A fellow blogger, Rashid Faridi, has shared an interesting article today entitled “The Final Adaptation – Evolving Our Minds for a Wounded Planet.” In the piece it describes how humanity is “hobbled by cognitive biases that were once adaptive but are now perilous” and advises that we change course and develop cognitive adaptation.
First, we need to become cognitively aware. That means learning about what is going on around us and others on the planet. In the present age, it has never been easier to experience virtually the environmental threats that others are facing. We are intimately connected to the world through the Internet and social media, with daily headline stories describing the latest weather and climate disasters happening elsewhere or close to home. Sometimes we find ourselves in the crosshairs. We are asked to send aid to those whose lives have been seriously disrupted. When an extreme weather event happens to us, it is we who pay the piper.
All of these personal and virtual experiences make us more cognitively aware, better able to perceive the risks of climate change, and overcome our parochial tendencies to look at the world from our backyards.
Cognitive awareness, however, doesn’t necessarily diminish our cognitive biases, such as believing that short-term risks remain minimal or underestimating the timing of future risks. Recognizing these biases means making the effort to learn the facts, rather than going with what others are saying or feeling.
Part of cognitive awareness includes cognitive adaptability. Climate change is dynamic and unpredictable, and demands new solutions. Cognitive adaptability equips individuals and organizations to anticipate change, interpret shifting conditions, and embrace novel approaches, rather than clinging to rigid routines. Cognitive adaptability requires continuous learning, openness, and innovation. It creates an awareness mindset that distinguishes “greenwashing” from real climate actions.
Cognitive diversity increases cognitive awareness. Reaching outside comfort zones to draw on other cultures, such as the Indigenous community’s traditional knowledge of the natural world, can ground responses in significant real-world experience.
Cognitive awareness makes it easier to adapt to environmental change proactively. Greater environmental awareness fosters a better understanding of the actions and policies needed to address climate change. It makes it much easier to make the lifestyle changes needed to improve planetary health.
Cognitive adaptation is the penultimate outcome of cognitive awareness. Only awareness can make humanity cognitively adapt to address global warming and other planetary environmental crises. In adaptation, humanity executes the overall strategies that come from changing how we think, learn, decide, and collaborate in response to a world increasingly under threat from environmental change.
How do we cultivate new ways of thinking to help the general public recognize patterns, interconnections, and feedback loops within complex environmental systems? What is needed is getting caught up with the science and then continuous learning to understand and advocate for helpful policies and actions.
Today, countless journal articles are published about climate change. Most are written for academics to read, not the average person. The purpose of this blog site, when writing about climate change, has been to make such research papers that add to our knowledge, be easier to understand for the average reader. I hope, through the more than 1,400 articles touching the subject of the environment and climate change that can be accessed from the 21st Century Tech Blog, that the goal is being accomplished.
Through education, we become assets and advocates for climate change solutions. Continuous learning keeps us on top of the subject of climate change. No longer are we inhibited by our own biases and those expressed to us by others because we remain on top of the facts with an understanding of what present and future actions are required. With knowledge, we can adapt and participate in the solution, rather than become a victim of the problem.
