[The New York Times published an online report about climate change that appeared eight days before it reappeared in the print edition of this week’s Sunday Magazine devoted to climate change. Two additional reports that appeared with the original are even more painful to read, yet I’ve let my final draft comment on the original stand because it already made clear where climate change is driving travel and tourism.]
The New York Times has published a milestone article that favors the outlook of The Climate Traveler and its core value of Travel To the Deep Nearby. The Times article brings us to the cusp of climate-aware tourism that in 2024 will become a popular new normal for learning about life on Earth.
The piece, “Climate Change Is Keeping Therapists Up at Night; How anxiety about the planet’s future is transforming the practice of psychotherapy,” never mentions travel or tourism. Yet that fruit hangs as low as the apple plucked by Eve from the Tree of Knowledge.
My last two postings about the nondenominational spiritual vibe that suffuses the Coconut Grove Farmers Market tie directly to this. Across short or long distances, when people travel they will want to be among people — fellow travelers and local residents — that respect the land.
A narrative like rolling thunder
Contributing writer Brooke Jarvis opens with psychotherapist Andrew Bryant in Portland, Oregon who contrasts his growing numbers of clients who express anxiety about climate change with others that haven’t brought it up even on “days when the Air Quality Index [was] so high you couldn’t see to the end of the block.“
On those days, Bryant himself would broach the subject. He learned that climate anxiety is a different challenge accompanied by “strange and disorienting and scary [thoughts about] how to deal with all the strong feelings — helplessness, rage, depression, guilt — being stirred up inside them.”
When Bryant asked colleagues what their clients tell them, the therapists together realize that none had been trained to analyze issues like climate change or environmental anxiety. Psychotherapy is meant to adjust individual clients to the norm, but the norm has been foot-dragging about inconvenient science.
The omission was important enough to turn Bryant’s practice from focusing patients on their personal growth to “a species-wide problem, a profound and constant reminder of how deeply intertwined we all are in complex systems — atmospheric, biospheric, economic — that are much bigger than us.
“It sometimes felt like a direct challenge to old therapeutic paradigms — and perhaps a chance to replace them with something better.” Bryant’s own encyclopedic website, Climate and Mind, reflects this.
The field has now modified our human self-aggrandizement endowed by holy writ over all animal and plant life to become instead stewards of Earth’s entire ecosystem.
A founding paper of climate psychology
Jarvis introduces us to a study published by scholars Susan Clayton and Thomas J. Doherty in a 2011 issue of American Psychologist as The Psychological Impacts of Global Climate Change. “They correctly predicted the rise of climate-driven migration and stories of xenophobia and community mistrust that led the American Psychological Association in 2017 to define ‘ecoanxiety’ as ‘a chronic fear of environmental doom.’”
Jarvis further introduces us to the Climate Psychology Alliance North America that lists more than 100 psychotherapists who are what the organization calls “climate aware.”
She cites a paper from June this year in the Yale Journal of Biology and Medicine cautioning that the world at large was facing “a psychological condition of ‘systemic uncertainty’ in which difficult emotions arise not only from experiencing the ecological loss itself, but also from the fact that our lives are inescapably embedded in systems that keep on making those losses worse.“
Climate change, in other words, surrounds us with constant reminders of “ethical dilemmas and deep social criticism of modern society. In essence, climate crisis questions the relationship of humans with nature and the meaning of being human in the Anthropocene.” For example, by our propensity to manufacture and release omnipresent nonbiodegradable plastic waste.
Jarvis cites the psychologist David W. Kidner, Ph.D., a former oil industry design engineer recently retired from Nottingham Trent University, that humans have historically assumed life “within a context that is obviously unhealthful [and that] has become painful: a dimly intuited ‘fall’ from which we spend our lives trying to recover, a guilt we can never quite grasp or expiate — a feeling of loss or dislocation whose true origins we look for, but often fail to see. This confusion leaves us feeling even worse.”
Rebecca Weston, a licensed clinical social worker practicing in New York and a co-president of the Climate Psychology Alliance North America, tells Jarvis that “feelings like grief and fear and shame aren’t a form of sickness. These are actually rational responses to a world that’s very scary and very uncertain and very dangerous for people. . . [I]s the definition of health resisting the things that are making us so unhappy? That’s the profound tension within our field.”
Cultural anthropologist and ecotherapist, Nicole Torres, Ph.D., who practices in Bellingham, tells Jarvis that“ she sometimes takes her therapy sessions outside or asks patients to remember their earliest and deepest connections with animals or plants or places. She believes it will help if they learn to think of themselves ‘as rooted beings that aren’t just simply living in the human overlay on the environment.’”
It was valuable to recognize, Torres said, that “we are part of the land and suffer when it suffers.”
Says Jarvis, “She encourages her clients to find a community of other people who care about the same problems, with whom they could connect outside the therapy room. . . ‘People who share your values. People who are committed to not looking away. [emphasis added]
“‘There was no fully separate space, to be mended on its own. There was only a shared and broken world, and a community united in loving it.’”
And so Travel To the Deep Nearby, which urges that we visit places closer to home by the least polluting transportation, places that credibly hold themselves out as locally self-resourceful. We become one with where we travel.
The same applies to how we welcome visitors to the places where we ourselves live.
NOTES
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/21/magazine/climate-anxiety-therapy.html
David W. Kidner, Ph.D., a former oil industry design engineer recently retired from Nottingham Trent University as professor of Critical Realism, Environmental Philosophy, and Critical Psychology.
Scholars Susan Clayton and Thomas J. Doherty in the May-June 2011 issue of American Psychologist as The Psychological Impacts of Global Climate Change Susan Clayton and Thomas J. Doherty on https://www.apa.org/pubs/journals/releases/amp-66-4-265.pdf posited that climate change
American Psychological Association (A)A. Mental Health and our Changing Climate: Impacts, Implications and Guidance. APA, 2017. (https://www.apa.org/news/press/releases/2017/03/mental-health-climate.pdf).
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/21/magazine/climate-anxiety-therapy.html [to the end]
