Humanizing climate change

The Great Immensity,

To research the play, Cosson, the writer and director, and Friedman, the composer and lyricist, traveled to Barro Colorado Island in the Panama Canal and the small town of Churchill, in northern Canada. Hotbeds of biological and climate change research, both are sites of spectacular, natural splendor. After interviewing scientists at Barro Colorado Island, Churchill and Princeton, as well as local residents and indigenous people at Churchill, Cosson and Friedman created the play with the help of science and theater students in the course ATL/THR/ENV 496: Environmental Documentary and Music Theater.

The result was amazing. The students and professional actors brought a deep human connection to the science. They captured the excitement and passion of scientists at Barro Colorado Island for the animals they research and also love, such as sloths and howler monkeys. They conveyed the profound fear of scientists at Barro Colorado Island and Churchill that action on climate change will not take place until it’s too late. And they showed the researchers’ dedication to getting the science right, as well as their desire to have it represented accurately in the media, without oversimplification.

What made the play so moving was not merely the mammoth topic of climate change, but the way that the actors made science come alive. Too often in elementary and high school, and even introductory college courses, science is presented as a list of facts to memorize, rather than as a creative process that remains ever open to critique and reevaluation driven by a deep thirst to understand the world. A false dichotomy is set up between the creativity of art and the sterility of science. Artists may use paint or clay, while scientists use precise measurements and math, but the two groups of people are not as different as they are often portrayed. The play bridged this divide by having actors play scientists and making the scientists seem real.

In the debate over climate change action, we are subjected to a barrage of numbers: The current level of atmospheric carbon dioxide is 390 parts per million. The goal is to keep carbon dioxide levels below 350 ppm or 450 ppm, depending on whom you talk to. A rise in global temperatures by 2 degrees Celsius above pre-Industrial Revolution temperatures could put us at the threshold of catastrophic climate change, and it is unlikely that we can avoid that amount of temperature increase. One million species may be extinct by 2050 as a result of climate change, according to a 2004 study in the journal Nature.

Mind-numbing quantification is also used to gauge the public’s temperature on climate-change issues: 48 percent of Americans believe that the seriousness of global warming is exaggerated. Fifty percent of Americans believe that global warming is man-made, while 46 percent blame natural causes. Fifty percent of Americans favor production of oil, gas and coal over environmental protection. Twenty-eight percent of Americans worry a great deal about global warming, less than the proportion of Americans who worry about species extinction, deforestation, air pollution or water pollution.

I could go on. The list of climate-change-related numbers is endless. But people don’t relate to numbers. I probably lost a few readers with my abridged list, while the eyes of many others likely glazed over. People relate to people. We connect to feelings. It’s much harder to be moved by abstract concepts of danger with consequences 50 or 100 years down the line.

This is where we can take a page from “The Great Immensity.” As a small play seen by a handful of people already concerned about climate change, “The Great Immensity” is not a catalyst for change in itself. But it is a reminder that our greatest hope for action is in bridging science and the humanities. When people view scientists as concerned, diligent perfectionists rather than removed, cold mathematical geeks — or worse, as corrupt conspirators (as some have portrayed them since the incident last year when e-mails of several climate scientists were hacked and made public) — and when people worry about their neighbors and their children, only then will the concern over climate change rise. In 2010, we cannot make the problems of climate change immediate — and by the time the problems are immediate, they will be irreversible — but we can make them human.

I am certainly not the first scientist (or science student) to have these thoughts, nor is “The Great Immensity” the first attempt to represent them. But it is a powerful reminder to scientists and professors, as well as to students and to (student) journalists, to think and talk about these issues in ways that make human connections.

Miriam Geronimus is a sophomore from Ann Arbor, Mich. She can be reached at mgeronim@princeton.edu.