Recently, I have begun to see myself as a piece of the earth rather than a being separate from it. This is something I began to feel not only in thought but as part of my soul. From skiing pillows in remote British Columbia as snow dumped onto us for days, to watching seals cover themselves with sand for protection from the sun on the shores of the Redwood Forest, I began to truly believe that the God I worship is mother nature and my religion is the natural world we live in.
Summit of Alpental after 4 inches of fresh snowfall.
With this spiritual discovery came the painful awareness that the things I saw and experienced are in danger of disappearing or being irreversibly altered by the effects of global warming. Less rainfall means shallow streams and Salmon not being able to make it to spawning grounds, wildfires destroying thousands of acres causing ash to rain from the sky states away, and homes being brought out to sea by extreme hurricanes doesn’t even begin to describe the effects that climate change has had on our planet.
So, I took this class. Because how can I see the earth as my mother without understanding how to grasp my own mortality as humans continue to kill it? Can we save it? If I ride my bike and take short showers, does that manage the terror I feel for the future?
Early morning where the freshwater river enters the oceans on the California coast in the Redwoods National Forest.
In class, we talked about systems theory in the context of understanding that we are living in the world rather than on it. I resonated a lot with this because it forces people to see something as a makeup of parts and how those parts function together to make a whole. Which is what the Earth is and how we participate in that system.
However, I think that it is important to see the interconnectedness of everything that works together to create the environment we live in, but Deep Adaptations provides a pessimistic view of climate change that not only seems to perpetuate an idea that the Earth cannot be saved from the harm that has been caused to it. This seems to embody the extremes of terror management theory that we have discussed in class and come to understand through various educational materials that show the extremes resulting from being reminded of our own mortality. In this case, the extreme of believing there is no reason to have hope.
Sources and References:
https://www.npr.org/2019/09/13/760599683/were-all-gonna-die-how-fear-of-death-drives-our-behavior