This Is How I Feel About Global Warming

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This Is How I Feel About Global Warming

January 10, 2008 by lamarguerite

A blank piece of paper, and a pencil. That’s all it took for the truth to come out.

My head, connected to the big bubble.

My heart, my guts, my hands, and my feet, in another space altogether.

I’m split.

Posted in Zen Moments | Tagged attitudes and behavior, climate change, consciousness, Global warming, Green Psychology, self-drawing, zen | 16 Comments

16 Responses

on January 10, 2008 at 8:09 pm | Reply nadine sellers

you have just drawn the societal image of man meets natural awareness.
here is a true rubber eraser and some genuine horse hoof glue for you. docteur nadine to the rescue.
one bite at a time, one long bath, and a walk in the park, to connect with today. only today.

standing on the intellectual platform of science, and absorbing the magnitude of complex issues does overwhelm modern mind.
thank you for sharing what we may not always identify in ourselves.
on January 11, 2008 at 12:41 am | Reply Kiashu

I thought the horizontal line was rising sea level, not some arbitrary division between head and body.

What’s creepy is that you have no eyes.
on January 11, 2008 at 1:36 am | Reply lamarguerite

I was an art therapist in a previous life. There is nothing like art to reveal one’s unconscious . . . Kyle, I have no eyes because that’s the truth of how I feel. In my limited world, I have no real experience or physical awareness of global warming. That is a problem.

Nadine, I agree that reconnecting with nature is good medicine.
on January 11, 2008 at 4:15 am | Reply danny bloom

I think what the drawing reveals is that you want your cake and eat it too. That’s a tough balancing act these days.

LaM, is it really true what you wrote: you have no experience or physical awareness of global warming? Really?

That IS a big problem, yes. Then go out and get some experience ASAP.

Maybe everyone should take your cartoon test. It’s very revealing. You might have stubled on a new kind of global warming awareness “image”. I like it. Do something with it. Ask more people to send in their cartoons of themselves vis a vis global warming. You could contribute a lot to the discussion with this kind of public litmus test. very interesting.
on January 11, 2008 at 4:37 am | Reply Darmok

The prospect of changing the environment on a local or global scale is not one our brains evolved to deal with. Our intelligence allows us to grasp concepts and engage in behaviors that are well apart from our evolutionary history, but it is not always easy to do so.
on January 11, 2008 at 4:43 am | Reply lamarguerite

Danny, I agree it would be interesting to poll people using that technique . . .

Darmok, yes, this is why global warming is such a different beast, as articulated by Daniel Gilbert.
on January 11, 2008 at 5:28 am | Reply Kiashu

Personal experience of climate change or peak oil isn’t that hard to get. Here Down Under, we had a record rainfall of about 120mm in 48 hours, followed by normal summer days of 25-30C or so, punctuated by 40C days. That sort of extreme and turbulent weather is exactly what we can expect more of with climate change. Plus we’ve had this drought for the better part of a decade.

Or you could visit New Orleans, and see the vast swathes of abandoned looted housing people aren’t allowed to live in. There’s your experience of climate change and peak oil in one.

Or you could visit Detroit’s abandoned suburbs to see what life without oil looks like.

It’s not hard to see it up close and personal, really. The only difficult thing is making the connection between your day-to-day actions and that end result. That’s the same as the guy who wrote “all men are created equal” but couldn’t bring himself to free his slaves. “But… I’m nice to them!” He couldn’t connect his day-to-day life with his principles.

When a building lacks “structural integrity”, what we mean is that the different parts don’t fit together and support each-other very well – so it might fall down. Likewise, when a person lacks integrity, the different parts don’t fit together, and they might fall down. A lack of structural integrity threatens the stability of the building; a lack of integrity in the founding of the US, with words saying one thing and actions another, led directly to the violent resolution of that conflict, of that lack of integrity, in the form of the American Civil War. When words were not matched by actions, conflict followed, and the whole was almost destroyed.

Similarly, if we don’t match our actions to our words, we can expect some sort of clash later on. Not necessarily or even probably a civil war, but certainly it’ll come back to bite us on the bum. For me, if I have principles but don’t act on them, I feel an inner tension, a conflict.
on January 11, 2008 at 6:27 am | Reply lamarguerite

I do feel that tension. It is barely noticeable, but when I stop for a moment, I can feel it.

One day, I am going to get it right, just not today yet . . .
on January 11, 2008 at 8:49 am | Reply Kiashu

Well, nobody gets it right all the time. All of us do some jaywalking, “forget” to do some household chore, think a little bit too long about some infidelity to our spouse, and so on.

We don’t have to be perfect, we just have to get it broadly right. There’s enough slack in the social, economic, and natural systems to allow a few wrong things to be done.
on January 11, 2008 at 4:14 pm | Reply lamarguerite

Yes, perfection is not what we are shooting for here . . . I have written before about ‘The Danger of Perfection’.
on January 13, 2008 at 11:15 pm | Reply Melinda

I know I’m chiming in a bit late here but I think the reason so many of us have difficulty connecting with the issue at hand is that we find it challenging to remove ourselves from the barrage of messages we are faced with on a daily basis. Messages that cause us to doubt our true inner voice.

We know inherently that we are abusing our planet but then on the other hand we love technology, we love thinner television screens, slimmer phones, newer this and newer that.

Unless we remove ourselves from the hype and seriously stop reacting to the barrage of messages and begin actively doing something, which in many cases is as simple as stopping our unabated consumption of ‘things’, we will and can make an impact on our world.

We are the richest nation on the planet and whether we like it or not many third world countries want to be just like us. The look up to us, they emulate us. Unless we start behaving like a true role model and changing our habits at the personal level, then the state level and then at the federal level we can expect to experience this limbo feeling for decades to come. And if it’s too late for some us it’s not too late to teach our children to question the messages they are expsoed to daily.

There is a great piece by Annie Leonard called ‘The Story of Stuff’. Have a look. It’s thought provoking at the least. It’s also 20 minutes long but well worth the time invested.

http://www.storyofstuff.com/
on January 13, 2008 at 11:44 pm | Reply lamarguerite

Melinda,

I agree. I also did a post on The Story of Stuff last week . . . It is a great educational video.
on March 13, 2008 at 9:55 pm | Reply Climate Fight: the Heart Connection « La Marguerite

[…] with people on an emotional level. The global warming message has made it into people’s heads, but has failed to grab them by the heart. Appeals to morality and civic environmental duty can […]
on March 20, 2008 at 6:01 am | Reply The Shrinking World of Technology « La Marguerite

[…] wonder I feel cut off. 12 by 8, inches, that’s the extent of my […]
on June 22, 2008 at 3:13 pm | Reply Ronald Van Wegen

You people haven’t been paying attention. Global Warming is a crock. There were 2,500 scientists on the IPCC who “sort of” agreed with it. There were 31,000 just the other day, 9,000 with PhDs, who disagreed – vehemently. Start reading the science people. The world has NOT warmed in the last 10 years while CO2 has gone up. And Down Under? It’s just the same here as it always is; cold sometimes, warm sometimes, droughts, fires, etc. Now it’s raining. Leave my money alone.
on June 23, 2008 at 3:21 am | Reply wb

Globlal?