Abstract
So what does any of this have to do with ecopsychology?
One of the issues our field is beginning to address is the psychology of dealing constructively and productively with unprecedented challenges to continued survival on a rapidly deteriorating planet. McKibben presents us with a fascinating case history: Here is a man who, while totally awake to escalating environmental threats, refuses to be cowed into inaction, passivity, or despair.
His new book “Eaarth” certainly pulls no punches. The tale it tells is sobering indeed: He informs his readers that current science reveals that we have already passed the point of no return. We now live on a completely different planet (hence the name change to “Eaarth”) and must face up to the challenge of how to survive (and help others to survive) under these deteriorating conditions.
“Here's all I'm trying to say: The planet on which our civilization evolved no longer exists.”
McKibben himself is aware of the psychological challenges involved. In the essay he contributed to our anthology “Ecotherapy: Healing with Nature in Mind,” (“Human Nature, Community, and ‘Deep Economy’ ”) he points out that survival now involves recovering from “hyperindividualism in an Autistic World.” He has read the happiness research and believes that the psychological and practical benefits of local community offer one effective treatment modality.
In “Eaarth,” McKibben also takes aim at some of our denial mechanisms. Exploding the “grandchildren myth,” he points out that when we talk about saving the planet for our descendents, the word “grandchildren” is a tip-off that we haven't kept up with the facts of our situation. “Smart people are starting to understand the size of the problem, but they haven't yet figured out the timing; they haven't yet figured out that the latest science shows that this wave is already breaking over our heads.”
Railing like an Old Testament prophet, McKibben risks overwhelming us with more information than we can absorb. However, perhaps in the light of the well-funded climate change denial movement and the lack of action on national or international levels, he feels now is not the time to soft-pedal the urgency of the situation.
McKibben has some alarming news for those of us in psychology and the mental health professions. He tells us that as conditions continue to worsen, “people's minds can be damaged as much as their bodies” (p. 75). Pointing out that climate-related emergencies such as hurricanes, environmental refugees, and spreading disease aren't just economic, political, or physical health issues, he warns that “Doctors in countries with bad heat waves report an upswing in psychosis … In the wake of Hurricane Katrina, the incidence of severe mental illness doubled in the affected areas, with 22% of the population suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, depression, panic disorder, and a variety of phobias. After such a disaster, researchers report, ‘people feel inadequate, like outside forces are taking control of their lives.’ ”
Mental health professionals will be, of necessity, front-line responders as the climate situation worsens, yet few are trained in ecopsychology or ecopsychological emergency medicine. McKibben's book should perhaps be required reading for anyone licensed to treat mental health issues on this “new” planet Eaarth.
McKibben also points out that the climate- and resource-related economic distress now causing increased psychological suffering around the planet isn't a short-term problem. As eco-economist Herman Daly once said, “The economy is a wholly-owned subsidiary of the environment,” and McKibben warns us that just when we need more funding for much-needed ecopsychological services, “On this new planet we'll have less money than we thought we would, and hence fewer choices” (p. 69).
McKibben is extremely concerned about the psychological and practical effects of the end of economic growth. “Of all the things I've told you about our new planet—the strongest storms, the melting ice, the acid ocean—the most terrifying and strangest change would be the end of growth. Growth is what we do. Who ever really dreamed it might come to an end” (p. 90). He devotes the second half of his book to the proposition that instead of clinging to nostalgia for the fat years of our youth, “we might choose instead to try to manage our descent” and “aim for a relatively graceful decline.” This is, indeed, a radical change in the psychology of our culture! (p. 99).
Here McKibben seems to be agreeing with E. F. Schumacher, who decades ago claimed that “small is beautiful”: “The most wrenching part will be the simple idea of decline. We don't like aging as individuals, and it frightens us as a society” (p. 125).
Many of us may still doubt that our collective prognosis as a result of global climate change is this dire. However, reading McKibben is still a worthwhile—and rather persuasive—endeavor. A truth-telling prophet who just happens to be a former New Yorker journalist, he's a hard-headed seer and elder offering statistics as well as stories and admonitions.
His core conclusion—shared by many environmental scientists—is sobering indeed. We now live on a planet whose life-support systems have been permanently changed and degraded by our own mindless actions.
The things McKibben gets right are critically important. His dismissal of all the twaddle about “for our children and grandchildren” correctly exposes a common defense even among the greenest of us that right here, right now, our planet has already changed. Not sometime in the vague future.
What he demands of us all is a huge psychological shift: “The project we're now undertaking—maintenance, graceful decline, hunkering down, holding on against the storm—requires a different scale. Instead of continents and vast nations, we need to think about states, about towns, about neighborhood, about blocks” (p. 124).
“The changes to our lives will be ongoing and large and will require uncommon nimbleness, physically and psychologically … Abstraction will grow harder; increasingly, we're going to have to focus on essentials: on actual food and on energy that comes from the wind and sun in our neck of the woods … We're going to have to focus on work” (p. 148). He urges us to put our hands to the nitty gritty of local food, local economies, and community building, all of which will radically change our collective psychology and our culture.
The promise in this shift, according to McKibben, is that life on the “new planet” is “about liberation—the slow but reasonably steady process of valuing more and more people.”
If McKibben's view of the future still seems entirely too pessimistic, you might prefer books such as Gunter Pauli's “The Blue Economy” or the new anthology, “Hope Beneath Our Feet: Restoring Our Place in the Natural World,” edited by Martin Keogh, where you can savor the words of the late “people's historian” Howard Zinn, who died at 88 shortly after offering these words of psychological encouragement for our times:
“In this awful world where the efforts of caring people often pale in comparison to what is done by those who have power, how do I manage to stay involved and ha seemingly? I am totally confident not that the world will get better, but that we should not give up the game before all the cards have been played … There is a tendency to think that what we see in the present moment will continue. We forget how often we have been astonished by the sudden crumbling of institutions, by extraordinary changes in people's thoughts, by unexpected eruptions of rebellion against tyrannies, by the quick collapse of systems of power that seemed invincible.”
I certainly hope Zinn is right and that the resistance to climate change action will melt away as the former Soviet Union did in the 1990s. However, I also have a funny feeling that I should also listen to a hard-hitting journalist such as McKibben who just “tells it like it is.” I'm shifting my perspective toward sustainability in increasingly challenging times and am looking for psychologically sensitive ways to help my clients do the same.