I have no doubt that this is true, and hearing about global warming and the horrible things we are doing to our planet often causes a profound sadness in me. But there is an interesting article in Wired that talked about a more specific kind of sadness.
Australia is suffering through its worst dry spell in a millennium. The outback has turned into a dust bowl, crops are dying off at fantastic rates, cities are rationing water, coral reefs are dying, and the agricultural base is evaporating.
But what really intrigues Glenn Albrecht — a philosopher by training — is how his fellow Australians are reacting.
They’re getting sad.
In interviews Albrecht conducted over the past few years, scores of Australians described their deep, wrenching sense of loss as they watch the landscape around them change. Familiar plants don’t grow any more. Gardens won’t take. Birds are gone. “They no longer feel like they know the place they’ve lived for decades,” he says.
Albrecht believes that this is a new type of sadness. People are feeling displaced. They’re suffering symptoms eerily similar to those of indigenous populations that are forcibly removed from their traditional homelands. But nobody is being relocated; they haven’t moved anywhere. It’s just that the familiar markers of their area, the physical and sensory signals that define home, are vanishing. Their environment is moving away from them, and they miss it terribly.
People often think that because America is rich they will be able to escape the horrors of global warming. While it may be true that we might (and thats a big might) be able to avoid starvation, plagues, and our army is strong enough to protect our borders, no amount of money will be able to protect us from the psychological effects of global warming.
How do you combat the depression that can come with facing a topic as heavy as global warming? Leave some tips in the comments for how people can take positive sustainable actions.
It’s the classic stages of mourning. We have, at last, gone beyond the denial state and are now into the grief state: there is a lot of grief out there, and while important, it must be managed and used as a positive motivation to make real change happen. We must not slip into acceptance, though, as this will be far more dangerous than grief. Grief, anger, fear – all necessary emotions when combating the terrible systems that have led us down this path. Time to take a different path; one that this culture doesn’t want you to take – the path out of consumerism.
It, how strange this may sound, also makes me happy, for now there are extra resources dedicated to making the shift. Renewable energy is becoming “economically” viable. Yes, it also makes me sad that much of our environment is suffering for our economical profit. But the positive approach is better as far as I am concerned.
And, as keithf also mentioned, we need to get rid of consumerism.
A previous post on The Sietch Blog comes to mind…
http://www.blog.thesietch.org/2007/12/12/the-story-of-stuff/
Just yesterday I noticed on a TV program something in Belgium (where I live) that’s called Kringloop Fiets (Recycled bicycle) made from recycled parts and distributed among school kids. They get to exercise and we re-use precious materials.
Hope that this gets copied in several places (if not already)
I think it’s time to abandon the term ‘global warming’ and start using ‘global climate change’ instead. The broader term much more accurately describes the array of erratic events we can expect to occur.