Everyday life and the sizzle of climate change (original) (raw)
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Philosophical Perspectives on Climate Anxiety
Handbooks in philosophy, 2023
The aim of this chapter is to examine the relevant philosophical accounts of climate anxiety and to provide a comprehensive overview of the existing literature on the subject. This will be done by outlining the three main philosophical approaches to climate anxiety. First will be considered the scholars who have put forward their own original theories or definitions of climate anxiety. These are philosophers such as Albrecht, who has developed an entirely new classificatory scheme of Earth-related emotions, or scholars like Smith, or McGrath, who look at climate anxiety through a cultural-historical lens. The second group consists of authors who analyse climate anxiety through the interpretive framework of Christian existential philosophy, mostly working with Tillich’s definition of anxiety. However, some of them also borrow concepts from other existential thinkers, most notably from Kierkegaard. The final, third group is made up of scholars who take a phenomenological approach to analysing climate anxiety, using the methodological framework provided by philosophers such as Husserl, Heidegger and Sartre. After outlining these three main philosophical approaches to climate anxiety, the chapter offers a brief discussion of the findings, which is followed by a definition of climate anxiety that is derived from these findings and from the two comprehensive taxonomies of climate emotions developed by Landmann and Pihkala.
Contemporary Psychoanalysis, 2018
I n the unfolding timeline of the deep history of Earth, our human epoch, or the "Anthropocene," is a mere blink of the eye, the tiny dot of a period punctuating the most recent sentence in an epic ballad. Yet, that tiny dot, like a traumatic event in a childhood left unhealed, has flowered into a paralyzing, cultural madness in which many of us
). Safety, Danger, and Protection in the Family and Community , 2023
The chapter examines contemporary environmental crises as a threat to citizens' emotional wellbeing and sense of safety. The danger is both practical and existential as climate change shows by entailing the human drama of denial, disavowal and political inaction. Accordingly, analysis covers climate emotions such as anxiety, grief and anger as well as their relevance for everyday life, community formation and development of trust. Special attention is devoted to strategies that seek to overcome individualism and alienation by prioritizing close relationships, a sense of we-ness, and collective action. Close relationships and safe emotional connections-including a connection to more-than-human world-offer space for reflection on possible actions and forms of resistance. This contribution does not offer hope-inspiring solutions to the drama of environmental destruction, but foregrounds relationships and alliances, which are forged even in troubled times, as well as narratives that make it possible to live with climate change.
Climate Anxiety on YouTube: Young people reflect on how to handle the climate crisis
Ekphrasis. Images, Cinema, Theory, Media, 2020
The material for this study is four YouTube videos that address climate anxiety published during the 2010s and produced by young people. The videos were analysed from an ecocritical perspective using a discourse theoretical framework and focusing on intermedial aspects. All of the videos inform about climate change and suggest activities that will help to reduce it. In the articulation of the climate crisis, the most prominent elements are heat and that the changes are happening very quickly. All of the videos articulate the fact that "we" caused the crisis. Generally, "we" includes all humanity, but it is sometimes meant to refer more specifically to people in highly developed countries or people interested in maintaining the status quo. The articulations of nature include elements such as justice and tranquillity. In a trope that often appears in the videos, human litter soils this idealised notion of nature. Cultural behaviours relate to overconsumption and, in one case, cities as threatening, monstrous machines. The videos also present alternative cultures and social behaviour in articulations of reaction and action in the face of the threat. Articulations of climate anxiety relate the condition to elements such as hopelessness and the feeling that it is too late. However, the condition can be cured by inducing hope. Even though the producers agree on the gravity of the situation, they do not generally include suggestions for radical change in their work. Instead, the message is that doing anything is better than doing nothing-even if the activity does not have any effect on the climate. Usually, the focus is on individual activities, but some of the videos also focus on organised collective activities, such as demonstrations or joining a group of like-minded people. Even so, the goal of these proposed activities is often making people with climate anxiety feel better.
Climate Crisis and Consciousness: Re-imagining our world and ourselves
Climate Crisis and Consciousness: Re-imagining our world and ourselves, 2020
Climate crisis disrupts the beliefs, values and behaviors of contemporary societies, sparking potential for radical changes in culture and consciousness. Drawing upon her experience as a Jungian psychotherapist and a researcher in the field of climate psychology, Sally Gillespie writes about the challenges, dilemmas, opportunities and transformations of engaging with climate and ecological crises. Many factors shape how we understand and respond to the existential threats of climate crisis. This accessible book with its discussions about worldviews, cultural myths, emotional resilience, social connectedness, nature relatedness and collective action explores consciousness change in those most engaged with climate issues. Calling upon the words and stories of many people, including Indigenous leaders, ecologists, campaigners, writers and philosophers, Gillespie encourages us to enter into climate conversations to forge emotional resilience, ecological consciousness and inspired action. With its unique focus on the psychological experience of facing into the climate crisis, this warm and supportive book offers companionship and sustenance for anyone who wants to be alive to our natural world and to the existential challenges of today. It is an essential resource for counsellors, psychotherapists, social workers and other helping professionals, as well as climate campaigners, policy makers, educators, scientists and researchers.
Critical psychologies and climate change
Current Opinion in Psychology, 2021
This article is a review of recent contributions in critical psychology and its close cousins, critical social psychology, critical community psychology and liberation psychology, to understand human response to climate change. It contrasts critical psychology with mainstream psychology in general terms, before introducing a critical psychological perspective on climate change. Central to this perspective is a critique of the framing of individual behaviour change as the problem and solution to climate change in mainstream psychology and a related emphasis on identifying 'barriers' to proenvironmental behaviour. This framework is argued to be reductive, obscuring or downplaying the influence of a range of factors in shaping predominant responses to climate change to date, including social context, discourse, power and affect. Currently, critical psychologies set out to study the relative contribution of these factors to (in)action on climate change. A related concern is how the psychological and emotional impacts of climate change impact unevenly on communities and individuals, depending on place-based, economic, geographic and cultural differences, and give rise to experiences of injustice, inequality and disempowerment. Critical psychology does not assume these to be overriding or inevitable psychological and social responses, however. Critical psychologies also undertake research and inform interventions that highlight the role of collective understanding, activism, empowerment and resistance as the necessary foundations of a genuine shift towards sustainable societies.
Ecology, Psychoanalysis and Global Warming: Present and Future Traumas [Editorial]
2020
The Coronavirus crisis links to the climate crisis in ways that challenge humankind to demonstrate an unprecedented creativity and adaptability to change. This article discusses, both in content and style, this need for creative change and what that might look like. It asserts that the current discourse, with its linear rationality and logic system will fail in the face of the enormity of such epistemological and ontological disturbance. Using the example of social dreaming as a different form of thinking, the article encourages the reader to radically reconsider thought, feelings, reason and creativity as a means to rethinking solutions for a shared future.
Climate anxiety as posthuman knowledge
Wellbeing, Space & Society, 2023
The American Psychological Association defines 'climate anxiety' or 'eco-anxiety' as a chronic fear of environmental doom (Clayton et al., 2017, p.68 [Glossary]). This paper instead theorises climate anxiety as an emergent form of posthuman knowledge, albeit one that is dominated by vulnerability rather than affirmation. Put this way, the cultivation of ethical relationality through meaningful multi-species encounters holds potential for transforming this vulnerability and alleviating the anxiety. Offering both a reappraisal of early earth-writing by humanistic geographers and an engagement with recent work on 'earth emotions', including notions of 'ecological grief' and 'mourning', the article critically reviews lines of thinkingtogether constituting a new form of posthuman wellbeing studiesthat challenge clinical understandings of climate anxiety by reimagining the purpose and mode of psychological intervention for the futures of earthly wellbeing.
Geo: Geography and Environment, 2022
The existence of nature is vehemently called into question in the Anthropocene. The standard image of nature as a pristine, harmonious, and stable background no longer holds, especially as ecological changes increasingly penetrate the collective consciousness. Consequently, there has been growing interest in the psychological effects of this end of nature. A recent wave of scholarship shows how climate change and the Anthropocene more generally affect people's daily lives and present significant threats to psychic well-being. This paper follows on from these debates. In contrast, however, we ask if and how nature is still considered as providing a subjective sense of (ontological) security today. We argue that, even under postnatural conditions, nature still maintains an imaginary existence in the social reality of the subject. We address this argument empirically by focusing on everyday life perceptions of nature in the city of Vancouver, British Columbia, and theoretically by following the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan. Drawing on image-based interviews (photo-elicitation), we demonstrate that a psychoanalytic approach to imaginary environments allows us to understand why people state that they love nature even though it does not exist. We show how this love works by pointing out how nature is considered as (m)other and, through this, engaged as a place to retreat and escape from the burdens of everyday life while being perceived from a certain distance. In conclusion, we emphasise the broader political consequences of the imaginary existence of nature and call for further engagement with the persistence of nature's fantasy in times when nature seems to no longer fit the purpose.
Dancing at the end of the world? Psychoanalysis, climate change and joy
The Journal of Analytical Psychology, 2022
This paper attempts to join the dots between psychoanalytic and post-psychoanalytic perspectives in relation to climate change and the ecological crisis and to begin a discussion on the role of joy in sustaining ourselves in the face of the global catastrophe. There is a vital expanding psychoanalytic literature addressing itself to the environmental crisis but a striking absence on joy and what stands in its way. This paper explores what psychoanalysis has to offer in the context of planetary emergency and also asks psychoanalysis to look beyond itself and reimagine what it can be. Joy involves a simultaneous affirmation of both our uniqueness and our togetherness, not only as humans but with all forms of life and the web of life itself. If we were to allow ourselves to actually enjoy our lives, we just might fight harder against our extinction. Download link: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/share/author/4RJGYN7J8RJAG7GSNSSM?target=10.1111/1468-5922.12857