The American Psychological Association counsels its members to validate their patients’ anxieties about climate change/global warming and then to encourage them to do something to prevent it – to make them feel less hopeless.
This is sound psychological advice. Psychology researchers tell us that if you are suffering the deleterious feelings and symptoms occasioned by despair, the best antidote is to act as though you had hope. Even if you don’t. Perhaps this is why, the more hopeless the world situation looks, the keener I am on whittling away at the old carbon footprint. Even though I know it won't make a dime's worth of difference to the climate.* But maybe the scientists are wrong. I mean, not like the Climate Denier scientists. Just the ones that paint the direst picture. Sure, things will get harder, but maybe it won’t really be that bad. Or fast. It doesn't seem that bad where I am. And after all, the scientific reports keep saying “by the end of the century . . . .” Why, that’s plenty of time to deal with even a big problem! After all, coal is in decline and renewables are taking off; more people are riding bicycles; so, really, all we gotta do is help that process along by getting more Democrats elected to Congress. And then there’s the geoengineering solutions: carbon sequestration, reflective aerosols, and so on. Science caused it, science will solve it. Or at least hold it off. At least until I’m gone. And my children. And my grandchildren. And isn’t climate catastrophe and societal collapse just more Apocalyptic Thinking? I mean, how many times has somebody predicted the end of the world? And nothing happened. So why should it this time? I mean, it’s too bad what we’re doing to the endangered species, and all; but my job is still there and got to go to work and feed the family. So why worry? O man, I so wish I could say any of that and believe it. And there are plenty of flavors of hopium out there to choose from. If you can, then think of climate change as a “what if.” What if your ATM didn’t respond because there’s no electricity. What if you turn the tap and nothing comes out, 9 times out of 10. What if the supermarket has a big sign in the window: “Sorry, no food today! : )” In other words, what if, in the end, all the world were Puerto Rico (after Hurricane Maria)? If you believed (or knew) that scenario was coming in the foreseeable future, what would you write? More nature writing? Protest poetry? Or paint or dance? Today, tomorrow? What would you do? What will you? Is it some kind of bullshit faux heroism, some Romantic retread, to think that writers have a vocation (duty?) to look things squarely in the face and represent them as they see fit, regardless of whether anybody listens? Or should we write as if we had hope? Or demonstrate as much by writing like you always write and ignoring climate change? Until you can't. ------ * In fact, if everyone in the world started living like the Amish tomorrow – but without having any kids – it wouldn’t make it stop. Start melting the ice and the it doesn’t reflect the heat; it’s absorbed in all that dark blue water instead. The methane in the permafrost thaws, releasing a greenhouse gas 20+ times more potent than CO2. Which accelerates ice melt, and so on. This process is underway and the whole loop is accelerating.
0 Comments
Your comment will be posted after it is approved.
Leave a Reply. |
Archives
June 2021
Kristin Prevallet Author/Editor
I'm a writer & teacher in Lawrence, Kansas who actually believes the scientists. I wrote a book of poems called Of Some Sky that seems to have something to do with all this. |