Warm Health for our climate - TEDx talk
Nervous Systems and Systems Change at Selkirk College TEDx Climate Countdown
I got to share my ideas about climate change and mental health at a TEDx event this afternoon. The event was beautifully organized by the local Climate Hub together with the sustainability coordinator and volunteers at Selkirk College, Castlegar, BC, Canada. The video will come in a month or so. There is so much to share on this complex topic so I did not get to say everything I had prepared - here those pieces are for you.
Our health and mental health are affected by climate change. But I also suggest that mental health issues and trauma are part of what is causing behavior that leads to climate change.
I started my talk with gratitude and movements that help us regulate our nervous systems. Like with the Inner Development Goals, inner and relational resourcing helps us to have capacity to be with climate change reality and to support others.
The mental health effects of climate change are increasing with every degree of heat. Yes, research has proven that there are more suicides and domestic abuse during heat waves!1 Climate change is entangled in a complex polycrisis. When we search for the driving factors of climate disturbing behavior, we find the colonial worldview of domination and disconnection, as described by Vanessa Andreotti and Four Arrows and others.2 And perhaps the origin of disconnection comes from centuries of violence and centuries of trauma, especially trauma in young children, as psychology professor emerita Darcia Narvaez’s research has shown.3
Polycrises symptoms and causes, graphics by Linnea Wagner
So I propose Warm Health, as a way to remember the kinship worldview and ways to integrate the fragmentation of collective historical trauma:
Health for the planet and the human plus the more than human world.
Health that comes from our bodies and the earth body connection.
Health that is nurturing, preventative and relational, based in trust and trauma aware safety.
Health that is fluid, addressing complexity and the deep assumptions we make about the world and ourselves.
I have led eco grief circles and worked with sustainability education for most of my life. I have learned to not be afraid of my tears and my rage but to cry and yell in safe places with other humans or with trees. I do not know if we can heal all the pain. We can never bring back the extinct animals, the melting icecaps.
And at the same time, we humans are still interbeing with earth. We have the capacity to self-heal. We are alive today thanks to our resilient ancestors who survived hard times. The answer is neither apocalypse nor progress. We are entangled in collapse and beauty and all in between. There are no easy solutions to complex predicaments. I breathe in grief, I breathe out gratitude.
My eco grief art piece at the Nelson Lantern festival
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10693336/ https://www.preventionweb.net/news/how-confront-gender-based-violence-warming-world
https://decolonialfutures.net/4denials/ Vanessa Andreotti Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures; Restoring the Kinship Worldview, Indigenous Voices By Wahinkpe Topa (Four Arrows) and Darcia Narvaez PhD
https://kindredmedia.org/2023/07/gabor-mate-on-the-evolved-nest-foreword-to-the-new-book/