Governments at the municipal, provincial and federal levels are either declaring climate emergencies or are debating resolutions to make such a declaration.
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| Another big storm? |
Do we respond to this news of loss with grief or perhaps “implicatory denial” helps us ignore this alarming news?
Dr. Steve Running recently took a fresh look at the widely recognized concepts on the "5 stages of grief" that Elizabeth Kubler-Ross defined back in the 1970s to summarize how people deal differentially with shocking news, such as being informed that they have terminal cancer.
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| Climate grief |
It seems that these stages of grief provide a very good analogy to how people are now reacting to the global warming topic.
First are viable alternatives to show that reducing greenhouse gas emissions is possible without the end of modern civilization. It is very heartening to see wind turbines, LED lighting, thin film solar and hybrid cars on the market right now, not some vague future hope. Second is visionary national leadership, a "Marshall Plan" level of national focus and commitment, so everyone is contributing, and the lifestyle changes needed are broadly shared, in fact becoming a new norm. Progress on that front has not been good so far. An obvious flaw in this analogy is that many people are simply ignoring the global warming issue, a detachment they cannot achieve when they are personally facing cancer. 1
The Economist book and arts reviews a terrifying look at the consequences of climate change entitled “The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming.”
Yet, as the author makes starkly clear, global warming is no parable. Far from being a problem only for future generations, it is wreaking havoc now. Five of the 20 worst fires in California’s history blazed in 2017; the deadliest incinerated the town of Paradise last year. Floods are becoming wetter, droughts drier and hurricanes fiercer. Such calamities, Mr Wallace-Wells notes, are not the “new normal”; they mark “the end of normal”, as climate change tips Earth beyond the conditions that allowed humans to evolve in the first place. And that is with barely 1°C of man-made warming since the industrial revolution...
But whereas his chapters—on the impacts of extreme weather, sea levels, human health, economic consequences and so on—echo reports by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, his elegant, accessible prose does not…He nevertheless gets the big things right. His insistence that electing leaders with climate-friendly policies matters immeasurably more than forgoing a plastic straw in your cocktail is surely correct. Yet he is perversely optimistic: because humans are responsible for the problem, they must be capable of undoing at least some of it, he thinks. If Americans’ carbon footprints matched those of average Europeans, the United States would emit less than half as much carbon as it does.2
CBC Tapesty's Mary Hynes interviews New York magazine deputy editor David Wallace-Wells. He believes that despite what should be dread-inducing data many of us continue to live in "complacency and denial."
People who adhere to scientific data despair when they hear opinions from the climate-sceptic movement. But sociologist Kari Norgaard says climate sceptics are a negligible problem in the face of a much more common form of denial ? what scientists call "implicatory denial." Implicatory denial is when we know about a problem, but divert our attention elsewhere ? the proverbial elephant in the room. Kari Norgaard deconstructs this type of denial of which so many of us are guilty. Crystal Lameman of Beaver Lake Cree First Nation says while many Canadians are just waking up to the frightening realities of climate change her people have been acutely aware of its consequences for decades. She explores what climate change -- and Alberta's oil sands development-- has done to her traditional territory and culture and how her community is fighting back.3
Awareness of possible psychological explanation for our lack of response to climate emergency is the first step in the transformation we must make to get the best outcome for our children and grandchildren.
References
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(n.d.). Five Stages of Climate Grief - Friends of Two Rivers. Retrieved April 22, 2019, from https://www.friendsof2rivers.org/dr.-steve-running-5-stages-of-climate-grief.html
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(2019, February 21). A terrifying look at the consequences of climate change - The end of .... Retrieved April 23, 2019, from https://www.economist.com/books-and-arts/2019/02/21/a-terrifying-look-at-the-consequences-of-climate-change
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3
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(2019, May 17). Climate and psyche | Tapestry with Mary Hynes | Live Radio | CBC .... Retrieved May 19, 2019, from https://www.cbc.ca/listen/live-radio/1-59-tapestry/clip/15705437-climate-and-psyche
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