The Compassionate Instinct

This means making future hardships vivid, imaginable, personalized, and credible, says Slovic. For example, he suggests that people communicating about global warming answer the questions, How will it change the whole economy and whole quality of life in a particular region? Will the forests die out? Will the summers be so hot and dry that the earth will be uninhabitable?

In setting out to evoke fear, however, one must tread judiciously. “If people are being scared without seeing a way out, it makes them dysfunctional and freeze,” says Weber. “They will switch channels and watch Britney Spears instead.”

And that leads to a second recommendation: people need to be offered a set of actions they can take to combat global warming. “In general, a good guide is: Where does most of our energy get used?” says Susanne C. Moser, coeditor of the 2007 anthology Creating a Climate for Change. The top three categories of energy consumption for individuals are transportation, home energy use, and food consumption. Already, plenty of books and Web sites offer tips on how to reduce energy use in all these areas. Reports on global warming need to draw on these resources so that people feel there is something concrete they can do about it.

Finally, beyond the many small energy-saving solutions people can take, combating global warming will require making people more aware of the large-scale lifestyle changes that will really make a difference. “I don’t want to have to make a zillion little decisions,” says Baruch Fischoff, a professor at Carnegie Mellon University and the former president of the Society for Risk Analysis. “Rather, I’d like to see people working out for me some alternative ways of organizing my life where it will really be a sustainable way to live.”

Indeed, figuring out these big lifestyles changes, Fischoff suggests, is the practical work that now lies ahead for climate and social scientists.

As for ordinary Americans like myself, I believe that significant collective action on global warming will come from a very personal place—such as love for our kids, who will, after all, be among those most likely to experience its greatest consequences. But perhaps even more significantly, I’m finding hope in knowing that the drive to protect our children is another universal desire for which most of us are, in fact, hardwired.

IN SEARCH OF THE MORAL VOICE

Jason Marsh

IN THE SUMMER OF 2000, the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) asked Harvard University researchers Nancy Briton and Jennifer Leaning to analyze some of the most comprehensive data ever collected about human suffering in war. Over the previous year, the ICRC had held thousands of hours of interviews with residents of 12 of the most war-torn areas on earth. The interviews were part of its People on War project, an attempt to document the varied human experiences of war in order to build greater support for international humanitarian principles. From Afghanistan to Colombia, combatants, refugees, doctors, housewives, and many others discussed the impact war had made on their lives. Briton and Leaning found the interviews almost unbearably powerful.

But they also found something else. Amid heart-wrenching accounts of humiliation and loss were unsolicited expressions of compassion and memories of altruistic acts. This surprised Briton and Leaning, particularly because interviewers for the People on War project didn’t ask about experiences of compassion. For the most part, says Briton, the interviewers asked the subjects “about terrible things that happened to them in war,” yet some subjects “spontaneously gave examples of people who had helped them.” There was the Abkhazian farmer who remembered how his Georgian neighbors had interceded on his behalf, even lying before tanks that approached his village; a Nigerian community leader who recalled how Nigerian and Biafran enemy combatants shared food at the war front.

After months of being immersed in stories of “unending woe,” says Leaning, these “little instances of resistance” stood out. By no means did Briton and Leaning think these cases negated the horrors of warfare, but they did see them as evidence that war doesn’t always wipe out moral consciousness.

“There was a cumulative sense of how horrible these events had been for people, how completely their lives had been destroyed and their physical circumstances upended,” says Leaning. “We’re dealing with populations that are enmeshed in a terribly ugly social setting for months or for years, and they all are aware of feeling degraded as they continue to be degraded. They’re ashamed of what they’re doing, but they’re still doing it.” When people can break free of this violence and degradation, their behavior provides “an indication of what might be called up in greater number, in greater consistency, if we understood its origins,” she says.