In Donna Haraway's paradigm of climate change denial, game-over people rushed to a conclusion of despair, while technofixers doubled down on the false hope that humans would fix this, despite daily evidence that those with the power to do so weren't even trying. Haraway proposed a third option: "staying in trouble". It was a simple but powerful concept: only by allowing oneself to exist within--to fully feel--the terror, sadness, and strange beauty of what was happening could one develop new ways of to live through it. When the early poet Imru' al-Qays, chronicler of climate grief back when it was simply called grief, came across the ruins of his own world, he stood with them for a while. That's how he began to endure the loss. Only by first allowing himself to experience the damage could he then carry on and create from the wreckage a new form, something like a song.
Friday, March 22, 2024
If it be now, 'tis not to come. If it be not to come, it will be now. If it be not now, yet it will come
Worlds ended all the time. I thought of captions I'd seen beneath photographs of the sky this morning: End of the world, they said. Apocalypse sky. It looks like a movie. People were understandingly struggling for ways to describe the situation, but there was an egotism to such proclamations that I didn't feel comfortable with. The idea of a singular apocalypse suggested that there was only one world, only one end. The notion of the end of the world was itself a flexible one: Earth had already experienced five extinction-level events, and it was at the start of a sixth. The past two decades alone had seen several historic tsunamis cause mass death of people living along the coasts or islands of the Indian Ocean, the Sunda Straight, the Java Sea, and parts of the Pacific. Historically, volcanoes had been common world-killers: in the Permian era, about 250 million years ago, a volcanic eruption killed approximately 90 percent of all species on Earth. There were all sorts of ways the universe could end you: earthquake, flood, plague. The one with the dinosaurs. And of course the human-made apocalypses: war, genocide, chattel slavery, climate change, the list was as unending as the world. The end of humans had begun the moment someone decided to burn coal for fuel. Or perhaps the root was in one of the many moments when people decided to keep burning it, even though we all knew where this was going.
In the early 2000s, sociologist Kari Marie Norgaard studied a Norwegian town that had been severely impacted by climate change via a dearth of snow. She found that, even when met with irrefutable evidence that their environment was transformed for the worse, many residents appeared to ignore what was happening. They wouldn't talk about it. It wasn't a lack of emotion that silenced them; it was the intensity of their feelings. "The word ignore is a verb," Norgaard wrote... Although ignorance might appear to be passive, Norgaard wrote, in the case of climate change such behavior is the product of a complex, systemic social reaction that allows humans, in the face of potential extinction, to downplay our feelings so that we can continue to go about living our lives. In order to conform to social or community norms people might ignore massive events like climate change, even when faced with blatant and unavoidable evidence of the event. They might modulate the way they talked about such events in order to uphold their own internal narratives about themselves or avoid talking about it at all in order to assuage feelings of guilt. Or, they might simply disregard reality as a way to cope, to keep going. Sociologists called these behaviors "emotion management".