(Awhile back, I profiled Generation Dread: Finding Purpose in an Age of Climate Anxiety by Britt Wray. The book accumulates concepts that can be helpful in grasping the nature of climate anxiety, as well as our reactions to it. These few ideas caught my interest…)
Narrative foreclosure
Psychologist Ernst Bohlmeijer and colleagues (Netherlands’ University of Twente) coined this term to refer to the (false) certainty that there aren’t any new interpretations, experiences or commitments that could change our life story. This could be another kind of confirmation bias, an unhelpful form of mindfulness.
Prospective survivor
Psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton (renowned author and professor, known for his studies of the effects of war and trauma on mental health) uses this term to describe someone who can imagine vividly how they might die–and how this realization haunts them, perhaps motivating them towards endurance, courage and clarity.
Politics of desire
Sarah Jaquette Ray (environmental humanist and author of A Field Guide to Climate Anxiety) suggests that visions of the future are incomplete when they are framed only by avoidance or self-denial.
Enchantment
Closely related to feelings of awesomeness, this emotion—described by Sharon Blackie, author, psychologist and Fellow of Britain’s Royal Society of Arts—helps us fully participate in the natural world, strengthening our sense of belonging and connecting to things outside ourselves.
Staying with the trouble
Scholar Donna Haraway (History of consciousness professor emerita at UC Santa Cruz, CA) advocates holding fiercely to all of the intense emotions—positive and negative—that comprise the matrix of feelings that greet us in this time of climate anxiety.
Claiming the high moral ground
Generation Dread’s author Britt Wray reminds us that this common approach—shaming and blaming—attacks people’s identities and fosters pushback, not a good way to foster resilience and hope among those around us.
These examples illustrate how the study of “deep ecology” can add to our understanding of the climate dread that we experience. With conceptual frameworks in hand, we might be able to react wisely to what could otherwise trap us in hopelessness.
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