From Anxiety to Hope: Working Through Environmental Melancholia in Eco-Justice Education

• In Event: 15.059 - Fairmont Royal York Roundtable Session One
  In Roundtable Session: 15.059-8 - Toward Pedagogies for Eco-Ethical Becoming: International Collaborations for Eco-Justice Education

Abstract

Ecological catastrophes like global warming have led educators to ask how to deal sensitively with such phenomena in the classroom. The question is often wound around the psychological, pedagogical, and political aspects of emotions and affects in education. It has become quite obvious that global warming, for example, should be approached without causing additional anxiety or crippling cynicism among pupils. However, there have appeared considerable proposals which argue that difficult themes such as loss, guilt and fear should be encountered directly in order to set emotional energy free for sustainability efforts. In our presentation we focus on recent ecopsycological and ecopsychoanalytic research on anxiety and hope in the face of global warming and ecological degradation and consider their repercussions for EcoJustice Education.
Renée Lertzman (2015) has coined the term environmental melancholia to denote the toll environmental degradation takes on the human psyche. The concept refers to a sense of loss and sorrow in a person's relation towards the environment in the context of environmental degradation. More broadly, ecopsychoanalytic theories assert that human subjectivity is psychologically bound to its more-than-human environment, as our emotions, feelings of safety and danger, as well as our identity are inherently reflected and articulated through them (see e.g. Dodds, 2012). As Lertzman (2015) argues "(h)ow we respond to particular environmental issues can be shot through with powerful and inchoate affective investments, memories, desires and losses" (p. 101). Because of this evanescent, elusive nature of emotions, melancholia might be difficult to articulate. This is also why it has escaped such environmental research that focuses on the relations between environmental knowledge a rational subject and its actions.
We argue that environmental melancholia is a concept which opens vistas for a relatively new, psychoanalytically charged area of discussion in EcoJustice Education, and also one that bears political weight on how to think about and act upon concerns of ecojustice.
Psychoanalytic studies of ecological concerns also provide insights on how to approach them with due sensitivity. 'Working through' is a term used in psychoanalytic theories to refer to the articulation rather than silencing, acceptance and recognition rather than denial, splitting or rationalization of reality. Working through also provides an open field for different forms of engagement in ecojustice education, ones that do or differentiate strictly between large and small, local and global scales as to predetermine a proper form of engagement. We elaborate resonances of working through with the ecojustice idea of 'letting our hearts break' (Martusewicz, 2014), in particular ideas on how to cultivate hope without denying the tragedy of current predicaments or falling back into denial, cynicism, or apathy.

Authors

• Antti Saari, University of Tampere

• Panu Pihkala, University of Tampere