By Mary T. An
What happens when you put a climate scientist, a filmmaker, and an environmental activist together in a room for a day and ask them to create something? This sounds like the makings of a social experiment, or the beginning of a joke about a desert island. But it is in, in fact, a very real thing. NAMAC brought together this diverse and exciting group in late March at the Carnegie Institute for Science in DC in partnership with the Environmental Film Festival—to create urgently-needed climate stories in very new ways.
Climate change suffers from a public perception problem. As a society, we make the dangerous mistake of thinking that climate change is distant: geographically (it’s happening in a place far away); temporally (it will take a long long time for things to really get bad), socially (this won’t affect people like me), and with uncertainty (is it really happening?). The problem is that public perception is the most important part in the fight against global warming. Only the force of a collective and concerned public can move global leaders and lawmakers to sign binding treaties and enact difficult policies… (read more)
