Forming bonds in times of crisis
Reimagining and acting to create a better world can be a deeply positive experience. In the act of coming together, we can rewire the status quo so that taking care of each other becomes the (Photo: David Suzuki Foundation via Flickr)
The climate and ecological crises touch each of us to varying degrees. Some carry the emotional weight of worrying about what kind of diminished, unstable world we’re leaving for our children while others are directly, physically affected by climate-fuelled disasters like storms, wildfires, droughts and changing wildlife patterns.
Our responses to these crises also vary. Most people know the traditional reactions to crises: fight, flight or freeze. But as climate scientist and activist Susanne Moser says, “We keep talking about the three Fs but there is a fourth one, and that’s the one that actually helped us survive. The forming of bonds, or the be-friending. That’s the piece that got to us to cooperate as a species and recognize that we have greater advantage when we work together as opposed to everyone for themselves. This is biology. It is in the genetic history of our species. We are here because we cooperated. It’s part of us.”
Naomi Klein’s book The Shock Doctrine examines how capitalism takes advantage of disasters, always ready to profit from the destabilization they create. On the flip side, a new phrase has emerged to recognize the human capacity to co-operate in the face of calamity — “disaster collectivism” — described by writer Rebecca Solnit as “the sense of immersion in the moment and solidarity with others caused by the rupture in everyday life, an emotion graver than happiness but deeply positive.”
This term has emerged from the displays of compassion, altruism and creative solution-seeking that blossom when climate disaster strikes communities. News reports are full of stories about neighbours and strangers going out of their way to share food, rescue pets, locate loved ones and help rebuild what has been lost.
Acute stress may actually lead to greater cooperative, social, and friendly behavior.
Although disaster collectivism was coined in 2018 in conjunction with the dizzying increase in climate-caused calamities, the phenomenon of the potential of positive reaction to stress has been documented by scientists. A 2012 article in Scientific American, “How the Stress of Disaster Brings People Together,” points to studies that found, “acute stress may actually lead to greater cooperative, social, and friendly behavior.”
Margaret Klein Salamon, founder and executive director of U.S.-based The Climate Mobilization, argues that society actually needs to enter “emergency mode” in which “individuals and groups function optimally during an existential or moral crisis — often achieving great feats through intensely focused motivation.”
The climate and ecological crises are manifest in destroyed homes and livelihoods during floods, hurricanes and tornadoes, drastic declines in wildlife populations and the disappearances of vast tracts of forests consumed by increased wildfires, but they are ultimately symptoms of the underlying crisis of our societal failure to take responsibility for our impacts on the planet so that it can continue to provide us with stable, life-supporting ecosystems. It is a crisis facing us all, that we created and to which we must respond.
Although we sometimes see our economy as an absolute, as something apart from us, it is our creation, and it can be recreated if we recognize the planetary harms it sets in motion.
The systems we’ve been using to structure the way we extract resources need to be rethought. Although we sometimes see our economy as an absolute, as something apart from us, it is our creation, and it can be recreated if we recognize the planetary harms it sets in motion.
Ideally, the fissures in the wall that has upheld business-as-usual operations provide an opportunity for us to come together, equipped with tools to redress, repair and rebuild. Some of the fixes will be technological, like better ways to make renewable energy sources accessible and affordable everywhere, but what is mainly needed is a new vision that sets limits to better manage the pace and reach of our historically unrestrained plundering of the planet’s offerings.
Reimagining and acting to create a better world can be a deeply positive experience, as Solnit highlights. In the act of coming together, we can also rewire the status quo so that taking care of each other becomes the norm.
As Barry Lopez observes in his book, Horizon, “Our question is no longer how to exploit the natural world for human comfort and gain, but how we can cooperate with one another to ensure we will someday have a fitting, not a dominating, place in it.” Change isn’t easy, but when people come together for the good of humanity and Earth, we can accomplish great things.
David Suzuki
David Suzuki, Co-Founder of the David Suzuki Foundation, is an award-winning scientist, environmentalist and broadcaster. David is renowned for his radio and television programs that explain the complexities of the natural sciences in a compelling, easily understood way.
Education
As a geneticist. David graduated from Amherst College (Massachusetts) in 1958 with an Honours BA in Biology, followed by a Ph.D. in Zoology from the University of Chicago in 1961. He held a research associateship in the Biology Division of Tennessee’s Oak Ridge National Lab (1961 – 62), was an Assistant Professor in Genetics at the University of Alberta (1962 – 63), and since then has been a faculty member of the University of British Columbia. He is now Professor Emeritus at UBC.
Awards
In 1972, he was awarded the E.W.R. Steacie Memorial Fellowship for the outstanding research scientist in Canada under the age of 35 and held it for three years. He has won numerous academic awards and holds 25 honourary degrees in Canada, the U.S. and Australia. He was elected to the Royal Society of Canada and is a Companion of the Order of Canada. Dr. Suzuki has written 52 books, including 19 for children. His 1976 textbook An Introduction to Genetic Analysis(with A.J.F. Griffiths), remains the most widely used genetics text book in the U.S.and has been translated into Italian, Spanish, Greek, Indonesian, Arabic, French and German.
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