When entering this course I had no real expectations or ideas of what it would entail. However after our discussion about the several different ways the human race may go extinct I began to understand what this class would explore. During this discussion I began to wonder about the seemingly ever increasing mental health problems each generation has been reporting. I began to ponder the different possibilities for this and how they relate to each generation being more and more focused on the futility of different endeavors. 

I considered that each new generation may be experiencing this due to a newfound emphasis that has been garnered around mental health. This seems to ring true as with more exposure and influence being put on a subject it tends to be brought further to the forefront of discussions. Are more people having trouble with mental health because we talk about it more or has talking about it more led to more people perceiving mental health issues that are not as large as they seem? While researching this further I found that American Psychiatric Association contributed this change to a reduction of stigmas and discrimination towards people with mental health issues therefore making it easier for more to admit that they have been repressing emotion. While this increase may have been pushed along by a larger discussion it also stands to reason that past generations have had more mental health issues than originally perceived. 

Another question I asked myself was how the mass spread of information has affected the mental health of the newest generations and whether it has had a marked impact. In the past two decades there has been an explosion of social media and networking. During the course of our discussion during class we talked about the increase in suicides over the past twenty years and how social media has affected this by providing a major influx of information, both good and bad. While listening to Bailey Parnell’s TED Talk about social media I found one quote that resonated with me, “In social media we are the product, and we are letting others attribute value to us”. Social Media has seemed to force maturity on young people showing them things that older generations had years to learn of and become comfortable with.

Resources and Inspiration

The Big Picture

https://www.psychiatry.org/patients-families/stigma-and-discrimination

Death has long been the focus and scope we as a species have used to frame how we live. Most humans understand death as something inevitable, ultimately no matter what action we take we will all be faced with the same fate. I have always wondered what the true impact of that understanding means. How has the very understanding that we will one day cease to exist shaped our species and why has it led us to this point?

It’s hard to understand how we as humans following our innate desire and instinct to survive created some of the most complex and interwoven systems and societies that this planet has ever known and even harder to understand how our relationship to death impacted our path as a species. Yet, it’s intriguing to think that the very drive to survive that once allowed us to embark on the path of creating these complex civilizations has resulted in us creating civilizations that are ultimately risking the future of our survival as a species. If civilization was our response to death then why is it that we have allowed our civilizations to become so dangerous to our own survival?

Geologists and social scientists have dubbed this era of civilization in which humans have the ability to threaten their own existence as the Anthropocene. The term attempts to express that the earth itself has entered a new geological era under the influence of humans with humans being the driving force of change in the environment. With the introduction of this term has come a new way of studying human society, Systems Thinking. Systems thinking seeks to understand the impact of humans on the earth and how this has ultimately impacted humans and how that has shifted the way naturally occurring phenomena have changed, including death.

Perhaps the most profound statement I came across while trying to grasp how Anthropocene relates to death comes from author Roy Scranton who writes on learning to die in the Anthropocene. He claims that perhaps our civilization is already dead. This is an interesting concept perhaps we as a society has begun to understand our systems and civilizations as an intrinsic part of our existence and as such we insist that they must continue to exist so long as we as do and maybe that is where we as a species went wrong. Perhaps moving forward our species may learn to live with death rather than in opposition to it. Despite the tree’s the pillars of a forest dying within the forest, the new regrowth is healthy and able to use the nutrients to grow a new forest

(https://nationalzoo.si.edu/news/smithsonian-scientists-examine-impact-high-severity-fires-conifer-forests)

In Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower, Lauren Olamina, the main character, strains against the cultural restraints of her community that prevent them from recognizing the imminent danger they face from a world ravaged by climate change, societal breakdown, and division. I’ll admit that I am nowhere near done with the book, but the tension between survival and cultural preservation in Parable of the Sower feel ever-relevant to the state of the current global order. Life, it seems, imitates art.

From Parable of the Sower:

All that you touch,

You Change.

All that you Change,

Changes you.

The only lasting truth

Is Change

God

Is Change.

Lauren Olamina struggles against the fact that, when faced with the terror, fear, and imminence of change (and death), her community turns away, refusing to make strides for safety, to prepare for what is inevitable, and to lessen the negative impact it might have. Octavia Butler, then, has taken hold of Terror Management theory and placed it into the future, in a not-at-all-unfeasible circumstance of climate disaster. Butler’s characters in Parable of the Sower are a very real reflection of people of the modern day, but when packaged into fiction, their actions become more outrageous and clearly ignorant.

Yet, we all know the people who turn a blind eye to global crises for fear of what it means to them. In some cases, this is framed in terms of mental health: it is absurdly painful to reconcile with what the future will really look like when it is nothing like what we imagined growing up. There are stories of growing old; of moving across the globe; of finding love, adventure and excitement. At our current state, it is unlikely that my generation will grow old. If we move across the globe, it will be as climate refugees searching for a livable environment. If we find love, adventure, and excitement, it will be in stolen moments where we can find a reprieve from struggling to survive, or it will be in ignorance of the struggles of others. That is not to say that there is no value to finding beauty in what exists in front of us, but it is unsurprising that, when the future looks so bleak, many use a preoccupation with the everyday to excuse inaction and create what is, in effect, a productive paralysis.

Hello everybody,

I would like to start this post by introducing myself. My name is Dimitra Sofia Tsamopoulou, and I was born and raised in Athens, Greece. In 2019 I got recruited from the women’s rowing team, here in the University of Washington. I am doing a Political Science major with a double minor in Human Rights and Law,Society and Justice. The honest reason I chose the class of “Political Ecology of Death in the Anthropocene”, was basically because I got really intrigued by the usage of a word that is greek, the word “Anthropocene”. Although greek is my mother language I had to look the meaning of it in order to understand that it refers to an era, the era that the Earth’s Geology is the most impacted by the human “hands”.

So far, most of the classes I have taken are really theoretical. They cover subjects of justice, legislation, economics etc. What took me by surprise with this class is the hidden spirituality of it. In order to succeed and learn in that class, you cannot just keep up with the readings and the course material, you really need to connect with yourself, acknowledge the way you feel about the topics being taught and reflect on these feelings. A deeper understanding of the political ecology of death requires a deeper understanding of the internal processes we have as humans. These internal “exploration” brings a lot of questions on the surface. One of the questions that was brought to me is “What would happen to Earth if the Human race was all of a sudden going extinct?”. We live our lives thinking that we are the center of everything, and I think by trying to answer that question we can understand that we are not as essential as we would like to be. The biosphere, hydrosphere, geosphere and lithosphere do not need the noosphere in order to survive and thrive.

While trying to answer my question, I came across a video that I would like to share in our forum. In the video we can have a little “taste” of what would actually mean for earth if the human race was disappearing. I would love to read your reflections on the video and also my post. Thank you for your time. Have a great day!

Link for YouTube video:
https://youtu.be/EWXdTwFHETA