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BeAtlanta Book Club :: “The Climate Swerve: Reflections on Mind, Hope, and Survival” by Robert Jay Lifton

by Adam Keen…
 
Each book recommended in our book club was either read or a long form interview with the author was heard. In this case I heard a 30 minute interview with the author Robert J Lifton on the Stand Up with Pete Dominick show on Sirius XM Insight.
 
Buy the Climate Swerve: Reflections on Mind, Hope, and Survival by Robert Jay Lifton on Amazon here.
 
This was a good interview with the 91 year old Robert Jay Lifton. A man who has spent a career studying nuclear proliferation and even lived in Hiroshima for 6 months interviewing survivors after the U.S. dropped the nuclear bomb on the city in 1945. His lifetime of insight and knowledge offer a sobering and genuine perspective on a wide array of issues including the current state of politics, Donald Trump as president, climate change and nuclear proliferation to name a few. He is a distinguished author who speaks quite well about the subjects mentioned.
 
In 2014 Robert Jay Lifton wrote an article in the New York Times explaining his viewpoint on what he calls the ‘Climate Swerve.’ He explains in the article: “AMERICANS appear to be undergoing a significant psychological shift in our relation to global warming. I call this shift a climate “swerve,” borrowing the term used recently by the Harvard humanities professor Stephen Greenblatt to describe a major historical change in consciousness that is neither predictable nor orderly. The first thing to say about this swerve is that we are far from clear about just what it is and how it might work. But we can make some beginning observations which suggest, in Bob Dylan’s words, that “something is happening here, but you don’t know what it is.” Experience, economics and ethics are coalescing in new and important ways. Each can be examined as a continuation of my work comparing nuclear and climate threats…”
 
A few items from the book that the interview touched upon:
 
1. The author’s story about living in Hiroshima after the nuclear bomb was dropped and the perspective it gave him about nuclear bombs and the affects of nuclear bombs…which he calls instruments of genocide.
 
2. The author’s thoughts on the Ethics of climate change. They touched on divesting (such as the Rockefeller family divesting from oil and gas sectors). The author thinks people and corporations across the U.S. are beginning to realize that pulling resources out of the ground that will pollute the earth and kill people is a losing situation.
 
3. The author states Donald Trump as the most dangerous person in the world given his volatile state of mind and his access to nuclear weapons. The author called Steve Bannon an ‘Apocalypticist.’
 
4. The author stated that climate change deniers are really climate change rejectors as the science is overwhelming and everywhere.
 
5. The author relates Climate change and Nuclear proliferation as the two most pressing issues of our time. He calls them the malignant issues..as in they can and will kill you if not addressed (see more below in the Amazon bio).
 
The interview was great and made me want to buy the book. Amazon provides the following bio and intro: “Over his long career as witness to an extreme twentieth century, National Book Award–winning psychiatrist, historian, and public intellectual Robert Jay Lifton has grappled with the profound effects of nuclear war, terrorism, and genocide. Now he shifts to climate change, which, Lifton writes, “presents us with what may be the most demanding and unique psychological task ever required of humankind,” what he describes as the task of mobilizing our imaginative resources toward climate sanity.
 
Thanks to the power of corporate-funded climate denialists and the fact that “with its slower, incremental sequence, [climate change] lends itself less to the apocalyptic drama,” a large swathe of humanity has numbed themselves to the reality of climate change. Yet Lifton draws a message of hope from the Paris climate meeting of 2015 where representatives of virtually all nations joined in the recognition that we are a single species in deep trouble.
 
Here, Lifton suggests in this lucid and moving book that recalls Rachel Carson and Jonathan Schell, was evidence of how we might call upon the human mind?”our greatest evolutionary asset”?to translate a growing species awareness?or “climate swerve”?into action to sustain our habitat and civilization.”
 
Buy the Climate Swerve: Reflections on Mind, Hope, and Survival by Robert Jay Lifton on Amazon here.