Climate Crisis, Psychoanalysis, and Radical Ethics

Donna M. Orange

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Topic: Psychology
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317299400
• Subtopic: Mental Health in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Psychoanalysis engages with the difficult subjects in life, but it has been slow to address climate change. Climate Crisis, Psychoanalysis, and Radical Ethics draws on the latest scientific evidence to set out the likely effects of climate change on politics, economics and society more generally, including impacts on psychoanalysts.

Despite a tendency to avoid the warnings, times of crisis summon clinicians to emerge from comfortable consulting rooms. Daily engaged with human suffering, they now face the inextricably bound together crises of global warming and massive social injustices. After considering historical and emotional causes of climate unconsciousness and of compulsive consumerism, this book argues that only a radical ethics of responsibility to be "my other's keeper" will truly wake us up to climate change and bring psychoanalysts to actively take on responsibilities, such as demanding change from governments, living more simply, flying less, and caring for the earth and its inhabitants everywhere.

Linking climate justice to radical ethics by way of psychoanalysis, Donna Orange explores many relevant aspects of psychoanalytic expertise, referring to work on trauma, mourning, and the transformation of trouble into purpose. Orange makes practical suggestions for action in the psychoanalytic and psychotherapeutic communities: reducing air travel, consolidating organizations and conferences, better use of internet communication and education. This book includes both philosophical considerations of egoism (close to psychoanalytic narcissism) as problematic, together with work on shame and envy as motivating compulsive and conspicuous consumption.

The interweaving of climate emergency and massive social injustice presents psychoanalysts and organized psychoanalysis with a radical ethical demand and an extraordinary opportunity for leadership. Climate Crisis, Psychoanalysis, and Radical Ethics will provide accessible and thought-provoking reading for psychoanalysts and psychotherapists, as well as philosophers, environmental studies scholars and students studying across these fields.

Chapter 1
Climate injustice and business as usual

What’s wrong with this picture?

Cursed be the earth because of you.

(Genesis 3:17)

Perhaps many psychoanalysts know the climate crisis better than I have done until recently. As a young backpacker, I came to love the forests, streams, and mountains of the Pacific Northwest, and to feel strip mining and clearcutting forestry as travesties. But I saw environmental devastation as something other people committed, and kept trekking, no, driving innocently along through life. Even when Al Gore worked so hard just after the century’s turn to convince us of the “inconvenient truth,” his message didn’t really penetrate or change the lives of many of us who spend our lives working with unconsciousness. Now it is nearly too late, and we must listen at our peril. But we listen backward: not only analyzing the unconsciousness: splitting, disavowal, melancholia (Lertzman, 2015), but also as in the biblical saying, and unlike most psychoanalysis, we reverse the listening sequence: “We will do, and we will hear,” in that order. This chapter begins to explain what we need to learn scientifically and to consider psychoanalytically, even while we start to act ethically. Justice allows us no time to evade at psychoanalytic conferences—where we meet in luxurious hotels in cities full of homeless people—or to theorize at leisure. Our brothers and sisters are starving, drowning and burning while we dispute. But 60 million refugees in the year 2015, together with tornadoes and floods, may reset the alarm clock.

The science: what we have come to “know”

Emergency situations require immediate response. With ever-increasing intensity, climate scientists (IEA, 2015; IPCC, 2014a; NOAA, 2015) warn us that the warming of our oceans and atmosphere is increasing far faster than they had predicted even 5 or 10 years ago, and that we will probably reach very soon, and may have already reached, “tipping points” at which the damage to the earth and its biological inhabitants will be not only irreversible, but unmanageable. NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) reports that July 2015 was the hottest month on record, 2015 the hottest year. The summer ice cap has nearly disappeared from the Arctic, while the West Antarctic ice sheet is slipping into the ocean. More and more species are already becoming extinct at a rate more than 100 times the “background rate,” reports Paul Ehrlich of the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment (Knapton, 2015), while human life rapidly degenerates into the “war of all against all” announced by philosopher Thomas Hobbes (Hobbes, Gaskin, & NetLibrary Inc., 1998) in the 18th century. Extremes of economic inequality—evident both within the USA and worldwide—though some consider them a separate problem—cannot, many of us believe, be addressed apart from the climate emergency. This chapter concerns the ways social justice and climate change intricately intertwine to form the question of climate justice.

First, the overwhelming majority of scientists agree that climate damage is largely self-inflicted, that is, that our addiction to fossil fuels and red meat is filling our atmosphere with toxic carbons and methane (www3.epa.gov/climatechange/ghgemissions/gases/ch4.html), melting the polar ice, and making ever-larger portions of our planet home into uninhabitable desert. The IPCC (International Panel on Climate Change) summary statement quoted below states clearly the current scientific consensus view of anthropogenic (human-caused) global warming and its consequences. Two new papers, one lead-authored by dean of climate scientists James Hansen ¹ (Hansen et al., 2015), appeared while I was preparing this chapter, announcing that the polar ice is melting much faster than anyone had suspected. Threatening many northern species, this development means an emergency for whole peoples living near sea-level, needing relocation. Should they, by extraordinary good fortune, find hospitality, they will still have lost home, culture, and language.

I am no climate scientist, but am reading these scientific analysts of our shared situation as well as some of their clearest interpreters, modern-day prophets like Bill McKibben (McKibben, 2010, 2014), Vandana Shiva (Shiva, 2008), Naomi Klein (Klein, 2014), and most recently, Pope Francis (Catholic Church, 2015). McKibben, currently a leading voice in the movement toward disinvestment in fossil fuels and against the Keystone pipeline, can be contacted via his 350.org website. The “350” refers to carbon parts per million to which scientists say we should reduce carbon in the atmosphere to keep our planet livable. Vandana Shiva (Shiva, 2005, 2008, 2010), a quantum physicist who has given her life to promoting local and sustainable forms of agriculture, and fighting GMOs (genetically modified organisms), writes in her recent Soil not Oil: Environmental Justice in an Age of Climate Crisis (Shiva, 2008) that sustainable agriculture can save the poorest from the ravages of carbon. Probably her voice most moved me to write this book, and kept me at it. Find her at seedfreedom.info. Naomi Klein argues in great detail that most of us have avoided this “inconvenient truth” (Gore & Melcher Media, 2006) so long that now only an effort equivalent to that required to fight World War II, including enormous communal sacrifices like immediate conversion for a world without fossil fuels and rationing, will now save our planet with any shred of justice for those suffering most from the world created by industrialization and globalization. Unfortunately, no obvious enemy is dropping carbon bombs on our centers of commerce and culture, concentrating our minds. (Boswell [Boswell & Chapman, 2008] quotes Samuel Johnson: “When a man knows he is to be hanged … it concentrates his mind wonderfully.” Sept. 19, 1777.)

Now Pope Francis has just published Laudato Si, “On the care for our common home,” an encyclical linking the climate crisis to social justice. Despite his resounding silence on injustice toward women, inside and beyond the church, he directly focuses on the way climate change is devastating the world’s poorest. These voices, and others, call us to repent, and quickly to change our ways. They appeal not to a punishing deity, but to the clear karmic (see also “The Time Is Now: Buddhist Declaration on Climate Change,” 2015) consequences for our children and grandchildren if we do not act quickly.

In late 2014 one group of the world’s most respected climate scientists, those who work together as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC, www.ipcc.ch/), told us what has already occurred. I quote at length to make sure I neither distort nor exaggerate the current situation nor the emergency we face:

Warming of the climate system is unequivocal, and since the 1950s, many of the observed changes are unprecedented over decades to millennia. The atmosphere and ocean have warmed, the amounts of snow and ice have diminished, and sea level has risen.

Anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions have increased since the pre-industrial era, driven largely by economic and population growth, and are now higher than ever. This has led to atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide that are unprecedented in at least the last 800,000 years. Their effects, together with those of other anthropogenic drivers, have been detected throughout the climate system and are extremely likely to have been the dominant cause of the observed warming since the mid-20th century.

In recent decades, changes in climate have caused impacts on natural and human systems on all continents and across the oceans. Impacts are due to observed climate change, irrespective of its cause, indicating the sensitivity of natural and human systems to changing climate.

Changes in many extreme weather and climate events have been observed since about 1950. Some of these changes have been linked to human influences, including a decrease in cold temperature extremes, an increase in warm temperature extremes, an increase in extreme high sea levels and an increase in the number of heavy precipitation events in a number of regions.

(IPCC, 2014c)

The IPCC goes on to predict, based on multiple modeling, the foreseeable future, whether we do or do not make radical changes in the way we are living. They assume that significant “mitigation,” that is, beginning to bring down our carbon usage to a 2 degree Centigrade atmospheric warming in this century, could keep the damage within adaptable limits. Continuing more or less on our current path will bring 4 degrees of warming, they warn, and defeat all possibility of adaptation to the conditions that will result (IPCC, 2014b).

Cumulative emissions of carbon dioxide largely determine global mean surface warming by the late 21st century and beyond. Projections of greenhouse gas emissions vary over a wide range, depending on both socio-economic development and climate policy. Surface temperature is projected to rise over the 21st century under all assessed emission scenarios.

It is very likely that heat waves will occur more often and last longer, and that extreme precipitation events will become more intense and frequent in many regions. The ocean will continue to warm and acidify, and global mean sea level to rise. Climate change will amplify existing risks and create new risks for natural and human systems.

Risks are unevenly distributed and are generally greater for disadvantaged people and communities in countries at all levels of development.

Many aspects of climate change and associated impacts will continue for centuries, even if anthropogenic emissions of greenhouse gases are stopped. The risks of abrupt or irreversible changes increase as the magnitude of the warming increases.

(IPCC, 2014c, emphasis mine)

Many observers consider this alarming account, so carefully worded, based on the 2 and 4% Centigrade warming, as too conservative. A 2% goal, reachable only if we stop putting carbon into the atmosphere almost immediately, converting to renewable sources of energy by 2030, still leaves us on a path to irreversible damage requiring major adaptations. Even these moderate prognosticators explain that gradual warming will surely accumulate its effects, reaching “tipping points” after which the effects will aggregate more quickly and more catastrophically, leaving us little or no time to adapt, and none to reverse our course. Some observers (350.org, for example) say that we need to work for much less than 2% to protect the world’s poorest from further desertification and sea level rise. James Hansen (J. Hansen, 2005; J. E. Hansen, 2009) has long argued that the 2% goal, agreed upon for mainly political reasons, is highly dangerous. Doing nothing about carbon means at least a 4% warming before the end of this century, with extremely probable catastrophic effects:

• Heatwaves of magnitudes never experienced before—temperatures not seen on Earth in the past five million years. Four degrees is only the average, so temperatures over large land masses will rise far higher.
• Forty percent of plant and animal species will be at risk of extinction.
• Precipitous decline in the growth of crops world wide, exacerbated by drought, floods and increased weed and pest invasion.
• Total melting of the Greenland ice sheet and, most likely, the Western Antarctic ice sheet raising sea levels by thirty-two or more feet—this would put two thirds of the world’s major cities under water, as well as large regions of countries.
• Once four degrees is reached there’s no guarantee that temperatures would level off.
• A population of nine billion will not be able to adapt to these conditions.
  (www.climatepsychologyalliance.org/,
  adapted from Marshall, 2014)

Here we already see the implications of climate crisis for social justice, the major focus of Pope Francis’s encyclical. Meanwhile, the more conservative but still very worried IPCC concludes, even under optimal conditions of mitigation, that is, radical reductions in carbon (from transport and all forms of energy production) and methane (mostly from fracking and livestock raising) emissions, limiting warming to 2 degrees Centigrade, significant climate changes already underway will require major adaptations, especially to protect the most vulnerable people. Whole island populations must relocate in the face of rising sea levels, while refugees from war and famine are already pouring into Europe (Ryde, in press). Without radical changes away from fossil fuels, including substantial decreases in consumption, initiated immediately, warming of 4 degrees is both extremely probable, they emphasize, and will make our planet uninhabitable by the end of this century. Like the IEA (International Energy Agency), the IPCC warns that every level (world, regional, national, sub-national, local) must make radical changes immediately to avoid the direst consequences.

They also tell us that the changes are still possible—including a complete change from fossil fuels by 2030—but will require vast mobilization of the world’s richest countries, those who have contributed most to the problem. (Again, while I am writing, the Obama administration has announced the strongest regulations to limit coal-fired power plants to date. Although these fall far short of what is needed, massive opposition from established “energy” interests is organizing to defeat even this modest initiative.)

Yet most of us go on just as if we had not heard these warnings. Are our brains simply wired to exclude bad news, as George Marshall believes (Marshall, 2014), are we in the grip of “environmental melancholia” as social scientist reader of psychoanalysis Renee Lertzman (2015) thinks, or have we inherited a philosophical egoism, wedded to a narcissistic mindset full of entitlement, perhaps even of unconscious racist privilege inherited from millennia of slavery (Davis, 2006), the topic of Chapter 2, trapping and immobilizing us? All may be true, but if the disciplines of philosophy and psychoanalysis can help us to identify our problem quickly, then perhaps alliance with the world’s moral and religious leaders can begin to shift the political tide, to create a “tipping point” of solidarity to meet the carbon tipping points already looming.

Enlightenment ego...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 Climate injustice and business as usual: what’s wrong with this picture?
• 2 Historical unconsciousness and the invisible present: settler colonialism and chattel slavery
• 3 Beyond evasion: psychoanalysis for the climate crisis
• 4 Radical ethics for our climate emergency
• Afterword: Thoughts after Paris: climate solidarity
• Appendix 1: UN Declaration on Climate Justice
• Appendix 2: Online resources
• Index