TED Talks Daily Book Club: Human Nature: Nine Ways to Feel About Our Changing Planet | Kate Marvel

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4.1 • 11.9K Ratings

🗓️ 16 November 2025

⏱️ 41 minutes

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Summary

When Kate Marvel set out to write a book on climate change, she wanted to expand the conversation beyond data, charts and graphs. This meant refocusing the topic on nine human emotions: wonder, anger, guilt, fear, grief, surprise, pride, hope and love. In this TED Talks Daily Book Club interview, host Elise Hu speaks with Kate about her new book, Human Nature: Nine Ways to Feel About Our Changing Planet — and why it’s not too late to save the planet.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Happy Sunday. Today we're bringing you a new installment of our book club series where we check out new books from TED speakers that will spark your curiosity all year long. I'm your host, Elise Hugh. Kate Marvel is a climate scientist and former cosmologist who spends her days
0:23.1	predicting different outcomes of climate change using weather models. But she's also a human being,
0:28.5	and like all of us, has deep feelings about our changing planet. We sat down to discuss her new
0:34.6	book, Human Nature, nine ways to feel about our changing planet,
0:38.0	and it's an extremely unique take on climate change, because it's not just telling us the science
0:44.1	or history or what we need to do to fix things. Rather, it's an exploration of nine different
0:50.1	emotions, which she uses as a lens for exploring this moment.
0:59.2	We talked about her immense sense of wonder and awe about the world, why she chose to write this book,
1:03.5	and how she is learning to embrace the grief she feels towards what we're losing,
1:15.2	and why for her it's better to know both the bad and good about our future, rather than to not know at all. Kate, welcome to TED Talks Daily. I'm so excited to be here. Thank you so much for having me.
1:20.4	So today, we're here to talk about your book, Human Nature, Nine Ways to Feel About Our Changing Planet,
1:26.5	which came out in June of this year.
1:29.4	For those who haven't read the book yet, can you give us a brief introduction to it?
1:34.0	Why this book and why now?
1:36.1	Sure. You can think of it essentially as a biography of the planet in nine different emotions.
1:42.7	And the genesis of this idea was the fact that I was having feelings
1:49.1	and I was feeling really guilty about it because I'm a scientist and we are supposed to be
1:55.4	neutral and we're supposed to be objective and we're supposed to pretend like we don't have any feelings or preferences.
2:03.0	But I study the earth and everything and everybody that I care about is here. So of course I have
2:09.5	feelings about that. And then I kind of realized that, oh, as scientists, we don't make ourselves
2:14.6	more credible when we pretend we don't feel anything.
2:18.0	That makes us liars.
	...

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