for years. Obviously, that’s different than climate change, but the point is the public feels like they’ve been burned by big companies, and that has spilled over into the cli- mate change arena.” In October 2017, noted psychiatrist and historian Robert Jay Lifton published The Climate Swerve: Reflections on Mind, Hope, and Survival, in which he argues that our society is going through a time of increased recognition of the reality of human-caused climate change, a psychologi- cal shift he refers to as a “swerve.” A swerve, Lifton says, is driven by a combination of evidence, economics and ethics. In an interview with Diane Toomey of Yale University’s online magazine Yale Environment 360, Lifton says denial of climate is a kind of natural progression that the human mind goes through on its journey to accepting something a problem as real. Accepting human-caused climate change as real comes with such profound implications for humanity, that he says it’s natural for humans to reject it at first. “With climate images, when they’re fragmentary, we may have an image of a storm here, of sea rise here, a little bit of flooding there, the drought. But when that becomes a formed image involving global warming and climate change, we take in the idea of carbon emissions leading to human effects on climate change and endan- gering us. And in that same narrative, there can be miti- gating actions to limit climate change,” he tells Toomey. The good news, he goes on to say, is that climate change denial will eventually run its course. “[Climate change deniers] have to know in some part of their minds, that climate change is quite real and dan- gerous. It’s becoming, I’ll argue, more and more difficult to take the stand of climate rejection, because there is so much evidence of climate change and so much appropri- ate fear about its consequences. …It won’t go away. The climate rejecters are fighting a losing battle.” That said, Wagner-Riddle notes the shift won’t happen overnight, and the fact climate change science can be hard to convey to people in a simple way is a major chal- lenge for scientists to tackle. 54 GERMINATION.CA SEPTEMBER 2018 “Big corporations are seen as pushing science to make a buck, and that’s also damaged what we do, because the public sees that corporations are out to make money. I see this over and over again in the area of seed-applied biologicals. If you show people your data, the question is, ‘Yeah, but who paid for that research? What’s your moti- vation? Someone paid for you to do that, therefore you have a bias in the data.’” And why, she asks, wouldn’t the public be skeptical? “Big Tobacco paid for research on smoking and its impact on human health, and it hid the negative results C M Y CM MY CY CMY K AD for SGS BIOVISION 3.5 x 4.75in.pdf 1 12/8/2017 10:01:31 AM