Climate Change and the Poetic Imagination

Luisetta Mudie

While the world's leaders converged on Copenhagen for the COP15 climate change negotiations,
the rest of the world watched the by now familiar roles play out on television. The Charismatic
President, the Representative of a Small Island, the Scoffing Skeptic, the Satirical Comedian; the
Environmental Protester; the Cop, the Arguing States, the Brussels Bureaucrat, the Television
Journalist, the Leaked E-Mail.

If this were a medieval morality play, or an ecopsychology conference, a few Virtues and Vices
would be in there, too, personified: Greed; Temperance, as well as Mother Earth; the Oceans, the
Fish, the Disappearing Species, the Demon Carbon, placing his Footprints across the earth,
faced by the Angel Temperance, who keeps things in Balance, so that All May Live.

But where we We? We the Consumer, the Viewer, the Individual Polluter, we the Six Billion?
What do we, as adults, Imagine about climate change? What are the characters in our dramas?
Are they apocalyptic, like the Book of Revelation and the movie 2012, or stories of genocide and
endless weeping, the World Ending With a Whimper? Are they Blackly comical, full of self-
knowing Dr. Who irony and compassion, like a Douglas Adams script? Or tragic, like the curse of
Oedipus that fell on Thebes as a direct result of an attempt to evade Fate?

How do we imagine the story forward? Our role in it? Is the council Recycling Man a facilitator of
salvation? Do we lash ourselves in the knowledge that the Original Sin of our age appears to be
that we pollute, irrevocably, the planet that gave us life? Or are we on a heroic mission to Save
the Planet, or willing to die in the attempt, knowing that, if it all goes down the toilet, at least we
Did Our Best, but Others Would Not Listen?

Can we imagine anything else? Will some Ubergeek or White-Coated Scientist invent something
that brings in global changes? Or will lots of inventive people come up with New Ways of Doing
Things, or Not Doing Things?

Are we those Inventive People? Or have we lost touch with our imaginations to the extent that the
very phrase Imagining Climate Change only brings images of pictures of a panting, smoke-
encircled Earth crayoned by children? If so, is that because our imaginations are so very badly
crayoned, because they have never been educated beyond primary school, because Imagining
as a way of knowing has long been disregarded by scientific rationalism, the only Respectable
Way of Knowing anything in our current society?

Poesis, the art of Imagining, is also another word for Making. The essence of poetry lies in the
ability to Make New Relationships between things which weren't automatically related in people's
imaginations: to come up with Image not pre-masticated by the media, by Canonical Literature
(which, for many of us in the West, includes the texts of Science), or by the commonness of
everyday speech. The current climate change crisis is a direct result of our emphasis on New
Ways of Doing Things. Not Doing Things is simply its antithesis, and the best we can apparently
come up with, because we are stuck without the full use of our Imaginations and the Different
Ways of Knowing and Being that they might bring.

Humankind has used Imagining as a Way of Knowing before, in so-called primitive societies' use
of animism, shamanism, song and story, but those ways have been skewered for the past century
or so in intellectual debate about whether the Savage was really as Noble as some people
seemed to think, with both sides caricaturing the other side's view.

The point isn't really about the Savage, however, who may or may not have enjoyed peace or
health as Imagined. It's about The Way Nothing Got in the Way of his Imagining about the very
difficult environments she was forced to negotiate. Ways were found, like the Songlines of the
Aborigines that guided them very practically, apparently for tens of thousands of years, through
an Imaginal Landscape, not to Overcome Problems, but to Live in a Tough Place. We have
become softened into thinking that we shouldn't have to live in a tough place, with the Demons
and Angels that come with Poverty, Pestilence, Famine, and so on. And yet, here we are,
Between a Rock and a Hard Place.

This is the True Ground of poetry, of Imagination, and the birthplace of New Ways of Being.
Science cannot get very far with climate change divorced from its partner, the Mature (not
classroom) Imagination. And the more of us who make the transition from Consumer/Viewer to
Active Imaginer the better. At the back of the role of Consumer/Viewer, sits the notion
(personified, of course!) of the Individual, who Inhabits a Private Reality we call Human
Subjectivity. We are now painfully aware that the Realities we inhabit are not only private.
Whether we imagine ourselves as Rising Apes or Fallen Angels, those Images are shared, and
the Realities they lead to are also shared.

In the Imagination, notions are Persons, ideas are Roles, and all can be modified and re-cooked
(as the Temperature Rises) by the Images that emerge between the Rock and the Gum Tree.
Climate change forces us into emergent forms of behaviour and the Great Dissonance heard in
Copenhagen last week is none other than the Cognitive Dissonance between our environment
and our ability to live in it. As the latest teaching theories suggest, Cognitive Dissonance is the
beginning of New Ways of Knowing. These have always emerged from the gap between our
situation, and our under-standing of it. While they have been guided and formed by all the
resources an educated adult mind can muster, they still have only one source: the Image that
comes out of the dark.

Luisetta Mudie is a freelance writer specialising in depth psychology, shamanism and the
imagination.