Intertwined crises, intertwined solutions
On shifting the perspective towards the interconnectedness of the world's ongoing crises - and its solutions.
Welcome back to Climate Psyched, the newsletter where we explore all things psychological, behavioral and emotional related to the climate and ecosystem crises.
It’s been a busy start to the year. For the world (not the least), but also for myself and my colleagues as we just finished the first draft of our upcoming book on climate psychology. It’s been hard to write. Not just because it’s hard to write a book, and perhaps even harder to write a book grounded in updated research. But most of all it’s been hard to write something that aims at help explaining some of the things that are going on in the world at the same time as the world seems to incomprehensible, and in many respects just plain bat shit crazy.
The longer I’ve worked with climate psychology, the more research I read, people I meet in my work, the more we collectively watch the climate crisis unfold, the more apparent it becomes that the climate crisis is deeply intertwined with the rise of authoritarianism and fascism, weakening of democracy, rising inequality and intensified geopolitical conflicts. I believe the field of climate psychology needs to acknowledge this, or else we will be emphasizing behavioral and emotional aspects that won’t target the main drivers of the ongoing crises. Navigating the trenches of an unfinished book manuscript at the beginning of this already crazy year, surrendering to that insight makes it clearer that when the problems are intertwined, the solutions too can, and should, be intertwined. Which means that what is helpful to help mitigate and adapt to the climate crisis, is equally helpful to strengthen democracy and equality.
I was reminded of that in this text by Emily Atkins at Heated, on how to keep finding meaningfulness in the climate work in the US whilst state funded violence is roaming the streets. She writes:
The climate chaos we’re experiencing now, and what we will continue to experience, is a direct, conscious choice by the state to allow certain people to die. It kills through heatwaves, asthma, hunger, and displacement instead of bullets and batons, but the logic behind both is identical: certain people, mostly brown, can be sacrificed.
I always need to remind myself that these are not two separate emergencies competing for attention, but one story unfolding on different timelines. That helps reignite the fire to continue.
The climate crises is not a coincidence. We didn’t just naturally happen to end up in this state of deep global inequality, where the wealthiest 1% emits twice as much as the poorest 50%, where the financial and political power belongs to a few, while climate impacts affect many. Just as we as humans are connected to one another, so are the consequences of how our societies, economies and technologies are organized.
Understanding that the climate crisis isn’t a coincidence, or an inevitable consequence of a short-sighted human nature (which it’s not), also makes it clear why climate psychology is an important field of knowledge and practical tools in the fight to resist and counter the world’s ongoing crises. But it also uncovers how climate psychology, in order to be helpful, needs to refrain from an isolated, individualized perspective that primarily focuses on incremental solutions, consumer behaviors and how to get people to lower their individual carbon footprint. Intertwined crises requires intertwined solutions. Human behavior, our choices and actions, lie at the heart of bringing those solutions forward.
Mobilizing social movements that take to the streets to voice their protest against authoritarian and repressive leaders, as is currently the case in e.g. the US and Iran, is definitely examples of how collective efforts simultaneously aim at strengthening democratic rights, nurture social cohesion and learning skills of cooperation that are much needed in times of crises.
A quite different example of intertwined solutions is building a large communal garden combined with a public park in a neighborhood. From a climate perspective, such a space can contribute to local food production and preparedness for food scarcity, reduce urban heat through vegetation, absorb rainwater during heavy rainfall, and capture carbon. But it also makes low-carbon lifestyles easier by encouraging local outdoor activities. In addition it can have important social and psychological effects: having access of natural spaces affects the sense of community belonging, which in turn is associated with improvements in depressive symptoms, negative mental health and psychological distress, indicating that natural spaces have an indirect positive effect on well-being. There are, of course, numerous other examples like this, where we can bring multiple perspectives together to target several problems at once.
From an emotional perspective the shift towards intertwined solutions can also feel relieving: instead of trying to individually tackle a hundred different balls being thrown at you at once, you can focus on collectively sewing a net that harness many of the balls at once. It also means seeing that people who are joining different groups and movements, partaking in different actions for different causes, can still be part of contributing to a broader collective movement that aims at strengthening democracy, equality and safety. Not everyone needs to to the same thing in the same group to still move things forward in the same broad direction. We can all contribute to sewing our collective safety net.