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This is "EXPLORER: Bill Nye's Global Meltdown" by Christopher Cassel on Vimeo, the home for high quality videos and the people who love them.
- 45 min
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- Christopher Cassel
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- (Environ)Mental Health
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In the face of losses caused by global warming, scientists, activists, and the public at large may be working through “climate change grief.”
The pastel Art Deco buildings of Miami Beach face a waterlogged future, as rising seas and saltwater intrusion threaten to reclaim the low-lying city. Hundreds of square miles of forest lay torn asunder in Alberta, Canada, as tar sand companies squeeze viscous fuel out of the earth below. And California’s lands lay baking and parched, as a historic drought continues to suck the Golden State dry.
It’s enough to provoke some strong feelings. Perhaps you’d prefer to ignore the growing signs of climate change, denying that the Earth’s shifting weather patterns will have a material effect on your life. Maybe you’re angry—or even depressed—about the problem’s size and our insufficient response to it. Or perhaps you’ve accepted climate change as the great challenge of our time and are ready to get to work.
In other words, you may be progressing through the five stages of a particular kind of grief: climate grief. And you’re not alone. Bill Nye the Science Guy is right there with you.
In the recent TV special “Explorer: Bill Nye’s Global Meltdown,” which premiered Sunday, November 1, on the National Geographic Channel, Nye guides viewers through the “five stages of climate grief”—denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance—as a means of grappling with his own feelings about climate change.
With tongue planted firmly in cheek, Nye’s on-screen grief counseling—administered by a sage Arnold Schwarzenegger—serves to categorize the varied ways that different businesses, governments, and citizens are responding to climate change. In Nye’s telling, for instance, the oil company Shell “bargains” with climate change when it builds a massive carbon sequestration plant in Alberta, Canada, that will capture less than two percent of the area’s CO2 output.
Yet make no mistake: Climate change will cause individual and societal loss, and how people will process that loss through grieving increasingly preoccupies scientists and policymakers.
Nye takes his cues from Steve Running, a University of Montana ecologist and lead chapter author on the lauded 2007 report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which won a Nobel Peace Prize that same year. When traveling the U.S. on a post-Nobel lecture tour, he noticed that his audiences’ responses varied wildly: Some proved utterly resistant to his discussion of a changing climate; others, he felt, were “very sad and demoralized” about the pending future.
Running soon realized that the “five stages of grief,” popularized in the 1970s by psychologist Elizabeth Kübler-Ross to explain people’s methods for dealing with loss, mapped surprisingly well onto his observations.
“I remember thinking, ‘Oh, this fits pretty well, this lays out the logic,’” he says, and worked “climate grief” into a widely circulated essay and presentation that has only grown in popularity.
“It’s a clever way to think about [climate change],” says Janet Swim, a psychologist at Penn State University who studies personal and social responses to climate change.
Though Swim emphasizes that research into climate change and mental health has barely begun, it’s clear that one faction in particular is struggling with a staggering sense of loss: climate scientists. As numerous media reports indicate, climate scientists’ existentially numbing work has mired many in what could be considered climate depression.
The TV special “Explorer: Bill Nye’s Global Meltdown” shows how people respond to climate change with the five stages of grief. Nye interviews scientists, activists, and politicians who face the challenges and losses of a warming world.
Nov 1, 2015 · After talking to his therapist, 'Dr.' Arnold Schwarzenegger, scientist Bill Nye realizes he is suffering from grief: climate change grief.
Nov 1, 2015 · Bill Nye explores the psychological effects of climate change on humans and the environment in this TV episode. He interviews experts and his therapist, "Dr." Arnold Schwarzenegger, to cope with his grief and find hope.
- (36)
- Documentary
- Christopher Cassel
- 2015-11-01
Scientist Bill Nye examines the earth's warming temperatures through the prism of the five stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. Ultimately Dr. Schwarzenegger encourages Bill to find solutions in science, and Bill heads to Silicon Valley to explore the ways technology companies like Google and Tesla are taking ...
- (9)
- DVD
Oct 31, 2015 · Spurred by his diagnosis, Nye goes on the road, exploring denial in surreal conversations with a Florida state legislator who flatly rejects any human contribution to global warming or coastal...
With the help of his “therapist,” Dr. Arnold Schwarzenegger, beloved Science Guy Bill Nye navigates the five stages of his grief over climate change, traveling far and wide to meet scientists, activists, politicians and citizens who represent Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression and Acceptance.
