The strong abuse the weak, and alleged leaders behave like addicts, unwilling to change the destructive habits that degrade others and our home, the Earth itself. Public discourse digresses into rant and manipulation. Indeed, as a global community, we appear as a dysfunctional family. Likewise, the rise of a vocal environmental movement over the last half-century, even apparent anti-social activism, arises as a response to a pervasive social pathology. The child acting out at school may be the systemic alarm, not the source of dysfunction. We may also recognize – as Catherine Bateson recalls in the film of Nora Bateson, An Ecology of Mind: A Daughter’s Portrait of Gregory Bateson (2011) – that ‘the pathology is in the system.’ When treating addiction or other social dysfunction, one may find that the pathology does not rest in the disruptive child, in the self-harming teen, or in the addicted adult, but rather pervades the entire family system, and thereby the entire social system in which the family lives, embedded. For society, the double bind may appear as: (1) keep consuming and burn the Earth, or (2) slow consumption and face hunger, poverty, or fear of the unknown. For the abuse victim, the double bind may be: (1) stay and suffer abuse, or (2) leave and face poverty and loneliness, possibly separation from one’s children, or simply fear of the unknown. Jackson, Jay Haky, and John Weakland at the Veterans Administration Hospital in Palo Alto, 1956) sixty years ago. Like the victim who remains in cohabitation with an abusive spouse, the global community appears caught in a double bind, as described by Gregory Bateson and his colleagues (Don D. By all measure, this pattern appears as pathological addiction. After 26 years of therapy, the patient is drinking seven bottles of alcohol per day, and still promising to ‘get better.’ The extensive team of therapists feel optimistic: ‘We’re making improvements.’Īs absurd as this sounds, this precisely represents the state of the world’s climate ‘progress.’ Industrial nations appear addicted to carbon fuels (coal, oil, gas), continually promise to change, pledge to reduce oil consumption, hold meetings to discuss it, while continually increasing consumption. This little story of geopolitical incompetence is comparable to an alcoholic battling a bottle-per-day habit: The alcoholic begins therapy to ‘cure’ the addiction. Today, in 2017, after 26 years of climate conferences, the global community is increasing atmospheric carbon at the rate of about 3.6 ppm per year, seven times faster than at the time of the first climate meeting. ![]() ![]() ![]() in 1991, humans were increasing atmospheric carbon at the rate of about 0.5 ppm each year. ![]() The process of recovery from this trauma may help protect and restore the lost wildness in our world and in ourselves. The wealth accumulated in Europe and North America has been plundered from the natural world, from the oceans, forests, and mines, leaving behind depleted landscapes and traumatized communities. ‘The poor are not those who have been “left behind” ,’ Vandana Shiva, Indian physicist and ecologist, points out, ‘they are the ones who have been robbed’ (2005). For most of the world, for billions of workers, indigenous communities, and poor, ecological trauma persists as a feature of daily life. In this paper, I will discuss a specific vector for trauma, ecological trauma, and its relationship to widespread addictive behavior. From Rex Weyler: “In In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction, Gabor Maté concludes that ‘A hurt is at the center of all addictive behaviors.
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