IAN ROBERTSON

IAN ROBERTSON

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Author of How Confidence Works: The New Science of Self-belief
Co-Director of the Global Brain Health Institute · Co-Leader of The BrainHealth Project

The book probes the science and neuroscience behind the idea that confidence can be learned, or whether it is something you inherit. Optimism, hope, and self-esteem are all concepts that are easily confused with confidence. But, as I show, they differ in one fundamental way - confidence empowers action. You can be an optimist who is hopeful that things will work out okay in the end without ever believing that you can play a part in that outcome, or indeed have any realistic grounds for that optimism. And you can have high self-esteem and feel good about yourself without feeling confident that you can achieve a particular goal.

LESLEY HUGHES

LESLEY HUGHES

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Lead Author of IPCC 4th & 5th Assessment Reports
Director & Councillor of Climate Council of Australia

It's certainly not the case that scientists should be the only people communicating. We have to have everybody in this mix because we're all in this together. So we have to have good science that's communicated. We have to have smart engineers who can work on the technological solutions. We have to have lawyers who are undertaking climate litigation. We have to have creative artists who can tell stories and appeal to people's emotions. No one group should have a responsibility to solve the climate crisis. It's got to be all of those groups bringing what they call the time, the talent, and the treasure to work together on this. We are all in this together, and we've all got a suite of different skills that have to be harnessed to solve this problem.

SHEHAN KARUNATILAKA

SHEHAN KARUNATILAKA

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Booker Prize-winning Author
The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida
Chinaman: The Legend of Pradeep Mathew

So this was the decision to write in the second person. A lot of people ask me: why? There are not many examples of this technique. The reason I opted for that is I was trying to figure out interviewing a ghost. And one of the challenges was: what does a disembodied voice sound like? The narrator's body has been chopped up and chucked in a lake. So, I figured that if anything survives the death of your body, it's perhaps the voice in your head. The voice in my head is in the second person. I don't know about your head or anyone else's head, but in mine, it's the second person. 

CATHERINE CURTIN & KATE MUETH

CATHERINE CURTIN & KATE MUETH

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"I don't know why we would really want to tell stories without being connected to the meaning. And I think that's especially for women, but I do think for human beings, that is how we can work as hard and be able to get up the next morning and keep going. Because we are working through the meaning, and it feeds us as we're like making sense of it all, trying to make sense of it, and for being in community and communion.” - Kate Mueth
”What we've done today is we've made everything so fast and so easy that I think there's something to the creative process about it being a little bit more of an exploration than it is wham bam, it's done. Let's go have lunch. And I think there is something to the creative process where it's allowed to develop. It's called process because it is a process. I'm always glad to just relax in the creative process, and I'm always very grateful for that. I think it's why I do so much indie film because it's really fun.” -Catherine Curtin

MARK HOWDEN

MARK HOWDEN

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Director of the Climate Change Institute at The Australian National University
Vice Chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)
Co-recipient of the 2007 NOBEL PEACE PRIZE

We live in a diverse world, and we're in a funny time where we sometimes see the best of humanity and the worst of humanity. And I think what we need to do is be very strong in wanting to lift the game of each other and ourselves. And so I think that's one of the sort of key things. Particularly, young people should be more demanding that we behave better towards each other and care more about each other and the world that we live in. In terms of these heatwaves, droughts, and fires that the world is seeing, which we thought were going to hit us in 2050 or 2070, are hitting us now in 2023. So, those risks are coming much faster and harder than we thought they were going to come. And so, in many cases, we're unprepared for the severity of these changes.

SIMON DALBY

SIMON DALBY

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Author of Pyromania: Fire and Geopolitics in a Climate-Disrupted World
Professor Emeritus at Wilfrid Laurier University

We also need to note most people move locally rather than globally. In the discussions about climate refugees, people are going to be dislocated. There are obviously going to be places that are going to become quite literally uninhabitable because they're too hot and too dry, or they've been flooded so frequently that they're just not sustainable. That said it is also worth pointing out that this climate change process is playing out in a global economy, which is also changing where people live and how people live very rapidly. the migration from rural areas to urban systems has been massive over the last couple of generations. We became an urban species.