Mixing science and creativity, “Human Nature: Nine Ways to Feel about Our Changing Planet” documents our irrefutable impacts on Earth’s climate system and the dire consequences we now face. But it does so much more than that.
Written by Earth scientist Kate Marvel, “Human Nature” starts from the premise that it’s OK for a scientist who has been trained to be objective to have feelings.
“And believe me,” she writes, “I have feelings.”
If the title is a nod to human impacts on the natural world, it’s also a provocation. Marvel doesn’t believe in human nature, “at least not in the sense of immutable characteristics that make a particular outcome inevitable.”
In other words, because human behaviors aren’t set in stone, the future isn’t set in stone, meaning it’s up to us to shape the future that we want. And that future, while hotter and more dangerous, can be marked by solar panels, green cities, and restored forests.
To organize and make sense of her feelings, and to imagine that different and better future, Marvel opens the door to the often opaque and complex world of climate science through mythology, history, and storytelling. Each chapter approaches climate change through a single emotion, from wonder, anger, and guilt, to pride, hope, and love, through fear, grief, and surprise.
Take hope, for example. “Is there any?” Marvel asks.
The short answer is yes.
We have confronted enormous challenges in the past, she argues, and we have found solutions. It wasn’t easy, there was opposition, and admittedly, climate change may be the greatest challenge we have ever confronted. But past successes – the Clean Air Act and the Montreal Protocol on Substances that Deplete the Ozone Layer – are reassuring guides, she writes.
So too are the books that she reads to her older son: “At bedtime we read stories about heroes and monsters, quests fulfilled against impossible odds. I tell him that to stop climate change, we will have to do something that no one has done before. But that, he knows, is what happens in any story worth telling.”
To maintain their credibility, scientists are expected to detach their feelings from their research and to suppress their emotions. But Marvel says, in effect, to heck with that, and permits herself to write about wonder, surprise, frustration, and yes, fear: “The most frightening thing about climate change is what it will make us do to each other.”
Many scientists will recognize themselves in passages like this one: “I feel so much,” she writes. “Isn’t this unscientific? Aren’t researchers supposed to be perfectly objective, unemotional, and neutral about the world we study? I can’t be.”
She also writes, with honesty, about her own illness, a blood clot in her brain and possible brain tumor that she calls Mitch. “I’m telling you this to explain something about myself: I now walk through the world in a state of undeserved and overwhelming grace.”
Marvel’s grace and her profound gratitude are present on every single page. She still finds wonder in the smallest things and wants to share them. Especially compelling is Marvel’s notion of climate helpers: the adults and children who imagine better futures and work together to make them happen. Although “Human Nature” gestures toward generational inequality, it could have explored this area further.
Still, it offers something powerful, a sense of collective belonging, inspiring readers to think of themselves as climate helpers who are not alone but part of something bigger that blends scientific insight with emotional understanding. The planet will survive. What it will look like is uncertain.
But in embracing that uncertainty, “Human Nature” invites readers not only to understand climate change but to feel it and even to act.
Sarella Arkkila is a Ph.D. researcher studying the effects of agriculture and climate change on biodiversity at the University of Helsinki.
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