We Are All Climate Change Deniers

Olivia Campbell

"I know of no restorative of heart, body, and soul more effective against hopelessness than the restoration of the Earth."

–Barry Lopez

As I enter the primate house at the Philadelphia Zoo, I notice a large group of people gathered at one small corner of the exhibit. The house is large, two stories of glass walls, viewing platforms on each floor, and dozens of primates—lemurs, gibbons, orangutans, tamarins, gorillas—in an array of indoor and outdoor enclosures. The commotion is centered around the new baby gorilla.

I make my way over and jockey for a turn at the optimum viewing spot. The people in front of me part to reveal the little infant clutching onto its mother’s chest. I am transfixed. It’s as if I am looking in a mirror: I am standing on the other side of the glass just with my six-month-old son strapped to my chest in a baby carrier. As the tiny humanlike faces peer back at us, I suddenly feel like a voyeur, intruding on a private moment of a mother trying to bond with her new child.

When I read about the 2018 study in Animal Cognition showing human toddlers are essentially “tiny apes” who share 96 percent of the same gestural vocabulary, I was not the least bit surprised. It would’ve been one thing if it was just me there viewing this moment, but the sheer number of people gawking through the glass rendered this an incredibly intrusive act.

I look away in shame, but wonder: who should be observing whom?

I know this sense of kinship is not a unique epiphany. People often express an outsize connection to pets or to creatures who bear a close resemblance to us; care more about the killing of Harambe the gorilla than the brutal murders of fellow humans. But when it comes to a sense of connection to the whole of nature, that’s where many of us fall short. Just look at one of our main story types: “man versus nature.” It solidifies the idea that man is not of nature, but somehow separate. To believe there is such a thing as a "man versus nature" scenario is to deny climate change.

When Jeff Bezos announced the establishment of a $10 billion “Earth Fund,” he used tellingly specific language. The fund was to “preserve and protect the natural world.”  Natural world. As if our built world is another, separate place. We think our technology and infrastructure, our self-awareness and sentience, our advanced communication and intelligence, our imagination and civility set us apart from all other living things. It’s a mistaken insistence that uniqueness equals superiority. It’s our hubris, our belief in our superiority and our divine dominion over Earth, that truly separates us.

Our advancing knowledge shouldn’t widen the mental fissure between us and nature, it should radically humble us. The more we discover about nature, the more we see we are not actually alone in possessing many attributes once thought solely in our purview. Elephants grieve their dead, crows use tools, trees talk to each other—sending warnings of drought, disease, and insect attacks via massive underground fungal networks. Humans have infused their young with microplastics.

The lesson of scientific inquiry should be “more and more daily to show man is but a part of nature, and not a small god for whom all has been created,” wrote eminent, if controversial, nineteenth-century psychiatrist and philosopher Henry Maudsley.

Now, having not heeded Maudsley’s warning, we are reaping the rewards of our separation—our belief that nature is ours to take and take and take from until there’s nothing left to give. We’ve been slowly, methodically burning our own house down. But in this tired metaphor, ours is the only habitable house. We can’t see the forest (fire) for the trees. 

My six-month-old is my third and likely final child. Three boys, the chances to raise environmentally conscious global citizens. I was raised in the ’80s by holdover hippies—Panda licorice from the health food store and Three Dog Night concerts. I lived through the zenith of the “Reduce, Reuse, Recycle” movement and the ozone-hole panic. We played outside: in the backyard, in the park, in the woods, in lakes. Summers were spent at my grandparents’ Alabama farm, poking crayfish in the creek and avoiding red ant hills. In my twenties, I accompanied my brother-in-law, a biology professor, to archeology field school and on late-night salamander-counting excursions. I grew into a science journalist, writing about the importance of talking about climate change, how to make professional dance more sustainable, how theatre is tackling climate change, how listening to the rainforest can help save it, and how climate change shapes the stories we tell.  

Many in the environmental movement are likely aghast that I had children at all (especially more than one!) given the dire circumstances we find ourselves in. I try to get my kids outside as much as possible, but climate change already ensured they are growing up in a world drastically different than the one I did: pandemics, extreme weather events, steadily increasing temperatures. Still, I hold on to the hope that one of them will grow up to invent an ingenious climate change solution. Or at the very least, that I’ll imbue them with an acute awareness of our interconnectedness with nature and a sense of environmental stewardship.

Recognition of our interconnectedness and reliance on nature is sacrificed, daily, on the altar of capitalism: profit and selfish individualism always win versus collective concerns in the West. Those who’ve plundered the most from the earth, who’ve done the most damage, will enjoy some level of insulation from repercussions—at first, anyway. Their money will buy them some time, but in the end, no one will escape the destruction of the planet.

Perhaps that’s what truly separates man from beast; no other animal would be so stupid as to knowingly, brazenly destroy its own habitat to the point of annihilation.

While corporations congratulate themselves for making climate pledges of zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2040 (which are mostly for show), the UN sounds a “code red” alarm for imminent environmental consequences without immediate action.

How can you make a profit without a planet?

We are not born into nature, but from it, Zen philosopher Alan Watts once declared. “The isolation of the human soul from nature is, generally speaking, a phenomenon of civilization. . . . The more nature is held back by brick, concrete, and machines, the more it reasserts itself in the human mind, usually as an unwanted, violent, and troublesome visitor.” The closer we feel to nature, the harder it will be to keep living our comfortable lifestyle. Sadly, all technology does is cocoon us away from our mammalian selves.

Recent research shows a sense of connection to nature is actually a basic psychological need—a conclusion both psychologists and kinesiologists have come to, independently. Spending at least two hours in green or blue spaces per week can lead to better mental health and wellbeing: reducing blood pressure and stress, and improving immune functioning and sleep. Perhaps it’s not that time in nature is good for us, but that time away from nature is bad for us.

According to Watts, if we were to “seek union instead of isolation this would not involve what is generally called ‘getting back to nature.’” That is, there’s nothing to reconnect with once you realize there was never a true division in the first place.

As our sense of connection to nature deteriorates, our indifference to our environmental impact grows. A robust collection of research shows that the more connected you feel to nature, the more likely you are to participate in efforts to conserve it. Or perhaps the more disconnected you feel from nature, the more unconcerned you are about its destruction. Connecting people with nature is an imperative aspect of tackling climate change.

How can we nurture such connectedness? More zoos? More national parks? Nature-based education? Doctors wielding nature prescriptions? People aren’t moved by photos of an emaciated polar bear because they don’t appreciate how its habitat is connected to their own. It doesn’t register as a harbinger of doom because it feels too abstract.

I’m furious about the politicization of climate concerns, about governments’ consistent lack of urgency on the issue, the persistent and misguided onus we place on individual impact, and the boundless greed of corporations. But I worry that my anger has ventured into the territory of hopelessness. Just knowing how little my personal sustainability efforts matter makes me feel even more helpless. Science tells me I need to remind myself what’s at stake to help turn these feelings around and prevent my hopelessness from achieving its final form of apathy. 

Why aren’t we all marching in the streets every day demanding better from our legislators? I think to myself on a daily basis. I think part of it is we can’t allow ourselves to admit just how big, how dire our situation is; our brain is protecting us with the necessary amount of cognitive dissonance required to go about our everyday lives. If our brains allowed us to fully see the future we’re headed toward, we would all curl into the fetal position and wail the wail of the near-extinct.

At a science writing conference a few years ago, I heard distinguished authors Kathryn Schulz and David Quammen discuss their desire to write THE climate change book, a book that would make everyone wake up to our plight and take action. It was fascinating to hear both writers describe independently pining to create such a book but being unable to, especially two science-writing luminaries. They haven’t written that book because no one can. It will never exist because the topic is too broad and far-reaching to be contained in a single volume. It overwhelms even the greatest of writers. Can anything push us to take action?   

Scientists at Stellenbosch University in South Africa concluded in a 2014 Springer Science Reviews article that connection to nature is “a radical but necessary prerequisite for realizing desired conservation and environmental behavior outcomes.” Most importantly, the researchers said, connection can help people cultivate hope. Connection breeds hope, and hope can breed connection. What a beautiful cycle. Perhaps I can use connection to recycle my anger into hope.

While interviewing an Australian conservation scientist for that article about saving rainforests, I asked if his work was depressing. He exhaled resignedly on the other end of the phone. I worried I might have been the first journalist to suggest his work might be disheartening. Had I depressed him just by suggesting he should be? After a longer-than-comfortable pause, he resolved: “You always have to have hope.”

Humans don’t gawk at adult apes quite in the same way as we do baby apes. Sure, they’re not as cute, but as they age, we don’t see ourselves as much in them—all that bushy hair, the walking on all fours. The truth is that they are far superior to us. Gorillas act as an “umbrella species” for their habitat, protecting its wider biodiversity. They are the opposite of own-habitat-immolating humans. We deserve to be on the other side of the glass as them at the zoo.

The year 2040 sounds so far away, so improbable. But my three tiny apes will only be thirty-three, twenty-eight, and twenty-four that year. Maybe they’ll have kids of their own, maybe they’ll have decided it’s far too cruel to bring children into such a devastated world. Maybe Earth will already be long dead. Bezos will be on Mars by then, colonizing and exploiting his way across the galaxy, never once stopping to look back at the barren wasteland he left behind. Part of our human hubris is believing our only possibility for legacy is via our offspring. What if an even better legacy was the cultivation of a healthier planet?  

Olivia Campbell’s work has appeared in The Atlantic, New York Magazine, Scientific American, HISTORY, The Guardian, and Literary Hub, among others. Her book, Women in White Coats: How the First Women Doctors Changed the World of Medicine, was published in 2021 by HarperCollins/Park Row Books. Find her on Twitter and Instagram.