Will appealing to human emotions "save the environment"?

Conservationist Wallace J. Nichols, known for his work protecting sea turtles and the ocean, argues that environmental problems should be addressed using neuroscience and empathy, in addition to the existing facts, figures and statistics. He says people make decisions based on various emotions (product marketers certainly can attest to this), but environmentalists don’t really speak to those emotions in their work. “We should be using words like happiness and love,” he says. “Not in the hippie way but in the neuroscience way.”

It may be tempting to conclude that an effective way to communicate climate change information is to place agreater emphasis on its possible consequences. Some goeven further, accentuating the risks by declining to mention the uncertainties involved. Such an approach evokes strong reactions in audiences, including fear of worstcase climate change scenarios and even heightened interest in what can be done to avoid them. But while an emotional appeal may make people more interested in apresentation on climate change in the short run, it may backfire down the road, causing negative consequencesthat often prove quite difficult to reverse.