-
Climate and the Psyche
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
Court considered all of the facts in this case, including #flood trauma and the psychological impact of climate change on young people.https://t.co/XvQM1wE09H
— Doctors for the Environment Australia (@DocsEnvAus) September 27, 2022
-
3 Replies
-
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?
-
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.
-
Last week I published my first peer-reviewed research on climate and mental health with @Imperial_IGHI and @ClimateCares, alongside twenty-two other climate-concerned young people around the world.
Here's what the paper is all about 👇 pic.twitter.com/WbT0U5ITx9
— Jessica Kleczka #StopRosebank (@jessicakleczka) October 3, 2022