetto translate a growing species awarenessor climate swerveinto action to sustain our habitat and civilization.
language: English
title: The Climate Swerve: Reflections on Mind, Hope, and Survival
publisher: The New Press