How can we survive and flourish in a world that we ourselves have created that threatens much of what we love and cherish?
There are many sources of instability in our world, some are driven by the natural cycles of geological epochs and others by the seasons of the year and the courses of an ordinary life. Among these sources of instability, anthropogenic climate change has a special place, and has sparked a desperate search for what are called “climate solutions.” But for there to be solutions there must be problems, and we need to be crystal clear about what the problem is that climate solutions are supposed to solve.
Triggered by the growing consciousness of air and water pollution, the category of climate anxiety (also called eco-grief or solastalgia) was coined. But the anxieties around climate change are deeper and more fundamental than what is suggested by the word “problem.” Scratch an environmental problem and you’ll find profound questions about what we value and why, who we are and what we love, and how we grieve our various losses.
“Mother” nature—as nature is thought of in many cultures—provides the physical presuppositions that structure the ways we live, manage our affairs, and organize our societies. Climate is an expression of these presuppositions: It constitutes a condition of our lives, much like the cultures and communities in which we are embedded and how we are embodied.
Conditions should not be confused with problems. Conditions are facts we must live with while problems are open to solutions. Yet the distinction between them is to some extent in the minds of the beholders. In the United States, for example, the authority of the Electoral College helps to define what counts as constitutional presidential politics. Despite the anomalies it sometimes produces, it is generally regarded as a condition to live with rather than as a problem to be solved.
We can imagine an American political system without an electoral college, but what is difficult to imagine is how we might get there from here. And so we live with the Electoral College as a condition of our collective political lives. On the other hand, mass migration into the United States is often viewed as a problem, with “mass deportation” as the name of a solution (whether it is a real solution to a real problem is another matter). A great deal of political rhetoric is aimed at framing matters either as conditions that we must live with or problems that can be solved with effective leadership.
This framing struggle occurs daily and regularly even in each of our own minds. Is my propensity to procrastinate a condition I must live with and learn to work around, or is it a problem that I should grab by the scruff of the neck and banish from my life? Even mortality is seen by some as a problem to be solved with cryogenics or by downloading the contents of our minds into alternative hardware as solutions rather than accepting mortality as a condition that bounds our aspirations and gives our lives meaning.
While conditions are not problems that we solve, they too are transient, for change is intrinsic to the conditions that govern life on Earth. What makes the climate change that is now underway different from the climate changes of the past is that it is anthropogenic. We are causing it, and we must learn to live with what we are bringing about. This brute fact is both a source and consequence of a confusing panoply of human emotions from guilt and regret to indifference and feelings of superiority over other living things.
Psychological, physical, social, and even spiritual resilience are needed to survive and flourish in the future that we are creating.
It did not have to be this way. Nearly half a century ago, when the precautionary case for phasing out fossil fuels was consolidating, climate change was a problem that could have been solved or managed. But now the genie is out of the bottle and cannot be put back in, at least not on time scales we understand and care about. Electric cars, solar panels, energy-efficient appliances, and smart buildings—all of these are important, but they will not return the atmosphere to its pre-industrial baseline.
We must learn to live with rising seas, more extreme weather, ecological disruption and the ensuing human consequences including mass migration and intensifying conflict. Even geoengineering technologies that have the potential to radically alter the Earth’s energy balance are not solutions to the problem of climate change. They promise to remake the world and present us with different conditions for life on earth, not return us to those of the past.
Psychological, physical, social, and even spiritual resilience are needed to survive and flourish in the future that we are creating. Summoning the strength, expertise, wisdom, and motivation is difficult. We transform the planet for many good reasons: to feed a large and growing human population, to maintain health and comfort, to enable mobility beyond the dreams of most twentieth-century people and even many people today.
However, we also design, build, and orchestrate systems that cater to relatively trivial desires: year-round 70-degree indoor spaces, luxury foods (which in many cases require live animals to be shipped around the world under terrible conditions), golf courses and ski resorts in deserts, and other objects of our individual and collective fantasy. Most of the benefits from these ventures are harvested by the rich and powerful while the poor suffer most of the costs.
Making matters worse, we know that these systems episodically fail in both predictable and unpredictable ways. As we look over the horizon to a steadily warming and unstable world, some of us are increasingly aware that this way of life cannot really continue. And we are right: it won’t.
Our children may live in a world in which the seas have reclaimed Miami Beach and Miami itself has begun to reassemble as an island city. By then several member states of the United Nations may have ceased to exist. What we have done and what is unfolding is so unfathomable that we often tune out the speed, scope, and scale of the changes that we are witnessing. Reason abandons us while anxiety remains.
Such enormous uncertainty raises spiritual questions—questions of meaning-making amid suffering, fear, and loss. Some take up religion and ask God to send us a “great man”—a political leader, oligarch, or technologist—to save us from the consequences of our actions. Others simply pray: for justice, for the good life to continue, or for particular asks (e.g., a storm to change direction or a child to heal).
The truly spiritually resilient hope for good outcomes and work with intelligence and compassion, but without expectation or attachment to success. Even on the small scale of everyday life, this kind of spiritual work is hard. It can feel woefully inadequate to the enormity of the future we are facing.
Climate change presents challenges that require us to mobilize the resources of science, medicine, engineering, law, economics, politics, and the social sciences. But it also poses spiritual, philosophical, and therapeutic challenges: How can we survive and flourish in a world that we ourselves have created that threatens much of what we love and cherish? This is the most profound question of our century, and one that we have bequeathed to our children.
Spiritual resilience is one of the many forms of mastery that climate change demands, and training ourselves and our children to bring this discipline to bear in the seasons and decades ahead is demanding work that we should embrace, for ourselves and for those who will come after us.
Dale Jamieson and Bonnie Nadzam ’99 met at Carleton when Nadzam was an English and environmental studies (ENTS) student and Jamieson was the Henry R. Luce Professor of Human Dimensions of Global Change, helping establish Carleton’s ENTS program. In 2015 they co-authored the book Love in the Anthropocene, and they have worked together on several projects since then, including a recent 15-country study on zoonotic disease and global animal markets, jointly supported by the Center for Environment and Animal Protection at New York University, which Jamieson founded and directed before retiring last year, and the Harvard Animal Law & Policy Program, where Nadzam is a research fellow.
Benjamin Flouw is an artist and author based in Marseille, France.