I Wanted to Believe in the Limitlessness of Resilience

January 10, 2023 4:21 AM

As I watch the unfolding of extreme events across our planet, I find myself continuously relocated to that moment in the car with my brother. The sense of fracturing that ripples from a single shock event, even if the full extent of damage is yet to reveal itself. from The Great Forgetting by Summer Praetorius [CW: climate pessimism, mental illness]
posted by chavenet (9 comments total)

I'd never seen climate pessimism in a content warning before, and am having a complicated emotional reaction to it!

To get it out of the way I understand and appreciate anyone who's considerate enough to offer content warnings. And, like other content warnings, perhaps somebody who doesn't want to deal with the impact that reading about climate change would have on them, right now, and that's obviously their decision to make. (Here I am, explaining what content warnings do)

Apparently (!) part of me feels like we should not be able to opt out of that particular content: that we should all be marinating in the awareness of future horrors currently being wrought by petrocapitalism. And this probably comes from a (probably) wrongheaded belief that awareness brings about change. Which is probably the case for simple problems (or at least that awareness is necessary but not sufficient) but less so for the impossible conundrum that is enabling us to continue to foul our own nest.

So maybe that further imposed awareness—that some part of me believes would help—would more likely just generate suffering.

Thanks, I figured it out! Should I post this comment or should I have written it in notepad? Hm.
posted by rhooke at 6:45 AM on January 10, 2023 [7 favorites]

Very poignant article. I hadn't considered that biodiversity acted as a sort of resilience memory bank, that's a very good point.

What strikes me most about the dialog concerning climate change lately is that people think climate change is predictable. Things will get warmer, sea level will rise, that's about the size of it. But we've dumped hundreds of millions of years' worth of fossil fuel energy and pollutants into the planetary system in a couple of centuries. That's geological change on a human time scale. There are going to be a lot more consequences than heat and sea level rise, and a lot of them aren't going to be predictable until they're happening.

Like, for instance, climate change causes more gun violence.
Almost 8,000 US shootings attributed to unseasonable heat: Research suggests climate crisis may contribute to increased gun violence by pushing temperatures beyond normal ranges

Or, warming causes wildfires, which damage the ozone layer and cause more warming:
Australia fires damaged ozone layer, caused major warming, study says

Or, warming kills pollen:
Pollen and Heat: A Looming Challenge for Global Agriculture

Or, rising humidity can cause an increase in suicides:
Rising humidity could be linked to increase in suicides, report finds: Increasingly intense and frequent spells of humidity linked to global heating may exacerbate mental health conditions, with women and young people worst affected

Hell, we're still discovering tipping points we didn't know about:
'Tipping points' in Earth's system triggered rapid climate change 55 million years ago, research shows

Or hey, how about...
Global warming disaster could suffocate life on planet Earth, research shows

And now we're in a position where everyone wishes we had listened to the climate pessimists decades ago, but no-one is listening still.
posted by MrVisible at 7:33 AM on January 10, 2023 [16 favorites]

People are very much NOT LISTENING to anything that's warning of potential bad news these days. In every single context of life.
posted by jenfullmoon at 8:19 AM on January 10, 2023 [6 favorites]

Thank you for posting this. I found it very resonant, the chorus of suffering and illness at the personal level, with environmental apocalypse on the broader scale. Re the first comment: I found myself skimming over the climate parts of this article because I do find them sometimes overwhelmingly impossible to look at directly. I have a rule for myself that if something is too hard for me to watch/read, I don't need to, unless reading or watching it will increase my engagement with the issue.

I do know we all need to increase our engagement around slowing climate change and mass extinction, including taking action with others, and interrogating our own resistance to change.
posted by latkes at 9:54 AM on January 10, 2023 [1 favorite]

I read Seveneves last year.

I can't help thinking of the people in the book. [Spoilers]

Specically the people living on the doomed Earth. They all know they are doomed. Everyone and everything is. Nothing at all will remain after what is to come. There is no saving anything. Nothing can stop it. But it won't happen for a few years. In the time that remains people still have to live. Eat. Drink. Sleep. All the things that life requires.

Living in the 21^st century feels like that sometimes.
posted by ob1quixote at 10:48 AM on January 10, 2023 [5 favorites]

we should all be marinating in the awareness of future horrors currently being wrought by petrocapitalism

I really appreciate the note. I read plenty of climate pessimism things, I get the points. Climate activism, I would read that.
posted by aniola at 11:44 AM on January 10, 2023 [6 favorites]

This was a very interesting read but I can't help but feel tired of the "personal tragedy + something otherwise completely unrelated" genre.
posted by simmering octagon at 4:04 PM on January 10, 2023 [1 favorite]

Severe mental illness is a puzzle and a tragedy and it can wound the suffered and their loved ones so much. The juxtaposition is apt.

Maybe this isn't where you want the comment discussion to go but:

I proposal to change the tag here from Climate Pessimism to Climate Honesty.

The author is describing in brief (with legit citations) the outlines of what is happening and does not make outlier predictions about what will happen and not revel in detailed vingettes of the suffering and destruction.

Indeed she makes almost no predictions at all. Beyond observing that climate change's consequences are obviously bad, it is hard to imagine how more neutral any account that acknowledges climate change can be.

Maybe Im making too much of the term pessimism. The article is more important than and not well described by the pejorative.
posted by anecdotal_grand_theory at 12:46 AM on January 11, 2023 [3 favorites]

Geez, that story. For lack of money to pay for healthcare, it's possible that a TBI caused an early death for his brother. So horrible.
posted by tiny frying pan at 8:10 AM on January 11, 2023