Andy Revkin has posted a piece over on DotEarth that I highly recommend, as much for the reader comments as for the main post itself.

The piece is, ‘Shrinking’ the Climate Problem, and it includes a “post card” of from Renee Lertzman about the psychoanalytical work being done regarding how we react to the topic of climate change. Andy also did a short Q&A with her. I am far from being an expert in such matters, but I believe her main point is that instead of focusing directly on peoples’ behavior, we should first pay attention to their anxieties and sense of loss caused by the issue of climate change and proposed measures to minimize its impact on human beings.

I have to admit being of two minds about this. My knee-jerk response is to say it’s a lot of nonsense and that we should stick to the climate science and let people worry about their own adjustment to a new (to them) reality. But that kind of hard line might well be far less productive than what Lertzman is suggesting. I have no doubt that anxiety and loss are contributing significantly to the phenomenon of climate change denial. The inherent assumption that human beings evolved with as a fundamental part of our world view, that our planet is effectively infinite compared to what we take from it and the damage we do to it (killing animals and plants, releasing our various emissions). But now it is 2010, a time when we have approximately 6.7 billion human beings alive at once, after more than two centuries of rapidly increasing use of fossil fuels and their implied environmental impacts, we’re suddenly confronted with the nastiest and most obvious reality imaginable in terms of our environment: We don’t live on Infinite Earth, but on Spaceship Earth. That realization and the associated feeling of confinement would understandably trigger a humanity-wide attack of claustrophobia, and then in short order the “splitting” that Lertzman talks about, “the ability to split up the world and our internal experiences so we don’t have to feel anxiety, pain or fear”. This casts an interesting light on many of the deniers and their tactics we see online.[1]

But what are we to do about that view of the situation, assuming it’s accurate? This is where I run aground in thinking about this topic. If the fundamental makeup of human beings predisposes a large portion of them to reject well established science, then it seems we have only the following nightmarish options:

• Try to change the way the deniers think. This is state sponsored mind control, on a scale that makes 1984 look like a prototype.
• Force people to change their consumption decisions. To some extent we do this already, via things like CAFE standards for motor vehicles. We also change the effects of consumption, by setting limits on pollution from various industrial activities. But those tiny steps are nowhere near what the science tells us is needed to avoid a list of horrible outcomes in the next few decades. To impose the kind of change that’s needed on an unwilling populace would be impossible in anything approaching a democracy, especially one that, like the US, now has unlimited, undisclosed corporate political spending. The logical conclusion here is that it would literally take a form of eco-totalitarianism, nearly every right wing media darling’s favorite monster under the bed, to implement. The fact that these re the very same people making it impossible, to date, to peacefully make the needed changes, thus increasing the probability of the oppressive state action being used is yet another detail that seems to be lost on them while they battle for ratings points.
• Do nothing and hope that somehow we come to our sense before it’s too late. As I’ve made abundantly clear in the past, I think this is a recipe for disaster, given the immense level of inertia in climate change. Once we are encountering impacts so painful and so persistent that even many of the hardcore deniers start demanding that “someone do something about this!”, we will have already locked ourselves into a path of far greater damage and almost unimaginable pain in the ensuing 50 to 100 years.

(I’ll leave you to form your own conclusion about which of the above horror stories would be worst. I’m not sure which one I’d pick.)

If Lertzman and the many others are right, and it’s far from a simple matter of putting the right data into the right pretty graph in a PowerPoint slide to convince the deniers, then I’d guess that we’re in far more trouble, and our situation is far more urgent, than even most people who are fully engaged on sustainability issues realize.

By the way — I mentioned above the comments on Revkin’s piece. Please go read some of them, and you’ll see one of the most revealing displays of people lashing out at an expert opinion one could imagine.

[1] There is clearly a very important component of the denial machine that I’m ignoring in this post, those motivated purely by money, the people who spend considerable amounts of money to fund think tanks and support political candidates who willingly repeat and repackage whatever fossil fuel friendly message seems most useful at any given moment. I’ve long thought that those people were a tiny minority of the deniers, and I don’t think anything I’ve read from Lertzman or others on the topic changes my conclusion.

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