How To Protect Yourself And Your Family from a Changing Planet

The beginning of the new year is a time of optimism, when we hope that the coming 12 months will be better than the past 12 months. 

If such high spirits seem unwarranted to you, then a new book by David Pogue called, “How To Prepare for Climate Change: A Practical Guide to Surviving the Chaos,” will perfectly suit your mindset. 

Pogue will share his warnings about the incredibly bad shape our planet is in during a talk hosted by the Salisbury Forum on Friday, Feb. 5, at 7:30 p.m.

The words alone in Pogue’s new book might seem daunting, even depressing. But Pogue himself is upbeat, fun and polished, a veteran of quick, snappy how-to’s on network news shows and TED Talks. He’s been a New York Times reporter, a best-selling New York Times author, an Emmy Award-winning host and writer and author of several books in the “For Dummies” series. 

And if that doesn’t automatically up his fun quotient in your eyes, the 1985 graduate of Yale spent 10 years conducting and arranging Broadway musicals. 

That might remind you of the story of the band continuing to play as the Titanic sank. Our planet, according to Pogue, an award-winning journalist/researcher, is sinking like that great ship. Even when he shares a droplet of (relatively) good news — that the decrease in our use of planes and cars during COVID-19 did wonderful things for air and water quality worldwide — he adds the flip side, which is that as soon as global lockdown ended, humans went right back to flying and driving and wasting electricity on lightly occupied shopping malls and office buildings, and any small environmental gains were quickly eradicated.

Pogue’s intention in telling us all this isn’t to send us back to bed, to lie beneath the covers and await the inevitable suffocation of Earth. He wants to scare you into action. 

With his how-to background, he wants to teach his readers how they, as individuals, can prepare themselves for the future through mitigation and adaptation — and how they can be ready for and perhaps even minimize the inevitable suffering that lies in 

“The time for bickering about who or what is at fault is long gone,” Pogue says in the introduction to his book, which he says is “about where to live, how to invest, what to eat, how to build, what insurance you need, how to talk to your kids.”

To learn what you can do to protect yourself from climate change, tune in to the Salisbury Forum Zoom presentation by David Pogue on Friday, Feb. 5, at 7:30 p.m. as he talks about his new book, “How To Prepare for Climate Change: A Practical Guide to Surviving the Chaos.”

For the link, go to www.salisburyforum.org.