The main problem, with the ‘environmental’ problem, is that it’s so energy-sappingly depressing. All those mind-numbing statistics about species extinction, escalating Parts Per Million of atmospheric carbon, another landscape racked by deforestation. A read through the “Jo’berg memo” for example, published to coincide with the Rio plus 10 Earth Summit in Johannesburg last year, is a downward-spiralling journey of despair. Lester Brown’s annually published ‘State of the World’ report, the essential brief-case bible of the environmental lobbyist, attempts to be positive but the undercurrent of desperation catches you in the end.
If we are right about the state of our planet home, we are in deep, deep trouble. But do you feel it? Is it in your waking consciousness that our daily life is slowly sinking into a quagmire of pollution and meaningless consumption? All those organophosphates in your fat tissue, carcinogens sucked into your lungs 12 times every minute, pesticide residues digesting ever-so-slowly in your stomach – these are the privileges of affluence for which we all seem so ready to sacrifice our family lives, our health and our sanity. But are you, as you read these words, churning with the raw pain of ecological suicide?
Denial is the dominant psychosis of industrial life. We all do it, I’m doing it now, typing away on a machine that took over 10 metric tonnes of raw material to manufacture and which has wound around it’s cabling toxic material that my grandchildren will be left to deal with. It’s an interesting paradox – we know what is happening to our planet and the evidence is frightening – ‘robust’, as they say in scientific circles – and yet most of us simply do not take the type and scale of action that is required, even at a minimum. I ask you – are YOU willing to give up your car? Because that is the kind of sacrifice it will take, at a minimum.
It’s a well known psychological dynamic that, when we are faced with information that is simply too scary to deal with, we cope by ignoring it, we hide it behind walls that are made of pure psychological energy. The cost of doing this is two-fold. Firstly, hiding the problem doesn’t solve it, and in fact actually makes it worse because a problem denied is one that is left to grow unhindered. And secondly, all that denial energy has to come from somewhere. As it seeps away from other essential functions in other areas of our lives, it leaves a huge deficit in our mental health. We feel stressed, tired, anxious, overwhelmed and depressed. We are running on empty because all our energy is soaked up trying to live a lie.
This is known as ‘cognitive dissonance’ – where your behaviour does not marry with what you know to be true, and denial is the obvious way out, until reality itself become derailed from the truth altogether.
Denial and cognitive dissonance have been around for a long time, right from the early days of Freudian psychoanalysis. The usual connotation is that these mental dynamics are used to deal with all kinds of tricky personal issues. The social consequences are often seen in anti-social and apparently ‘inexplicable’ behaviour, the actual real causes of which having been long-since buried. This dysfunction is further exacerbated because the energy required to maintain the charade has left none to fuel the respect, tolerance and empathy necessary for normal relationships.
But this dynamic duo – denial and dissonance – are also ecological. They impinge as much on our relationships with the environment around us as they do with our relationships with other people, and indeed, with our perception of ourselves. Living a lie leaves us on the one hand defeated and impotent to act, on the other blind to the dangerous truth about the state of our own reality.
Perhaps shifting our behaviour away from our blind and relentless consumption of resources and dumping of pollutants may depend as much on our definition of mental health as it currently seems to on essentially shallow and ineffectual social policy. Maybe the way to change our cultural addiction to anything that distracts us from the truth of our own predicament is to reconnect us in no uncertain terms with that truth. But whose truth is true?
Luckily, we don’t have to make that call. In fact, all those ‘post-modernists’ amongst you – all those who believe that reality is a purely human concept, one that rallies to the New Age mantra “you make your own reality” – should take a walk in the mountains. Stand in the path of an avalanche and shout “you make your own reality” and I assure you the answer to all your self-obsessed intellectualism will be forthcoming.
Right there in the wilderness is the answer to that fundamental question – what is the truth? While reading about the tree-munching, acres-per-minute destruction of tropical forests, or watching the oily slime of the latest tanker wreck lapping at a previously pristine coastline via satellite television, may help temporarily shatter the ‘business as usual’ illusion, such starkness could just as easily drive the denial deeper. We don’t need any more doom and gloom.
Wilderness is the antidote for denial and dissonance and it brings the truth of our ecological reality, wrapped in experiences that are intrinsically rewarding, to those who show respect for it. Those who go there without respect don’t have to stay long before they get feedback they simply can’t deny. No amount of human hubris can distract from the real work of survival. Wilderness doesn’t suffer fools gladly – just like the entire biosphere of which wilderness is the quintessential raw and real representative. In the end, the truth will be forthcoming and a balance must be struck.
Wilderness is healer, guru and spiritual guide. It is healing, education and spiritual awakening rolled into one. The truth is out there.
Hi – just a little note to say thanks for this entry. Very great.