University of Colorado energy-behaviour researcher Karen Ehrhardt-Martinez — who in June 2011 became director of the Climate, Mind and Behavior Program at the Garrison Institute in upstate New York — believes that society can cut its energy use cheaply by up to 30% through behavioural changes alone. She talks to Nature Climate Change about achieving practical change.

What are your goals for the Climate, Mind and Behavior Program?

We’re trying to pull together social science research across the various disciplines and apply that in the...

From the time Elizabeth and Annie were little, my husband Nat and I took them into the mountains, from Tennessee to New Hampshire. They trudged miles carrying loads. We taught them how to light a stove, collect water, wait out thunderstorms, and walk through wet and cold. The best part, I thought, was that they would come to know discomfort and even danger. Courage would become second nature.

I was then a newspaper reporter. I got sent out late at night to write about fires, fatal truck accidents, murders, and motel evacuations. I watched people who were crying because they’d...

The amazing giant saguaro cactus of Arizona’s Sonoran Desert in the southwestern United States does what its human neighbours cannot. It survives
on 8 to 15 inches of annual rainfall. The Saguaro sucks up these rare drenchings through extra-long shallow roots, holding the water deep inside its leathery, crevassed skin. A tree-sized saguaro can live for a few hundred years, and it grows very slowly, pushing spiny arms towards the blistering sky. Walking through the Sonoran Desert, an unadapted human is soon humbled by the interplay of resilient plants and animals that have...