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ing at a university, but he still leads workshops and gives talks. Things are different from when Kiehl first began his work of marrying psychology and climate — back then only a few others were thinking about ecopsychology, which wasn’t even a term at the time, he says. Now there’s a whole body of work dealing with the intersections of climate and psyFormer NCAR scientist turned chology. A 2021 survey of ecopsychologist talks coping 10,000 people ages 16 to 25 with climate anxiety found that more than half of respondents were very or extremely worried about cliBY KAYLEE HARTER mate change, with more than 80 percent at least moderately worried. Half felt “sad, anxious, eff Kiehl had been a climate angry, powerless, helpless, and guilty.” scientist at NCAR in Boulder After the hottest summer on record studying topics like the greenand with local climate disasters like house effect and stratospheric fires and flooding looming fresh in ozone for nearly two decades when our collective memory, I had a something started to shift. conversation with Kiehl Sometime around the year 2000, he about the psychology of was looking at the projections for rapidclimate change and ly increasing emissions over the next century and decided to look back to the how we can address our last time the Earth’s atmosphere conmounting anxiety. tained that much carbon dioxide. The interview He was struck by what he saw — it has been editwas 40 million years ago and “a comed for clarity pletely different world.” and brevity. “I distinctly remember sitting at my desk, looking at these numbers, looking at the projected warming and CO2 levWhat are els, and just asking myself, ‘What are the psychowe doing? Why would we do this?’” he logical reasays. “In that moment, my feeling was, sons we ‘This has to be psychological.’” might avoid Kiehl was so bothered by this discon- acting on the nect between the severity of the probinformation we lem and our collective capacity for have about cliaction that he went back to school for mate change? clinical psychology and trained in Fight, flight and freeze Jungian analysis. Since then, he’s prac- mechanisms are an integral ticed as a Jungian psychotherapist and part of the older part of the brain analyst, written a book on ecopsycholo- [known as the limbic system]... It’s gy, led conferences and workshops, affective, and it’s emotional … When taught at Pacifica Graduate Institute you’re presented with traumatic inforand UC Santa Cruz, and won AGU’s mation, the self-regulatory processes Climate Communication Prize in 2012. that normally work in a fluid manner He also continued his work at NCAR are disrupted to the point where you until retiring from his position in 2018. cannot take in information. So if Kiehl is winding down his career now, you’re going to talk to people about no longer practicing clinically or teachsomething that’s really threatening,
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like climate change, if you just bombard them with images of disaster after disaster after disaster, and that’s typically how it’s conveyed in the media, one response would be, well, people saturate. They’ll just shut down. They’ll disassociate. Evolution has provided us with very primitive ways of responding as well as more sophisticated ways. A more sophisticated way from a psychodynamic, psychoanalytic approach is projection. ‘It’s not me that’s causing this. It’s them.’… These are not, in themselves, harmful ways of dealing with the world. They’re actually there for a reason — to preserve us and protect us, especially when we’re a young child. The problem is when we grow up, they no longer benefit us. They can actually prevent us from living a fully engaged, ethically responsible life. There are
other factors that are more social, which are fear based. Fear of losing one’s autonomy — it’s a big one in the United States … It’s a culture we thrive on, but it is preventing us from acting on this problem
How can someone combat feelings of helplessness, hopelessness, fear or anxiety?
If it’s severe, you go find somebody to work with. But in addition to that, or if you’re not going to do that, I think it’s absolutely essential to talk about how you’re feeling. And so one of the things I always encourage people to do is talk to your friend, talk to your family, or get a neighborhood group together. If you’re a member of a church or a social organization, find a time where you can just sit in a room. You don’t have to do psychotherapy, you just give people a chance to talk about how they’re feeling about what’s happening in the world with regards to the environment. That alone is helpful.
I think in recent years, it feels like the realities of climate change are hitting a lot closer to home. Boulder County, for example, has experienced devastating wildfire, drought and flooding in the last decade. How do those local climate disasters affect our psyche differently than when it felt like those problems were farther away?
I hate to say this, but that’s a good thing in terms of getting people to realize the severity of what’s happening. From that point of view, scientists will often say nothing’s going to be done about this problem until there’s a really, really big catastrophe, which will be so shocking that people will finally get their act together and start reducing
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