great_lakes_storm.jpg The riddle on which most environmental studies and thought is based on concerns how it is that humanity has managed in a short amount of time, to destroy and irreparably threaten much of the planet’s ecosystems and ecological integrity. Closely related to this riddle, is the one concerning the lack of response and reaction from governments, institutions and publics in the face of such problems. It’s a Gordian knot concerning human nature, capitalism, mastery, emotion and anxiety. From the point of view of an advocate for the environment, it is an expression of insanity. From the vantage point of industry, it’s a way of life, necessary evils. But what determines ‘necessary’ in this equation, and more importantly, who?
For many years, I’ve been exploring the psychic or emotional dimensions of environmental problems, particularly relating to anxiety. This interest was sparked when I was a first-year undergraduate at UC Santa Cruz, sitting in a darkened auditorium listening to a professor matter-of-factly narrate an entire catalog of serious environmental issues facing us and our future generations. From the destruction of fragile and vulnerable ecosystems, to global resource scarcities, I found it deeply frightening. But what I found equally distressing was the complete lack of acknowledgment of how this information impacts each of us, as we walk out of the lecture hall, and attempt to get on with our lives. As young people in particular, how does this news shape our sense of who we are, and more broadly what it means to be a person in this world? How do we live with this knowledge?
That was in 1987, and since then I’ve followed all sorts of paths into this topic. Like many I started with environmental philosophy and religions, deep ecology, nature writing and literature, and just kept going. I ended up doing a MA in communication studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and worked with rhetorician Robbie Cox and cultural geographer Ken Hillis, along with Dorothy Holland in anthropology and Doug Crawford-Brown in environmental studies. My MA thesis was on the ‘cell from hell’ — pfiesteria piscicida, the organism that was linked to massive fish kills in the Southeast United States, and linked as well to industrial hog farms lining fragile estuarine systems. It had to do with how narratives help us manage and cope with horrific and abject events, such as fish kills, and the political implications are.

Fast forward to the present, and I am now doing a psycho-social project with Valerie Walkerdine at Cardiff University. I was fortunate to discover, quite by accident, an entire orientation that recognises the relationships between culture, psychology and emotion, history, geography and subjectivity. It’s a fruitful location to pursue my studies, which concern psycho-social dimensions of how people living near the Great Lakes in the USA experience their local environmental issues. Drawing on in-depth interviews, the study explores the complicated ways in which people make sense of and experience their local environment (notably the Lakes and Green Bay), and goes beyond the surface of surveys, polls and focus groups. In this intimate approach, inspired by psychoanalytic methods, I hope to explore what concern actually looks and feels like in these contexts, and challenge the prevailing myth of public apathy.