Overcoming Numbing to Save the Environment

Photograph by David Iliff. CC BY-SA 3.0

By Andrew Quist

Cognitive biases can be a significant limitation in our ability to solve global problems. For example, rather than motivate us to act, learning about statistics of large numbers of victims from catastrophes like genocide, famine, and natural disasters can instead cause us to turn away from the problem. This inability to emotionally process statistics is referred to by psychologists as psychic numbing. A related problem is pseudoinefficacy: when a challenge is large, any effort we take to address it seems meaningless. It feels like our effort is merely a drop in the bucket. Both of these cognitive biases are obstacles to addressing the problem of species extinctions.

According to a United Nations panel on biodiversity, around 1 million current species on Earth are facing extinction in the next century due to human impacts on the environment. This number is so staggeringly large, it can be paralyzing. Ecologist Carl Safina recognizes the psychological obstacles to saving so many endangered species. In his recent article “Psychic Numbing: Keeping Hope Alive in a World of Extinctions,” Safina writes, “If conservation and the environmental movement are remiss in anything, it is the inability to remember that mass statistics obscure real tragedies, and numbers numb.”

However, Safina also recognizes a solution: focus on whatever you can do individually to help. He writes:

For the last 40 years I’ve had a quote from Gandhi pinned somewhere in my office through several moves. He said that “what we each do seems insignificant, but it is most important that we do it.” It can be something little and local, or maybe something big. You can maybe help do something like putting falcons back into the skies or be head of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service; one woman—Jamie Rappaport Clark—eventually did both. In the humblest beginnings of individual effort, big things can incubate.

Safina documents dozens of examples where focused conservation efforts have brought species back from the brink of extinction. He writes:

As the recovery of species from bald eagles to humpback whales shows, our actions do matter in saving species and the aliveness and beauty they bring to this world. . . .

No one worked on all of those successes. But someone worked on each of them.

As Carl Safina reminds us, all of our actions add up, and together we contribute to a greater good.