Ecopsychology for the 21st century? Confessions from a climate emotion sceptic

Abstract

In recent times, the human dimension of the global environmental and climate crisis has received increasing attention. Not least psychology that many now turn to hoping that it can help the world’s politicians and citizens respond faster and more adequately to the crisis. Thus, current directions such as environmental, climate and ecopsychology have been met with great interest and given rise to a number of new ”green” emotional concepts such as solastalgia, ecological grief and climate anxiety that describe human responses, or lack thereof, to climate change. In this theoretical article, I shed a critical spotlight on the validity of these concepts and ask whether ecopsychology’s grand ambition to close the emotional gap between man and nature really can be fulfilled. My review of solastalgia and ecological grief suggests that these feelings, both empirically and theoretically, rest on an idea of alienation from nature-based more on empathy and faith than scientific research. Thus, the mobilising effect of these newly discovered emotions towards nature may not appear and mislead us as much as guide us.