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Original article: https://theconversation.com/loving-the-world-could-address-the-climate-crisis-and-help-us-make-sense-of-changes-to-come-240766
This January, the world watched as Los Angeles burned. “I’ve never seen anything like this,” one police chief told reporters, a sentiment echoed by front-line firefighters.
Last fall, hurricanes Helene and Milton swept through North Carolina and Florida.
The storms’ intensity and record-breaking fatalities, exacerbated by climate change, blindsided many inhabitants. “Never in a million years,” one nurse said, “did I think [a storm like that] would happen in my own backyard.”
As a researcher focused on how language and storytelling contribute to social cohesion and social change, I noticed people repeatedly felt they had “no words to describe” what they saw.
Their experience captured what happens when stories and words to fail describe our world.
(AP Photo/Jae C. Hong)
‘Between past and future’
After the Second World War, for example, philosopher Hannah Arendt, born into a German and Jewish family, wrote about not just the impact of the war on a personal level, but also its impact on how people make meaning.
What did it mean, Arendt asked, not to have the conceptual frames through which the world had once made sense? What did it mean to live in the strange interval of time “between past and future” when old forms of understanding the world had eroded and new forms had not yet been found?
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Her response was bracing and unexpected. She called for everyone — not just philosophers or scholars but the general public as a whole — to step up and contribute to the work of making meaning at a time when meaning-making was grievously fractured. Her phrase for this was amor mundi or “for love of the world.”
Now, as many people seek to understand and respond to the climate crisis, they are again experiencing a sense of personal loss and a larger sense of not having the conceptual tools to make sense of this moment. How does one love the world in difficult times?
Learning to love the world
Love is complicated and messy. Like hurricanes and fires, it often defies the categories available to describe it.
(Barbara Niggl Radloff/Wikipedia), CC BY-SA
And as Stephanie Lemenager, professor in American literature and environmental studies, illustrates, love of fossil fuel culture, and the conveniences it provides, makes it difficult to respond to the climate crisis.
Love also evades measurement, and metric-oriented value structures can’t count it. As William Shakespeare asks, tragically, in King Lear: “How does one measure love?”
Love won’t run out in 2030 or 2050. It doesn’t have a parts per million, and despite the many hot and cold words to describe it, it doesn’t have a temperature. Still, as climate emotions professor Sara Jacquette Ray notes, love of this world powers climate action.
I was talking to a friend recently, the Canadian poet Ken Victor, and he suggested “giving priority to the climate crisis as a multi-faceted relationship to be repaired rather than as a problem to be solved.” Indigenous thinkers like Leanne Betasamosake Simpson,
the renowned Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg scholar, also emphasizes “deep reciprocity” and “relationship” to resist the injustices imposed by colonialism.
Global North climate responses have much to gain from Indigenous thinking and Arendt, of course, is not alone in animating the power of collective, participatory storytelling and loving the world.
Learning to ‘restory’ the climate
The idea of “restorying” has been taken up by Indigenous writers to speak in diverse and powerful ways to dynamic and relational forms of oral storytelling, leadership and theatre.
(Wikipedia)
My research on time and climate develops German Jewish philosopher Walter Benjamin’s relevance to storytelling, and what I am calling “restorying” here.
Like Arendt, Benjamin wrote that the trauma of war — in this case, the First World War — weakened the stories upon which his world relied for social coherence. Where Arendt suggests loving the world, Benjamin endorses amplified, dynamic forms of storytelling.
Here I build on the tradition from Benjamin to Arendt that invests in the collective practice of making sense of the world one inhabits through sharing, revising and building stories. For Benjamin, stories are in dialogue with other stories; they are participatory and inconclusive. They are also “effective,” meaning they produce effects and invite a response. Above all, they are meant to be repeated and passed on.
Benjamin’s account of stories, however, also includes a cautionary note: people stop telling stories, as he defines them, when the world no longer fills them with wonder or surprise; when they think they know where they stand. They stop asking questions and no longer believe they can benefit from sharing their dilemmas and concerns with others. They stop thinking, in Arendt’s sense.
When people isolate themselves in silos of like-minded others, they avoid being challenged or provoked. As Arendt notes, facts are fragile. When lies proliferate and the ability to distinguish those lies from factual truth is eroded, reality wobbles and political action becomes near impossible.
People can’t act, Arendt believes, when they stop sharing a world in common, however divided by different customs it will always be.
Relationship rebuilding
Environmental justice asks us to rethink the systems and practices that created today’s climate impacts. Addressing the climate crisis only from the perspective of a problem to be solved means that we continue on the path, and with the infrastructure, that created the problem in the first place.
Now, poised between another past and future, I’m interested in, as writer and activist Astra Taylor puts it, “coming together as things fall apart.” Coming together, as a relational practice, can animate what’s missing in the problem-solution models that dominate Global North responses to the climate crisis.
Arendt and Benjamin offer me stories that “work” and stories that “wonder.”
Stories that “work” mobilize equitable climate action. Stories that “wonder” are stories that keep open questions, conversation and thinking.
As international assemblies like COP29 fail to realize their goals, as global carbon emissions continue to rise and as extreme weather everywhere makes many people feel that the frameworks available for understanding no longer serve them, a different response is required. We could call it, following Arendt and Benjamin, restorying the climate and loving the world.