Category Archives: Action Projects

Death Anxiety as a Barrier to Climate Action

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Death acceptance is a valuable tool for building a more sustainable future. If humans overcome death anxiety, prioritizing natural systems and far out goals for the future become easier. This is because environmental movements often deal with long time frames and forward-thinking. Terror Management Theory suggests that humans intrinsically avoid death reminders. How can we think about climate change without envisioning a world in which we don’t exist? Thinking critically about sustainability means thinking beyond our own lifespans. 

In daily life, humans don’t often choose to think outside of our 100 years. Even though, geologically, 100 years is practically insignificant, our lifespan feels long and monumental. To think beyond 100 years is to perceive mortality. Humans disregard sustainability because it forces them to contemplate their own mortality. To live for the future is to acknowledge that you are acting to benefit a future that does not include you. Sustainability is hard because we don’t want to think about that. 

My experiences during our group’s action project directly counters this fear of mortality. By having conversations with people I normally wouldn’t speak to about death, as interviews for our video project, I opened the conversation to denial of death, personal beliefs, and our collective fears of the idea of not existing one day. What initially seemed like a rough conversation quickly began to ease my uncertainty and helped me form stronger bonds with the people I interviewed. 

While death anxiety may encourage us to limit our thinking in terms of sustainability, conversations about death give us room to process our emotions without falling into the false belief that we’re alone in our thinking. As we learned through Terror Management Theory and in this course, humans seem to internalize fears of death in similar ways. Discussing death directly addresses the elephant in the room. I found that after having a conversation about death, rather than spiraling in my mind, I was less adverse to thinking about large-scale worldly issues, like climate change. 

Death conversations increase humanity’s tolerance to mortality as a whole–a state we must reach to survive. We are mortal beings. Denying this drives us to ignore a future without us. Throughout history people even like to feel like they’re “building a better future” for next generations. To accept death is to open conversations about planet Earth in the coming centuries and prioritize protecting our natural resources for future generations. 

What Did I Learn This Quarter?

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While my action project experience in this class could have been better, I am able to recognize the valuable lessons I learned from it – primarily about the importance of having a group leader. If we had one person taking charge, I think we could have gotten a lot more done. Regardless, I am proud of how we came together in the end to create engaging and informative content, despite our busy schedules.

In the context of our class, I found that our project, promoting the passage of legislation aimed to revolutionize plastic recycling in Washington, perfectly represents political ecology. We live in a system where we elect individuals to make environmental policy decisions on our behalf, and this recycling bill relies on them to pass it. I don’t want to say that my group’s action project was worthless (because I think there is a lot of value in public education), but we should acknowledge that a social media campaign will likely have a limited impact on the decisions made in Olympia.

Honestly, that is the reality of political ecology in the Anthropocene.

As far as the other action projects, WashPIRG’s Save the Orcas campaign was what finally allowed me to understand what our class was about. I could see that, like my group’s, theirs hinged on the actions of legislators, and that Senator Cantwell’s refusal to support breaching the dams might be motivated in some way by her fear of dying. Relatedly, the Ernest Becker group was contributing to the study of conceptions of death, which is beneficial in helping us to predict whether future environmental reforms might be possible in the face of climate disaster, given that Terror Management Theory explains our actions in response to death reminders. As this group mentioned in class, they were frustrated at the constraints they were given by the people in power over them, which is exactly what the ICA is for. This last group’s action project was directly investigating the political ecology of UW in the Anthropocene and trying to get our Board of Regents to follow through on their fossil fuel divestment commitments, again relying on people in power.

All in all, while it wasn’t my own group’s action project that led to me discovering the true meaning of our class, it was the action projects of our class in general that helped me to understand what it means to survive the political ecology of death in the Anthropocene.

How then shall I live?

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My major takeaway from this course regards how I want to proceed with living my life.

We have learned that death anxiety rules our lives and decisions, and that we cope through various forms of terror management. This constant fear drives our species to war, industrialization, colonization, exploitation, and now to the brink of a planetary climate disaster.

One of our contemplative practices asked us to consider three mindsets. Where 1) the world is generally getting worse, 2) the world is generally getting better, and 3) the world is how it is. I find the 3rd mindset to be the most realistic and empowering. In this view, we see the world as it is without sugarcoating it or focusing purely on evils. In this view, humanity has agency. We can sit back and continue our trajectory toward a terrible future, or we can choose to collaborate, innovate, and save our species from collapse.

With this mindset of agency, I am struck by the question: “how then shall I live?”

I need to start with my forms of terror management. Before this course, my management consisted of spree online shopping to fill a non-existent gap in my life and constant distractions because silence allowed intrusive thoughts to run rampant. These are unsustainable strategies.

Professor Jem Bendall in his video about Deep Adaptation asks viewers to cherish what they have. To enjoy life in the short time that we have it. Though I talk about why I dislike Bendall’s perspective in another blog post, I have come to accept this concept when taken alongside the strategies presented in Active Hope, the relief and fulfillment of volunteer work like my action project for WashPIRG’s Save the Orcas, and the hope that humanity still has agency to change.

Image Credit: Syracuse Peace Council

To answer the question “how then shall I live?,” I must adjust my terror management. Rather than needlessly consuming, I can focus on being grateful for what I already have. Rather than constantly distracting myself, I can spend more meaningful time with friends and family to feel reassured that I have people I care about who also care about me. I can take part in local efforts that better my community and environment. I can make changes like being better about recycling and using my purchasing power to favor local, sustainable businesses. I can choose to live with hope.

There are easily implementable things I can do to live a more conscientious and sustainable life without drastically changing my lifestyle. I don’t know if this is enough, but I hope that between collective individual action, death anxiety harnessed by corporate inventors to find technological solutions, and global politicians trying to one-up each other, we will find a way to persist as a species.

Death Anxiety, Culture, and the Public

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My group’s action project had a lot less to do with political policy and action than other groups. Instead of supporting real campaigns with campaign goals, we were tasked to make a video for the Ernest Becker Foundation introducing Ernest Becker’s work, death anxiety, and what the Ernest Becker Foundation did.

Initially, I found the project to be frustrating because of how limiting it was; as we mentioned in class, we were discouraged from pursuing a more critical lens regarding death anxiety, but we managed to get some in there regardless by having our experts touch on the biases in the research. I also wanted to be able to draw more concretely on what we had learned in class, but incorporating complex ideas would require complex explanations, and there just isn’t time for that in a video that’s meant to be consumable by the public. So instead, our video acted as a sort of survey introduction to the topic of death and death anxiety which did, in fact, raise some issues and/or goals for research on death anxiety in the future.

The aim of our video, in essence, was to get people thinking about the ways they thought about death and how that might be related to other cultural outcomes. The questions we asked our student-interviewees reflected this in particular (How often do you think about death? What do you feel when you think about death? How do people’s feelings about death impact our culture and broader society?). We were really surprised with how reflective students seemed to be in response to this question, and it gave us a bit more hope for the future.

The student interviewees’ responses, though, are symbolic of some of the goals that a video like this has. While there is no guarantee that this video will reach more than a handful of people, our video might encourage them to reflect on their own experiences with death and death anxiety to recognize the detriment it causes in their own life. Hopefully, as a result, they would engage in more compassionate behavior and reject cultural frameworks that perpetuate harm, slowly building towards a more equitable, just, and safe future.

Fear Within our Anthropocence and How We Can Over Come It

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My biggest takeaway about the political ecology of death in the Anthropocene is that people are ruled by fear. Political leaders, religious leaders, everyday people, and everyone in between has some amount of fear in their lives. Fear of our death, fear of failure, fand ear of how our world is being run.

This poem by Shakespeare speaks of fear:

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/50428/song-fear-no-more-the-heat-o-the-sun-

Fear does not have to be a negative influence. Letting fear control you allows for it to have power over you. But, acknowledging this fear creates a new opportunity. An opportunity for love, desire, hope, and a life full of adventure.

The Worm at the Core states “Why not depart from life as a sated guest from a feast” (Solomon) and I agree. Why not take our life for everything it has to offer. Living in the depths of despair does nothing for for anyone. This class has shown me that yes, our world is dark, has several demoralizing issues, and needs some fixing-but the beautiful thing is that we have the power to change this. We can be the light in our own world.

My action project was built around WashPirg’s Save the Orca Campaign with the goal of breaching the Lower Snake River Dam to allow more salmon to be available for the Orca’s to feed on. This is a passion project, and as I reference in my paper all passion projects are a way of coping with death anxiety. Passion projects to me are a positive way of working through personal death anxiety on some level. Being a part of something greater than oneself is an incredible feeling, and to me gives the feeling of hope.

Hope is stronger than fear, but when paired together can create opportunities to better our world

Shakespeare’s poem talks about how we will all come to rest as dust eventually (Shakespeare), and The Worm at the Core talks about how we are no more valuable to this Earth than a lizard or a potato from a biological perspective (Solomon), so then what is the point of being riddled with anxiety. This ay be a blindly optimistic point of view, but with how things are currently going… What do we have to lose by giving our best effort to enact change?