Lertzman and Norgaard

Lertzman, R (2011). Interview with Kari Norgaard, Ecopsychology. 3(1)

 
"I have been highlighting in my work three central emotions raised by climate change: fear, helplessness, and guilt," Kari Norgaard tells Renee Lertzman, in what turns out to be a nicely expository conversation.

As someone who has been too committed to recruiting-by-shouting - to acting as a new age Cassandra trying to startle people out of their torpor or stupor of whatever was keeping them in apparent climate paralysis, it's almost embarrassing to see so clearly an explanation that I understood in my gut but never acted upon: people really, really don't want to think about it.

As Norgaard says: "The scale of change that climate scientists are describing evokes a level of fear that is very profound, very significant, and much bigger than just thinking about the ozone hole—which we were able to respond to pretty effectively and fairly quickly through the Montreal Protocol."

(Interesting reference here: the Montreal Protocol was one of the greatest negotiated solutions in the history of international diplomacy on earth; how can we get back to that useful place?)

Returning to the theme, Norgaard says, "If you have a lot of guilt or fear and yet your emotion norms do not allow for that to be expressed, then it is very difficult to do anything with that and it becomes particularly paralyzing."

And also, "It seems to me that a big piece of what is so paralyzing for people is the sense that they are alone in actually taking climate change seriously, which in turn makes them further convinced that there is nothing really that can be done. One can look at various studies of what motivates social change or what causes people to change behavior. But certainly having a group of people around you who are doing something can make people feel more empowered"

I'm finding a pattern here, and while this let's-get-together-and-bake-a-solution prescription sounded lame when Mary Pipher said it in The Green Boat, it sounds practical - and adequate - here. Adequate, at least, in that it amounts to a realistic recommendation that recognizes the potential depth of human despair and the height of the mountain that we have to climb - a journey that will take much longer if we continue to gambol about the foothills in isolated paralysis, imagining that closing our eyes will make the problem go away. Norgaard - and Pipher, as well, for that matter, are settling on a better solution - even if it is very modest in scope.