The Politics of Eco-Grief, Guilt, and Anxiety

Question 1

Questions relating to the politics of eco-affect

Answer 1

How can eco-emotion inform political claims?
- eg. how might eco-grief motivate or substantiate demands for environmental justice?
How can eco-emotion inform political projects and attitudes?
- eg. to what do eco-grief and anxiety incline toward transformative vs reactionary politics?
How might eco-emotions inform political action?
- eg. to what extent do affects like grief, anxiety, and guilt encourage eco-political engagement? To what extent do they stymie engagement?

Question 2

What do Cunsolo and Ellis believe environmental grief is?

Answer 2

Climate change creates human loss and therefore grief

Question 3

Why is environmental grief unusual? (Cunsolo and Ellis)

Answer 3

• Timeframe (eg. can be anticipatory)
• “Disenfranchised” quality (ie. mostly unrecognized and therefore not dealt with)

Question 4

Eco-grief in connection to physical loss (Cunsolo and Ellis)

Answer 4

• Loss of material possessions or property
• “Slow violence” of gradual change to environment
• Disruption to how people interact with and connect to environs (eg. Inuit communities)

Question 5

Eco-grief in connection to loss of knowledge and identity (Cunsolo and Ellis)

Answer 5

• Knowledge and environment thrown into disarray by climate change
• Can call identity into question for those who maintain close ties to environment and whose sense of self is linked to it (eg. Australia farming communities)

Question 6

What do Cunsolo and Ellis believe that grief indicates and therefore draws attention to?

Answer 6

Grief indicates interdependence with and reliance on what’s been lost
- Grief highlights interconnection between, and relational ties to, other people and things

Question 7

What does eco-grief draw attention to?

Answer 7

Eco-grief draws attention to humans’ interconnection to and dependence on nature (ie. that people are saddened and distressed by environmental loss indicates their reliance on it)

Question 8

What does eco-grief imply by drawing our attention to environment?

Answer 8

By drawing attention to our dependence on environment, eco-grief implies that we have responsibilities toward it
- Ethical responsibility to treat that which we depend on in a way that’s morally sound
- Political responsibility to use collective power to protect that which we depend on

Question 9

What does eco-grief imply by drawing our attention to human loss?

Answer 9

By drawing attention to human loss, eco-grief implies that people suffering from it may be entitled to justice and reparations
- eg. UNFCCC Warsaw International Mechanism already recognizes need to compensate “loss and damage” which is assumed to be material but could be immaterial too

Question 10

In what way can people react to eco-affect?

Answer 10

People may respond to fraught eco-affect via psychological defense mechanisms

Question 11

How may people choose to manage their eco-anxiety?

Answer 11

• Denial
  – If climate change isn’t real, then no need to be anxious
• Disavowal
  – If climate change isn’t that threatening, or not that threatening to me, or not that threatening to me right now, then no need to be anxious

Question 12

How can coping mechanisms of eco-anxiety create a vicious cycle?

Answer 12

Denying and disavowing climate change allows phenomenon causing negative eco-affect to worsen, which may lead some to double down on denial and disavowal

Question 13

How may people choose to manage their eco-grief?

Answer 13

• Numbing
• Substance use

Question 14

How can eco-grief be used by authoritarian/reactionary regimes?

Answer 14

• Eco-grief can be linked to nostalgia (eg. desire to return to lost environment or to a time when environmental loss wasn’t a major concern)
• Nostalgia can be used to strengthen appeal of authoritarianism (eg. MAGA)
• Nostalgia, grief, and anxiety may feed into allure of eco-authoritarianism (eg. via strong leader’s denial of climate change and promise of return to a less anxious time)

Question 15

What can climate change disrupt people’s ability to do?

Answer 15

• Manage existential fear of death via am “immortality project” that gives life some enduring meaning
  – eg. having children, pursuing accomplishments, adhering to religion

Question 16

How can climate change disrupt people’s ability to manage existential fear of death? How can this impact politics?

Answer 16

• By upending the reassuring sense that life has meaning after we’re gone, climate change can heighten existential dread, leading some to seek relief in reaffirming the status quo
• In this context, more far-reaching eco-political proposals may meet with reactionary backlash because they press on an affective sore spot: existential fear and distress

Question 17

Jensen’s idea on effect of eco-guilt rhetoric

Answer 17

Language and discourse can be used to encourage people to feel and act certain ways

Question 18

What are eco-friendly rhetorics?

Answer 18

Appeals to make small adjustments to everyday behavior for the sake of the environment
- eg. “please recycle” directives on packaging

Question 19

How and why are eco-friendly rhetorics used?

Answer 19

• Eco-friendly rhetorics are very common, especially in advertising and institutional branding
• Eco-friendly rhetorics are common because they’re profitable
  – Can convert interest in environmentalism into sales and consumption
  – Can distract from systemic change by focusing on individual action (ie. profitable to those with an interest in environmental status quo)
• Eco-friendly rhetorics tap into low-lying levels of collective guilt and offer atonement
  – They promise release from collective guilt via individual action
  – eg. buying green products

Question 20

Implications of eco-friendly rhetorics

Answer 20

• Eco-friendly rhetorics can perpetuate guilt-atonement cycle
• Eco-friendly rhetorics can inhibit political environmental action and change
  – ie. by atomizing collective guilt so that it’s expressed as individual behavior and atonement

Question 21

What is scapegoating?

Answer 21

Blaming single person or group for misfortunes or wrongdoings of others

Question 22

What is environmental scapegoating?

Answer 22

Blaming single person or group for environmental misfortunes or wrongdoings
- eg. 2015 viral backlash to Walter Palmer’s killing of “Cecil” the lion

Question 23

How is environmental scapegoating used?

Answer 23

• Used by corporations to shift blame for environmental harm onto consumers
• By displacing their own contribution to environmental harm onto consumers, corporations absolve themselves of environmental wrongdoing

Question 24

1971 “Crying Indian” public service announcement (PSA)

Answer 24

• Produced and paid for by bottle and packaging corporations of Keep America Beautiful INC
• In response to rise of radical green movements
• Renders companies making disposable products blameless by pushing eco-blame onto consumers
• Eco-emotional manipulation deflects attention from economic actors’ systemic contribution to harm

Question 25

What does Jensen identify as the two dimensions of environmental scapegoating in the Crying Indian PSA

Answer 25

- Viewers blamed for pollution of physical landscape - Viewers blamed for industrial-colonialism

Question 26

What does the Crying Indian PSA do to the viewer?

Answer 26

- American audience asked to identify with both the ad's protagonist and the forces responsible for making him cry - This dissonance triggers a sense of collective guilt -- ie. viewers are guilty for both environmental degradation and genocide which becomes fused together

Question 27

How does the broad audience of the Crying Indian PSA affect the population?

Answer 27

- Question of who's responsible for pollution are deflected by focusing on "inherited, collective guilt of an entire nation and its present [environmental] sins" - Activation of guilt breeds desire for emotional relief, redirecting potential anger into a quest for reconciliation and atonement instead - Attribution of environmental harm to ambiguous group of "people" absolves corporate actors of guilt by rendering them indistinguishable from other actors - Collective guilt then individuated and attached to atomized consumers who are invited to atone via individual action (ie. not politics)

Question 28

How has environmental scapegoating been used today?

Answer 28

- Eco-guilt individuated and weaponized via "carbon footprint" concept - Popularized by British Petroleum in 2005 in a $100 million media campaign - Attributes blame and guilt for environmental harm to individual consumers who should track and reduce their personal footprints to save the planet - Distracts from BP's own carbon emissions and contribution to environmental harm - Focuses attention on individual behavioral adaptation instead of collective, systemic change (ie. political change)

Question 29

How is the hypocrite's trap used?

Answer 29

Used to silence advocates of environmental change by pointing out how they either participate in or benefit from the environmental status quo - eg. politicians who call for stronger environmental legislation but travel by plane

Question 30

What does the hypocrite's trap assert?

Answer 30

Asserts that personal actions must align with recommendations for change

Question 31

What does use of the hypocrite's trap achieve?

Answer 31

- When words and actions are misaligned, advocates of environmental change are dismissed as "hypocrites" - Hypocrite's trap guilt trips individuals for their inevitable participation in ecologically harmful systems - Hypocrite's trap normalizes neoliberal commonsense wherein systemic compulsions are reduced to a matter of personal choice - Hypocrite's trap transforms collective, systemic culpability into individual blame and obstructs change because virtually no one can avoid accusations of hypocrisy

Question 32

What is the double bind?

Answer 32

Communication paradox where the substance of a message is undercut by its context - eg. encouragement to switch from plastic to paper straws to fight climate change

Question 33

What is the problem with the double bind?

Answer 33

- Suggested behavior modification may be environmentally beneficial but is so mismatched to the severity of the problem as to be self-undermining - "It's crucial that you act" but "the act doesn't make an impact"

Question 34

How is the double bind used?

Answer 34

- Used to guilt people into taking environmental action that can only be insufficient, and to then blame them for this very insufficiency - Used, like the hypocrite's trap, to level accusations of complicity and eco-hypocrisy