CLIMATE TRAUMA & RECOVERY: The Radical Compassion behind the Green New Deal & the One Earth proposal
We hear a lot in the media these days about eco-anxiety, climate grief, and other psychological afflictions associated with the existential crisis of climate turmoil. But anxiety is a symptom, not a disease, and grief has to do with something that has been lost — but the media is so far in the dark when it comes to naming the disease or specifying what has been lost. In other words, this is a rather euphemistic, and not entirely helpful, approach to what is really ailing us.
Please allow me to name the modern malaise, and specify what it is that has been seemingly lost. What we are experiencing is an entirely new form of trauma, and it is directly attributable to the loss of our connection to, and intimacy with, the natural world. The key to the inability of the media and popular culture to come to grips with this malaise has everything to do with our failure to collectively acknowledge the scientific reality that the planet we inhabit is a living organism of which we are an integral part.
My peer-reviewed paper, “Climate Trauma: Towards a New Taxonomy of Trauma,” in the professional journal Ecopsychology has been downloaded over 15,000 times since its publication last Spring — a rather startling amount of interest for a wonky academic paper featured behind a professional journal’s paywall — and it has even landed me in the top one tenth of one percent (.01%) of researchers worldwide over the past year on the academic clearinghouse website, Academia.edu., where I am able to make it more freely available.
This last fall, noted spiritual teacher and modern mystic Thomas Hübl led the first ever online symposium on collective trauma, prompted in part by the publication of my paper. More than 50,000 people from 178 countries participated over the course of nine days, with interactive presentations by leading experts on personal, generational (epigenetic), and collective (cultural and biospheric) trauma.
It seems that naming the beast heretofore disguised and concealed by the disarming vernacular of “climate change” induces a feeling of relief for most people, and is often met with a knowing recognition and intuitive understanding that shifts others’ perspective in the same way it has shifted my own during the course of my climate journey.
The term Climate Trauma resonates at the deepest level of our Psyche. It somehow strikes a harmonious chord. It even sparks an inchoate lumen of universal empathy.
And it startles — in stark contrast to the subtle reassurance of the scientific phrase “climate change” or the generic euphemism, “climate anxiety.” Of course, everything changes, and we are all anxious about the future. There’s a pill for that.
Not so reassuring, however, to acknowledge that a new and unprecedented form of trauma has been unleashed in this man-made age, like the opening of Pandora’s Box.
And yet it is trauma that is driving civilization off the proverbial cliff in this hooked-up, 24/7 maxed-out age. Fight it, fear it, or flee it, the climate crisis is the sword of Damocles that hangs menacingly over the heads of all life on Earth. As awareness is the natural elixir for resolving trauma, once we name Climate Trauma, recovery is possible.
Acknowledging Climate Trauma holds the potential to completely change the narrative of the climate crisis in a way that just happens to lend a clear moral impetus to the Green New Deal, the Five Freedoms , and new proposals for rewilding that will be presented at the International Biodiversity Conventions renewal conference this Fall in Kunming, China.
It was a happy coincidence, if not kismet, that the journal Ecopsychology published an advance copy of my peer-reviewed paper on the very morning that the Green New Deal was unveiled. Grist Columnist Eric Holthaus, who has covered the climate crisis for many years, sensed the synergy of this conjunction immediately. As he put it:
There’s a new vein of psychology that is starting to analyze climate change from the perspective of a massive, shared trauma, and its conclusions are profound: “Climate Trauma” can only be addressed by naming the enormity of what we’re facing. Only then can we process how we feel about it, and move forward together, to solutions.
The Green New Deal is still a work in progress, and it’s going to take sustained effort to make sure the future it promises doesn’t leave behind those who are being most affected by climate change. But as long as those pushing for radical policy change keep directly confronting the scale of the problem, it’s going to be easier to bring even more people on board.
See: How Climate Trauma led to support for bold action (Feb. 12, 2019).
That same week, conservative thinker Andrew Sullivan wrote about Climate Trauma on his weekly blog for NY Magazine, the same publication David Wallace-Wells (“Uninhabitable Earth”) writes for. Like Holthaus, Sullivan instantly grasped the pregnant possibilities of changing the narrative from the current, ineffectual ‘climate change’ to the more impactful paradigm of Climate Trauma:
We’re used to seeing the challenge of marshaling political support for radical climate measures as a struggle against ignorance, denial, greed, or the inability of human beings to confront an abstract threat in the future that doesn’t overwhelm them now… But we may be underestimating what the constant drumbeat of news about the accelerating sixth great extinction has been doing to us psychologically.
In fact, we are all living through this collective trauma… But this collective trauma is never-ending. It’s a 9/11 all the time…
Think about that for a second. If jetliners continued to crash into skyscrapers every day, we’d fucking do something about it, wouldn’t we? We wouldn’t just say “Oh, accidents happen.” Well, guess what? The warming of the oceans has been calculated to be the equivalent of adding the heat of an atom bomb every second. There lies the hidden horror of Bret Stephens’ casual dismissal of the urgency of the climate crisis with this single disarming sentence in the Sunday NYTimes: “Climate change is change, not doom.” The same indefensible defense was made by Australian politicians after the unprecedented losses to unnatural wildfires in recent months.
Clearly, we need to change the narrative of the climate crisis in a way that is in accord with the urgency of the Green New Deal and the International Biodiversity Conventions.
We can conclude from the encouraging reception by both liberal and conservative thinkers that Climate Trauma (& Recovery) has the power to do just that. To change the narrative.
Just to be clear at the outset, this radical new proposition was not really “my idea” — as some are saying. I’ve merely elevated its importance academically in a way that places it in context. In fact, the first use of the term I’m aware of was in 2010, by Gillian Caldwell, and it was also identified in an anticipatory sense in the book Climate Trauma: Foreseeing the Future in Dystopian Film and Fiction, by E. Ann Kaplan. Kaplan was referring to something in the nature of “Pre-Traumatic Stress Disorder.” However, given the accelerating pace of climate chaos over the past decades, there is no longer anything anticipatory about Climate Trauma — it is our present reality.
So by characterizing Climate Trauma in more psychological, and less literary, terms, I have merely given voice to an idea whose time has clearly arrived. And even in this effort, I am beholden to a series of conversations between myself and the Boulder climate psychologist and psychotherapist Carolyn Baker, author of Collapsing Consciously: Transformative Truths for Turbulent Times, and host of The New Lifeboat Hour podcast. We’d begun examining “the unseen elephant in the room” of every conversation today, whether on the therapist’s couch or around the kitchen table. While I got busy soliciting peer review for an academic paper on the topic for the journal Ecopsychology, Carolyn was actually talking to mental health professionals about the phenomenon. As she explained it to them:
The elephant in the room that is not seen in the United States or in Canada or in most parts of the world is the trauma we experience each day as even a small part of us feels consciously or unconsciously the gargantuan loss of our ecosystems, the loss of species, the loss of each other, and the loss of our own souls.
And she was just as surprised by the reception she received then as I have been by the reception my writing on the subject has received since. Listen to how she describes her experience at that professional conference:
I concluded my remarks by emphasizing that it is impossible to talk about mental health without talking about climate trauma and conscious cultivation of resilience in every aspect of life. What is more, climate trauma is an existential crisis — the most severe crisis humanity has ever faced.
Contrary to my concern that people might be “turned off” or leave feeling engulfed in despair, the feedback I received was overwhelmingly positive. One person remarked that they expected to leave in despair but actually left feeling hopeful. I did not ask them to define “hopeful,” but I assume that for that person and others in the audience, the challenge to commit to a life of reconnecting with one’s deep inner wisdom, reconnecting with others, and reconnecting with Earth quite naturally redefined the word “hope” and automatically offered the inspiration we all seek to pursue in the age of extinction.
More recently, climate trauma was featured in the Sunday Review section of the New York Times, in Cara Buckley’s heartfelt essay “Is There a Cure for my Climate Grief?” As a facilitator for Joanna Macy’s “Work that Reconnects” offered: “Our pain for what is happening is the other side of the coin of our love for the world. We feel such depths of despair because we love the planet so much.”
And this is congruent with what I want to get across to you here. I’m not going to try to allay your skepticism over the thesis and synthesis of Climate Trauma — you’ll have to read my paper for that. Instead, I want to appeal to your humanity here, to spell out why it has great utilitarian value to accept this idea, after which you can let it sink in to your psyche.
Acknowledging Climate Trauma is not the solution to the climate crisis, but is rather a badly needed accelerant that provides the kind of personal and moral imperative that has been largely missing from the narrative of this crisis to date. It takes what has been seen as an external threat ‘out there’ somewhere and makes it very personal.
And making the climate crisis personal — in the same way that the climate prodigy Greta Thunberg models for all us adults — IS the solution to the crisis. The only way we will finally resolve the climate crisis is by changing the way we relate to ourselves, to our traumas, to all we perceive as others, and to the natural world we have been traumatizing at least since the advent of the Industrial Age.
We know this about trauma — it is caused by our dysfunctional relationship to the natural world, it arises in relation to unnatural events, and the path of recovery is also, necessarily, relational.
Currently, with the climate change narrative as our backdrop, we tend to see the crisis through a lens of politics or science, right? The result is that the more we learn about the gravity of the situation, the more ANGRY we become with politicians and, if we’re activists, our political opponents. This causes us to adopt lousy tactics of shaming our politicians and trying to scare our opponents.
News flash: it’s not working!
Now let’s change our lens to Climate Trauma. The entire biosphere is under assault. All life is threatened. And because Climate Trauma is a “superordinate” form of trauma, meaning that all other forms of trauma are subordinate to this pervasive and continual, growing threat, it is triggering all of our traumas.
And I don’t just mean personal traumas here. I mean cultural and epigenetic (inter-generational) traumas in additional to our individual traumas.
What happens when all of our traumas are triggered at the same time? Well, look around you. Consider the state of the world.
So the first point of this new narrative is of course Donald Trump!
Of course MeToo! OF COURSE Black Lives Matter! Civil War monuments and white supremacists! Standing Rock and the rise of the water protectors! OF COURSE endless wars and mindless chants of USA! USA!
As Bob Dylan sang at the start of all this: “Everything is broken.” Or, as the spoken word artist Kate Tempest puts it, “Europe is lost. America — lost.”
This is all reflecting unresolved trauma back at us, and because we don’t see it as such, we continue to act out in harmful patterns. But this is also the first phase of a Cultural Truth & Reconciliation Movement. The more difficult “Truth” phase, in fact. Where truth itself comes into question.
So instead of despairing over the unprecedented levels of chaos and tumult we find ourselves submerged in, we all need to begin by acknowledging that “Hey, EVERYONE is traumatized, and we ALL deal with trauma in different ways.”
This, itself, represents a critical shift in perspective.
Suddenly, instead of seeing those who disagree with us as monstrously insensitive and ignorant, instead of continuing to shout at them across this unbridgeable political chasm, we begin to see them as maybe more traumatized than we are or, alternatively, less equipped by their life experiences to DEAL with all this trauma.
This is a shift from anger to compassion, from demonizing people to maybe loving them in spite of their inability to cope.
Suddenly we find ourselves standing on common ground — even if it is constantly shifting beneath our feet. Suddenly it is not so much a political issue or a scientific and technology issue — it is a spiritual issue, a relational issue. And just as suddenly, a light appears at the end of this long, dark tunnel we’ve been stumbling through.
The path of recovery is relational. It happens in community with others. And unlike the overwhelm of unacknowledged trauma, facing up to our shared Climate Trauma is empowering.
Consider how spontaneously a movement like “MeToo” arises, and how quickly it changes the way we relate, both culturally and in our communities and work places.
What changed?
We simply brought a new level of AWARENESS to a system of iniquity that has existed for pretty much ever — Patriarchy.
It bears repeating here: it is awareness that places us on the path of recovery from trauma. It is lack of awareness that keeps us trapped in destructive patterns of behavior.
Do not underestimate the transformative power of awareness when it comes to resolving our sociocultural problems. What will change if we are in fact the perpetrators and victims of Climate Trauma, and we bring awareness and acceptance to this relatively new and totally unprecedented global phenomenon?
Everything. With apologies to Naomi Klein, this changes everything.
Suddenly, we gain insight into what it is we have lost, and open our hearts to the grief of that loss, as well as to what we still stand to lose. We understand that trauma is pervasive in our culture as a natural consequence and alarm of the ongoing biospheric trauma, the trauma of a living planet. We know that the path of recovery is relational — that we can feel empowered to question and change the way we relate to the natural world, to our communities, our families, and our selves — and set about changing the way we live. And finally, we grasp that our most powerful ally in reversing the harmful trends we see, and facilitating climate recovery, is Gaia herself. By collectively changing our relationship to Her, recognizing Her “right to life” as the very source of all life, we will resolve this existential crisis — and be changed as a species in the process.
So this shift in perspective will open up a path out of our deadly, decades-long inertia. The Five Freedoms that form the foundation for the Green New Deal are a perfect expression of the kind of Reconciliation that needs to follow this Truth phase we’ve been caught up in. And the One Earth proposal that will be presented to conference on the International Biodiversity Conventions for adoption this year suddenly is seen as a moral imperative.
It is time to progress from the Fight, Flight, and Freeze syndrome that has plagued our collective efforts to face up to Climate Trauma. We are beginning to approach a critical mass of awareness of this as a relational issue, and together we can re-write the ending of this story in a way that future generations will thank us for.
The future is here. It’s time for bold action.
Let us rise together.
