Climate Psychology Consultant. Nurturing psychological wisdom and resilience in a time of global upheaval and climate anxiety
Having spent a week in Venice, the city seems to be a metaphore for the wonky ground that the culture I have been socialised into has been built on. Venice was built on wooden poles that were rammed into the unstable ground of a muddy wetland. What made this possible, is a particular human mindset that has the gift to imagine doing things like that and the technical "genius" to do it. And this mindset asserted its power over the land, created obscene wealth and a particular kind of beauty that has an ugly shadow side to it. Gregory Bateson famously said , that the major problems in the world are the result of the difference between how nature works and the way people think. The city has always flooded, but in 2019, 80% of the city was under water. Water came from everywhere, from the canals, out of the drains, the sinks, the toilets. The technical human genius came to the rescue with a technical solution: The dam MOSE was finally completed at enormous cost. It can seal off the entire lagoon. The only problem is that by closing off the lagoon, even temporarily, the sewage of the city has nowhere to go. The city floods in its own shit. After Mose's costly completion it quickly became clear that this engineering wonder will be unable to keep up with the pace of change. Linear correctives don't account for ecological connectedness. More defences must be built! Venice must not die! What is it about Venice that is worth so much more effort, energy and money than the protection of the lives of people living on small islands in the Pacific and the Philippines? What needs to be protected at this cost? Tourism? Nostalgia for the symbols of colonial power? What are we holding dear and how does the largely unaddressed ugly side show up in the solutions we come up with and in the decisions about what or who needs to be saved? And in sync with the technical mindset, our own psychological defense system helps us not to be flooded by the emotional horror of it all. But despite these defensive psychological engineering solutions, Every so often the force of our wild human nature comes gushing through the cracks- and we see the whole scale of the mess. It floods the neat order of things, disturbs our dreams and unsettles our minds. How do you respond to this call of nature? Do you plan to invest in better flood defences? How do you take care of the remaining wild and undomesticated parts in your inner world that have remained untouched by the harms of living in a destructive culture ? And what about the shit that builds up? How do you take care of that? And what is not allowed to die? If these questions are relevant to you, sign up to the newsletter of ‘Climate, Psychology and Change’. https://lnkd.in/eV4PUrDD This will keep you updated about a range of online events, which explore what it means to be human in a time when the familiar is dying. Happy Earth Day! https://lnkd.in/gaBKDWjr
Nina Downer
4mo
Steffi Bednarek Thanks for sharing your reflections. So many important points to sit with. And, many associations came up for me. I recently finished listening to Gun Island by Amitav Ghosh, a wonderfully narrated novel that brings up climate change and migration and draws interesting parallels between Venice and the Sunderbans in India. Also, your mentioning of being stuck with one's own shit reminds me of Vanessa Machado de Oliveira's book Hospicing Modernity - we really need to learn to take care and metabolize our shit of all sorts instead of dumping it out of sight. And lastly, I'm in southern Germany at the moment where many towns and villages have been flooded and everyone is talking about building better physical protection and that there's nothing that can be done about climate change... I'm very much looking forward to the release of your book!
I think Bateson's quote has some similarities with Gilman's quote. They are systemic, a dance between human Nature and the Nature of life and the planet. A yin/yang "There are no environmental problems, there are only environmental symptoms of human problems.” Robert Gilman. What If the "pathways" are internal? Two great virtues and 10 strengths to cultivate for this #Earthday and why these strengths are maybe pointed to the Planet and Life ( #Wisdom & #Transcendence). 1️⃣ Gratitude to the EARTH 2️⃣ Appreciation of Beauty and Excellence of the EARTH 3️⃣ Spirituality, with the EARTH 4️⃣ Hope for us in the EARTH 5️⃣ Humor of our mistakes with the EARTH 6️⃣ Love of Learning for the EARTH process 7️⃣ Curiosity of the mysteries of the EARTH 8️⃣ Perspective of the EARTH (Overview Effect) https://lnkd.in/epa-zW9q 9️⃣ Creativity in the service of the EARTH 🔟 Open-Mindedness towards the EARTH https://lnkd.in/g2QvQB8
PhD researcher- Archaeotherapy, ecotherapist, animist guide, tutor and lecturer, Board Member Radical Joy for Hard Times, Core Tutor at Tariki Trust, UK
5moA really thought provoking surmise of the cluster-shite of this surreal situation. As I was reading I was thinking of all those coastal towns and villages not afforded protection and genius defence solutions. What do we value? Why? And why not? What is the golden ticket to being cared for in this dystopian umwelt? It seems perhaps on the surface to be abundantly clear: we value what gives money and attracts people’s sense of heightened culture. We value what reaffirms our (westernised) specialness. We find it inherently difficult to afford the same value principles to that which we cannot see as reflecting back to us that lofty exceptionalism. Perhaps?