In the book Lauren's father said that "It's better to teach people than to scare them."
I think that the real world could really use this as a teaching moment. Currently the "method" in a way to tell anyone about a problem is to state the downsides first.
"Climate change could destroy the world, everywhere is going to be flooded and the world will end!" (I know this isn't the message, don't cancel me)
The point is, this isn't the right way to go about it. Then you end up with people denying everything, who there is almost no chance to convince until it is too late. I think this might be a fight of flight response in a way.
You could "fight", stand up to the problem, try to fix it, and mostly just acknowledge it's existence. Or you could take "flight", deny it's existence no matter what, or for something else just say it's not a problem even if it exists. This is the result of trying to shock people, to scare them into recognizing a problem.
This is entirely our fault, it should be obvious that trying to shock people into action would never work. If what looked like an unstoppable force came your way what would you do? Get swept up trying to stop something in an action that seems futile or run away, escape. For many people the latter seems like a more human option (I'm not talking specifically about climate change btw).
Coming back to the book, what Lauren's father said makes sense. Don't purposely bring out the strongest response you could hope for as fast as possible; break it slowly, talk about solutions as you talk about the problem, try not to freak people out and push them to an edge.
What do you think about this? Comment below:
Good points here. I suppose a lot of times the media wants to grab our attention, so the first thing we see is a death count or something else horrifying. But yeah, you're right: what often happens is people put up a shield. We become disaster-fatigued. And possibly that's exactly what Lauren's father himself did. Lauren wasn't only trying to scare people; she really was trying to teach them, but he took her views as scare-tactics.
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