The weather in our heads.

THE BODY IS THE SOUL #3. A collective trauma to beat all the others.

Audio version for paying subscribers will arrive by noon Eastern on Tuesday, January 17.

In his Substack post yesterday, public policy professor and former labor secretary Robert Reich described some of the unjustly distributed death and devastation caused by eight “atmospheric rivers” pounding his home state of California for the past several days (with a ninth one arriving later on Monday).

The stream next to my house has become a river and some of the roads I rely on are impassible. I’m one of the lucky ones. At least 19 people have died as storms continue to cause widespread flooding, mudslides, and power outages. Another storm is hitting today. Millions of Californians are under a flood watch.

Among the most vulnerable are low-income people who live in fragile structures or are homeless, disproportionately people of color. We don’t talk nearly enough about the consequences of climate change for the most vulnerable among us. If Martin Luther King, Jr. were alive today, I’m sure he would be.

Reich goes on to complain that US news has failed to connect these violent storms (and all the other increasingly dramatic weather news from around the world) with their likely origin in global warming. I was glad to see him write about this because I too have noticed a certain fog of unknowing that accompanies reports of extreme weather events these days. Catastrophic climate change is undoubtedly hovering in the back of nearly everyone’s minds as they either produce or consume such news, a truth that dares not speak its name. I’m hardly the first person to note that Adam McKay’s movie DON’T LOOK UP (2021)—about two astronomers hopelessly attempting to warn humanity about a comet that’s on course to destroy the earth—was presented as rueful satire but felt like a documentary.

Shouldn’t the opposite thing be occurring?—constant climate contextualizing alongside the daily weather report? Or are we sick of hearing about this thing that we subconsciously already fear can’t (won’t) be stopped? In terms of actual information, we are nowhere near a saturation point. I’d rather see more connections and even potential disconnections flagged and discussed. For example, certain complications in the research and modeling of tornadoes apparently mean that there’s no clear, established causality between the warming planet and the deadly twisters in Georgia and Alabama last week. I’d welcome hearing such things to keep myself from decorating a bad enough reality with garlands of irresponsible speculation.

Then again, Americans have proven time and again that we are not scientifically or even spiritually literate enough, en masse, to accept answers such as We don’t know everything yet, we don’t have the complete picture yet, we’re working on it, but here’s what we do know for sure. The indeterminacy is too uncomfortable for a culture steeped in theocratic myth-mongering, in the compulsive need to determine winners and losers, and in pollyanna technocratic brightsizing. It certainly doesn’t help that we have de facto cult leaders/climate ignoramuses like self-help millionaire Jordan Petersen speaking on the topic while actual research scientists are assumed to be greedy by fossil-fuel apologists at “think” tanks like The Heritage Foundation. (Sorry, I can’t make myself add the links here, but you can find Peterson in way too many places already and look up the 2018 Heritage claim easily enough.) A casual historical survey will show that nobody ever got rich telling people truths they don’t want to hear.

Photo by Mika Baumeister on Unsplash

A 2015 study corollated climate change denial with the nations in which rightwing media mogul Rupert Murdoch has had his greatest influence—the US, the UK, and Australia—but the English-language, tabloid-reading world isn’t alone anymore. I find it chilling, for example, that Indonesia (with more than 270 million people) beats out the US by a few percentage points as the nation boasting the largest number of climate change deniers¹—at the same time that Jakarta, already imperiled due to land erosion beneath its infrastructure, is expected to be 95% underwater within the next 30 years. (I’d make the old joke about “De Nile” here, but there’s too much water talk already.)

Of course, Jakarta is not alone. Without significant mitigation or adaptation efforts, our own New Orleans is similarly imperiled, as are Bangkok, Amsterdam, Manila, London, Hamburg, …²

We know these things and we don’t know these things. We see and we don’t see. We have to function, driving and flying and doing whatever we do, without stopping at every moment to analyze our climate footprint. The instincts and habits of survival will always involve compartmentalizing and caching away one’s fear of death. Of course, Buddhism has long been teaching that it’s best to live each day as if it were your last. As challenging as that personal exercise might be, it’s a piece of cake compared with figuring out what to do and how to be in the face of the massive dislocations on the horizon.

It’s quite possible that where the existential threat of a warmed planet is concerned, we are all suffering from collective trauma—in the form of subdued, anticipatory anxiety—making it nearly impossible to act in our own best interest. This is a position taken up by at least several ecologists and sociologists, and it makes some intuitive sense. A UK-based clinical psychotherapist named Steffi Bednarek writes and speaks on such topics as “the role of compartmentalization and numbing in a response that allows individuals, companies, and nations to rationally say the right things and then to act in incongruent ways.”³ Wow, she's being polite.

But that last phrase really hits home with me, as I’ve recently seen my own capacity to speak and act in wildly inconsistent ways under the duress of personal grief and heartbreak. That loss of self-mastery, multiplied by billions? No wonder we also have a global authoritarian movement to contend with…. but that’s another topic for another day.

In an article entitled “Climate change, fragmentation and collective trauma,”⁴ Bednarek starts by citing the COVID-19 pandemic's terrible impacts on wellness worldwide. That was merely a dress rehearsal and many observers believe we botched it. Bednarek continues, “No nation is currently on course to meet the target of CO2 emissions needed to keep global heating to the minimum of 1.5 C, set out in the Paris agreement. In fact global emissions are rising rather than decreasing. Once the seriousness and scale of the problem sinks into public awareness, the risk of a global mental health crisis is high.”

Quoting a number of established trauma experts, she goes on to say,

In general, a trauma response is an adaptation to overwhelming experiences without recourse to sufficient support (Rothchild, 200; Van der Kolk 2014). Without adequate external and internal support structures, traumatic experiences can’t be assimilated and are split off in an attempt to numb the wounded part and protect survival (Fischer, 2017). Protection from traumatic overwhelm can appear in the form of deflection, denial, rationalisation, fragmentation, dissociation or numbing (Forner, 2017).

So if that’s where we are, what’s to be done? “[C]limate action must go beyond a mere reduction in CO2 emissions and work towards a shift in values, perceptions and consciousness.” In other words…hearts and minds. Is there any real opportunity to make this happen? Can such a massive collective shift occur at scale, in enough time, when the only people with the resources and power to implement such efforts are almost uniformly pro-status-quo? Sorry to leave you with questions you’ve probably already asked yourself, or perhaps you’ve tried hard not to ask yourself. Quiet despair and issue avoidance, of course, are also trauma responses.

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Tangentially: If you aren’t familiar with Donald Fagen’s song “Weather In My Head,” it’s a great one off his 2012 record SUNKEN CONDOS. By the way, I highly recommend this album and all of Fagen’s solo work since the days of Steely Dan. The band’s hits of the 1970s and 1980s are as immortal as pop music gets, but I believe Fagen has only improved as a songwriter, having burned off all the post-collegiate in-joking and snarky obscurantism. He has grown both sharper and wiser with his pen. We could all do worse.

1. https://www.statista.com/chart/19449/countries-with-biggest-share-of-climate-change-deniers/

2. https://earth.org/sea-level-rise-projections/

3. https://www.steffibednarek.com/keynote-speaking

4. https://futuref.org/climate_change_fragmentation_and_collective_trauma_en