Yes, that was rather naive of me.
No matter how many arguments I came up with, no matter how many scientists I quoted, the answer of this housemate remained the same: They only make us afraid. It doesn't make any sense. The climate is always changing. All those climate measures are actually destroying us.
It struck me that he had clearly studied the subject: he named prominent climate skeptics and could eloquently present arguments for positions that he repeated like a mantra. He's not a stupid guy either: as a tax consultant, he's been in university as long as I have.
But how is it that we view the problem so differently? Why do I feel so many emotions when he doesn't even believe it. How is it that the climate debate is so incredibly polarized?
Several psychologists and academics suggest that the emotions associated with the climate debate are like a grieving process. This is not a crazy thought: after all, we are in danger of losing our familiar habitat, our familiar way of life and perhaps more. That we should therefore mourn seems more than logical.
But grief is a complex emotion: studies show that if grief is not processed properly, it causes problems for the mental health of people. In addition, unprocessed or poorly processed grief is bad for the functioning of social groups. And this while the solution to the climate problem calls for well-functioning collaborations.
Shared rituals and traditions can help in processing grief. The loss of a partner or family member has many such traditions: people pay their respects, hold funerals and vigils, they can talk and cry. For some types of grief this is more difficult: losing an unborn child, being infertile, or the death of a pet have far fewer common traditions and are therefore generally less well processed. Finnish Theologian Panu Pihkala suggests that we should think of eco-mourning as this kind of complex grief, which therefore does not yet have a good common way of processing it. But what exactly is grief? How can we process it? And why do I need to grieve and my friend's roommate isn't aware of anything?
Grief is a process, with many different emotions. In the 1960s, Elizabeth Kubler-Ross attempted to map out the stages of grief. Her famous "five-stage model" is not a comprehensive description of grief: but the model does give us insight into the different stages people can go through and the different ways people can deal with grief.
She describes the five stages as respectively: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. When we see this model in light of the climate, suddenly all these polarized, different ideas about the climate seem to stem from the same emotion. The climate skeptics who deny the problem (denial), the angry activists(anger), the people who eat organic and therefore feel they have done their part(negotiation) and the paralyzed people who can't get out of bed (depression) are in fact doing exactly the same thing. They are grieving. Only the stage of mourning differs. But what then is acceptance? And how do we get there? In Kubler-Ross' model, that final stage is accepting the death of a loved one. For climate change, we might think of this stage as the time when we can accept the facts, but still productively move on with our lives and rearrange them through processing the grief.
This is a hopeful perspective: it may seem that everyone is divided on the problem, but in fact, we all feel the same urgency. We just don't yet have a good way to deal with this urgency and are throwing ourselves into other ways of coping. This realization makes the debate much less polarized and makes it a problem that we will have to solve together. So it is important that we find common structures to make mourning possible in society. Structures that leave room for people to grieve in their own way. Indeed, mourning research shows that common rituals and traditions promote the processing of mourning.
Yet I won't be so quick to say this to my friend's climate denialist roommate. To say to someone who believes that the climate is not a human problem at all that he is in a grieving process is going a bit far. The model seems to be especially beneficial for people who actually experience emotional problems linked to climate change. For them, this model offers a method to deal with the emotional burden.
Although it is nice for me to be able to think in my bed at night: He does grieve. Yes. I also understand that this makes me just as unkind and unconstructive as when I still refused to talk to Mr. Roommate. Therefore, I propose the following:
If all the grieving people now try to take the climate deniers seriously too. We do this by continuing to engage in conversation with them, and occasionally, when they present cogent arguments, admit that they are presenting a cogent argument there. Perhaps we can then make the following valid argument:
Taking better care of the planet never hurts. And looking for a different way to relate to the planet as humans is exciting, but will also give us a lot of innovation and new perspectives. And we are living now: so if we want to be able to contribute something to those new perspectives, we have to be quick.
In any case, it can't hurt.
She describes the five stages as respectively: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. When we see this model in light of the climate, suddenly all these polarized, different ideas about the climate seem to stem from the same emotion. The climate skeptics who deny the problem (denial), the angry activists(anger), the people who eat organic and therefore feel they have done their part(negotiation) and the paralyzed people who can't get out of bed (depression) are in fact doing exactly the same thing. They are grieving. Only the stage of mourning differs. But what then is acceptance? And how do we get there? In Kubler-Ross' model, that final stage is accepting the death of a loved one. For climate change, we might think of this stage as the time when we can accept the facts, but still productively move on with our lives and rearrange them through processing the grief.
This is a hopeful perspective: it may seem that everyone is divided on the problem, but in fact, we all feel the same urgency. We just don't yet have a good way to deal with this urgency and are throwing ourselves into other ways of coping. This realization makes the debate much less polarized and makes it a problem that we will have to solve together. So it is important that we find common structures to make mourning possible in society. Structures that leave room for people to grieve in their own way. Indeed, mourning research shows that common rituals and traditions promote the processing of mourning.
Yet I won't be so quick to say this to my friend's climate denialist roommate. To say to someone who believes that the climate is not a human problem at all that he is in a grieving process is going a bit far. The model seems to be especially beneficial for people who actually experience emotional problems linked to climate change. For them, this model offers a method to deal with the emotional burden.
Although it is nice for me to be able to think in my bed at night: He does grieve. Yes. I also understand that this makes me just as unkind and unconstructive as when I still refused to talk to Mr. Roommate. Therefore, I propose the following:
If all the grieving people now try to take the climate deniers seriously too. We do this by continuing to engage in conversation with them, and occasionally, when they present cogent arguments, admit that they are presenting a cogent argument there. Perhaps we can then make the following valid argument:
Taking better care of the planet never hurts. And looking for a different way to relate to the planet as humans is exciting, but will also give us a lot of innovation and new perspectives. And we are living now: so if we want to be able to contribute something to those new perspectives, we have to be quick.
In any case, it can't hurt.