Human Up Season 1 Ep 5: A Human Up Moment about Science, Family and Hope

This is a transcript of Human Up Podcast Season 1, Episode 5 with Jenn Marlon, which you can watch and listen to here:

Dave Marlon: Welcome to the Human Up Podcast. I'm Dave Marlon, your host, and it's a huge honor today to have Dr. Jenn Marlon. Lemme tell you a little bit about her. Jenn Marlon is a senior research scientist, lecturer and director of data science at the Yale School of the Environment and the Yale program on climate change communication. She was recently appointed the inaugural executive director at the Yale Center for Geospatial Solutions. Dr. Marlon uses surveys, experiments, and modeling to understand public perceptions of and responses to rapid environmental changes, particularly related to climate and extreme weather events. She developed the global charcoal database now an international collaborative effort that houses hundreds of sediment records from lakes, soils, and oceans around the world. Her research has traced the shift from climate to human-driven fire regimes globally and has provided evidence on how wildfires respond to abrupt climate changes in the past.

In addition, her research on American's risk perception related to climate events has informed those working to produce effective and targeted climate change related messages. She's also developed a global paleo fire database, used to understand the history of wildfires and their interactions with climate and human activities. Dr. Marlon, a widely respected expert on climate change, communication and engagement. Jenn has consulted for agencies, an organization such as fema, the US Fish and Wildlife Services, Google, the Union of Concerned Scientists and the Sierra Club. She has authored over 75 peer reviewed papers and journals such as science and the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. She received her PhD and her MS in geography from the University of Oregon Go Ducks where she studied Paleoclimatology and Paleoecology, and most importantly, she's my amazing sister and I couldn't be more proud to have her to be in her family. So welcome, Jennifer.

Jennifer Marlon: Thank you. Thanks for having me, Dave.

Dave: It's such an honor to spend the next 30 or 40 minutes with you. I wanted to start by asking what I just read, talked about a lot of your work with respect to science and climate change. From your point of view, what does that mean?

Jenn: The science of climate change? What it means for me is that the weather patterns that you and I grew up with living on Long Island primarily are changing. We built igloos out of snow that had accumulated many feet in our front yard, and there hasn't been a winter like that in a long time, and that snow has gone away. And so our summers that we experience now are hotter. The rainfall that we have now here, I'm in Connecticut, I'm in New Haven, Connecticut. We just had a deluge of rain come a few weeks ago that took the lives of two people, unprecedented downpours. And so the weather that we grew up with is very different today than it used to be. So that's what climate change means to me, and climate science is all the evidence that shows how it's changing.

Dave: That was very well put. What inspired you to make this your life's work?

Jenn: That's a great question. So I've thought about this a lot because my path has been very winding. We did not grow up in an academic family. Our parents and our family, they were small business owners, and so I didn't even know what graduate school was until I was many years past getting my undergraduate degree. So I came kind of late to academia, but I do remember collecting caterpillars when I was in elementary school in the backyard and building a nice shoebox and a home for them. And the caterpillars came in, I collected them. I remember waking up the next day and being very sad and disappointed because all the caterpillars had left the nice home I had made for them with leaves. And it was kind of an aha moment for me because they were all gone and I realized, oh, I had actually made them very vulnerable.

It was like food for the birds, putting all the categories in one place and putting it out on the deck and then realizing, oh, either they were all eaten or they were smart and they escaped the home. And that was my first lesson in ecology and how nature works. And those experiences stayed with me a long time. We went camping, we spent a lot of time hiking and in the backyard playing. So I always had a love of nature and a love of the environment. Our mother taught me all the names of the flowers in the yard and the birds, and so I grew up feeling very connected to nature. And I think that really those kinds of events and experiences really shaped me and made me curious about the world we live in and how we relate to it.

Dave: That's beautiful. And while you were talking about the deck in that backyard, I just have so many rush of memories of growing up and that to me it was just a perfect place. I'm so grateful we got to grow up at 54 Bay Avenue in hail site. What a cool place. I remember we buried frisky back there. Mogie. Mogie. Sorry, Mogie your gerbil. Yeah. And I remember you were really attached to Moogy, so that love of nature and animals and such certainly rings true. Why do you think this has become so darn political?

Jenn: Yeah, it's a great question. It is political in the United States. It's actually not political in most parts of the rest of the world. I think it's become political because of the enormous billions and billions of dollars invested in coal oil and gas extraction. And I think really it's just a very difficult proposition to transition our entire society, our entire economy, away from one based on fossil fuels, toward renewable energy because we've gained so much from these resources, these natural resources and these technologies, and it's like turning a tanker around. But in this case, there are a lot of losses associated with making that change. And so there's just a lot of interest in slowing that transition as much as possible. I mean, there are direct dollars associated with that of course. And so I think that has just spilled over into the realm of politics really, and made it very challenging even though a lot of people recognize that we cannot go on burning fossil fuels. It's not good for any of us. It's not good for our environment, it's not good for our health, and so we've got to make the change. But yeah, I think that's why it's political in large part.

Dave: That's great. That's well put. And it makes sense. I used to work for a large insurance company and we were the largest political contributor in the state, and I used to recognize that I was surprised how much sway spending that much money had with legislators and the news and policy. So I can't imagine what oil companies have, but you're right, I'm sure we're talking about billion dollar PR efforts and when I see how polarized we are, I'm going to say they've been darn successful despite its counter helpful as that may be. I know you co-authored a piece in 2019 called How hope and Doubt affect Climate Change mobilization. Do you remember that piece? Can you tell me about a little bit? Little bit?

Jenn:

Sure. Yeah. I mean, I've been working in the realm of communication and thinking about polarization. A lot of the people most engaged on the issue of climate change care a lot about it, and they are very anxious about it. There's even climate anxiety that some people have that we talk about climate anxiety or doism thinking it's just too late, nothing we can do. There's a lot of emotion wrapped up in this issue. So we use survey data to investigate what makes people hopeful, and we found that a lot of people said nothing actually, they're not hopeful, right? Very disheartening. And it's disheartening because in large part, that's because people don't realize how much action is going on, how much effort is being applied. There are thousands and thousands of organizations and companies and governments and initiatives that are working effectively in many cases to reduce our carbon emissions and start lowering temperatures.

But in this case, we found that one of the most important things that makes people hopeful is seeing other people do things. Seeing people engage in coming up with solutions and being creative and taking action, whether that action is using recycled products or sustainable products or installing solar panels or getting an electric vehicle or using public transportation. There are many, many things we're doing. Some of those things are visible and those have an added benefit that other people can see what you're doing. So you're starting to change culture. So even if I bring my water jug instead of using a water bottle, it's a small action, but if it motivates somebody else to think about maybe their sustainable behaviors, then there's an additional effect.

Dave: It's infectious that positivity.

Jenn: Exactly. There's this spread of those behaviors, but hope is important because if you just think about when you're hopeless about an issue, you're really not going to change your behavior or change your mind about it. But if you have some hope that can often lead to a plan like hope alone isn't going to save us, but hope and a plan will save us. So that's what we need.

Dave: Oh, that's great. And you just instilled a little more hope in me while you explain that, so that's beautiful. I was always baffled why when I see left and right, them saying, no, we're anti recycling, and I'm like, who on earth would ever want to be anti renewables? It's just an absurd position to me. Now I understand we want to tax oil more some fiscal impacts. I understand the pro business anti-tax people. I understand them being against that, but being against renewables, being against any of these sustainable efforts, to me, I think the right has made an error in hammering their stake as being against that it's an incorrect position. Now, some of it is just not what they say, but I'm hoping that Americans, the people of the world get more hope from efforts of things that you are doing and that we realize that we're hoping to stay here for multiple generations and we're going to have to be a little bit more mindful as we burn through resources.

Jenn: Well, and even though there is polarization, there are also many groups and organizations who are working together. There are young evangelicals for climate science and there are young Republicans who are completely convinced that climate change is caused by burning fossil fuels and we need to be acting on it. There's a big difference. In fact, there's a larger age difference in the Republican party than there is in the Democratic party in terms of is this a problem? Is it serious? What should we do? It tends to be older. What white male republicans who are the most conservative and entrenched, you're not quite up there yet.

Younger Republicans are more likely because they're growing up with it. They're more likely to sort of accept the reality of a changing climate. I like to talk about even if you put away fossil fuels and just think about our impact in deforestation, most of us accept the trees store carbon, and we know that trees grow and plants grow because they're taking carbon out of the air. We have lots of forests, especially in the tropical parts of the planet, and we also know that we've been cutting those forests down at a terrible rate. And so where does that carbon go? It goes back into the air. And so some people say, oh, humans can't be affecting the planet. It's like, well, think about deforestation and all the trees we've cut down all the land we've cleared and converted to agriculture. All that carbon did go into the air, and that's partly it's accounting for almost a quarter of the carbon pollution that's increasing in our atmosphere. It's acting like a blanket that traps heat around the surface of the earth. It's causing the temperature to go up. So we know the mechanism very, very clearly.

Dave: Wow. Again, super helpful. Let me change gears. You talked a little bit about growing up and you said like a business family. How was our family different from other families?

Jenn: In many ways, our family was unique and it took, I think both of us quite a lot of therapy to come to terms with our family. And in many ways though, our experience growing up in a fairly dysfunctional home to me actually helps connect me to a lot of other folks. People who are in graduate school now at Yale who are first generation or people who come from other countries and face other challenges. They don't come from academic, traditional academic homes or their parents didn't graduate from Harvard or Yale or anything like that. So our family, there was a lot of conflict growing up. There was a lot of moving around, but I also feel that my exposure and experience with the diversity of businesses that our father had helped me become more adaptable. It also made me interested in things like crisis management, and I'm very interested in wildfires and how they're changing and fighting wildfires and dealing with climate change, and I think part of my interest in sort of managing crises comes from growing up in a home where we had a lot of crises.

Dave: It's interesting, I think back and I always think, oh, I loved my childhood. Although whenever I'm asked to share my experience, strength and hope, I mentioned that I was in a different school every year until seventh grade, which means you were in a different school every year until you went to Switzerland and being the new kid, especially in Long Island where families had been there for years. So it was always me hanging out with the groups of kids who'd been there and their parents had been there, and I was prove kid. That had a big effect on me that I underestimated while I was growing up and was unaware.

Jenn: Yeah, it was tough. And yet I also feel that there are certainly benefits that emerged from that. The creative thinking, the out of the box solutions, the being comfortable in a startup environment. I would be a very different person and another family as would you, but yeah, it's

Dave: Cool to hear gratitude for the adversity. That's a great way to frame it. Now, what neither one of those talked about is addiction and growing up with drugs in our house, and as a loved one of somebody with a disease of addiction, what was that like for you?

Jenn: Well, I talked a little bit about chaos and dysfunction and crises. There was a fair amount of that. I think there was definitely sickness, mental health challenges in our family, and I still remember being fed bologna in a closet.

Dave: I had your hostage,

Jenn: Right? That's right. Right. That's sort of typical sibling torture, sibling rivalry. But yeah, I mean, I think addiction, as you study and know and help people with it, it affects many more people than we realize. One of the things I've learned the phrase, you're only as sick as your secrets. To me, that was a really powerful phrase that I learned in my journey towards healing because it meant that. It just talked about how important it is to share these things and not sort of hold those secrets and to find trusted groups and trusted friends and mentors that you can share with. I've found so many tools in my journey of learning how to deal with addiction in my family, and again, you're going to hear the gratitude step programs incredibly valuable. So many tools and the toolkits, I wouldn't be where I am today without those programs and those people who've helped me.

Dave: Good. Yeah. I was going to ask, what advice would you have for somebody listening who has a family member who drinks or used like I did or drank or used like dad did?

Jenn: My advice would be to think about the last time you asked for help, the last time you asked for support, because you probably have been helping those people who you love and trying to help yourself and trying to manage chaos and control the dysfunction and keep everything together. And I think the most important thing you can do is actually find help for yourself and stop focusing on those other people. Let them take care of themselves and step programs are free. They happen every day. It's a good entry point. If you can't find your own therapist or pay for your own therapist, you probably want to do that too, but step programs or something like it, there are other group therapy type offerings all around us now. There are phone numbers and hotlines, and a lot of this is available online and it's easy to just kind of drop in now because you can often join a group on Zoom and you can just sit there and be quiet and keep your camera off and just listen. But those rooms, those pieces are incredibly helpful to some people. They don't work for everybody, but it's worth a shot. Right.

Dave: Agreed. That was great advice. I appreciate the self-care focus too. I always say that I can't fill someone else's cup if mine's empty, so we got to take care of ourselves, and when there's dysfunction, you're surrounded by working on building those boundaries. It becomes important even if you're inherently codependent.

Jenn: I am reading, I just finished reading a book by Tina Turner, her story called Happiness Becomes You, I think, and she talks about her journey from extreme dysfunction and abusive relationships to being an incredibly powerful and healed person to a great extent, and she talks about the many different tools and processes that she went through, but one of them is forgiving the people, the resentments we carry. When you grow up with others who are addicted to alcohol or drugs or have problems like that that are so consuming, you can end up with a lot of resentment and anger, but when we carry that resentment and anger around, we're carrying it, it's hurting us. It's like drinking poison and thinking you're going to hurt somebody else, but she just says, forgiveness is not a process of condoning or excusing somebody else's behavior, but it is a process that in large part is for yourself because you're going to feel better after you forgive somebody, but it is a process. It's not something that happens overnight. Being able to work through that really can just lighten your load so much. So I've had to work through that.

Dave: You're the second person who recommended book today. That's amazing to me. Yeah, very odd. I'll certainly read it. I also, I gave advice this morning to someone who was angry and that freedom tastes better than revenge.

Jenn: Yeah, it does.

Dave: Despite being Sicilian. No, it's interesting. I'm going to shift gears again. You know what I do. And you recognize there's a homelessness crisis in America. What's your thought of the homelessness crisis as a scientist?

Jenn: It's really troubling and disturbing, and the little bit that I've learned from you, I've really appreciated learning about the complexities of why people are homeless and how to help get them off the streets. I think the sort of homeless epidemic and the drug epidemic has changed a lot since we were young over the decades, and the dynamics have changed and worsened beyond anything I ever would have expected. So to me, it seems very complicated because of the financial and economic dynamics and the policy components, the public health components, the mental health components. I tend to view it through the lens of climate change. I get very worried hearing about people living in tunnels in Las Vegas when I'm thinking about the increasing floods that are happening and the higher temperatures. Death Valley hit the highest temperature in recorded history anywhere. I believe July was the hottest month on earth, about

Dave: 20 degree days. Seeing people on fentanyl laying in the sun, it's just terrifying,

Jenn: Right? It is. It so, yeah, it's really disturbing and I'm really grateful that you're working on it.

Dave: We hit a milestone last week where we took 50 people off the streets, and to me, I now have, we have 80 DH staff, 50 therapists, and being able to get 50 people a week into therapy, getting psychotropic meds, getting housing, helping 'em get jobs, helping deal with their prior family and their traumas and all those issues over a long period of time, I realized that our run rate, we're going to help a third of the homeless population just in our little clinic now in our city. So we're scaling, and I'm hopeful that as opposed to most of the efforts, which are we have to give 'em a house or we should put 'em in internment camps, whatever the nonsense is from the left to the right, helping sick people get healthcare is really the Vegas stronger approach, and I'm grateful to be carrying that yoke.

Jenn: It's so important.

Dave: Yeah. The title of this podcast is my last question. The title of the podcast is Human Up. Can you tell us what do you think that means to you

Jenn: Human up? Well, I mean, I think initially the phrase Man Up was very popular, so Man Up is be strong. I tend to think of Human Up as being a broader. More inclusive, a broader call to accept our shared humanity, and also perhaps a less emphasis on the toxic masculinity that people talk about, and the recognition that some of the maybe traditionally more feminine aspects like emotion and softness or flexibility, adaptability, some of these qualities that decades ago but still today in some circles may not be valued so much. To me, human Up sort of invokes all of this and suggests we need to focus on being whole. In fact, this is another great quote. I think it was mentioned in the book, but I know it is coming from Carl Young originally, which is that we should strive not to be good, or for goodness, we should strive for wholeness. And to me, human up is really invoking the wholeness, the holistic sort of nature. One of the things I've learned in my own work, especially in the social sciences, is good decisions don't just come from careful analysis and research. Good decisions come from being really in touch with your emotions, and it's a dance and an interplay between our emotional or sort of feminine side and are more analytical. Maybe some people will consider that a masculine logical side, but human up is sort of like bring your whole self, right? Let's integrated in how we address these problems of homelessness and climate change.

Dave: I think some of that understanding also comes from discourse, not just being in touch with emotions, and to me, it makes you taking some time to engage in some of this discourse that hundreds of my viewers we will get to appreciate. So Jenny, thank you so much for being on the Humana Podcast with me. It's such an honor to be your brother and fellow, Dr. Marlon. Just all I have to say is thank you so much for participating in today and tying it all together on why it was so important to have a climate Scientologist on the Human Podcast. It all ties together.

Jenn: Just a scientist, not a Scientologist, not

Dave: A Scientologist,

Jenn: Not a Scientologist.

Dave: That was not intended to be a dig.

Jenn: It's been fun being on. Thanks, Dave, and thanks for the work that you and your team are doing.

Dave: Thank you. Take care, Jen.

Jenn: Bye.