Climate emotions, K-pop, and pet cafes
South Korea's top brass are listening to how the psychosocial impacts of the climate crisis connect with the post-pandemic world order
Hello and welcome to another edition of Gen Dread! Your totally independent newsletter about the emotional repercussions of our climate reality, written by me — Britt Wray. If someone emailed this to you, you can subscribe for free here:
This week’s filing is going to be quite different than normal. That’s because I’m in South Korea, and for me, that’s not normal. I should not be flying for climate reasons, let alone because of the pandemic. But I made the trip because I was invited to give a presentation on the psychological and mental health impacts of the climate crisis to a group of Korean government ministers. It’s the kind of thing I doubt will ever come my way again, and the potential for policy impact seemed high, so here I am.
I won’t indulge with a post about all the cool things I’ve learned about Korea this week (there’s lots), or the wild experience of going through Korea’s COVID-19 contact tracing program (wowza!) But I will mention something striking I picked up. Namely, an awareness of how hard it must be to be a climate woman in South Korea. Pictured below are the speakers and government ministers from our event. Just a stunning ratio!
Fun fact: the man in the blue tie, two over from me, is South Korea’s Prime Minister Chung Sye-kyun. I was ready to bow when we were being introduced, but then he reached out and fist bumped me!
What I will also say is that the South Korean government - unlike many governments - is doing a standup job of articulating the very close link between the climate crisis and COVID-19. Park Byeong-seug, the Speaker of the National Assembly for the Republic of Korea made some hard hitting opening remarks that laid out the way in which climate change will bring us more zoonotic pandemics. He also pushed for a green transition as nations seek their “Roadmap for Navigating the Post-Pandemic World Order”, which is what we were there to discuss.
This aligns with President Moon Jae-in’s most recent landslide election win on a campaign for a Green New Deal (even though some are not happy with the government’s performance on their promises so far). Polls show that South Koreans care more about climate change than any other issue (including the nuclear program of their northern neighbours). Youth activism has also been fierce in the country. And speaking of women in climate, they actually do have a firecracker in parliament named Soyoung Lee, who is pushing to decarbonize Korean society. Not only is she the youngest MP in the country, she credits the global school strike movement with raising her awareness of how critical this issue is.
Below is the introduction of the keynote I gave in Seoul this week. I’ll keep most of it under wraps for now because I want to unpack the material properly in future Gen Dread posts.
Hello everyone. It’s wonderful to be with you here today at this remarkable time in history when a pandemic wraps itself around the world, at the same time that a much larger planetary health crisis -– comprised of climate change, species extinctions, water scarcity, food insecurity, air pollution, and land transformation -- urge the many complex interconnected systems upon which human life depends, closer and closer to abrupt and irreversible shifts.
Of course, the pandemic is not separate from, but a symptom of our planetary health crisis. We know that as we continue sucking resources out of the natural world – by cutting trees in tropical forests for example, or extracting mineral and fossil fuels – that we also suck viruses out of species that live in the wild places we tear into and draw them into us. Epidemiological research shows we can prevent future spillovers as well as stop outbreaks from turning into pandemics through political willpower to change the way we interact with the natural word.
But how do we just “change the way we interact with the natural world”? That’s actually a hugely psychologically challenging task.
And how can we put a stop to our perverse tendencies to protect our own short term comfort, as well as the status quo, at all of our own - and all our children’s - expense?
In other words, how can we engage with this crisis at the scale it demands?
Today I want to talk about the soft sides of this very hard predicament. By that I mean I want to talk about the feelings and emotions that come with living in the planetary health crisis that is currently unfolding. Because far too often, we limit the way we deal with this crisis to scientific fact, political argument, and technological ambition. But after more than 30 years of leading with those talking points, things have only gotten worse. We crucially need to also deal with it at the level through which it was created -- human behaviour. Our psychology.
The insights I’ll share today are shaped by a Western and anglophone perspective, and I look forward to hearing about whether these concepts resonate for you within the Northeast Asian context.
In Western culture, emotions have typically been cast in the female gender, undervalued, and extracted as artifactual noise in the places where policy decisions are made. This tendency hurts us deeply now, because we all need a high degree of emotional intelligence to practice the arts of living well together on a hotter and more hostile planet.
That’s enough of that. Actually wait, there’s one more bit I’ll share. It’s the part about being in denial enough to fly to Korea to talk about climate change. It was actually effective in getting some of the other speakers/audience members to come up to me later and divulge that they feel anxious about their own flying. They said that they hate to face it because they know they’re part of the problem, so in fact, they never face it. The best way to move towards the kind of behaviour change that flying less requires is in fact to first talk about the uncomfortable feelings it produces. As climate psychologist Renée Lertzman says, once we do that, we can start to scrutinize our lives with self-compassion rather than the kind of penalizing mentality that reactivates our defences. From there, new possibilities can sprout. This seemed to click with a few frequent flyers.
Feelings like eco-anxiety and eco-grief become part of one’s life when we finally wake up to what we are doing to the natural world and let the existential stakes of that into our hearts. But before we get there, we’re often living in a state of what psychologists call "soft denial” about this crisis.
For the majority among us, it’s not that we outright deny that this crisis is happening. But we turn away from its terrifying implications in order to protect ourselves from the anxiety it causes and resist the changes that are necessary but uncomfortable to make.
It’s understandable to a degree. As the climate psychologist Paul Hoggett says, we all need to lie to ourselves a little bit to get by when reality is hard to bear. And we’ve evolved an impressive cadre of unconscious defences to help us do this.
A typical defence we often see in the climate crisis is what psychologists call disavowal. Disavowal is like having one eye open to the truth while shutting the other simultaneously to it. So with one part of our brain we believe what scientists say about how little time we have left to make effective change. Then at the same time, we play down the threats in order to drill, build, buy, travel, and do as we please. Sound familiar? I’ll be the first to admit that I had to be in a state of at least some disavowal to get on a plane and fly all the way here to speak to you today about the climate crisis.
Thankfully, when we become aware of how soft denial shows up in our lives, we become more capable of outmaneuvering its perversities that trap us in inaction. You can learn to look for soft denial by noticing when we artfully engage with the truth, act as though everything is on track when we perform national success based on carbon emissions targets rather than actual accomplishments, and give no permission for people to speak in emotional terms about something that it is healthy and rational to feel emotional about. This happens a lot when people say that we should only use positive and hopeful frameworks in our climate storytelling, for example.
We need to find a balance in this matrix of feelings. The sweet spot where we’re not just intellectually engaged with this crisis but emotionally engaged with it. Where we’re familiar with how to integrate dark emotions into our lives so that when they appear we don’t shut down. Where we’re in touch with our care for the world instead of numbed by unconscious defences. And where we’re able to see ourselves as being able to make a difference, which psychologists call self-efficacy. All of this requires a high degree of emotional intelligence. We have to practice it and we need support to do so because it is not innate to all of us. What is more often innate is becoming stressed, rigid, shutting down, projecting blame onto others, and being defensive -- all the things that are common in strongman politics but will not help us get through this mess while upholding the integrity of each and every human life.
Lastly, I’d like to ask you a favour, Dear Reader. I want to know what you’re curious about, or struggling with most, when it comes to wrapping your heart around the planetary health crisis. What you share with me will feed into what I write about here in future posts. So really, let me know. I’m curious. My email is hello@brittwray.com and I’ve absolutely loved getting all the mail I’ve gotten from readers so far. So keep it coming.
Next week, I’ll be back in your inbox with a more thorough look at an emotional dilemma that the climate crisis is creating.
In the meantime, here’s a racoon named Puh I met today, because that’s a thing that’s normal here. Racoons in pet cafes!
If you like, tell your friends to sign up to Gen Dread. Thanks!