Advertisement
An excerpt of Joanna Macy’s essay in Roszak’s “Ecopsychology”:
As a society we are caught between a sense of impending apocalypse and the fear of acknowledging it. In this ‘caught’ place, our responses are blocked and confused. The result is three widespread psychological strategies: disbelief, denial, and double life.
Disbelief:
The toxins in the air, food and water are hard to taste or smell. The spreading acreage of clear-cuts and landfills are mostly screened from public view…The things that disappear—the frogs or topsoil or bird song—are not as likely to catch our attention as what remains for me to perceive. And the more perceptible changes, like the smog layer over my city or the oil globs on the beach, accrue so gradually they seem to become a normal part of life. Although ubiquitous, these changes are subtle, making it hard to believe the gravity and immediacy of the crisis we are in.
Denial:
Denial is facilitated…by the sheer multiplicity of factors at play in the planetary crisis. Conditions worsen in many dimensions simultaneously: water shortages, toxic dumping, loss of wetlands, deforestation, the greenhouse effect, and so forth. Although each issue is critical in its own right, it is their interplay that most threatens our biosphere, for they compound each other systemically. However, it is precisely these systemic interactions that are hard to see, especially for a culture untutored in the perception of relationships.
Double Life:
On one level we maintain a more or less upbeat capacity to carry on as usual…All the while, there is an unformed awareness in the background that our world could be extensively damaged at any moment…Until we find ways of acknowledging and integrating that level of anguished awareness, we repress it; and with that repression we are drained of the energy we need for action and clear thinking…Each of us has the capacity to drop everything and act.
As a society we are caught between a sense of impending apocalypse and the fear of acknowledging it. In this ‘caught’ place, our responses are blocked and confused. The result is three widespread psychological strategies: disbelief, denial, and double life.
Disbelief:
The toxins in the air, food and water are hard to taste or smell. The spreading acreage of clear-cuts and landfills are mostly screened from public view…The things that disappear—the frogs or topsoil or bird song—are not as likely to catch our attention as what remains for me to perceive. And the more perceptible changes, like the smog layer over my city or the oil globs on the beach, accrue so gradually they seem to become a normal part of life. Although ubiquitous, these changes are subtle, making it hard to believe the gravity and immediacy of the crisis we are in.
Denial:
Denial is facilitated…by the sheer multiplicity of factors at play in the planetary crisis. Conditions worsen in many dimensions simultaneously: water shortages, toxic dumping, loss of wetlands, deforestation, the greenhouse effect, and so forth. Although each issue is critical in its own right, it is their interplay that most threatens our biosphere, for they compound each other systemically. However, it is precisely these systemic interactions that are hard to see, especially for a culture untutored in the perception of relationships.
Double Life:
On one level we maintain a more or less upbeat capacity to carry on as usual…All the while, there is an unformed awareness in the background that our world could be extensively damaged at any moment…Until we find ways of acknowledging and integrating that level of anguished awareness, we repress it; and with that repression we are drained of the energy we need for action and clear thinking…Each of us has the capacity to drop everything and act.
posted by:
|
Canada
|
Advertisement
Advertisement
