In this episode of Healing From Within Sheryl Glick your host and author of The Living Spirit a story of spiritual awakening, spiritual communication healing Universal Energy and a guide to soul awareness and evolving intuition and am delighted to welcome Donna M Orange author of Climate Crisis, Psychoanalysis and Radical Ethics and discuss her efforts to fight climate change by caring for the earth and its inhabitants everywhere.
We share awareness of life in all in complexities in hopes of further becoming aware of the purpose of life, human nature, and ways we interact with each other and the planet. In metaphysical searches we become more aware of who we are and how to improve life individually and collectively. We will talk about the tendency of clinicians, healers and government workers to avoid the warnings, times of crisis, and our engagement with human suffering as we face the inextricably bound issues of global warming and massive social injustices. We look for ways to develop radical ethics of responsibility to truly awaken to climate change and bring professional involvement for demanding change from government such as living more simply, flying less, and caring for the earth more. Dr. Orange is a psychoanalyst and philosopher living in California who teaches at the NYU Postdoctoral Program and the Institute for the Psychoanalytic Study of Subjectivity, New York. Author of several books her most recent Nourishing the Inner Life of Clinicians and Humanitarians is a topic we all need to focus on.
Dr. Donna Orange when asked to think back to a memory from their earlier days and share a story of a person place event or value tells of her early days on the farm and the connection and freedom she felt in that open unrestricted beautiful world where childhood imaginings and dreams as well as joy could be experiences without the problems of the outside world. Thinking back, she also remembered being taught as a child to memorize the “natural resources” of the places we studied in geography class, including minerals, forests, sometimes fish and other animals. Now she realizes that, from the viewpoint of the United States in the 1950s, we were meant to learn what could be extracted from these faraway countries, then often known by colonial names, to grow the economy here. The people in these places, considered exotic and “primitive,” had nothing to teach us in our vast superiority. To study the world was to learn to dominate. While a passion for knowing may, instead, serve humanistic, ecological, and transcendent purposes—curing disease, alerting us to climate dangers, connecting us to others geographically distant and culturally strange to us—cognition as master rather than servant destroys, appropriating, dominating, and conquering, just as Hegel wrote.
Dr. Orange tells us why and how she decided to write Climate Crisis Psychoanalysis and Radical Ethics and how they all relate to each other and what can be achieved by bringing these thoughts together. Though she may never have wanted to write this book, she felt demanded, or a responsibility from which she could not turn away, an urgent call. Somehow, this urgency, this “stop now!” forced this task upon me. At this point in life, beginning retirement from clinical practice, Donna had hoped to slow down and perhaps, wanted to write something reflective, even more literary Donna quotes from Hans-Georg Gadamer and R. E. Palmer (2007) who distinguished between eminent artistic texts where one speaks of “a work” and those writings intended to be of service, more like handicraft. Then write, “Alas, the looming threat to our common home, and to its most vulnerable members, felt too demanding to proceed at leisure. Literary aspirations must wait. Literary or no, however, I must remind my readers and myself, that many better-prepared observers of our climate emergency, from many disciplines, are writing in this area. One more voice is only one more voice.”
She also shares with us that while psychoanalysis engages with the difficult subjects in life it has been slow to address climate change. Climate Crisis, Psychoanalysis, and Radical Ethics draws on the latest scientific evidence to set out the likely effects of climate change on politics, economics, and society more generally, including impacts on psychoanalysts.
Despite a tendency to avoid the warnings, times of crisis summon clinicians to emerge from comfortable consulting rooms. Daily engaged with human suffering, they now face the inextricably bound together crises of global warming and massive social injustices. After considering historical and emotional causes of climate unconsciousness and of compulsive consumerism, this book argues that only a radical ethics of responsibility to be “my other’s keeper” will truly wake us up to climate change and bring psychoanalysts to actively take on responsibilities, such as demanding change from governments, living more simply, flying less, and caring for the earth and its inhabitants everywhere.
Dr. Orange goes on to reveal that while psychotherapy, though more alert now to our responsibility to the world’s most vulnerable people, more conscious of our solidarity with those who suffer, seems still to be working largely in a bubble. Climate change has already, scientists tell us in the most urgent voices they can find, become an emergency, threatening to overwhelm all attempts to stem the primarily human-created disaster. Still psychoanalysts (as most people)work quietly and faithfully on, living as we always did, driving to work, flying to conferences, watering our lawns, eating and consuming mindlessly. Meanwhile, most political and financial leaders conspire to hide ominous truths, no longer simply inconvenient but dire, and we allow ourselves not to notice. Are we psychotherapists, even psychoanalysts who should perhaps do better, conspiring or colluding to sustain an environmental unconscious to the truth?
Sheryl goes on to say that while she was never very political assuming our politicians were following the law and handling the business of governing, over the last few years she has seen a lack of moral justice by world leaders and politicians, pharmaceutical companies, government and she believes by listening, observing and learning how to use intuitive healing work and spiritual awareness we may help our troubled nation. Sheryl thinks Dr. Orange is also concerned about this decline in responsibility and empathy and asks how we can proceed to address this lack of awareness or judgment for more people to become aware of their spiritual energy and a multi-dimensional truth of soul life.
Dr. Orange wrote, “Having received extensive education and training, including mandatory personal analysis, to prepare us for our work, we have, I believe, also acquired responsibility to be leaders, moral if not scientific, in confronting the global crisis we are living. We possess the intellectual and communal resources to take on this responsibility. So far, however, we have been resoundingly silent. Where are the psychoanalysts, we who, rightly or wrongly, consider ourselves intellectual leaders in psychotherapy and in understanding human motivation? Perhaps we have learned nothing from the example of Sigmund Freud, who, blinded by his passion for his work, his love for Enlightenment, German culture, and his need to be as important as Copernicus and Darwin, could not see that he and his Jewish family, as well as psychoanalysis itself, faced mortal danger in Vienna in the late 1930s .Are we, too, so absorbed in our theories, and worse, in our theoretical and interdenominational disputes over who belongs and who does not, that we fail to notice that human caused planetary warming threatens to destroy the world within which we practice our beloved profession? Have we learned nothing from the heedlessness of Freud and of the second generation of analysts? We say that all is grist for the psychoanalytic mill, but what if this crisis threatens the survival of the mill itself? We psychoanalysts, together with our colleagues in other therapeutic areas, actually have a unique contribution to make in this crucial moment. We can help not only to refocus our own attention on the imminent threats to our own way of life, but to the world’s most vulnerable people and to the earth which supports us all.”
Sheryl says…In my next book New Life Awaits Creating our Best Afterlife by Living Consciously Now which she is now completing, she addresses this same need to notice the needs of others and contribute to humanity’s evolution and wrote, “Perhaps the values and dreams from earlier times, cultures, and societies have been reinvented with less moral intent just like the political, economic, and social structures being addressed in the 2016 presidential election. The American people are ardently demanding changes to present corrupt political elitist ruling class practices that do not allow simple, kind, good values to be honored. As we question what we want in life and what is truly the criteria for success, we are discovering that people embroiled in only a materialistic approach to life, either forgetting, or never having considered their equally important spiritual needs for love, compassion, to be of service to others and to be free from greed have become disconnected and dissatisfied. The quote by Shakespeare’s Polonius, “To thine own self be true. And it must follow, as the night the day, Thou cannot then be false to any man” is still the only way to approach and remember our deepest personal needs as well as the reason we incarnated into this life. I have observed people who are not only happy and fulfilled, but often courageous, dynamic, and bold leaders much needed in today’s world of conflict and confusion. Their general mindset reflects virtues including empathy, the acceptance of others with genuine regard for their differences, and respect for what we all can contribute to the world.
Dr. Orange seemingly on the same vibration wrote, “We can call out the more selfish of the defenses that keep us avoidant, and name the forms of traumatic shock that keep us too paralyzed to respond appropriately. We can help with the processes of mourning not only the remembered ways of life, but also the loss of many kinds of hope and certainty for the future…….. Together we may be able to find paths out of the magical thinking and evasions of our past and present, and into a shared future that will be simpler, humbler, more communal, more reverent toward our mother earth and toward each other.”
“The developed nations of the world must make the changes needed radically enough and quickly enough to limit the damage and keep our planet livable.“Now it is nearly too late, and we must listen at our peril. But we listen backward: not only analyzing the unconsciousness: splitting, disavowal, melancholia (Lertzman, 2015), but also as in the biblical saying, and unlike most psychoanalysis, we reverse the listening sequence: “We will do, and we will hear,” in that order. This chapter begins to explain what we need to learn scientifically and to consider psychoanalytically, even while we start to act ethically. Justice allows us no time to evade at psychoanalytic conferences—where we meet in luxurious hotels in cities full of homeless people—or to theorize at leisure. Our brothers and sisters are starving, drowning and burning while we dispute. But 60 million refugees in the year 2015, together with tornadoes and floods, may reset the alarm clock.”
“Basic attitudes, in Europe and North America, have brought us to this crisis, and have kept it hidden from us. Emergency situations require immediate response. With ever increasing intensity, climate scientists (IEA, 2015; IPCC, 2014a; NOAA, 2015) warn us that the warming of our oceans and atmosphere is increasing far faster than they had predicted even 5 or 10 years ago, and that we will probably reach very soon, and may have already reached, “tipping points” at which the damage to the earth and its biological inhabitants will be not only irreversible, but unmanageable. NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) reports that July 2015 was the hottest month on record, 2015 the hottest year. The summer ice cap has nearly disappeared from the Arctic, while the West Antarctic ice sheet is slipping into the ocean. More and more species are already becoming extinct at a rate more than 100 times the “background rate,” reports Paul Ehrlich of the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment (Knapton, 2015), while human life rapidly degenerates into the “war of all against all” announced by philosopher Thomas Hobbes (Hobbes, Gaskin, & NetLibrary Inc., 1998) in the 18th century.”
People like Vandana Shiva (Shiva, 2005, 2008, 2010), a quantum physicist who has given her life to promoting local and sustainable forms of agriculture, and fighting GMOs (genetically modified organisms),have influenced Dr. Orange. Shiva writes in her recent Soil not Oil: Environmental Justice in an Age of Climate Crisis (Shiva, 2008) that sustainable agriculture can save the poorest from the ravages of carbon. Probably her voice most moved me to write this book, and kept me at it. Find her at seedfreedom.info Another leader in the field Naomi Klein argues in great detail that most of us have avoided this “inconvenient truth” (Gore & Melcher Media., 2006) so long that now only an effort equivalent to that required to fight World War II, including enormous communal sacrifices like immediate conversion for a world without fossil fuels and rationing, will now save our planet with any shred of justice for those suffering most from the world created by industrialization and globalization.
Dr. Orange alludes to Pope Frances and his hopes for dealing with climate change yet still religions in general do not address the inequality of the structure of their hierarchy from thousands of years in perhaps limited ethical responsibility. Sheryl thinks Pope Francis like Pope John Paul have done much to help the Catholic Church modernize and evolve but still there is work to be done. Pope Francis has just published Laudato Si , “On the care for our common home,” an encyclical linking the climate crisis to social justice. Despite his resounding silence on injustice toward women, inside and beyond the church, he directly focuses on the way climate change is devastating the world’s poorest. These voices, and others, call us to repent, and quickly to change our ways. They appeal not to a punishing deity, but to the clear karmic (see also “The Time Is Now: Buddhist Declaration on Climate Change,” 2015) consequences for our children and grandchildren if we do not act quickly.
Dr. Orange in her book provides readers with facts figures and necessary information to assess the seriousness of climate change which follows below: It seems warming of the climate system is unequivocal, and since the 1950s, many of the observed changes are unprecedented over decades to millennia. The atmosphere and ocean have warmed, the amounts of snow and ice have diminished, and sea level has risen. Anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions have increased since the pre-industrial era, driven largely by economic and population growth, and are now higher than ever. This has led to atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide that are unprecedented in at least the last 800,000 years. Their effects, together with those of other anthropogenic drivers, have been detected throughout the climate system and are extremely likely to have been the dominant cause of the observed warming since the mid-20th century. In recent decades, changes in climate have caused impacts on natural and human systems on all continents and across the oceans. Impacts are due to observed climate change, irrespective of its cause, indicating the sensitivity of natural and human systems to changing climate. Changes in many extreme weather and climate events have been observed since about 1950. Some of these changes have been linked to human influences, including a decrease in cold temperature extremes, an increase in warm temperature extremes, an increase in extreme high sea levels and an increase in the number of heavy precipitation events in a number of regions
The IPCC goes on to predict, based on multiple modeling, the foreseeable future, whether we do or do not make radical changes in the way we are living. They assume that significant “mitigation,” that is, beginning to bring down our carbon usage to a 2 degree Centigrade atmospheric warming in this century, could keep the damage within adaptable limits. Continuing more or less on our current path will bring 4 degrees of warming, they warn, and defeat all possibility of adaptation to the conditions that will result. It is very likely that heat waves will occur more often and last longer, and that extreme precipitation events will become more intense and frequent in many regions. The ocean will continue to warm and acidify, and global mean sea level to rise. Climate change will amplify existing risks and create new risks for natural and human systems. Risks are unevenly distributed and are generally greater for disadvantaged people and communities in countries at all levels of development .
Many aspects of climate change and associated impacts will continue for centuries, even if anthropogenic emissions of greenhouse gases are stopped. The risks of abrupt or irreversible changes increase as the magnitude of the warming increases. Extremes of economic inequality—evident both within the USA and worldwide—though some consider them a separate problem—cannot, many of us believe, be addressed apart from the climate emergency. First, the overwhelming majority of scientists agree that climate damage is largely self-inflicted, that is, that our addiction to fossil fuels and red meat is filling our atmosphere with toxic carbons and methane, melting the polar ice, and making ever-larger portions of our planet home into uninhabitable desert. The polar ice is melting much faster Threatening many northern species, this development means an emergency for whole peoples living near sea-level, needing relocation. Should they, by extraordinary good fortune, find hospitality, they will still have lost home, culture, and language. We can look for an ethical point of view adequate to wake us up to our personal and communal responsibilities. We acknowledge the valuable contributions of duty ethics, of utilitarianism, of deep ecology, but find that none of them suffices to create the needed sense of urgency.
Doing nothing about carbon means at least a 4% warming before the end of this century, with extremely probable catastrophic effects: Some of these expected conditions are:
- Heatwaves of magnitudes never experienced before— temperatures not seen on Earth in the past five million years. Four degrees is only the average, so temperatures over large land masses will rise far higher.
- Forty percent of plant and animal species will be at risk of
extinction .
- Precipitous decline in the growth of crops worldwide, exacerbated by drought, floods and increased weed and pest invasion.
- Total melting of the Greenland ice sheet and, most likely, the Western Antarctic ice sheet raising sea levels by thirty two or more feet —this would put two thirds of the world’s major cities under water, as well as large regions of countries.
- Once four degrees is reached there’s no guarantee that temperatures would level off.
- A population of nine billion will not be able to adapt to these conditions.
We Westerners inherit an outsized share of the guilt and responsibility for climate change. Whatever we may think of China now, we in the West set the industrialization-at-all-costs pattern it has followed. As Stephen M. Gardiner writes, “the USA is responsible for 29 percent of global emissions since the onset of the industrial revolutions (from 1850 to 2003), and the nations of the EU 26 percent; by contrast China and India are responsible for 8 percent and 2 percent respectively” To understand what has gone so wrong in our relation to the earth, including our indifference to its most destitute people, we must first briefly revisit the roots of the scientific rationalism and political individualism emergent in 17th- and 18th-century Europe. These became founding ideals in the United States. Many, however, would draw a straight line from the ancient Greeks to our current problems. Too much faith in rationality, too much looking for totalizing, single explanations.
A philosophy of entitlement may have lead to a moral lack of appreciation for human life freedom and protecting our planet. Unsurprising, then, that such a philosophy “entitled” its believers to colonial appropriation of the lands of indigenous peoples, to the destruction of their earth-loving ways of life, to slave-ownership and inheritance enforced by the lash, to the subjection of women. Egoism blinds us to the intrinsic value and dignity of whatever or whomever we dominate, reducing the “thou” (Buber & Kaufmann, 1970) to solely instrumental value, the “it.” What we own, we may exploit, use and abuse, even destroy. With this philosophy firmly in our background, many in the United States—from where I write— can see no serious problem with our legacy of slavery, with the continued subjection of the few remaining descendants of our native peoples, and with exploiting and destroying the earth that is our common home. Much less can most of us truly feel connected to others in Latin America, Asia, and Africa being destroyed already by our way of life, and sometimes turning to jihad. Our philosophical and ethical unconsciousness, our profound individualistic egoism, prevents us from noticing both what we are doing to each other and to our planet as well as to the ways we are beneficiaries of the slave system, of colonialism, and of carbon-dependent industrialism. Unconsciousness blinds us to egoism’s devastating consequences. We cannot see ourselves in the wrong.
Sheryl says it is essential for more people to realize the energetic nature of life and to know that they are spiritual souls having a physical life and must remember the empathy compassion and love that reign supreme in their DNA and soul nature, and bring it forth into the physical world.
Knowing the past can certainly show us where we have gone wrong and past the blame and sorrow there needs to be forgiveness and positive action forward
Donna wrote in remembering past stories …”To keep the tent open today means not only welcoming refugees into our countries, and at least temporarily, into our homes, learning their languages, and learning what they need to feel less homeless and bereft. It also means turning a corner on the institutional injustices that bring them, that have turned their homes into deserts and war zones. It means reforming our own lives radically, seeing the links between their suffering and our mindless comforts, learning every day. I believe, actually, that only a radical ethics of the fundamental worth of every human life will make the difference we need in the climate crisis. Until we can see, really see, ethically see, that our carbon-hungry “lifestyle” harms, even destroys, the other whose suffering places an infinite responsibility on me, nothing will change, really. “
In summarizing today’s episode of “Healing From Within” we have seen that throughout history we have had to grapple with human suffering and people intent on preserving their own life and lifestyle often without consideration or with limited human capacity for compassion and empathy. We have learned that such behavior ultimately leads to tragedy at a personal and collective level. Fear is the motivating emotion that clouds or obliterates our true inner divine nature which is to nurture our planet and our people.
Dr. Donna Orange and I would have all those listening to reconsider some of their former thoughts on why we act towards others who are different with hostility and lack of civility. Ask to remember how it feels to be alone, unsure of your survival and hopeful that there will be human and divine intervention. Then it may be possible to rid yourself of preconceived or learned interpretations of self-survival at the expense of all others, and will open your heart and mind to better possibilities for helping yourself and others to overcoming climate change, migration and to love without limits.
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