Traumatizing Children and Damaging Planets
Parallels Between Harming Children and Injuring the Earth (Vol. 4; Issue 14)
Attentive parents, sufficient socioeconomic resources, and safe social environments cannot fail to prevent psychological injuries to children. Even wonderful parents disregard their children in various ways. Sometimes they’re distracted by work or family. Other times they cannot prevent abuse from others, e.g., bullying by peers at preschool or beyond. Seemingly ideal environments still create, at least, deficits in self-confidence. The fact that children spend 12 or 13 years smaller in stature than the adults around them often negatively impacts self-images.
The much-less-than-ideal contrasts with obvious types of harm: Neglect, physical or sexual abuse, and similarly means of hurting children cause unequivocal psychophysiological injuries. Steven Pinker (2002), the Harvard evolutionary psychologist, believes we need only let our children “be who they are” and prevent them from harm. Even these modest goals often prove elusive.
Childhood trauma, ranging from mild to disastrous, parallels the approaching climate catastrophe. Winnicott (1960) coined the phrase, “infant-caregiver unit,” to emphasize the intimacy of the bond and the degree of the dependency of infants on their caregivers. A Rose City clinician, Kiel McFarland, mentioned the parallel during a class there. He suggested that, much like infants are to caregivers, we humans are intimately dependent on the Earth. As I will illustrate below, we’ve ignored our relationship with the Earth for the past two centuries. The neglect equals the worst types of child abuse imaginable.
Further, our pending planetary disaster results from harm done to other living things. Plankton, a diverse collection of organisms in water unable to propel themselves against currents, comprise the primary source of hydrocarbons. These and other decayed organisms—plants and animals—create precursors to hydrocarbons. These organisms died, became buried, heated up, mixed with rock, and formed complex molecules bursting with potential energy. Biomarkers within hydrocarbons validate their organic origins (Walters, 2017).
Despite opinions to the contrary, dinosaurs did not significantly contribute to petrochemical development. However, their extinction resulted from another type of disaster:
An asteroid some 10 to 15 kilometers wide struck Earth near the Yucatan peninsula 66 million years ago. Its impact, leaving a crater more than 150 kilometers wide, instantly vaporized immense geological formations. Plumes of sulphur-based gases blocked out the sun, causing an “impact winter” lasting around 15 years. Named after the Chicxulub Pueblo near where it hit the Earth, the Chicxulub Asteroid is considered the event leading to the extinction of dinosaurs. (Their only remaining relatives are birds).
OK, so what’s the point?
Like the Buddha got half correct, life is suffering. (He left out the joyous part). We are all traumatized children, grown into adults who, in my view, are “adults” because they’ve learned to play dress up well. We live out our dream-like, culture-infused journey towards inevitable death, hopefully enjoying most of the ride. But now, for the first time in 66 million years, we face two risks to the extinction of humanity: nuclear weapons* (Jacobsen, 2024) and global warming.
Can you appreciate the irony, also noted by Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek (2023), that the disaster facing human civilization is layered upon earlier calamities? Humanity has enjoyed a seemingly endless supply of energy from petrochemicals, which, in turn, resulted from the catastrophic death of millions of organisms. The miracle of organic life, reaching (arguably) its heights in homo sapiens, emerged from just such primitive forms of life.
We contemporary humans probed, excavated, extracted, and refined these hydrocarbons to provide energy for the past 200 years. For at least the past 50 years, we’ve understood their climate destroying effects (Karbelnig, 2024ab). According to the July 2023 edition of the Economist, this most recent geological period, called the Anthropocene, began in 1950 when scientists discovered sediment near Toronto, Canada. Their discovery revealed that human activity was permanently changing the Earth’s geology. The journalist continues: “The idea of the Anthropocene is a striking expression of a profound truth… [that] humans are responsible for physical, chemical, and biological changes previously brought about only by the great forces of nature” (p. 2).
Unlike organisms decaying for hundreds of millions of years, or asteroids dropping out of the sky 66 million years ago, our abuse of our host planet Earth is unequivocally our responsibility, and a function of our free will. We have, in essence, dissociated ourselves from our dependency on the planet Earth. Consider this alarming fact noted by climatologist Wallace-Wells (2019):
Ninety-six percent of the world’s mammals, by weight, are now humans and their livestock; just four percent are wild. We have simply crowded—or bullied, or brutalized—every other species into retreat, near-extinction, or worse. (p. 170).
So what’s the solution? Žižek (2023) proclaims that:
in order to change our future, we should first … reinterpret [the past] in such a way that it opens up toward a different future from the one implied by the predominant vision of the past.
Such a reinterpretation requires we humans to understand how our vision of the past, e.g., petrochemicals are infinite or they don’t really pollute the Earth, created these perils to civilization. It involves the humbling realization that our evolution into “intelligent” beings brought psychotic levels of denial with it.
Breaking through our defenses and addressing the problem requires us to eliminate the use of fossil fuels, reduce our reliance upon industrialized agriculture, and increase our conservation of natural resources. I propose we buy our food locally, consider resources like drinking water a precious commodity, switch over to electricity as much as possible, practice conservation, and otherwise bring a greater conscious awareness of the approaching climactic changes. As things get worse in the coming years, it might behoove us to join protest movements, which will likely consist of millions of people taking to the streets.
Changing the future requires us to face into, and prevent, two looming threats to the human civilization: The possibility of nuclear war* (Jacobsen, 2024) and the certainty of global warming. The former requires disarmament; the latter radical prevention.
*As noted earlier, the topic requires it’s own deep dive—particularly in terms of how it invades our unconscious minds. The threat of nuclear war goes back to the 1950s, and we humans are equally in denial of the always-present threat.
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References
Jacobsen, A. (2024). Nuclear War: A Scenario. New York: Dutton.
Karbelnig, A.M. (2024a). Beyond climate defensiveness: The role of psychoanalysis in creating a sustainable future. The American Psychoanalyst, 58.1:32-45. (March 2024 Issue).
Karbelnig, A.M. (2024b). To whisper or to shout: Psychoanalysis’ climate dilemma. Psychoanalysis, Culture, and Society. (Requested revisions under consideration by editorial board).
Pinker, S. (2002). The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature. New York: Penguin.
Wallace-Wells, D. (2019). The Uninhabitable Earth: Life after Warming. New York: Crown.
Walters, C.C. (2017). Origin of Petroleum. In: Hsu, C.S., Robinson, P.R. (Eds) Springer Handbook of Petroleum Technology. Springer Handbooks. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-49347-3_10
Winnicott, D.W. (1960). The theory of the parent-infant relationship. International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 41:585-595.
“Worry not about when the Anthropocene began, but how it might end.” The Economist, July 13, 2023.
Žižek, S. (2023). What lies ahead? Jacobin, (January 17, 2023 Edition).