A Harbinger of What's to Come

An Alien Scene: Icicles Melting off our Roof
CC Jean Stimmell:1/130/16

Looking out my window today, I see pussy willows already blossoming, mud in the driveway,  what-little-snow-we’ve-had-all-winter melting off my  roof.

Climate change, excruciatingly racheting up the tension – as was so masterfully done on medieval torture racks –  torments Mother Nature and our minds. Environmentalists call this the “long emergency" from which there is no escape. 

Glenn Albrecht, an Australian professor of environmental studies, has come up with a new diagnosis: “eco-anxiety.” Though we don’t yet find this term in the DSM-5, it perfectly describes what we are all feeling: ‘‘the generalized sense that the ecological foundations of existence are in the process of collapse.’’*

*Albrecht, G. (2012). Psychoterratic conditions in a scientific and technological world.

In P. H. Kahn, Jr., & P. H. Hasbach (Eds.), Ecopsychology: Science, totems, and

the technological species (pp. 241–264). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.