Tatiana Schlossberg Wants You to Be Less Serious About Climate Change
The Author of Inconspicuous Consumption on Just the Right Book with Roxanne Coady
In this episode of Just the Right Book with Roxanne Coady, Tatiana Schlossberg joins Roxanne Coady to discuss her book, Inconspicuous Consumption: The Environmental Impact You Don’t Know You Have.
From the episode:
Tatiana Schlossberg: I want to say that while the book doesn’t sound fun from the way that we’ve been talking about it, but it’s actually&mdash.
Roxanne Coady: It’s actually funny.
Tatiana: I think a lot of the writing on climate change and the environment has been very serious, scary, and technical, and I wanted to do something different because I wanted people to feel that those things are true but they are also incredibly interesting. Also, we’re going to have to live with it so we have to find a way that we’re interested in it and continue to be engaged and maybe to laugh every now and then.
I was very honored that my book was reviewed in the New York Times, and by Bill McKibben. He found it to be “cutesy” and the rate of jokes to be diabetic. I feel bad for giving him diabetes, but I did that on purpose. I think that it’s important for lots of different people to be able to feel like they are part of this issue, that you can be a not-so-serious person but also care about the environment. You don’t have to take yourself too seriously to do that.
There are lots of ways to be interested in it as well. It’s not just science and nature. It’s also business, politics, health, foreign relations, fashion, and technology. I didn’t consider myself a science person; I studied history. However, understanding all these systems and their contexts and histories and how we got to this point is one of the things that I really enjoyed while researching this topic. I hope that people feel that they can be part of this and have been brought along on the journey, opposed to feeling scared like they want to crawl into a hole.
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Roxanne Coady is owner of R.J. Julia, one of the leading independent booksellers in the United States, which—since 1990—has been a community resource not only for books, but for the exchange of ideas. In 1998, Coady founded Read To Grow, which provides books for newborns and children and encourages parents to read to their children from birth. RTG has distributed over 1.5 million books.
