Nature’s being as excess can also strike us, in a way that provides a deeper glimpse into the nonhuman than we are usually afforded. [N]ature is primarily considered as material for ready-to-hand entities (timber, leather, etc.) or as a present-at-hand object of scientific fact-gathering. But… a further, more poetic sense of “the power of nature” … proposes that nature can be contrary to sense: natural catastrophes can intrude absurdly into [our] sphere of significance. (R. Polt)
Arnold Schroder is an extraverted ecologist living a nomadic life and fighting the fossil fuel industry. In his article (see below for link) I was startled to read that he finally came to see that he too, is a climate crisis denier. He means that:
for most people most of the time, whatever our worldviews, global collapse is simply beyond our emotional and psychological scope, if it is presented in non-mythic terms.
In other words he came to discover that the language we use re: our global crisis determines how we respond and how deeply the issue penetrates us.
He writes that, for him, the likelihood of the end of the world only came home to him when he moved from prosaic, problem-solving political language to what I would call language of the “interior” or as he says, mythological language, in order to truly comprehend what is happening to us. He claims he came to this insight through a religious experience and describes it in detail. His “religious experience” could just as well be called an initiation into the soul of world, just as Robert Oppenheimer was initiated when he burst out with that famous quote from the Gita when the bomb went off:
Now I am become Death, destroyer of worlds!
Schroder goes on to say
The moment of psychological integration I experienced didn’t occur because I was explicitly processing anguish over a doomed food system or an ocean populated only by plastic. I’d been doing those things for years. It occurred because I had a religious experience; and I didn’t have a religious experience because I was seeking one, but because of fire.
Schroder and Oppenheimer shifted from rhetoric of pragmatism to poetic, mythological language because only this language penetrates us and overcomes the subtle denial that Schroder admitted to and I suspect many other programmatic problem-solvers do as well.
Here is his article as well as two of mine on this theme:
The Meaning of the Bomb as World-Destroyer
