Magical Thinking, Grief, and Climate Change

During major peaks of COVID-19, news stories of a rebounding nature began to circulate, and visions of our planet getting a chance “to breathe” and recover gained social currency. As nature cannot suddenly and miraculously “just heal itself,” especially when humans contribute so much pollution and carbon dioxide to the environment (Killian, 2022), many of those stories weren’t true (Erickson, 2020). They sprang from “magical thinking,” where our hoping and dreaming something else was reality would somehow “undo actual loss, or make things…orderly ‘like they were before’” (Erikson, 2020). Magical thinking is more common than you might think. For instance, we try to imagine that if we had only said or done something, a catastrophe might’ve been averted. Some see a beloved family member striding down the hall with their characteristic smile when that person died years ago. These are grieving processes, and we all engage in them in some way.

Great trick! Is it getting hot in here?

Source: Julius Drost/Unsplash

Erikson (2020) writes, “Grief begets eccentricities of magical thinking, and however much ecological healing isn’t completely true, we wish we were making that regeneration so…. Our present ecology of magical thinking…may be read as a kind of unacknowledged grieving…a passion for a planet rending apart in the wake of ecological losses”. Of course we want to feel hopeful, and there’s nothing wrong with optimism. But because climate change is real and measurable, it should be undeniable.

Grief, and a kind of indignation, are also a natural consequence of folks refusing to accept the basic scientific facts of climate change (i.e., air and water temperatures are significantly and measurably increasing and are the hottest on record, storms are intensifying, and the oceans are rising). It would behoove responsible adults to acknowledge this fact. But just this past week, The Wall Street Journal published an article with the unfortunate title, “Don’t believe the hype about Antarctica’s melting glaciers.” Just the title lets folks off the hook, allowing them to feel okay about not caring about or even believing in climate science.

Opinion pieces such as these work against calls for collective action to aid our ailing planet. In the interests of accommodating the bottom line, quarterly growth in profits, and ecological exploitation worldwide, fictive, regressive narratives clearly demonstrate magical thinking. Another example: "Infinite growth is not only possible, but sustainable." Also magical. One can also grieve that so many members of our species directly contribute to, don’t care about, and deny the processes that are making our planet increasingly uninhabitable.

Anthropogenic global warming continues to accelerate beyond all predictions of 10 and 20 years ago (Killian, 2022), and yet some folks still suggest that scientific reports from the best minds of our global scientific community are somehow “too alarmist.” As a climate scientist wryly commented on Twitter, “Unfortunately, we’re correct.” Climate science denial is dangerous and provincial to the extreme. We have one home, and what humans are doing to it is irresponsible and negligent at the very least, perhaps even criminal (Killian, 2022).

Source: Markus Spicke/Unsplash

Linguist and anthropologist Gregory Bateson (1979) stated, “The major problems in the world are the result of the difference between how nature works and the way people think.” That would include magical thinking, where we just hope nature proves so darn resilient that it overcomes all human contributions to climate change. But it's clear that while we need it, the planetary ecology does not need us. Darwin asserted, “It’s not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change” (1859). To effectively respond to climate change, we must first acknowledge it and challenge fictive narratives that a wave of a magic wand can make climate change just go away—"we just have to think it and it happens.”

We can also grieve that some folks choose to be part of the problem. Then we can put our money where our mouth is and support policies that help rather than hurt our planet. Because there is no "planet B."