Presenting Green Melancholia
Freud (1917) defines melancholia as prolonged grief, an intense experience of sadness and sorrow after the loss of a valued one or something of value. It encompasses intense feelings of sadness and hopelessness. Loss of hope can be toxic for the person experiencing it. Many scholars define hopelessness as “negative expectations about the occurrence of highly valued outcomes and feelings of helplessness about changing the likelihood of occurrence of these outcomes” (Alloy et al., 1998). Though this can be a temporary feeling, when facing melancholia, it might be experienced for much longer.
There are increasing studies that point to how climate change is affecting our perspective on life and changing the discourse on planetary survival from hope to despair. The “doomer” literature, a new genre of popular culture, tackles climate change and the future of our planet with a perspective of hopeless apocalyptic imagery (Bulfin, 2017; Svoboda, 2016). A recent example from this emerging genre of pop culture can be the latest album of Grimes, “Miss Anthropocene”. In the album, the artist adopts an aggressive, negative, and isolating perspective on climate change and does not leave room for hope. Moreover, the same thing can be seen from some media outlets in which they favor a negative and hopeless approach to news on climate change. But what is the impact of such narratives?
It has long been known that narratives, and the stories we tell ourselves and others, have a profound influence on how we relate to and define our experience with the world (Schneider-Mayerson, 2018). In a 2020 survey in England, more than half of child and adolescent psychiatrists reported that young people were stressed about climate change with complaints of hopelessness (Royal Collage of Psychiatrists, 2020). In another survey study in 2021, with 10,000 people who were aged between 16 and 25 from ten nations, 75% reported that the future is frightening; 56% stated that humanity is doomed; 55% that their most valued things will be destroyed; 52% that their security will be threatened (Hickman et al., 2021). Moreover, 68% of the respondents reported feelings of sadness, fear, anxiety, helplessness, and powerlessness. We at Green Hub have observed that all these feelings can be adequately encapsulated in the wider concept of melancholia. To provide an accessible, holistic term, we propose to call this “Green Melancholia”, a melancholic state of being caused by climate change, news on climate change, and governments and big companies’ greenwashing. Even though we believe in a hopeful approach to our future in which the impact of our actions are more important than ever, it is crucial to listen to, acknowledge, and honor these uneasy feelings because they are telling us something very important: we not only want change, but we need change.
Green melancholia is an emotional, psychological, physiological, and social imperative for the health and well-being of an increasing proportion of the generation who are having to inherit the dereliction of their forebears. Naturally, feelings of betrayal and anger accompany this. This state of being can be seen as a collection of narratives: narratives that we tell and create ourselves, that our climate anxiety tells us, and that are fed by the mainstream media. It is crucial for us to reflect on these narratives so that we can have a clearer picture of how the climate crisis affects our mental well-being and possible ways to tackle the issues that arise with green melancholia. In the next section of the article, we discuss backpacking as one of the narratives that are related to green melancholia, a romantic view of reconnection with nature.
From Romanticism to Backpacking: reconciling for a loss of Nature?
Romanticism developed in the artistic and philosophical spheres in Germany and England at the end of the 18th century during a period marked, like the present one, by revolutions driven by the great faith placed in technology and progress. Romanticism substituted feelings for reason (the core of Enlightenment thought), which had failed to provide an effective explanation for the deep sense of change and loss happening at the time. Romanticism moved from the faith of objectivism and reason to the importance of subject emotions, thus expressing the unease of the intellectual who is constantly confronted with the daily experience of psycho-social distance, between the search for perfection seen as a perennial goal, and a problematic and imperfect present from which it is not possible to escape. This experience leads to the production of the famous German state of mind called 'Sehnsucht', which, at the closest, can be translated as anxiety. Anxiety for a beloved lost, a grief that is captured by the concept of green melancholia.
From a purely philosophical point of view, there is a revival of Spinoza's mechanistic and Leibniz's organic finalist models. The Romantic image of nature is thus a synthesis of these two models: a Spinoza-like infinity and a Leibniz-like finalism. It is depicted as infinite but unitary, driven by a polar force in constant motion. It is this force that shows us the thought and will of humans (it is no coincidence that Nietzsche, a generation later, placed his Zarathustra in the middle of nature) of perfect harmony with the universe. As an expression of God, not as father and biblical but as a transcendent whole that connects everything, nature is seen as the source of truth and people identify within it and immerse themselves in search of peace.
As scholars, scientists, indigenous communities, and activists are screaming, the Anthropocene is marked by pollution, exploitation, and the destruction of natural habitats. Does all this destruction mean that the feeling of the 'romantic' can no longer exist in Western societies? Or has it survived, or even evolved, into other forms? As is often the case, there is no single answer. A plausible one, however, can certainly be found in backpacking.
Popular and having started in northern Europe, backpacking is a manifestation that has turned into a phenomenon, a way of traveling and experiencing: put what you need in your backpack and off to discover the unknown. Prevalently widespread among young people, it concerns anyone who feels the need to stop for a while and get away from the alienation, toxicity, and sometimes chronic illness (whether physiological, emotional, or psycho-social) that Western societies lead us to experience through their races and dynamics. A completely different way of understanding travel compared to the common modern holiday, an old way of getting to know the spaces and places of our world that is back in vogue today. The impetus behind such a change, of course, is curiosity and the spirit of adventure. It is a way of traveling with a deliberately limited budget to break down the invisible barriers created by money, favoring the authenticity and naturalness of the experience.
Backpacking is a response through travel, a way to re-establish a connection with nature by getting to know it by direct experience and exploring what we might call the 'infinite-finite'. The search for personal transformation and then returning to the world one had abandoned, but experiencing it with new eyes and awareness.
As much as it relates to traveling, backpacking can also become - as it was for Romanticism - a key to interpreting the world. Traveling is part of life itself, it is a way of expressing oneself and living away from the superfluity of consumption. People move, and they always have. For much of our evolutionary history, we were nomadic and heavily reliant on the social-community unit we were part of. Perhaps we are existentially called, or carnally compelled to remember what we have forgotten, or even, been programmed to forget. The rhythms slow down, as it is essential to abandon oneself to the flow of time that the place visited requires. This connection to the land and the wider whole is endemic and essential for indigenous cultures worldwide. This type of travel is not aimed at the conquest of the space visited, as 'I have been here', but at a deep understanding between the traveler and the place visited. The most important aspect of backpacking is the connection with the indigenous nature of the place, which, however, is transformed into an absolute nature, as from the knowledge of the outside one can get to know the inside of oneself better. The travelers through this experience grow themselves because, just as in Romanticism, they lose themselves to find themselves again, realizing that they are indeed a part of the world, inhabitants of it, representing a small but very important part.
With such dissolution between travelers and the territory around them, there is a space in which green melancholia and romanticism narratives that surround backpacking coexist together in a realization of harmony, a restoration of nature, and its expressions.
We wish to conclude this article with a selected poem from T.S. Eliot, and movie and book suggestions that explore narratives around Green Melancholia.
“We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
Through the unknown, remembered gate
When the last of earth left to discover
Is that which was the beginning;
At the source of the longest river
The voice of the hidden waterfall
And the children in the apple-tree
Not known, because not looked for
But heard, half-heard, in the stillness
Between two waves of the sea.”
T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets, 1943
Movie and Book Suggestions
· Into the Wild (2007)
· Nausica From the Valley of the Wind (1984)
· Siddharta (1922, Hermann Hesse)
· The Way (2010)
· Melancholia (2011)
· Walden (1854, Henry David Thoreau)
References
Alloy, L. B., Abramson, L. Y., Metalsky, G. I., & Hartlage, S. (1988). The hopelessness theory of depression: Attributional aspects. British Journal of Clinical Psychology, 27(1), 5-21.
Bulfin, A. (2017). Popular culture and the “new human condition”: Catastrophe narratives and climate change. Global and Planetary Change, 156, 140-146.
Freud, S. (1917). Mourning and melancholia. The standard edition of the complete psychological works of Sigmund Freud, 14(1914–1916), 237-258.
Hickman, C., Marks, E., Pihkala, P., Clayton, S., Lewandowski, R. E., Mayall, E. E., ... & van Susteren, L. (2021). Climate anxiety in children and young people and their beliefs about government responses to climate change: a global survey. The Lancet Planetary Health, 5(12), e863-e873.
Plautz, J. (2020). The environmental burden of Generation Z. Washington Post. https://www.washingtonpost.com/magazine/2020/02/03/eco-anxiety-is-overwhelming-kids-wheres-line-between-education-alarmism/
Royal College of Psychiatrists (2020). The climate crisis is taking a toll on the mental health of children and young people. London. https://www.rcpsych.ac.uk/news- and-features/latest-news/detail/2020/11/20/the-climate-crisis-is-taking-a-toll- on-the-mental-health-of-children-and-young-people.
Schneider-Mayerson, M. (2018). The influence of climate fiction: an empirical survey of readers. Environmental Humanities, 10(2), 473-500.
Svoboda, M. (2016). Cli‐fi on the screen (s): patterns in the representations of climate change in fictional films. Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Climate Change, 7(1), 43-64.
Links
Topic - Human and CultureTopic - EconomyBlog - SDG Book ListBlog - Life in the OceansBlog - SDG Movie ListTopic - EnvironmentProject - Waste SegregationProject - Sustainability SeriesProject - Sustainability Week