We have been oscillating in Quebec between ice storms, floods, forest fires and smog since the spring. The reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change on the impacts of climate change, we just read them: we live them.
In the context, it is high time to change the paradigm. It is clear that with a planet in crisis, we should stop pathologizing eco-anxiety, and instead focus our research efforts on what should be called “eco-insensitivity”.
The human being is after all a mammal dependent on its ecosystem, like the rest of life. The question that should be asked is: how have our societies, our cultures, our economies, our political systems come to generate individuals so radically cut off from their natural link with the environment? How do we manage not to think about the planet when the sky is covered by yet another episode of smog?
Before I go any further, a point of clarification is in order. There is a tendency, here as elsewhere in the West, to reduce the so-called “eco-anxious” sensitivity to one’s environment to “eco-guilt”. We say that the anxious are people who feel guilty for their polluting lifestyle, their travels, their choice of vehicle. One wonders if this guilt is productive as a catalyst for social change.
Except that this guilt has nothing to do, a priori, with the so-called “ecoanxious” sensitivity. To put it bluntly: guilt is a rich man’s problem. Or, at least, it is a problem of a rich society, which knows very well, in its moments of lucidity, on whose backs and at what price this wealth is built, and what fundamental rights are violated so that this mode of life is maintained. It is almost impossible, in Canada, to get out of this economy built on North-South inequalities and the destruction of the global environment. But only those feel guilty about it who feel complicit in it.
We can imagine that many of the Innus of Mani-utenam, who have just lost their outfitter in the forest fires, in addition to confronting the Government of Quebec on the protection of the habitat of the woodland caribou, feel very worried by relation to the health of their ancestral territory. I would be surprised to learn that people there feel largely guilty of the state of things while sovereignty over decisions concerning their land is a perpetual fight there.
Similarly, one can easily imagine that farmers in Central America or herders in the Sahel who can no longer feed their families in a stable and predictable way given the upheavals in the climate, and who are hesitating between living on or taking the risk to migrate, experience one form or another of anguish. I don’t think, either, that we feel guilty.
Are these populations – that is to say the majority of the world’s population, which suffers the worst from climate change while being the least responsible for it – are even imagined, taken into account by our theorists of “the eco-anxiety”? Or are we mistaking the bad conscience of the North American middle class for a universal human problem?
But back to eco-insensitivity. It seems possible under two conditions. First, an eco-insensitive person is necessarily a person who has lost sight of the direct link between the rest of the living and their own life. The more steps there are, for example, between the production of our food and its consumption, the easier it is to forget where it comes from, to misunderstand the conditions of its existence. When we live in the city or in the suburbs, almost all the objects that make up our daily lives come to us like that, a bit by magic, often from the other side of the world, without us thinking about it.
In short, in a globalized economy, almost all of us are cut off from the direct causal relationship between our environment and our well-being, which has been the lot of almost all of humankind for millennia. From this perspective, so-called “eco-anxious” people are those who, by dint of learning about climate change, and especially experiencing it little by little, start to make connections between the planet and their well-being. These links are quite normal on the scale of human history. If they remain perceived as strange, even sick, within our societies, it is because our societies themselves are very strange, even sick.
Second, we know very well that we tend to avoid people and situations that generate feelings of shame and guilt in us. This is also one of the keys to understanding the phenomenon of procrastination: if you feel bad for not having completed a task in time, the brain will want to bypass it, which causes an even greater delay. The Western guilt mentioned above can therefore fuel anxiety just as it can fuel avoidance, apparent apathy in the face of environmental issues and procrastination in the face of necessary political reforms.
What science tells us, basically, is that our economies and our lifestyles are leading to cataclysm. In terms of questioning, it’s a lot to digest. And we should never underestimate the ability of humans, especially when they feel threatened, to protect their ego rather than the common good.
Colleague Alexandre Shields, journalist for environmental issues at the Duty, regularly presents on social media a summary of the hatred he receives for his work. The force with which some readers sink into denial of reality would be surprising if we did not know that it is completely human to react so viscerally to simple facts… when we receive these facts as an attack on our person. and all its universe of meaning.
Anthropologist, Emilie Nicolas is a columnist at Duty and to Release. She hosts the podcast Detours For Canadaland.