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  • Climate and the Psyche

    Posted by Michael Degani on September 27, 2022 at 10:09 pm

    From nature-bathing to climate grief to environmental psychology, there is a whole fast developing world out there attending to the psyche/climate interface that of course would be really interesting from a design perspective. But what got me thinking about that in particular was this news story. Maybe it implies that Direct Action = Therapy?

    https://twitter.com/DocsEnvAus/status/1574891841568509952

    Michael Degani replied 8 months ago 2 Members · 3 Replies
  • 3 Replies
  • Anand Pandian

    Administrator
    September 28, 2022 at 10:30 pm

    Fascinating idea. It reminds me somehow of the Victorian literary critic John Ruskin and his idea of the “pathetic fallacy,” his criticism of the way that poets would project a subject’s emotions onto the outside world, that a willow weeps with you, etc, that this was a false picture of both emotion and the world. I suppose that notion held firm for sometime, that there was in fact a firm divide between self and world. But is that divide itself collapsing as the world seems to be falling to pieces and people along with it? Does news like this betide a belated reconciliation of the subject/nature divide, as we suffer together in oneness with a suffering world?

  • Michael Degani

    Moderator
    September 30, 2022 at 9:50 am

    Yes the divide isn’t really holding anymore is it!

    I think about the visceral stress reactions people have to prisons, cubicles, traffic jams. And about what so many people with means actually choose to build and live with–wood, stone, light, air, leaf. Our bodies evolved in a certain zone. Now the climate is going haywire and so are we.

  • Michael Degani

    Moderator
    October 3, 2022 at 12:34 pm