My name is Nikki and I’m a social worker-in-progress.
I primarily focus on environmental justice and its impact on human health. Right now, things look and feel bleak. At some point, I would like to be a part of the solution but I need to work through the grief and anxiety that I feel as a result of the constantly shifting landscape around me in order to make it feel like something I can do something about.
Recently, I was thinking about a concept I read about in the Handbook of Climate Psychology published by Climate Psychology Alliance that was called a hyperobject which was proposed by a scholar named Timothy Morton.
To summarize this concept as I understand it, a hyperobject represents something that is both abstract and difficult to put into words and is on such a massive scale that it outgrew our ability to fully grasp and conceptualize it. Morton captures the concept by observing that “the more data we have … the less we know about them” (p. 29).
For me, climate change is a hyperobject hydra. The more I think about it, the more heads it sprouts and… as a social worker, I do a lot of thinking and contemplating about the well-being of others. Maybe its more like conceptual poison ivy, the more you scratch the more likely it is to spread.
It doesn’t take much to feel the enormity of the struggle we are facing: Sea levels are rising to the point where the shape of maps have changed due to the tides (anyone else remember Louisiana being boot-shaped?), greater numbers of species are tilting toward endangerment or extinction, policy lags far behind the data, there’s mistrust of the science or rejection of it altogether, and people across the world are being displaced from their homes due to climate related catastrophes.
On the opposite side of the coin, I live in a rapidly developing region and I feel like it brings the large(r) scale outrage I feel from a simmer to a boil. I have watched the town I lived in as a child become virtually unrecognizable. I’ve seen the woods I grew up playing in and exploring being stripped to build expensive single-family housing, unnecessary grocery stores, and gas stations, among other things. The worst part is knowing that this small-scale destruction and hostile divorce from both ‘rural’ and ‘nature’ in favor of suburban sprawl is occurring on a larger scale pretty much everywhere else, too. One more head for the hydra.
Recently, there has been land clearance in Big Bend National Park, talks of clearing even more public land, and repealing the roadless rule which would allow development to reach into the national and state parks. The boil begins to roll and we add three more heads for the hydra.
The problem is that its not just pure outrage. Underneath the ocean of white-hot anger inside of me is a cold undercurrent of helplessness because these problems are so massive that it is more than any one person alone can tackle. The problem is that climate change is not the only hyperobject, it’s also the nature of human greed, indifference, and carelessness. I want to believe that we will wake up one day and realize that we’ve taken it all for granted and hold power to account in some meaningful way, the problem is that I know that day is more than far away.
I realize that to care deeply is not the curse I think it can be sometimes and, also that to care to the point of consumption is not a sustainable or healthy practice, either. My problem is that I don’t know how to reconcile the world I know with the world I want and I don’t know how to nurture the flame I feel without turning it into a wildfire.
At home, on the whiteboard next to my desk, I have a quote from Antonio Gramsci that says “Pessimism of the spirit, Optimism of the will.” I think the only way to scale down a hyperobject is care with a dose of rationality and I’m writing this publicly so I can find a way to twist this grief into a lantern that I can navigate the darkness. Maybe it’ll help you, too.
I hope this finds you well.
– N.
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