A guest book review post by Annie Mitchell, Community Psychologist, on Kate Marvel’s (2025) Human Nature: Nine Ways to Feel About Our Changing Planet; Scribe Publications.
This marvellous book is about much more than how it feels to be alive and aware on a changing planet. It’s about how it feels to want not only to stay alive and aware ourselves, but for our children and grandchildren to do so too, while truthful awareness painfully requires facing the knowledge of the avoidable death and extinction of all we love through the burning of the planet. Kate Marvel begins by quoting poet Walt Whitman’s Song of Myself: “I am large, I contain multitudes.”. Like Whitman, and as a grandparent and psychologist (with a career stretching back through a lot of yesterdays) I too contain multitudes and am glad to feel the resonance with such a gifted storytelling scientist as this nominally determinative writer. I agree when she says that we can be good, if we choose to be, and that there is no such thing as “human nature” (though who chose the book’s title?), and that we humans contain squabbling contradictions, both within and between ourselves. It’s reminiscent of an earlier important book: Why we Disagree About Climate Change (2009) by climate scientist Mike Hulme, who like Marvel, explained that because climate change shapes the way people think about ourselves, communicating well about it requires a mixture of scientific knowledge, personal experience and human imagination. Humanness involves storytelling, while physics and cosmology are immune to our desires and meanings. In her book Kate weaves human emotional meanings with the certainties and uncertainties of the science of complex systems, reminding us that the only place we can live is here within the limits of a gentle climate. Survival, such as it might now be, requires us to face the complexity of our emotions, the fragility of our defences and the powers of our interdependence with one another, including the more than human species with whom we share the planet.
Marvel explores nine feelings: wonder, anger, guilt, fear, grief, surprise, pride, hope and love. She creates a compelling blend of scientific knowledge with mythology and history, illuminated by her own life and loves for her children, people, places and creatures – and with a shocking revelation in the final chapter. As a cosmologist, she is well able to conjure wonder and awe for the fragility and beauty of the earth, and for the science that enables the modelling of what is happening – echoed now by the astronaut crew of the 2026 Artemis moon shot. Her anger is directed at the idea that things are hopeless, and that humans have to accept the inevitability of climate catastrophe. As a scientist she calls for the necessary and huge experiment to reshape society and culture in ways that would enable us to mitigate future harm and adapt fairly to what is baked in already (an experiment that could well draw from indigenous ways of life that modernity and colonialism have all but stamped out). In the chapter on guilt she tells of the Little Ice Age between 1550 and 1880, and how in the search for responsibility for the bad cold weather the most powerless were singled out to blame – largely women, thousands of whom were executed for witchcraft. It is not hard to see the resonances of victim blaming now, as misogyny rises, and asylum seekers and refugees are falsely accused of causing societal ill, while the rich and powerful spread disinformation and clamp down on protest. Marvel says that the most frightening thing about climate change is what it will make us do to one another.
Grief is in the centre at the heart of the book: conjuring death, mourning, and our anticipatory grief for all that is to be lost and squandered, all happening frighteningly fast and much, although not all, now inevitable: “the breaking of billions of hearts all at once”. Surprise comes in the form of an on-screen climate story for teenagers in which the teenagers rightly ask: wasn’t this story told way back in the 1970s (and as readers of this blog know, many decades before that too). Why didn’t you act?, they ask. On pride, Marvel alerts us to the dangers of hubris, explaining how geo-engineering stands little chance of making a substantive difference relative to the absolute necessity of stopping carbon emissions and generating renewable energy sources. She rightly calls for the other world that is possible: “one where the power to make decisions about the climate is invested in the people, not corporations or billionaires.” And on hope, she summons up the potential of people coming together, collectively doing our best, generating positive stories to help generate the sort of world we want to live in and working to bring the stories to life.
Marvel’s final chapter is on love: being alive, although risky and dangerous, can be joyful, wild and lovely. Change for good has happened before, many times, and it can happen now, if enough of us determine so. This book must surely help our determination.
Annie Mitchell
Community Psychologist
5th May 2026