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.
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