Environmentalist Love To Point Fingers But Hate When Others Point Back

Environmentalist are well known for pointing their fingers at eco-wrongdoers however they usually take criticism very poorly themselves. In fact, given the nature of their work, environmentalists might even be more susceptible to erring than others.  The “environment” in “environmentalism” is that surpassingly messy and mutable information field known as the real world.  The real world is a wonderful place — that’s why we’re all dedicated to protecting it — but it is, to put it mildly, exceptionally complex.  Within it, controlled experiments are nearly impossible, genuine signals compete with generalized noise, false alarms masquerade as true, and the left field (that inconvenient source of surprise, disorientation, and disconfirmation) lurks everywhere.  The work of environmentalists is to make sense of that messy situation, predict its future, and encourage appropriate action in light of those predictions.

Kathryn Schulz just released a new book about being wrong. Even though the book isn’t directly about environmentalist being wrong she is an editor at Grist.org and talks about how she was inspired to write this book from questions that she received from the community asking her to write about environmentalist being wrong about specific topics.

To err is human. Yet most of us go through life assuming (and sometimes insisting) that we are right about nearly everything, from the origins of the universe to how to load the dishwasher. If being wrong is so natural, why are we all so bad at imagining that our beliefs could be mistaken, and why do we react to our errors with surprise, denial, defensiveness, and shame?

In Being Wrong, journalist Kathryn Schulz explores why we find it so gratifying to be right and so maddening to be mistaken, and how this attitude toward error corrodes relationships — whether between family members, colleagues, neighbors, or nations. Along the way, she takes us on a fascinating tour of human fallibility, from wrongful convictions to no-fault divorce; medical mistakes to misadventures at sea; failed prophecies to false memories; I told you so to Mistakes were made. Drawing on thinkers as varied as Augustine, Darwin, Freud, Gertrude Stein, Alan Greenspan, and Groucho Marx, she proposes a new way of looking at wrongness. In this view, error is both a given and a gift — one that can transform our worldviews, our relationships, and, most profoundly, ourselves.

In the end, Being Wrong is not just an account of human error but a tribute to human creativity — the way we generate and revise our beliefs about ourselves and the world. At a moment when economic, political, and religious dogmatism increasingly divide us, Schulz explores with uncommon humor and eloquence the seduction of certainty and the crises occasioned by error. A brilliant debut from a new voice in nonfiction, this book calls on us to ask one of life’s most challenging questions: what if I’m wrong?

If you’re a local Seattlite meet up with Kathryn.