"What will global warming looking look like?" the LA Times headline blared, "Scientists point to Australia."
We had just returned from Tucson where we were doing a Training 4 Transition workshop and presentations on how to prepare for the effects of climate change, peak oil, and the ensuing economic instability to evidence that at least in Australia the predictions we've all been hearing about and too often avoiding are no longer future possibilities but current realities.
Prolonged drought and deadly bush fires, monsoon flooding, deadly mosquito-borne fevers, widespread wildlife decline, economic collapse of agriculture and killer heat waves -- epitomize the "accelerated climate crisis" that global warming models have forecast, the article declares.
And the psychological impacts are also just a we've been discussing here.
"Suicide is high. Depression is huge. Families are breaking up. It's devastation," Frank Eddy who runs a shrinking orchard told reporter Julie Cart, shaking his head. "I've got a neighbor in terrible trouble. Found him in the paddock, sitting in his [truck], crying his eyes out. Grown men -- big, strong grown men. We're holding on by the skin of our teeth. It's desperate times."
The article did not touch on what professional services are available to those suffering through such desperation. But it did point out, however, that:
- 200 Melbourne residents dying in a heat wave that "buckled the steel skeleton on a newly constructed 400-foot Ferris wheel and warped train tracks like spaghetti"
- days of temperatures at 110 degrees or higher with little humidity, and 100-mph winds,
- 4,000 gray-headed flying foxes dropping dead out of trees in one Melbourne park a quarter of Victoria state's koalas, kangaroos, birds and other wildlife dying from the heat
- entire towns destroyed in massive bush fires
- mile after mile of desiccated fields lying fallow
- 60% of the nation's produce farmers walking off their land or selling their water rights
- one rancher or farmer a week taking their own life and 14 dairy farmers committing suicide in the last five years
... and such dramatic anecdotal and empirical evidence hasn't sparked equally dramatic action from Australia's government.
Think that can't happen here? Think again. The climate in Adelaide where much of such suffering is occurring resembles much of our southwest, Los Angeles in particular. Other parts of the US are already suffering from severe weather anomalies at this very moment.
So the question is .... are we ready for this?
Are we ready personally? How are we preparing so that we as professionals can be available to help others instead of becoming paralyzed in our own desperation? Are we professionally ready? In this country known for its boundless opportunity, endless possibility, and rugged individualists, do we as helping professionals know how to assist our communities in adjusting to new realities such as these where choices are narrowed and even the rugged will face unimagined challenges?
Can we expect more of our government? What can we as both citizens and professionals do to assure a more immediate and effective response?
If you have been reading this blog, you already know a lot about what I and others have been doing. Safeguarding our homes as best we can. Setting up home and neighborhood growing possibilities suited to our locale, joining with others to restore resilience to our local communities, working to make needed policy changes, and learning nature-based psycho therapeutic methods for assisting our clients (and ourselves) to begin living more closely in harmony with our natural environment.
Still as I read and re-read this article, I sense the time to make such preparations is running out. I know we're all very busy. I know we're already stressed with other obligations and responsibilities. But just how important will our many other projects, plans, and duties be when we encounter what is already underway in Australia?
There are a wealth of resources here on this site already for responding to these challenges, but let's also share how we're preparing and support each other in our efforts.
We cannot do what needs doing alone.
Read more!
Friday, April 10, 2009
Predictions Becoming Realities: Are We Ready?
Sunday, January 25, 2009
Eco-Anxiety: Breaking the Over-Consumption Habit
These feelings may are becoming more intense now as we hear our President call for shared sacrifice over the years to come. How are we to understand and help others understand our role in the mess we're in without wallowing uselessly in guilt and despair? How do we extricate ourselves from a way of life that is ingrained into every aspect of our society? How do we find satisfying lives even as we sacrifice aspects of life we've valued but now must abandon?
I find that sharing the following explanatory background at opportune times combined with nature-based re-patterning activities can replace guilt with a realization that the way we're living now can't provide what we truly want from life, but that there are other satisfying ways to live. In this way we needn't continue blaming ourselves for our participation in the mess our species has created as long as begin to change the way we live now. Even if we can't reverse the damage, we can halt its progress. Here's the kind of background I try to provide. (Sources and citations are included here for professional references only unless further information is requested by my clients.)
How We Get Fooled into Believing We Want the Opposite of What We Say We Want
You have probably noticed there is a marked discrepancy between how we live today and how we say we would prefer to live. For example, we talk of wanting more time for family, friends and children, doing community activities, and pursuing personal interests, but we spend most of our time working to earn money so we can keep our lives as we know them afloat.
While we say we want to eat healthfully, exercise more and watch less TV, we live on fast food and crash in front of the tube. We say we want to stop to smell the roses, but instead we sit in hours of stalled freeway traffic and smell the exhaust.
By studying the relationship between the natural environment and our mental, psychological and physical health, Pioneering professionals in many fields from environmental psychologist Roger Barker to environmental educator Michael Cohen, entomologist Edward O. Wilson and Jungian analyst Marion Woodman are finding that this discrepancy arises because we are no longer attuned to the vast bioecological system of which we are apart.
We are endowed with inborn energetic connections to this natural system and are thereby naturally attracted to those aspects of life that will simultaneously sustain and support both us and nature as a whole (Cohen, 1997, pp 43-50), but once this connection is severed, we lose our sense of what we want and need and our desires can be easily subverted.
Disconnection from this web of natural attractions not only weakens us mentally and physically but also effects the system as a whole. (Cohen, 1997, p 67) In this sense we can see how the vast majority of our personal, social, psychological and environmental problems are nature’s way of calling our attention to this disconnection and attempting to bring us back into alignment. They are either a plea for help, a release from, or a sedative for, the lack of natural gratification that is our birthright as part of the natural world.
In reviewing history, we can see that our disconnection from nature began long ago. As Jeremy Rikfin points out in The End of Work, the Industrial Revolution was especially alienating. Leading scientists, economists, educations, and philosophers of that era, like French mathematician Rene Descartes and later psychologist B.F Skinner, “stripped nature of its aliveness, reducing both creation and all creatures, into mathematical and mechanical analogues.” (Rifkin, 1995, pp 43-44).
Or as Thomas Carlyle declared in 1829, “Were we required to characterize this age of ours by any single epithet we should be tempted to call it, the age of machinery in every outward and inward sense of the word. Men have grown mechanical in head and heart, as well as in hand.” (Carlyle, 1997, pp. 229-231)
With the advent of the Industrial Revolution, nature was no longer our source of sustenance, but became a resource to be conquered and used for the progress of mankind. We no longer considered ourselves part of the nature world, but as adversaries to its forces that must be tamed, measured, dissected, and harnessed for our use.
We didn't always shop 'til we drop; we've been entrained to over-consume.
Considering that just a little over one hundred years ago half of the U.S. population still lived on farms or in small towns, the gulf between ourselves and the natural environment has grown far wider in the 20th Century as the U.S. shifted from a producer culture to a consumer culture. Rifkin points out how during this time natural human desire, or our natural attraction to life around us, was intentionally manipulated so we would begin wanting things other than what we actually wanted. The result has been a convoluted way of thinking that has magnified over the last century to its pinnacle today.
Rifkin documents how at the turn of the last century, economists noticed that “most working people were content to earn just enough income to provide for their basic needs and a few luxuries, after which they preferred increased leisure time over additional work hours and extra income.” But if the economy was to continue to grow, they concluded, people had to “want things.” So they launched a concerted commercial campaign to convince us that we needed to buy more and more things. And within only a couple of decades, the “dissatisfied consumer” was born.
This shift was accomplished by massive advertising efforts in which “home-grown,” “natural,” and “handmade” items were denigrated while the “store-bought” and “factory-made” ones were extolled. Once “frugal Americans were converted into a hedonist culture in search of every new avenue of instant gratification.” (Rifkin, 1995, p 19-23)
By 1929, Herbert Hoover’s Committee on Recent Economic Changes reached a glowing conclusion that their surveys “proved conclusively … that wants are insatiable. … Economically we have a boundless field.” (Recent Economic Changes, 1929, p xv).
Until the recent financial breakdown, it appeared he'd gotten that right. As of last year there were 22.2 square feet of commercial shopping space per person in the US compared to 2 and 3 square feet per person in other first world countries.
But How Could This Happen? Surely We Know What We Want
We do, but not if we're convinced otherwise. Recent discoveries in neuroscience suggest how such hijacking of human desires occurs. The neural systems of the human brain that detect and evaluate social reward circuits are located in the mid-region of our brain where they generally operate outside of our conscious awareness. So, as reporter Sandra Blakeslee concludes in her review of this research in the New York Times, February, 19, 2002, “In navigating the world and deciding what is rewarding, humans are closer to zombies than sentient beings much of the time.”
Neuroscientists now believe that since we are highly social beings, our brains are shaped from infancy according to what we encounter in the external world. From an ecopsychology point of view this means that by spending 90% of our time in an indoor manmade world, we become disconnected from the natural sensory attractions that would subconsciously direct us to what is best for our well-being, as separate from what would benefit the economy. Instead of attaching to nature’s natural ways, the brain easily attaches to the social rewards defined by our consumer society, as well as to addictions that help ease the pain of our disconnection from our true desires.
By using magnetic imagining scanners, California Institute of Technology neuroscientists Steve Quartz and Annette Asp are observing the effects of advertising on the human brain. Their findings further explain how we end up not knowing what we need, much less knowing how to fulfill our needs. It seems that networks of neurons in our brain act in concert in response to experience. So, just as practicing the piano or learning to read physically alters areas of the cerebral cortex, intense, repetitive marketing can do more than change our minds. It may alter the brain itself.[1] We are not only what we eat, but also what we hear, see, and otherwise experience most often.
Armed with this information marketers have become ever more sophisticated at -- to use their term – "branding our brains" with what’s called neuro-marketing techniques.
The Painful Result
Once we disconnect from our natural attractions, our desires become insatiable because they’re not what we really want. No matter how much we consume, we remain dissatisfied. In a hopeless effort to consume enough to feel fulfilled, we consume more and more, so we have become the richest nation in the world, but not any happier.
As psychologists David Myers and Ed Diener wrote:
"People have not become happier over time as their cultures have become more affluent. Even though Americans earn twice as much in today’s dollars as they did in 1957, the proportion of those telling surveyors they are “very happy” has declined from 35-29 percent. Even very rich people are only slightly happier than the average American. Those whose incomes had increased over a 10-year period are not any happier than those whose income is stagnant. Indeed, in most nations the correlation between income and happiness is negligible – only in the poorest countries … is income a good measure of emotional well being."[2]
David Blanchflower, professor of economics and associate dean of the faculty of social sciences at Dartmouth College points out from his review of dozens of surveys, “Even as many people have grown richer, they’ve also grown less secure and less satisfied because of relentless competition that forces us to work harder and puts our jobs in constant danger.” (Blanceflower, 2001)
In his book The High Prince of Materialism, Tim Kasser (2002, p 8-9) presents a formidable body of research that highlights what for most of us is a counter-intuitive fact: Merely aspiring to have greater wealth or more material possessions is likely to be associated with increased personal unhappiness,” including more symptoms of anxiety, a greater risk of depression, and more frequent somatic irritations, watching watch more television, using more drugs, and having more impoverished personal relationships.
Making matters much worse, as we produce and consume more, we also consume natural resources faster than they can be replenished and we create vast amounts of waste, garbage, pollution and other fall out that damages the natural environment and has resulted in the energy depletion and climate issues we face today.
Is it any wonder that 49% of Americans have voluntarily made changes in their lifestyle over the past five years to earn less in exchange for a better way of life and that most of them happy with this change?[3] Now as we begin to wake up to the disconnect from our natural inclinations, more of us are in the process of making substantial changes. In addition the economy is forcing others of us to make similar changes, albeit sometimes unwillingly.
Reconnecting with Nature Can Help Us Make This Shift
The same information that explains how our brains get hijacked into thinking we want the opposite of what we really want and need also points the way for how we can take back our brains. If the neural networks that define what we want are shaped by what we experience, we can re-shape them by reconnecting with nature and re-experiencing our natural desires and attractions. Organic psychologist Dr. Michael Cohen’s Natural Systems Thinking Process (NSTP) is designed to enable us to do that. NSTP provides a specific way to go into nature where we can enjoy culturally unmediated experiences and thus rewire our brains to consciously reconnect our neural reward circuits to natural as opposed to artificially induced attractions.
By spending time relating to nature in specifically defined ways, be it in an urban park, a remote wilderness, a backyard garden or with a potted plant in the kitchen windowsill, we can become aware again of our natural attractions and experience the difference between natural and artificially manipulated rewards. With this sensory awareness intact, we can also begin to reconnect with our natural attractions in other areas of life.
Representative comments from those who have used NSTP are evidence of the positive life-changing effects this process can have:
“These activities helped to make clear the gap between the part of me that lives in my stories of who I need to be and the part of me who knows who I truly am.”
“Immediately from doing this activity I had the sense that I was part of everything, not an alien here. It increased my feeling of self worth.”
“This is who I really am (we all are) at my core beyond what modern society has "taught" me to be.”
“This activity led me to feel that I can trust letting go of all my inner debris, allowing my emotions to be washed away to their organic place in the universe. Nature transforms them to beneficial energy. What remains are my roots, my trunks of strength, my rocks embedded in Mother Earth. This is my core essence, yet all is intertwined and constantly progressively changing. I can remember this place even when I am in my car rushing around the outskirts of this oasis and once again connect.”
“In those moments in nature all was right with me and with the world and I felt merged into all things.”
“I find myself singing, even dancing, through the day when relating to or engaging in these particular activities. This is in contrast to pushing or forcing myself to complete other activities because I will like the result some time later.”
“I can use examples in nature to describe and define parts of myself when with others. I can use these same examples to better understand the core of other people. I can feel more fully connected to a person by sharing our mutual experience with a part of nature. The experiences don’t have to be the same, but the fact that we both have them gives us something in common to each other and nature – like the root systems of the aspens!”
Resources and References
The Continuum Concept, In Search of Happiness Lost by Jean Liedloff. New York: Da Capo. 1996.
Ecological Psychology by Roger G. Barker. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1968.Education and the Cult of Efficiency by Raymond Callahan. University of Chicago Press, 1964, pp. 50-51.
Educating, Counseling and Healing with Nature by Michael J. Cohen. Institute for Global Education, 2008.
“High Cost of Success” by David Blanchflower. USA Today, January, 2001.
The End of Work, The Decline of the Global Labor Force and the Dawn of the Post Market Era by Jeremy Rifkin. New York: Tarcher/Putnam, 1995.
The High Price of Materialism by Tim Kasser. MIT Press, 2002.
“Hijacking the Brain Circuits with a Nickel Slot Machine” by Sandra Blakeslee. New York Times, February, 19, 2002.
“Marketing Might Brand the Brain” by Robert Lee Hotz. Los Angeles Times, February 27, 2005.
“Signs of the Times” by Thomas Carlyle. Edinburgh Review 49, June 1829, pp. 239-359, reprinted in abridged version as “The Mechanical Age: in Clayre, Alasdair, ed. Nature and Industrialization: An Anthology. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997)\. Recent Economic Changes, Committee of Recent Economic Changes. New York, 1929).
Reconnecting with Nature, Finding Wellness through Restoring Your Bond with the Earth by Michael J. Cohen. Corvallis, Oregon: Ecopress, 1997.
Footnotes
[1] “Marketing Might Brand the Brain,” by Robert Lee Holtz, Los Angeles Times, February 27, 2005.
[2] The High Price of Materialism by Tim Kasser. MIT Press, 2002, p 3.
[3] “The American Dream Survey,” Center for a New American Dream Widmeyer Research and Polling, August, 2004. http://www.newdream.org/
(c) Sarah Anne Edwards, 2009
Read more!Wednesday, December 24, 2008
An Eco-Anxiety Retrospective
What a Difference a Year Makes It is my wish that the New Year will bring a still greater awareness that "eco-anxiety" is a normal and natural response to the unprecedented challenges we face across the globe but that we can reach out to others in our community, work together to respond responsibly, and when needed find help from nearby professionals who are aware of today's realities and worked to marshall both the inner and outer resources we all need. Samples of Recent Eco-Anxiety Google Alerts Quiet Nature: Water- The Essential Source Of All Life On Earth By Sherry Many people are experiencing 'Eco-anxiety', due to the current Economic and Environmental Crisis. My aim is to inspire people weekly to experience shifting their attention and feel the physiological healing possible from Nature. ...Quiet Nature - http://noticequietnature.blogspot.com/ Eco-anxiety Videos - Watch Video about Eco-anxiety on Mefeedia Watch eco-anxiety videos. Find the most recent eco-anxiety video and clips from thousands of online video sites on Mefeedia. Soulways Center for Conscious Evolution - Melissa Pickett - Santa ...As in Fox News, Melissa Pickett is owner of the Soul Ways Center for conscious evolution. Alternative to psychologists for many symptoms such as eco-anxiety. Green products reviews, ethical advice and eco gift ideas Blog ...Posted on Monday December 8th, 2008 at 19:19 in eco anxiety, eco humour, environmental, green energy. The petrol crisis in the UK appears to have dialled ... How Eco-anxiety Works - HowStuffWorks - Yahoo! Buzz Lifestyle. » View all Lifestyle stories · Image: How Eco-anxiety Works ... How Eco-anxiety Works · HowStuffWorks. Made Popular: Nov 3, 2008 - While it's ... Diagnosis: Eco-Anxiety EcoSalon - The Green Gathering Eco-anxiety: it’s a new term that’s being used to describe people’s nervousness about global warming or secret guilt about not taking canvas bags to the. Eco Anxiety Algae fuel Animal rights bio bugs bio fuel Carbon footprint cheaper Eco Button Consumerism eco anxiety Eco balls Eco Button £9.99 eco christmas eco friendly ... Green Gazette November 2008 - Ohlone College Most people have never heard of eco anxiety, but it is actually recognized as ... Eco Anxiety is the stress that people carry about the their impact and the ... (c) Sarah Anne Edwards, 2008
It was just over a year ago when we began to see news coverage about "eco-anxiety." If you recall most of the articles referred to it in a rather demeaning manner as new designer malady concocted to describe growing concerns about environmental threats experienced primarily by neurotic, suburban housewives with too much time on their hands.
Coverage continued in that vein through last spring, then then began to wane until its all but vanished. Not the use of the word. No, just the demeaning tone. At the end of this post you'll find a few examples of the kind of frequent and widespread attention the term is getting today.
If you check these out, you'll notice the term eco-anxiety has become integrated into normal parlance, taken more or less as a given of our time. You'll notice also that rather than its being cast in the pejorative, more often that not it is being used in conjunction with tips and ideas for what someone can do about concerns one feels about such things as peak oils, climate change, and environmental degradation.
Here are several reasons for this quick and robust shift and what I see as the implications for us as helping professionals:
1. There is near universal acceptance now that there are very real and serious concerns about climate change and the future availability of cheap fossil fuel. This both makes the topic and people's concerns respectable and thus reduces anxiety levels somewhat for those whose concerns arose because it seemed that no one else but them was recognizing these impending threats. At least now these concerns can be discussed and options discussed in most polite company.
President-elect Obama's message to the public is certainly a help here. Not only is he bringing up environmental concerns as real and pressing, but also he is saying that the problems we face and the changes we will be needed to make are going to be long and hard ones, igniting some of the spirit of heartiness and endurance Franklin Roosevelt brought out to inspire people to hunker down and work together during the Great Depression and World War II.
2. Concerns about the economy are rapidly overshadowing eco-concerns for both the public and the media. Of course, there is a direct relationship between our living beyond the carrying capacity of the earth and its rapid degradation and our own burdens of debt and economic peril. But this relationship is not yet apparent to many and certainly we can help make the connections between the two. Fortunately many of the things we need to be doing to safeguard our health and well-being lives and address our eco-concerns are the same from living more simply, driving less, spending less, and becoming more self-reliant.
The rapid economic downturn is causing intense concern and suffering, however. Requests for counseling have soared 40% in the last six months with financial worries or marital problems arising from financial stress spurring most of this increase. Concerns among those already distressed over environmental issue can also arise when one is faced with the reality that healthier, "green" ways of life may be beyond one's means in today's economy. Realizing, for example, that one can no longer afford or is unable to relocate to less expensive, more eco-friendly area or to a small,er more energy-efficient home, for example.
3. But offsetting the above escalation in concerns is a growing number of people who are becoming involved in movements like local Transition Initiatives, so they 're no longer alone in their concerns. Instead they are directing their concern into constructive action. The Transition Initiatives were started in Totnes, UK, and has spread to over 100 towns there. It is growing quickly in the United States and spreading to Japan, New Zealand and Australia as well.
There are a variety of additional noteworthy elements to this movement applicable to us as helping professionals. First, they approach the changes we need to make as both an inner and outer process. So the psychological aspects of today's issues are being addressed and helping professionals are getting involved both personally and in their roles.
Eco-nomic concerns and anxieties will most certainly rise in the coming year. It will not be an easy year. Helping our clients understand what's happening, providing resources, and support in making practical, day-to-day changes will be crucial. It will be particularly important for us to resist the temptation to tell them all will be well soon, as it will not. But we also need to uplift our own spirits and those of our clients for affiliating with others who are working to make the fundamental structural changes in the way we live and work.
One of the ways we can help is to reframe all the "bad news" we're being bombarded with by the media as "good news." For example, we're hearing regular reports that shopping is down, people are using their credit cards less, borrowing less, learning ways to be more frugal, making things last, repairing our belongs, doing things for ourselves like making our own meals or entertaining family land friends at home. We're driving less, buying smaller cars, or riding a bike to work, traveling less or not as far. We're buying from local family farmers, volunteering to do more for others who need help, and using the library instead of the video store. (For these reports and more see the Middle Class Advocacy Institute News Updates and Archives.)
Such news is usually presented as a sign of how bad things are. We need to help our clients see that these changes are the very ones we all need to be making both for our own well-being and the well-being of the environment. They are signs that we are waking up, that we can adapt to the challenges ahead, and that we're beginning to move in the right direction. As we begin to think of such changes as an active choice instead of something being foisted on us, we immediately become more resilient and capable of moving on.
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