End of the World

It’s the End of the World — How Do You Feel?

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Terry Root often goes to sleep at night wondering how she’ll be able to get up the next morning and do it all over again. Then the sun comes up and she forces herself out of bed. She might go for a run to release the pent-up anxiety. Sometimes she cries. Or she’ll commiserate with colleagues, sharing in and validating each other’s angst. What keeps Terry up at night aren’t the usual ailments; it’s not a tyrant boss or broken heart.

The diagnosis: global warming.

A senior fellow at Stanford’s Woods Institute for the Environment, Root has spent the past two decades unraveling the thread between climate change and the eventual mass extinctions of countless species of plants, animals — and, yes, humans. “That’s a tough, tough thing to cope with,” Root says in a weary, jagged voice. There’s more. When the gray-haired bird watcher shares her End of Days findings, she’s often met with personal attacks; naysayers hurl their disagreement and disdain, complete with name-calling and threats from politicians. But the absolute worst part of her job? We’re not listening. “It’s harder than hell to carry that,” says Root.

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Stanford University built a non-secular spiritual center on campus called Windhover, where students and faculty can go to meditate and reflect. It opened last year.

Armageddon aside for a moment, that an acclaimed scientist will say h-e-l-l to a reporter and use words like cope is a sign of changing times. Not only are we living on a warming planet but a progressively emotive one. It started with parents coddling their kids (no more advice to “just suck it up”), then it was emojis (punctuation isn’t enough) and now it’s climatologists tweeting “we’re f’d” and field researchers speaking up about climate depression — or even pretraumatic stress disorder.

There is a paradigm shift taking place in the field of science with the recognition that even the most stoic minds of the world need a way to process their doomsday findings. All of this is fueling a debate that’s raged since before Galileo and until recently landed on one central question: What place does human emotion have in scientific reasoning? But in 2015, there’s another layer that’s been schlepped into the controversial heap: What do you do when your job is to document the end of the world?

For centuries, professors say, the scientific fraternity has adhered to a “hidden curriculum” — right there, in invisible block letters, beneath the sign saying Goggles must be worn at all times. No. Crying. In. Science. And for good reason, many argue. In this world of double-blind trials and peer-reviewed articles, objectivity rules all. Otherwise cracks open up and doubt seeps in, rotting the very foundation science is built upon.

But what if the entire goddamned profession gets wiped out in a hurricane? Then what? There’s a growing sense of urgency as worsening environmental catastrophes play out before us. In the midst of what many in the science community — by “many,” we mean upward of 95 percent — are calling a planetary crisis, more researchers are finding that they can’t simply present their data in a vacuum, then go home at the end of the day and crack open a beer. “Scientists are going from these totally objective outsiders into being much more subjective and a part of the community,” says Faith Kearns, an outreach coordinator for the California Institute for Water Resources, which tries to solve drought-related challenges.

Indeed, the façade of total objectivity has deteriorated in recent years alongside intensifying environmental cataclysms. In 2012, Camille Parmesan, who shared a Nobel Prize with Al Gore in 2007 for her climate work, publicly announced her professional depression and frustration with the current political stalemate. Shortly after The Atlanticnamed Parmesan one of its 27 “Brave Thinkers,” alongside Steve Jobs and Barack Obama, for her efforts to save species, she temporarily left her university job in Texas for a reprieve across the pond. Then last summer, climatologist Jason Box’s tweet — “If even a small fraction of Arctic sea floor carbon is released to the atmosphere, we’re f’d” — went viral, provoking a media frenzy. The public relentlessly chastised him for a) making a definitive statement instead of dealing in the usual probabilities and b) expressing emotion.

And now there’s the website Is This How You Feel?, which publishes handwritten letters from climate scientists expressing their frustrations, fears and hopes. One professor writes, “It’s probably the first time I have ever been asked to say what I feel rather than what I think.” Another scrawls, “I feel exasperation and despair. … I feel vulnerable that by writing this letter I will expose myself to trolling and vitriol.” Joe Duggan, the mohawked Aussie with a nose ring and master’s degree in the growing field of science communications who manages the site, says he’s been shocked at how many responses he’s gotten in the mail: “There is a movement of scientists looking for new ways to connect; they’re emoting in ways they never have before,” he says.

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Stanford’s Windhover integrates nature throughout the center to help visitors re-connect with and replenish their spirits.

Elizabeth Allison turns off the lights. She instructs her students to stack one vertebra on top of the next until their spines are straight and long. Then to focus on the rhythm of their breath. In. And out. In. And out. Acknowledge any feelings or sensations that arise, then let them go. After 15 minutes she slowly guides them back into the present. Feet and hands begin to stir. Eyelids slowly make their way to full attention.

OK, that’s it. See you all next week — and don’t forget your homework assignment is due. After all, this is graduate-level course PAR 6079.

So much for that centuries-old hidden curriculum. From professors like Allison taking students through a guided meditation after a discussion on retreating rainforests to scientists signing up for workshops on compassion and communication to support groups for climatologists, human emotion has wedged itself into every step of the scientific method. Marilyn Cornelius, a Stanford-trained researcher, has found the best way to explore creative solutions for the planet’s woes is to meld behavioral science, biomimicry, meditation and design thinking. Now she works as a consultant, taking energy experts on wilderness retreats and teaching lab coats to connect with themselves and nature. “I made a decision to work on behavior change,” Cornelius says, “because it’s a positive way to work on the climate problem.”

This isn’t just about managing the feelings of scientists, though. Kearns, from the California Institute for Water Resources, acknowledges how painful it can be to watch academics try to relate to everyday folks and has made it her mission to make these interactions less cringe-inducing. The soft-spoken brunette first began thinking about this impasse after some years back she hosted a community workshop on emerging “stay or go” science that weighs whether home owners can — and should — protect their property from increasingly frequent and ferocious wildfires. Her audience was a small northern California community that had recently faced that very dilemma. Fear, anger and helplessness pulsed through the room. “I started to feel their anxiety,” Kearns says. “Our research has an effect on people’s lives. My scientific training hadn’t prepared me to cope with the emotions that come with that.”

But there is still the camp that believes feelings erode credibility and breed bias. It’s the naturalistic fallacy, and it’s the difference between the is and the ought. The philosophy is that facts can’t substantiate value judgments. Science is perhaps the last frontier of neutrality, especially in today’s polarized society. As Philip Handler, former president of the National Academy of Sciences, once said, scientists “best serve public policy by living within the ethics of science, not those of politics.”

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Windhover is named after Nathan Oliveira’s renowned series of paintings that were ”inspired by kestrels swooping above the Stanford foothills,” according to the website.

The seismic sentimental shift among scientists parallels an outpouring of feeling — and narcissism — across American society. Once-detached psychotherapists are hugging their clients, journalists have come to love the personal essay (in fact, it seems like everyone has a story to tell these days), even man-eating corporations are experimenting with emotional leadership. Or think of the impassioned protests around Black Lives Matter, the outrage at sexual abuse and the pleas against social inequality. “There’s been more space in the public realm for bringing up and dealing with emotional stuff, and that has cracked the shell of otherwise very removed scientists,” says Allison, a professor at the California Institute for Integral Studies. Then again, maybe climatologists are more cunning than we give them credit for, and they’re simply taking a page out of their opponents’ playbook.

Indeed, emotions are a powerful tool for those who know how to use them. Which is why those leading the climate-change charge aren’t looking to labs anymore. Instead, eager students are following Cornelius’s path, pursuing studies in contemplative environmentalism or transformational ecology, which looks to shrinks, money and Facebook to protect the planet. With the future of everything at stake, what has traditionally separated science from sentiment is a lot less defined — and perhaps even irrelevant.

But emotions are less predictable than facts and figures. Root remembers giving a talk once at the University of Utah. Afterward a few students came up to ask questions; one young man had tears in his eyes. “Is it really this bad?” he pleaded. Root told him it’s worse. He went on to become an activist and was sent to prison for one of his illegal protests. Root has always felt responsible.

“I’d always thought that facts and the truth would win out; then I realized that wasn’t the case,” Root says.

Our Nostradamus Age.

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We are living through a new Nostradamus age, full of dire tidings. Bloggers and cable specials are connecting Nostradamus’s predictions to Hurricane Sandy, the Mayan calendar, and cataclysmic events on December 21, 2012. There are more than three dozen Nostradamus applications for the iPhone alone.

As the winter solstice approaches, commentators decry all of this as superstitious drivel and fear-mongering. In truth, while certain mass media play their part, Nostradamus’s words continue to resonate in our day (as they have since the 1500s) because they ease anxieties and provide meaning when the authorities on which we rely — government, schools, or churches — seem powerless or unreliable. What Nostradamus’s presence says about our era may be disconcerting, but it is neither surprising nor catastrophic.

Michel Nostradamus was born in Provence in 1503 as a notary’s son. An itinerant physician and plague doctor, he began selling horoscopes and writing annual almanacs. In 1555, he published the Prophecies, a collection of 942 four-line poems known as quatrains. Contemporaries deemed his verses incomparably enigmatic and dark (he predicted the end of the world for 3797). They also gave these verses credence and made Nostradamus an international celebrity.

Nostradamus died in 1566, but his posterity proved long lasting.  One reason for this staying power is that, unlike other soothsayers, Nostradamus neither founded a social movement nor attached himself exclusively to any religion or party. His quatrains did not belong to anyone, which meant that they belonged to everyone. This has enabled people to marry his verses with other predictions or even the Mayan calendar.

Having come of age with the printing press, Nostradamus was also an early media entrepreneur. He provided his publishers with droves of predictions that contained few dates but plenty of place names. Written in Old French, his quatrains proved easy to connect to innumerable historical events. Over the centuries, they have made their way into newspapers, radio, movies, and series such as the History Channel’s “Countdown to Apocalypse” (whose Nostradamus special premiered in late November).

In one respect, these media have used Nostradamus to dangle images of gloom, all the more so in recent decades. The sheer number of quatrains has made it easy to fashion new scenes of horror and transform the Renaissance doctor into a prophet of doom.  Without any religion, political school, or intellectual current to object to such uses, Nostradamus has become a brand in our mass culture.

But there are other reasons why the Nostradamus phenomenon (as we may call it) has continued to flourish.  Vivid and cryptic verses such as “Battle, death, defeat: the cross most disgraced” have long captured and named the flux and confusion of the world, expressing what people felt but could or dared not put into words. During the Renaissance, it was famine, disease, and vicious religious wars; today, it is recession, terrorism, and climate change — an accumulation of threats suggesting the end of all things.

Nostradamus’s dark verses dramatize the just and sometimes catastrophic violence of our world and the sorrow that punctuates the human condition. They tell readers that they are fragile being but also draw them into a wondrous universe in which they can connect with broader forces and other people while tapping a vast range of emotions, from awe to bewilderment to terror. Readers can feel the tremors while remaining at a remove.

Some people have accordingly read Nostradamus and uncovered a mesmerizing spectacle about their own world. Others, in contrast, have found depictions of the future. By pinpointing events to come, the quatrains can provide a sense of control during uncertain times. Even if the forecasts are scary, they can help people adjust to new situations and chart a course of action. It is easier to tackle apparently specific threats than it is to battle diffuse perils. It is also more awe-inspiring to contemplate the fragility of human civilization than it is to confront personal troubles on one’s own.

Finally, the quatrains have been used to situate wars or natural disasters within a historical chain of catastrophic events. They restore the span that has been broken asunder by crises and also tell contemporaries that they are living through epochal events rather than mere emergencies. Their pain is real and logical given the magnitude of what is going on.

And so, alarming as these predictions may be, they have not caused apocalyptic frenzies. Instead, when change seems to come ever faster and the authorities on which we rely appear ineffective, some people are drawn to all-powerful forces, even if these forces are unsettling and leave little room for personal responsibility. Other people use these verses to alleviate uncertainty, infuse their world with meaning, peep into the immensity of time, and gain a sense of history in the making. They may even include Nostradamus within the personal spiritual frameworks that they create on their own. Quatrains that have lasted without institutional support are ideal for such patchworks.

Ultimately, the Nostradamus phenomenon warrants our attention, not because it depicts our future, but because it mirrors present contradictions. In our day, it depicts an era caught between media sensationalism and thirst for meaning, an era that yearns for collective protection as well as individual participation, an era seeking more knowledge as well as relief from too much knowledge.

These free-floating predictions thus help us perceive deep-seated yearnings that hover below the surface, just out of our view. Nostradamus did so during the Renaissance — and his words continue doing so today. This is why the Mayan calendar will come and go but the quatrains are bound to endure. Living in a Nostradamus age, it turns out, is not the end of the world.

Source: http://www.huffingtonpost.com