A climate of trauma

The unfolding environmental tragedy arose from collective human trauma and the response to it has been shaped by that trauma – including COP28. Fortunately, there is a wave of activity emerging to help.

An audio narration of this essay is available.

When I first heard someone explain that the climate crisis is a result of our collective human trauma, I was a bit confused. ‘Speak for yourself mate,’ I thought. I hadn’t been feeling particularly traumatised about life – just worried about the damage we are doing to the environment. Surely the climate crisis is a pollution problem which our political and economic systems aren’t allowing us to respond to properly, I thought? So how could people’s emotional injuries be involved in such systemic problems? It didn’t make sense to me. Over the years, as I have learned more about what is meant by collective trauma, and what is at the root of the destructiveness of modern societies, I changed my tune. I have come to understand what people mean when they say the climate crisis, like the ecological crisis more broadly, results from our collective trauma. By that, I mean the subtle and lasting psychological wounds that most of us have from growing up in societies that maintain stories of reality that generate fears about ourselves and each other. Therefore, a trauma-informed approach to the climate crisis can open up new areas for individual and collective action, as the climate becomes more unstable. This trauma lens can also help explain why the response to the environmental crisis has been so inadequate, and even why environmentally-useless climate summits have become so popular. As the world’s climate professionals turn their attention to COP28 in Dubai, highlighting the subtle but pervasive role of trauma in influencing our behaviours can bring wider attention to this important topic and open new arenas for meaningful action on the environmental predicament. That is why I am pleased to participate in the trauma-aware Climate Consciousness online summit that runs in parallel with the deathly programme in Dubai.  

My own work on collapse readiness and response arises from the failure of the world to significantly address the ecological and climate situation over the last decades. An indicator of the failure is that global emissions of carbon dioxide are over 60% higher than when the first Conference of the Parties (COP) of the UN’s framework convention on climate change (UNFCCC) met. The COP summits haven’t just accompanied that failure but been a contributor to it, through distracting the world from existing risk assessments and avoiding addressing root causes until too late. For instance, in Kyoto in 2007, delegates sidestepped proposals for a global framework for carbon taxes, to instead develop markets for the permits to pollute. While they hailed that as a success, critics warned it would be a huge failure by enriching polluters and financiers without curbing emissions. That also meant it alienated the public. In 2009 nations agreed to phase out fossil fuel subsidies, but they have since gone up, now at around 7 trillion dollars a year. They also agreed that emissions needed to peak by 2020, but they have been going up since then. At COP28, delegates sit down to discuss how to stay below 1.5C warming above pre-industrial average temperatures, despite the world’s climate having reached that already in 2023, decades ahead of predictions. Perhaps more than anything, the current fiasco illustrates that the summits have been about something other than engaging reality in meaningful ways.

My first and last time at a COP summit was in Egypt in 2022. I used the platform of the media room to convey some neglected issues to people following the climate policy agenda. Two of my speeches were warnings. First, that there will be a spike in global temperatures due to the reductions in aerosols. Second, that there is a new and growing kind of climate scepticism that regards any action as motivated by authoritarianism and commercial greed. These issues did not enter the official process nor the conversations of the tens of thousands of people attending to do business. This year it is unlikely those issues will be discussed properly, as the event focuses on an outdated understanding of climate change, not the climate that has been changing rapidly in the months leading up to the summit.

With almost 50,000 attendees at COP27 in Egypt, last year was the largest summit ever, and is being greatly surpassed this year in Dubai. If judged purely in terms of the numbers of people attending, the media noise generated, the deals done (publicly and privately), the personal networking, and the PR gains for attendees, these annual COPs are hugely successful events. I believe that type of ‘success’ is for two reasons. First, they help global capitalism to function by enabling commercial deal making, promoting an ideology of technology and reform, and keeping the climate issue away from economics or any mechanisms that might involve real enforcement. Second, the summits feed the trauma-shaped addictions of many of the participants. To understand that, we need to recognise the relationship of our collective trauma to climate change – so let’s dive in.

The connection between collective trauma and climate change

Most people in the world today live in industrial consumer societies. As such, we experience being ourselves in ways that have been shaped by those societies. That makes me curious about how myself, and others, have been influenced. The typical view within modern societies is to think that we have each been ‘civilised’, through discipline and moral exhortation, so that we behave better for both ourselves and society. However, there is another view, which doesn’t start from the assumption that we are born with moral deficiencies. Associated with that view, I particularly like the (pre-)Buddhist idea of Brahma Vihara, or four virtues. They point to the idea of an original human nature, prior to any psychological injuries from experiences and cultures. That original human nature includes a general benevolence towards all life, compassion for the suffering of sentient beings, vicarious joy at others’ joy, and an equanimity or non-attachment to those three emotions and all else that occurs. The idea is that delusions and fears block us from those virtues, which are actually our original human nature and natural way of being. With that in mind, we can be curious about how growing up in modern societies has created delusions and fears that then shape our perceptions and behaviours in ways that are problematic for ourselves, others and wider nature.

We have been taught so many ideas that are deep within us, often not commented upon because they have become ‘common sense’ assumptions. Some of the simplest deep stories that create emotional injury are that we are separate from the rest of life, that we can and should be in control, that we need to strive and compete, that we need to suppress our emotions and that other humans are dangerous (or even that we are to others). These all relate to a ‘scarcity mentality’ that there is not enough for everyone, and that we aren’t enough as we naturally are.

All of those deep stories produce a traumatic emotional injury, by which I mean a form of emotional hurt that stays with us and promotes defensive, ill-considered, over-reactions, to experiences that occur today and hereafter. For instance, when we seek to know what’s occurring in the world, where the reality might present a difficulty to ourselves, or those we love, a trauma-shaped sense of unsafety can mean we look for what story to believe that calms us down. That is a story where we think we are less in danger and that we belong to a group which we believe gives us security, meaning and status. That traumatic response might be happening to climate scientists as much as anyone else. It might happen as much to medical professionals as it does within contrarians on health issues. It is at the heart of people’s susceptibility to polarisation between false binaries of elite-defending orthodoxies and outsider-bonding heresies. Then there is the personal, not collective, trauma that people have, such as from our childhood experiences. For instance, adult children of alcoholic and abusive parents are known to suffer in various ways and benefit from support groups. The existence of personal trauma presents a difficulty for responding wisely and kindly to bad news and actual difficulties and disruptions. However, it also offers an opportunity to people if they have been able to consciously heal from such traumas, to become better able to approach the generalised societal traumas I mentioned earlier.

It is important to recognise that, for most of us, both our environment and society will become more disturbed and disturbing for the rest of our lives. Consequently, there will be no respite from triggers of trauma responses during this new era of societal collapse. The difficulties will become worse both at distance and locally. That includes even the most local, as our colleagues, neighbours, friends, family and ourselves may react poorly to increasing difficulties and worries, if not aided to respond differently. 

In this case, ignorance is not bliss. For if we are fortunate enough to recognise this situation now, as well as understand something about trauma, then we can try to develop our own resilience and that of the people we know. This opens up a huge arena for positive responses, which is something I will explore in closing this essay.

We can also become aware of what some psychologists label a ‘pre-traumatic stress’ disorder. That is a term to describe problematic reactions to bad news or setbacks which in themselves wouldn’t actually disrupt our lives. These occurrences can impact us more if we are anticipating great suffering and tragedies to come but haven’t allowed ourselves the time and space to integrate that anticipation into our sense of self and world.

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The collective trauma of delegates at COP28

There are many ways of responding to climate chaos that could be shaped, in part, by our personal and collective trauma. Any action that is partly motivated, consciously or not, by a need to quell difficult emotions might be partly influenced by unhealed trauma. The most obvious instances of that are when people choose to dismiss climate change altogether, using the vast array of illogical or irrelevant statements available for that. “The climate has always changed” or “people are always screaming about Armageddon” are the type of statements you may have heard. Even the apparently more sophisticated critiques, such as citing the importance of sunspots or water vapour, can be seen as emotional avoidance when the science for those views falls apart on closer scrutiny. But none of us are free of collective trauma or immune to avoidant patterns, including those of us who believe ourselves to be dedicated to action on climate change. I know that my incessant research analysis, writing, educating and advocacy over the last six years has sometimes been an addictive behaviour to channel my anxious energy into something. Some fulltime activists might also be driven by emotional pain aversion. Being aware of trauma puts a question mark on the famous climate activist phrase “the antidote to despair is action.” Perhaps it’s not. Instead, the antidote to despair might be healing oneself and others from collective trauma, finding more equanimity, and therefore making wiser choices over future actions. The recent rise of authoritarian sentiments and even violent ideation amongst exasperated Western environmentalists might also be an indicator of unresolved trauma influencing them. What we can do to help each other not react from our trauma, is something I will turn to in a moment. But first, it is important to consider how the dominant agenda on climate change, including the whole UNFCCC process, is influenced by this collective trauma.

Attending a UN summit can provide one with a sense of being successful, important and even virtuous. I speak from experience of that, due to my previous career. To begin with there is the imagery of power. The feeling that you matter can be increased not only by who you are ‘rubbing shoulders’ with, but also as you might be quoted in the media and mentioned favourably by your boss back home. Then there is the process of establishing virtue. For scientists and others, participation in the COP summit, as well as the IPCC processes, provide a sense of belonging within an informed, dedicated, respectable and virtuous group. For activists, speaking in the side meetings of such summits provides a chance for ‘moral exhortation’ in the name of holding leaders accountable. Recent decades have demonstrated that such commentary has served little purpose other than for activists to publicly claim themselves to be the source of moral clarity and conviction. Although they may feel and express dismay at the lack of action, they gain a renewed sense of belonging within a virtuous group.

To obtain momentary trauma-alleviation, all attendees need to be wilfully blind to the reality that the COPs of the UNFCCC have always existed to engineer a never-ending conversation rather than either inquiry or appropriate action. To an uninformed reader, that can sound cynical, rather than obvious. So, I will take a few moments to demonstrate how obvious it is.

Since the start, the UNFCCC and its COPs have focused on the articulation of far-off targets of limiting warming, carbon budgets, and policy regimes for new profit-making activity (carbon markets). That was instead of simple policies to curb emissions, such as an upstream global carbon tax adjusted for GDP and linked to trade treaties to enable enforcement. If the politicians of the world had been committed to significant action on climate change then they wouldn’t have developed the UNFCCC, and instead focused on the root causes and mechanisms for compliance. They would have acknowledged the correlation between GDP increase, energy and carbon gases. They would have acknowledged the wider correlation between GDP increase and destruction of the environment. They would have recognised that root causes of the requirement for GDP growth are found in an expansionist monetary system and a lack of economic equality.

The COPs utilise scientific assessments from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) which involves a process of finding mediocre consensus across a volume of research papers, instead of a rigorous questioning of the situation and assessment of the salience of research and data to the situation faced by humanity. Those IPCC processes have swamped the clarity of existing science on the likelihood of future global heating, not only by seeking consensus from a volume of research outputs, but also by over-emphasising the relevance of findings from computer modelling. That is not just because of worshipful attitudes towards software and those who can programme computers. It is also because computer modelling has provided latitude for adjusting perceptions of the threat from a changing climate and an unending demand for further funding for ever better computer systems, software and simulations. The institutional and personal incentives of professionals working in climate science and policy to ‘play along’ rather than focus on what’s already known, and act on it, are huge, and lead to what I’ve previously described as the sins of denial of sustainability professionals as well as the emergence of ‘climate users’ who appear to treat it more as a career than an existential crisis.

You might ask whether it matters that the science is too reticent and outdated, and the official negotiations fail to achieve any real outcomes for the environment, if at least the COPs are helping convene business and civil society to take action. That is one of the flimsy excuses we hear from some participants. It is true that the COPs host and promote various organisations to seal deals and celebrate their actions, but those are insignificant (or harmful) and collectively have not yet demonstrated any positive impact on the climate. Sadly, if we assess the recent COPs by the activities of the volume of people attending, it has become a trade show and career fest at the end of the world.

This is the awkward truth about everyone attending the conference, including nearly all activists: they are within the global top 10% of earners that produce about 50% of global emissions due to being wedded to industrial consumer ways of living. For many of them it provides a fun 1-to-2-week respectable escape from the mundanity of their professional lives – a holiday from the daily grind. It is an easy way to ask for funding and allocate budgets, and justify your trip to colleagues. These aren’t the kind of people who would feel naturally aligned to desires for a revolution in the socio-economic order. Instead, more reports, conferences, and quotes in the Guardian constitutes the natural habitat for the climate user.

A lack of sociological and psychological expertise amongst those engaged in climate science and policy leads to confused, and sometimes hostile, responses to these obvious critiques. They claim that to critique the IPCC, UNFCCC and mainstream climatology constitutes a conspiracy theory, or an ‘ad hominem’ attack, or an anti-science attitude, or even bad faith fossil fuel propaganda. Even some vocal scientists active in the climate campaign group Extinction Rebellion make such claims as they call for our deference to the IPCC and its participating scientists.

Psychologists warn us of the inevitable aggression against people calling out the charade. Writing for the Climate Psychology Alliance, one expert explained that “there are two ways the psyche experiences and deals with painful unprocessed experience. It is embodied as trauma or unconsciously projected, away from the self into an other that then can be identified as the bad, in order to defend against anxiety. Attacks on truth [about how bad the climate situation is] as doomism work as an invitation to do just that, to project back out the unbearable anxiety, blame the truthtellers for not telling the truth, reversing the actual situation.” Fortunately, such analysis means I don’t take personally the coordinated attempts by some elite scholars, political hacks and nuclear sector professionals to cast me as unprofessional, unethical, anti-humanist, primitivist, racist and, well, generally nasty, for concluding the situation is far worse than they recognise.

The truth that trauma avoids is that our climate is already changing at an accelerating pace which humanity cannot control through our non-existent emissions cuts and minimal efforts at drawdown. On the one hand, the politicians lie that they want a Net Zero society, while their policies go in the opposite direction (such as new drilling licences and subsidies for fossil fuels). On the other hand, many environmentalists lie (to themselves as much as anyone else) when they say we need Net Zero by 2030, because it is physically impossible to achieve that, due both to the extent of current dependence on fossil fuels (at over 80%) and the limited availability of critical minerals for the batteries needed. The new public debate on climate change between people who are entirely dependent on mainstream media versus those relying on populist contrarian media is actually just fear avoidant nonsense (I explain this in my book Breaking Together).  

What can be done about this climate of trauma?

A trauma-informed perspective on the reasons modern humans have caused an ecological disaster and been so poor at responding to it, invites us to consider all aspects of our lives and how we can heal ourselves and each other. I am not an expert on trauma. As I explained at the start, I didn’t really understand this framing of the predicament we are in. But by inviting people to help each other through the pain and despair of accepting climate reality to then reconstitute their sense of self and how they live their lives, I realise that was an invitation into healing collective trauma. Therefore, the work of the Deep Adaptation Forum (DAF) remains critical, and I hope that more environmental professionals and activists will benefit from its many activities that enable emotional co-regulation in the face of collapse. The intellectual work of excavating the harmful ideas and habits of modernity is also useful. It can help inform facilitators of group processes that help us to be with each other in ways that don’t suppress our emotions, and give space for the recognition of psychological wounds. That is why “deep relating” processes and “circling” are such important modalities for people to develop inner resilience in the face of current and future disruptions. That is also why introducing ‘deep relating’ to participants in our online and in-person courses on Leading Through Collapse has proved to be one of the most transformative contributions. But the field of trauma healing is huge, which is why new initiatives like The Collective Trauma Summit and The Pocket Project (which runs the Climate Consciousness summit) are so important.  

One area of trauma-healing that has been widely recognised and utilized, is to get out of urban environments. As a suburban kid we always went hiking at the weekends, in forests, meadows, or along coasts. It was our form of recharging and revitalising. Most of us live disconnected from wider nature, and that will not help the healing. In the absence of being close to wilder environments, then even gardening organically can help with a sense of reconnection to natural reality. The importance of nature reconnection in our healing is why we named our regenerative farm and training centre the Bekandze Farm School. Known widely in Buddhist communities due to the Medicine Buddha mantra, Bekandze is a Sanskrit word describing healing through reunion.

Because of where I have chosen to live, I have the luck and benefit of exposure to many modalities for emotional co-regulation. I even made a short film about the importance of these modalities and the people involved in them, for my own journey of considering the possibility of societal collapse – Grieve Play Love. However, this experience has also given me the sad insight that even being immersed in such ‘healing’ environments doesn’t necessarily mean people are capable of brave, wise, kind and creative ways of engaging with our planetary predicament. Instead, the form of healing from collective and personal trauma that many have pursued is a bliss-seeking pseudo-spirituality that regards the spiritual realm as special and different to the ‘ordinary’ aspects of life. Although many of the healing modalities and spiritual experiences can be deeply healing, they can also aid a form of ‘spiritual bypassing’ that avoids any deeper introspection or cultivation of resilience. It often involves thinking that ‘being spiritual’ includes pleasure-seeking, pain-avoiding and ego-affirming attitudes and behaviours. Within that emotional avoidance, spiritual bypassers can be attracted to fantastical beliefs and ignore incongruence between their espoused values and daily lives. Therefore, many people in the expatriate ‘conscious communities’ of Bali and elsewhere are now ‘planetary bypassing’ to find ways of avoiding the anxiety and grief associated with our environmental predicament. Some of them dismiss the ecological crisis as a hoax, while others choose to believe it will be solved by imagining perfect futures, praying to aliens, or suchlike. Basically, they choose anything other than patient solidarity with people to create meaningful change.

The denialist responses of people who are, nevertheless, extremely well resourced with trauma-healing modalities has helped me to see that if our prime (but sometimes unacknowledged) desires are to feel safe, special, and happy, then our commitment to truth and kindness can wane, especially on difficult topics. That points to how a deeper healing from collective and personal traumas cannot stop at feeling safer in our own skins. Rather, the greatest healing is to lessen our fear of death. If we somehow reach a point where we are less attached to being alive, then the various injuries from feeling unsafe and ‘not enough’ will fall away. I no longer think it is enough to aspire to transcend the ego. Such aims can become a desire to live a life filled with more bliss, which then augments the ego. Instead, we can become a bit more OK with being dead. Even by the end of today. Then, from that place, the collective traumas can melt away. That is why Reverend Stephen Wright explains in his new book that deep adaptation is death adaptation. There are many routes towards releasing ourselves from our fears of not existing anymore, or not existing until we have experienced a certain amount of life, made a certain kind of contribution to others, or reached certain insights. Therefore, as so many people have recognised, the climate tragedy presents a spiritual invitation. As I explained in my ‘Buddha At The Gas Pump’ interview, this does not mean that we are entering an age of mass awakening, but that there are increasing opportunities for such awakening due to the troubles in the world. A society with more such awakening is what I described in my book as an ‘evotopia’, as more people are more present to reality, with all its joy and pain.

If some of these ideas are new to you, then you might be wondering how to begin to allow yourself to discover and heal from any personal and collective traumas. For many people it has started with exiting the rush… that rat race or treadmill, however you might call it. Those exist for environmental professionals and activists as well – I was involved in my own green rat race. For most people, to exit the rush requires major changes in living and working arrangements, which can take some planning. Within the new space you create for yourself, you can then adjust focus and discover what a more resilient way of living will mean for yourself. It’s always good to talk to people, so I recommend joining one of the many online groups on ‘deep adaptation’ to introduce yourself and ask to meet others. Good luck.

The climate consciousness summit starts December 1st! https://summit.pocketproject.org/

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