pierced

“The inverse relationship between the scale of the climate problem and our difficulty in engaging with it emotionally isn’t just a cruel irony, or another opportunity to squabble over the proper traffic between the personal and the political. It is one of the structural features of the crisis. So I’m focusing here on feelings, especially ugly ones, not only because I think they’re standing in the way of something we like to call “action,” but also because, whether we “act” in time to stave off a truly catastrophic rise in temperature or not—and we may very well not—they still matter, insofar as they shape our experience of our lives, determine how we treat others, and decide the ways we are able to “stay with the trouble,” sometimes even determining whether we are able to do so at all.

We all struggle with what it means to “know” about global warming, even as we are living it. As Edward Morris and Susannah Sayler of the Canary Project point out, “knowing” is distinct from “believing” as, by their account, true belief would spur action, yet we do not act. (It would help, of course, if we felt surer about what actions to take, or if we had a stronger sense of the collective into which our individual actions poured.) As Morris puts it, “Belief is a function of feeling. We can only believe in climate change—by which I mean not the statistically created research object, and not even the hyperobject, but rather the cost in terms of pain that climate change will cause—when we are opened emotionally to it. Pierced.” He and Sayler have described this awakening as a type of rupture or trauma. Those who have borne the brunt of climate-related trauma have already been delivered unto this awakening; those who have not face something of a paradox, wherein the continued refusal to be pierced on behalf of others may be precisely what ensures that climate-related trauma will come to them as well.”

Excerpt From
"On Freedom"
Maggie Nelson