This reminds me of the bigger conversation and topic about climate emotions. If you haven't, I highly recommend looking up "The Climate Scale" created by Isaias Hernandez (Queer Brown Vegan). They speak to a scale that includes: Eutierra, Soliphilia, Solastalgia, Eco Anxiety, Eco phobia, Eco guilt, Eco grieving, Tierratrauma & Eco rage.
Really excited to listen and hear from more folks about this topic. It's hard to mourn something that is technically still living. But being able to process it, makes it that much easier to move forward towards action ❤️
I really love and appreciate your work. My own sense is that we have been taught to be terrified of death and extinction, and we have normalized our ecocidal and genocidal ways to thrive — which only causes us to fear death and extinction more.
I suggest that we embrace individual death and even species extinction as natural portals into the mystery that we find ourselves in the middle of already.
We are living in the Hellish afterlife of millennia of increasing ecocide and genocide, and as we face our own deaths and our species suicide, we are terrified.
If we try to make a way for life by being as loving as possible, we will die too — but I believe we will not be as afraid to die.
We have been given profoundly misleading maps for life. We have been taught so much about ourselves and our universe that are simply not true.
Babies need to spend time with the very old. Children need to see their elders die well-loved.
We are mortal, and our species is mortal. But we are one with the soil and the stars — even as we live, we are one with the whole living body of ongoing Creation.
We are not going to unshred our habitat or bring back the Holocene. The body of Mother Earth is changing very fast, and is not ours to control. We can adapt and be responsive in order to nurture life as best as we can, but we are not responsible to make our species or our planet somehow live forever.
We already have the gift of eternal life here in the Impossible House of Love. We belong and are beloved forever.
I feel like we have become eco-terrorists because we have learned to survive through indifference and cruelty.
Hell is the inability to love.
Heaven is the ability to love.
We are here to love.
I appreciate the academic discussion, but also note that all of the people and living creatures I have loved and lost teach me how to grieve, how to trust that they are always with me, and also that even those unborn are already here with us.
Could it be that baseline expectations and deeply mistaken ideas of reality are pretty solidly baked in to our ideas about the environment and our relationship to the environment?
I’m thinking that we are already living well-into a rapid and accelerating extinction event, and that the very violent conglomeration of ecocidal/genocidal civilizations are responding with more violence.
I’m thinking that corruption and rapacity determine actual policy and lock us in to self-terminating collective actions.
With our god-like technology we are caught in multiple multipolar traps, are we not? Those with actual power must develop more weapons faster, and more means of controlling the bodies, hearts and minds of masses of people in order to render them compliant.
Even if planet earth were to be ecologically stable, and even if we stopped war, and even if we were governed justly rather than by organized crime masquerading as government, civil society, and legitimate business — wouldn’t we need to burn more fossil fuels in the next 30 years than we have burned so far in history?
I’m trying to imagine the spiritual revolution and transformation that might make a way for human life to continue on earth.
Our current religion involves the complete destruction of the biosphere, to be replaced my a mechanical technosphere.
“We” are trying to turn a living planet into mechanical spaceship that “we” can live on forever, and never grow old, never suffer pain, and never die.
Our culture has cultivated, glorified, and consistently affirmed malignant narcissism, criminal sociopathy, and particularly cruel compulsive Machiavellianism as our ideals, has it not? This is who we vote for and this us who we elevate to positions of leadership in the incredibly ecocidal businesses that dominate our economic and political life, isn’t it?
Haven’t we been made to believe absurdities, and so have been made to be complicit in atrocities?
Isn’t this the real source of our terror and grief?
How can we talk about the future without exploring these questions?
You may be surprised to know that I do not think the future is locked in or that we are damned and doomed.
I do think that we are not asking the right questions about who we are, how we got here, and how we might trust the great come-what-may.
Will the way open before us as we dance our prayers upon the earth?
Doesn’t how we get and share our food determine how we treat each other?
What ripe and challenging questions. This is the work --- turning towards these kinds of really difficult confrontations about how we got here, if we are to be more effective at uprooting the rot. Thank you for taking the time Gary to shed your wisdom.
Can’t wait to listen! I found a lot of relief a few years back through your writing and others like Leslie Davenport, and Pinkala’s “Toward a Taxonomy of Climate Emotions”. This is great stuff to dig into some complex emotions, and supports the actions I personally take to adapt and navigate the warming world.
Thank you for sharing such moving perspectives on ecological grief. Especially the Elizabeth Rush quote at the end!
I’ve grown increasingly concerned about the growing apathy among younger generations, do you think that this is a denial response similar to what you described in your post or a sign of something more complex?
What looks like apathy is not often a sign of not caring, it's often a defence against intolerable emotions like anxiety and overwhelm that a person does not want to feel, or, it's a way of reconciling painful cognitive dissonance around the issue. Shut down ensues so one does not have to feel, which looks like apathy, but in reality is an unsupported emotional soup that a person is unconsciously battling to not feel. Environmental psychologist Renee Lertzman has done the most work explaining this dynamic with her idea of 'the myth of apathy'. This post has a bit about that in it: https://unthinkable.substack.com/p/dear-climate-therapist-peoples-inertia?utm_source=publication-search
I've published a bunch on anger (i.e. the usefulness of anger, demographics who feel it most, ways of coping with it) in previous editions. Admittedly, it was left out of this one just to keep it somewhat focused. If you're interested in anger as an eco-emotion, please see these posts:
Fear and anger and sadness all motivate me. But many people I know aren’t touched by those emotions at all regarding the ecosystem’s destruction. They expect it to be there always and serve them. Serve their pleasure or whatever. Fear will not work for them. But I also don’t think anything will. It will be about teaching new generations from young ages about responsibility and advocacy. But of course, there’s no time for that, really.
So sorry for leaving this so long but I just haven't given myself the space until recently. This blog and its predecessor 'Gen Dread' are high on my list of 'go-tos' precisely because you have the courage and the sight to link our responses to the polycrisis to the way we feel about it. Yet I cannot help feeling this article & those like it skip over the question of healing the dread and fear we feel by e.g. deflecting into cognitive dissonance, or artificially separating 'fear' and 'dread' and ascribing positive reactions to one and not the other. Our dread and fear when confronted with not only individual annihilation but cultural and societal extinction (read Russell's "Free Man's Worship" from over a hundred years ago) are abhorrent to our wish to exist forever in the world, are absolutely intolerable to contemplate, and hence are rejected defensively resulting in denial, attack, and apathy. Witness as a gigantic body of evidence our responses to the recent COVID-19 epidemic which raised mortality salience like few other events recently. Yet practitioners shy away from tackling the issue at its root and taking the fear of death head-on because it is believed to be too difficult or sensitive, because it shapes the way we see the world, who we are, and our place in it; it is foundational to our sense of being. But I hold that it is only by showing that this suppressed fear of death, reanimated in times like this, can and must be overcome so that we may truly realise our potential and resolve these crises facing us. Overcoming our dread of annihilation must therefore be taken up as the key over-riding priority in all populations, old and young, along with meeting basic needs. It is truly the defining challenge of our time. Thank you once more Brett for raising these questions in your work, and calling our attention to the massive dread and anxiety prevalent in our younger cohorts.
I think it’s the fear message but then the tagged on but there is still hope that doesn’t land and I think a message that lays out very practical things people can do instead is more useful. Thank you for all that you science communicators do. I spent 5 years communicating about climate for the charity I ran and it’s exhausting.
This is a great podcast. In a very ad hoc way, I tried to sense what feelings people experience in relation to climate. Grief is one, but anxiety, depression, or anger are also part of the list. I started by asking climate scientists. I thought they would have greater awareness than people who spend less time to think about climate. It proved really difficult to get them to share their emotions. Some were suprized they had never thought about the emotional aspect of climate change. Here is the link to the experiment results https://icefrontiers.com/the-postcard-experiment/ and some of the contributions we got https://icefrontiers.com/tag/living-with-climate-change/
What an fitting post to connect on then! Glad you found it. I think psychedelics have a lot of potential in this space. I keep encountering researchers who are investigating their use for metabolizing feelings around ecogrief / polycrisis / collapse and finding 'a new story' for the mysterious world we're moving into; one that's more supportive and alive. I have not seen any results yet! Just people dropping into my inbox. I hope to find out more about this.
also if this is anything that you're working on, please feel free to share more. I'm sure lots of people here would be interested. Thanks for being here and your kind words.
This reminds me of the bigger conversation and topic about climate emotions. If you haven't, I highly recommend looking up "The Climate Scale" created by Isaias Hernandez (Queer Brown Vegan). They speak to a scale that includes: Eutierra, Soliphilia, Solastalgia, Eco Anxiety, Eco phobia, Eco guilt, Eco grieving, Tierratrauma & Eco rage.
Really excited to listen and hear from more folks about this topic. It's hard to mourn something that is technically still living. But being able to process it, makes it that much easier to move forward towards action ❤️
Interesting! Thanks for bringing that to my attention, I hadn't seen Isaias' scale yet. It combines a lot of the key psychoterratic emotions that folks like philosopher Glenn Albrecht came up with. He's got some intriguing ideas he's shared here before about the language we're using for these emotions, ex: 1) https://unthinkable.substack.com/p/fighting-the-extinction-of-positive and 2) https://unthinkable.substack.com/p/are-eco-terms-like-eco-grief-holding?utm_source=publication-search
I really love and appreciate your work. My own sense is that we have been taught to be terrified of death and extinction, and we have normalized our ecocidal and genocidal ways to thrive — which only causes us to fear death and extinction more.
I suggest that we embrace individual death and even species extinction as natural portals into the mystery that we find ourselves in the middle of already.
We are living in the Hellish afterlife of millennia of increasing ecocide and genocide, and as we face our own deaths and our species suicide, we are terrified.
If we try to make a way for life by being as loving as possible, we will die too — but I believe we will not be as afraid to die.
We have been given profoundly misleading maps for life. We have been taught so much about ourselves and our universe that are simply not true.
Babies need to spend time with the very old. Children need to see their elders die well-loved.
We are mortal, and our species is mortal. But we are one with the soil and the stars — even as we live, we are one with the whole living body of ongoing Creation.
We are not going to unshred our habitat or bring back the Holocene. The body of Mother Earth is changing very fast, and is not ours to control. We can adapt and be responsive in order to nurture life as best as we can, but we are not responsible to make our species or our planet somehow live forever.
We already have the gift of eternal life here in the Impossible House of Love. We belong and are beloved forever.
I feel like we have become eco-terrorists because we have learned to survive through indifference and cruelty.
Hell is the inability to love.
Heaven is the ability to love.
We are here to love.
I appreciate the academic discussion, but also note that all of the people and living creatures I have loved and lost teach me how to grieve, how to trust that they are always with me, and also that even those unborn are already here with us.
Could it be that baseline expectations and deeply mistaken ideas of reality are pretty solidly baked in to our ideas about the environment and our relationship to the environment?
I’m thinking that we are already living well-into a rapid and accelerating extinction event, and that the very violent conglomeration of ecocidal/genocidal civilizations are responding with more violence.
I’m thinking that corruption and rapacity determine actual policy and lock us in to self-terminating collective actions.
With our god-like technology we are caught in multiple multipolar traps, are we not? Those with actual power must develop more weapons faster, and more means of controlling the bodies, hearts and minds of masses of people in order to render them compliant.
Even if planet earth were to be ecologically stable, and even if we stopped war, and even if we were governed justly rather than by organized crime masquerading as government, civil society, and legitimate business — wouldn’t we need to burn more fossil fuels in the next 30 years than we have burned so far in history?
I’m trying to imagine the spiritual revolution and transformation that might make a way for human life to continue on earth.
Our current religion involves the complete destruction of the biosphere, to be replaced my a mechanical technosphere.
“We” are trying to turn a living planet into mechanical spaceship that “we” can live on forever, and never grow old, never suffer pain, and never die.
Our culture has cultivated, glorified, and consistently affirmed malignant narcissism, criminal sociopathy, and particularly cruel compulsive Machiavellianism as our ideals, has it not? This is who we vote for and this us who we elevate to positions of leadership in the incredibly ecocidal businesses that dominate our economic and political life, isn’t it?
Haven’t we been made to believe absurdities, and so have been made to be complicit in atrocities?
Isn’t this the real source of our terror and grief?
How can we talk about the future without exploring these questions?
You may be surprised to know that I do not think the future is locked in or that we are damned and doomed.
I do think that we are not asking the right questions about who we are, how we got here, and how we might trust the great come-what-may.
Will the way open before us as we dance our prayers upon the earth?
Doesn’t how we get and share our food determine how we treat each other?
What ripe and challenging questions. This is the work --- turning towards these kinds of really difficult confrontations about how we got here, if we are to be more effective at uprooting the rot. Thank you for taking the time Gary to shed your wisdom.
Can’t wait to listen! I found a lot of relief a few years back through your writing and others like Leslie Davenport, and Pinkala’s “Toward a Taxonomy of Climate Emotions”. This is great stuff to dig into some complex emotions, and supports the actions I personally take to adapt and navigate the warming world.
Welcome Michael! Leslie and Panu are both colleagues of mine; I've learned a lot from them as well.
Brilliant and this feels like an incredible tool that will help me deal with the unthinkable. <3
more on the taxonomy of climate emotions here: https://unthinkable.substack.com/p/climate-emotions-arent-all-negative?utm_source=publication-search
Thank you for sharing such moving perspectives on ecological grief. Especially the Elizabeth Rush quote at the end!
I’ve grown increasingly concerned about the growing apathy among younger generations, do you think that this is a denial response similar to what you described in your post or a sign of something more complex?
What looks like apathy is not often a sign of not caring, it's often a defence against intolerable emotions like anxiety and overwhelm that a person does not want to feel, or, it's a way of reconciling painful cognitive dissonance around the issue. Shut down ensues so one does not have to feel, which looks like apathy, but in reality is an unsupported emotional soup that a person is unconsciously battling to not feel. Environmental psychologist Renee Lertzman has done the most work explaining this dynamic with her idea of 'the myth of apathy'. This post has a bit about that in it: https://unthinkable.substack.com/p/dear-climate-therapist-peoples-inertia?utm_source=publication-search
Very exciting - can't wait to listen!
hello ryan! thanks!
What about anger? Research indicates anger is a great mobilizer.
You're absolutely right about that.
I've published a bunch on anger (i.e. the usefulness of anger, demographics who feel it most, ways of coping with it) in previous editions. Admittedly, it was left out of this one just to keep it somewhat focused. If you're interested in anger as an eco-emotion, please see these posts:
https://unthinkable.substack.com/p/your-anger-is-part-of-the-hope?utm_source=publication-search
https://unthinkable.substack.com/p/dear-climate-therapist-what-should?utm_source=publication-search
https://unthinkable.substack.com/p/eco-anxiety-in-nigeria?utm_source=publication-search
Fear and anger and sadness all motivate me. But many people I know aren’t touched by those emotions at all regarding the ecosystem’s destruction. They expect it to be there always and serve them. Serve their pleasure or whatever. Fear will not work for them. But I also don’t think anything will. It will be about teaching new generations from young ages about responsibility and advocacy. But of course, there’s no time for that, really.
So sorry for leaving this so long but I just haven't given myself the space until recently. This blog and its predecessor 'Gen Dread' are high on my list of 'go-tos' precisely because you have the courage and the sight to link our responses to the polycrisis to the way we feel about it. Yet I cannot help feeling this article & those like it skip over the question of healing the dread and fear we feel by e.g. deflecting into cognitive dissonance, or artificially separating 'fear' and 'dread' and ascribing positive reactions to one and not the other. Our dread and fear when confronted with not only individual annihilation but cultural and societal extinction (read Russell's "Free Man's Worship" from over a hundred years ago) are abhorrent to our wish to exist forever in the world, are absolutely intolerable to contemplate, and hence are rejected defensively resulting in denial, attack, and apathy. Witness as a gigantic body of evidence our responses to the recent COVID-19 epidemic which raised mortality salience like few other events recently. Yet practitioners shy away from tackling the issue at its root and taking the fear of death head-on because it is believed to be too difficult or sensitive, because it shapes the way we see the world, who we are, and our place in it; it is foundational to our sense of being. But I hold that it is only by showing that this suppressed fear of death, reanimated in times like this, can and must be overcome so that we may truly realise our potential and resolve these crises facing us. Overcoming our dread of annihilation must therefore be taken up as the key over-riding priority in all populations, old and young, along with meeting basic needs. It is truly the defining challenge of our time. Thank you once more Brett for raising these questions in your work, and calling our attention to the massive dread and anxiety prevalent in our younger cohorts.
I think it’s the fear message but then the tagged on but there is still hope that doesn’t land and I think a message that lays out very practical things people can do instead is more useful. Thank you for all that you science communicators do. I spent 5 years communicating about climate for the charity I ran and it’s exhausting.
This is a great podcast. In a very ad hoc way, I tried to sense what feelings people experience in relation to climate. Grief is one, but anxiety, depression, or anger are also part of the list. I started by asking climate scientists. I thought they would have greater awareness than people who spend less time to think about climate. It proved really difficult to get them to share their emotions. Some were suprized they had never thought about the emotional aspect of climate change. Here is the link to the experiment results https://icefrontiers.com/the-postcard-experiment/ and some of the contributions we got https://icefrontiers.com/tag/living-with-climate-change/
What an fitting post to connect on then! Glad you found it. I think psychedelics have a lot of potential in this space. I keep encountering researchers who are investigating their use for metabolizing feelings around ecogrief / polycrisis / collapse and finding 'a new story' for the mysterious world we're moving into; one that's more supportive and alive. I have not seen any results yet! Just people dropping into my inbox. I hope to find out more about this.
also if this is anything that you're working on, please feel free to share more. I'm sure lots of people here would be interested. Thanks for being here and your kind words.