Are We Feeling Collective Grief Over Climate Change? The idea is highly controversial, but at least one psychiatrist is convinced that we are, whether we know it or not.
"There isn't the slightest shred of doubt in my mind, that everyone on some level is anxious, deeply anxious, about climate change," the forensic psychiatrist and climate activist Lise Van Susteren says. She attributes her belief to decades of experience with people who have difficulty knowing what they are feeling on a deeper level, and she understands that anxiety comes from many headwaters.
Hindsight may prove the only true vantage by which to see how we've worked through the scaffold of bereavement, and it will be left to our progeny to judge whether we conducted business as usual, or reversed course when approaching the most critical thresholds.
Meanwhile, the cauldron simmers with a stew of emotions, actions and inactions. The realities hit closer to home with every Hurricane Sandy, each new Zika hot spot on the map, and with the ever-dwindling array of animals, from the Monarch butterfly, to the pelican and stork and 1300 other types of birds whose collective song, or lack thereof, might well serve as warning: we, too are a threatened species.
It's a tragedy, says the article, because it's unavoidable.
http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/are-we-feeling-collective-grief-over-climate-change/
I'll link this with another article on a similar theme.
“I’m in love with a world that’s falling apart”: Meet the 16-year-old from Boulder trying to save the planet
“I’m going through struggles and pain, just like many other young people in the world,” he said. “I share a lot of similarities most young people share with each other, and once I show people that I’ve been able to use my voice and be powerful with it, they realize they have that potential as well. What I would love to see during my lifetime is my voice become less and less pertinent because I’m speaking as a generation, with all those other young people joining hands and lifting up the world together.”
http://www.denverpost.com/2016/08/24/environmental-activist-xiuhtezcatl-martinez-we-day/
I'll give you my view. To inspire the right action, we need a positive vision of a beautiful world worth having, something that inspires effort and motivates actions, a world that embodies and expresses the right way to be and to live, regardless of any crises and imperatives making action necessary, something that makes action desirable.
Every time I post something on climate change, on possible solutions and ways forward, transitions, somewhere deep inside is a nagging pain that it is all too little, too late. I keep going by asking, "too late" for what? Go back a few decades, and I don't think an Ecopolis of social justice and ecological health was beyond us at all. But potentialities were repressed and diverted elsewhere. But that remains the right world. But now, what? We are acting to avoid 2C increase? Which is better than 3C. Which is better than 4C. Beyond which the world will be a complete hellhole.
There's a grim irony in thinking that we may well come to know ourselves and our world for the first time ... in the process of losing it all. There's a sadness hanging over it all. But we can respond rather than collapse into despair.
I'm thinking of Rilke here when he extolled sorrow as a supreme tool of self-knowledge. On how great sadnesses transform us and bring us closer to ourselves. https://www.brainpickings.org/2015/03/10/rilke-letters-to-a-young-poet-sadness/
And Simone Weil when contemplating how to make use of our suffering. https://www.brainpickings.org/2015/05/12/simone-weil-pain/
Or C.S. Lewis on how suffering confers agency upon life and Nietzsche on why a full life requires embracing rather than running from suffering. The anguish of emotional suffering makes a difference, something is wrong, something of value and meaning is at stake, something must change. There is nothing that is indifferent.
I say, let's act as if the future was here. 'The future is now', as Starhawk wrote in Webs of Power. Along with the grief, there is still love and joy to be had, and in claiming that, maybe, just maybe, we may claim the future for life and in the process recreate our death-dealing culture anew, bringing about the changes we need in our relations to the world, to other humans and to other beings and bodies, enriching our understanding of what it is to be human in the process.
I like what Alistair McIntosh wrote in "Soil and Soul" in this respect.
'Action for transformation, then, starts with becoming truly aware of how we feel: within ourselves, in our communities and in relation to nature. It faces up to the reality of disease - the spiritual dis-eases of disequilibria, stunted growth and cancerous growth. Rather than pushing away or masking existential pain with consumption or addictions, it recognises its value. The pain is the mantra. It is the signal that points us to where healing is called for. That's why we need to feel it, to go into it, to see where it's coming from and to find what it asks of us. Healing then becomes a process of re-creation, opening up the channels of creativity. And creativity is nothing less than the renewal of eros; the cutting edge of poesis; the literal unfolding of reality on the rolling crest of time in the ongoing process of God's creation through all eternity.
This is what makes spiritual activism so compelling. It brings alive the feminist principle that 'the personal is the political'. It lights up the darkness so that the blind see, the lame walk and even the dead rise. In other words, the simple act of becoming truly aware of reality can cause miracles. It can set loose magic.
(McIntosh 2001 ch 12).
Starhawk uses the word magic quite deliberately in this respect:
'Magic is another word that makes people uneasy, so I use it deliberately, because the words we are comfortable with, the words that sound acceptable, rational, scientific, and intellectually sound, are comfortable precisely because they are the language of estrangement.' Magic, she continues, 'encompasses political action, which is aimed at changing consciousness and thereby causing change'. It is 'the art of changing consciousness at will.
Wild words? 'Words ought to be a little wild, for they are the assault of thoughts upon the unthinking.' J. M. Keynes
And in this instance, the words are nowhere near as wild as the facts we are facing in a world of planetary unravelling.
More from the marvellous Alistair McIntosh:
'I have been careful in this book not to be alarmist... Yet at times, one cannot help but hear the thundering hooves and feel the hot breath of the apocalypse cantering by. There is a slow urgency about what humankind's levels of consumption are doing to the Earth. Slow, in that it is difficult to register it in ways that can trigger radical action on political timescales. But urgent, in that the ratchet is tightening especially if we have any care at all for future generations. The tipping points of no return show signs of slipping. That is why I have been forced to abandon optimism and seek recourse in hope.
My call to rekindle inner life is the next pull that's needed on the string of the grimpeur - the incremental climber. But that doesn't mean that we should wallow there! Too much inner life without the grounding nourishment of getting our hands dirty is just as toxic to the soul as the other way round. We need a dance between the fantastical and the practical; not apartheid between the two. Our drift must be towards becoming whole people in a whole world. We are talking here of a spirituality that is both transcendent and immanent. An incarnate spirituality that is not of the 'world' in all its wicked ways, yet neither abandons that world: 'For God so loved the world . . .'
Even if we find ourselves forced to view the little steps we take today as patterns and examples for reconstruction after the grand melt-down in some post-apocalyptic scenario, what matters is that we never give up. Love does not succumb to compassion fatigue. Love cherishes the flesh-and-blood body of the world . . . infuses it... forgives it... constantly seeks to transfigure and to re-set the seeds of Eden as Heaven on Earth. That is our calling in these our troubled times. We are commissioned to draw out the flavour of what Providence provides; to be, in the words of the Master, 'the salt of the Earth'.
And so, hope is not about sitting back on tenterhooks and waiting for a miracle to happen. Hope is being receptive to a new mind and a new heart. Hope is about setting in place the preconditions that might reconstitute life, and then getting on with it. All else is hubris on the bonfire of vanities. And I'm afraid that's as far as I can take this unfinished and unfinishable book. The rest is 'not perfected' because the rest is up to us all. Such is the cry of the Earth to its own sweet child in time.'
- Alistair McIntosh, Hell and High Water, Afterword, 2008
In the end, we are experiencing a collective grief over the fate of the Earth, one that involves a pervasive fear and anxiety which could paralyse the will and mire us in despair. But it is also a grief which, in its shared nature, brings people together, and brings us close to the world we are in the process of losing. It is this coming together in a common concern that contains within it the seeds of a joyful hope. It is the hope that, faced with the prospect of losing all that makes life worthwhile, we may finally come to appreciate the great gift we have been given in being alive on this, our earthly home. Our anxieties diminish the more we make common cause with each other and with other beings and bodies on this planet. In joining with others, we lift ourselves and we lift others, pulling ourselves out of despair to act in joyful hope of reenchanting the world.