Many of us are feeling very upset about the ecological destruction caused by our species and anxious about the future of the planet. Often called ‘eco anxiety’ or ‘climate anxiety’, it’s a completely natural response to the situation we’re in. We face a massive existential threat to our survival. A threat of our own making.
The sad story of western culture
Ever since the birth of agriculture, around 12,000 years ago, humanity’s relationship with the planet has been changing. As we began cultivating the land and capturing and rearing animals, we started to believe that we could own the earth, and all other living creatures. Nature came to be seen simply as a resource; something to be exploited for our benefit. Before this, ancient people saw themselves as part of nature. Not only this, they actually worshipped animals, the elements, plants. They had an important emotional and spiritual connection with the land on which they lived.
The fracturing of our relationship with nature accelerated rapidly after the Middle Ages, when scientific thought and ‘rational’ thinking began to dominate western culture. In 1637 the philosopher René Descartes declared: “I think, therefore I am.” He claimed that everything other than humanity was simply ‘matter’ – and all other life on the planet was instantly relegated to something meaningless. The only thing that really mattered to him was the human mind and what went on inside it. This was known as the Cartesian Split, but this disconnection between us and the rest of nature continued through the Age of Enlightenment and the industrial revolution.
Modern technology, consumerism and individualism have separated us even further from other life on earth and, of course, ourselves. It now seems perfectly ‘normal’ that we spend most of our lives on screens. Children rarely play outdoors in a wild and unstructured way. Many people don’t even know where their food comes from. Our culture is losing hold of a fundamental reality: that we are part of nature.
‘Normal’ doesn’t mean ‘natural’
It's important to remember that what’s now considered ‘normal’ isn’t necessarily healthy. We tend to think that what’s normal is also natural. But our culture has become so divorced from the actual needs of human beings that normal is neither healthy nor natural. Our responses to our culture include mental and physical illness, addiction and eco anxiety. The true abnormality lies not with the individual but with the culture itself.
This is brilliantly examined by Dr Gabor Maté in a recent podcast at the Collective Trauma Summit.
He points out that what we think of as ‘civilization’ is actually a tiny blip in humanity’s history. For at least 150,000 years before agriculture started, we lived in small communities of hunter-gatherers. We evolved in response to the natural world all around us. Children were always with their parents. The community life revolved around the necessities of survival and a key part of this was that we supported each other. The idea that life was all about competition would have been completely alien to our ancestors. They understood that an individual human being could not survive alone.
The growth of inequality and its toxic affects
With the birth of agriculture and the idea of accumulated wealth came the invention of ‘classes’ of people: those who had wealth and those who didn’t. Certain groups of people became more powerful. ‘Masculine’ traits, such as intellect, became more valued than ‘feminine’ traits, such as emotion. As more wealth and power was accumulated in the northern hemisphere cultures, fair skinned people came to be seen as superior to dark skinned people. ‘Western’ values became dominant, because of the accumulation of power in the west. Eventually, the toxic combination of wealth and power led to the idea that some people were less human than others. This ended in the slave trade, where people were kidnapped from African countries by western colonial powers and shipped home to work in servitude, without any human rights at all.
And although modern societies now see slavery as an aberration, we’ve still seen a gradual exacerbation of inequality around the world. Put into this context, it’s easier to understand how non-human life fell so low down the pecking order, but it’s also really important to see the connection between all this inequality.
The modern world is not meeting our basic needs
Dr Maté explains that from an evolutionary psychological perspective, all people are born with certain needs:
Unconditional loving acceptance
Attachment to and contact with others
Meaning and purpose in our lives
Connection to nature
Free play and the freedom to be creative
Modern western society actively stops us from being able to meet these needs. We are not accepted unless we conform to certain standards. We are isolated from each other - the fact that the UK now has a Minister for Loneliness says a lot. Modern capitalism requires us to be producers of goods and services rather than the creative, wild beings we were meant to be. We are forced to subjugate our authentic selves so that we can fit in with the wider expectations of our society.
The stress of living in our toxic modern culture shows up as physical and mental illness, frustration, obesity, eco anxiety, anger, unhappiness, bitterness….the list goes on. It’s important to remember that these reactions are perfectly healthy and normal.
Ecopsychology (and its practical application, ecotherapy) tries to find ways for us to reconnect with our wild, healthy selves, each other and the rest of nature. Our mental health – and indeed, our survival as a species – depends on it. At it’s heart, ecopsychology is all about healing the Cartesian Split. I’ll talk more about this in my next blog post.
So the next time you feel eco anxiety, remember that you are having a perfectly healthy reaction. The problem lies not with you but with our culture, which refuses to recognise what’s really going on.
