Is climate change old news? The short answer is yes. But, somehow, the long answer is no.

I recently read that people in the US see climate change as less important than they did three years ago. Maybe a part of this change is shifting focuses—increasing cost of living, Palestinian genocide, et cetera. However, it could also be how climate change is communicated; these other news stories seem more immediate and palpable than the typically data-driven climate change stories.

You know the ones: the articles about polar bears clinging to tiny ice rafts, the warnings about pollinators dying off, and the graphs showing ever-increasing parts-per-million of CO2 in the atmosphere.

These don’t connect anymore—if they ever did in the first place. They shut us down instead of lighting us up, making us feel small, ineffective, or bored. On a psychological level, this happens because they’re big, slow-moving, distant, and there’s no clear way to fight against them. Often, if these stories leverage emotions at all, they paralyze, not encourage, us.

Speaking of fighting, over the past few weeks, I’ve interviewed designers from various backgrounds, asking them what they want to learn about sustainability. A typical response was that they wanted to know what they could do, even if only in their immediate area, on a small scale. They want to feel effective somehow.

These two situations are more related than they seem.

While climate stories do need to be told more thoughtfully, and taking action is essential, I also wonder if designers’ bias toward action doubles down on avoiding a crucial step in our climate journey: feeling emotions.

What would recognizing this often-ignored aspect of the climate crisis allow us?

Emotional Imagination

Disillusion is a natural step in seeing reality for what it is. In addition to general unhappiness with current affairs, it’s defined as “the process of becoming freed from false belief.” Without this step, we couldn’t create a new reality.

Since there’s been a relatively small cultural shift regarding climate change, I wonder if we’re not disillusioned enough. Somehow, what’s happening hasn’t impacted us emotionally. Our feelings haven’t had the same wild swings from dismay to clarity and back that you would get even from a teenage breakup. The world is shifting beneath our feet, and we, as a species, carry on walking the same path.

If you think of any pivotal moment in your life, it’s likely bound up with various emotions. In design, we use this to our advantage, connecting people with joy, sadness, compassion, or desire to get our point across (typically, that point is ‘buy this thing,’ but that’s another story). Social movements are built and grow because of an emotional story, not because they’re the most logical solution; the strong social identity formed around MAGA doesn’t reflect that you can’t just turn the clock back on cultural norms.

In contrast to these examples, when did we last feel grief or sadness, awe or compassion about climate change? Emotions help us form concepts, which then inform our imagination. However, when it comes to climate change, designers’ bias towards action can cut us off from feeling, so we end up understanding the problem in theory but not in reality.

This is backed by research. Norwegian psychologist, Per Espen Stoknes, writes in his book, What We Think About When We Try Not To Think About Global Warming,

Attitudes consist of three main parts, as captured in what psychologists call the ABC-model:



• An affective or emotional component: What feeling is connected to the thing, person, issue, or event? (I really do love oranges.)
• A behavioral component: What kind of action or readiness for behavior lies dormant in the attitude? (That daily glass of juice.)
• A cognitive component: What thoughts, knowledge, and beliefs come up from memory when attending to the issue? (Yep, the vitamin C.)

An attitude is strong and consistent if all three components are aligned: “I love oranges and eat one daily because they contain vitamin C.”

It seems that, in design at least, we’re missing the emotional component.

Quickly trying to solve a problem without sitting with it—without grasping its contours and feeling the emotions that bubble up—isn’t solving the problem. It’s forcing a solution. Hurriedly, we lose sight of what should stay and what should go; everything is up for discussion when we undervalue what the world needs and overvalue our specific objectives.

Our imagination for alternate futures becomes blunted, and we fumble our commitment to addressing the climate crisis.

The Climate Journey

So, if disillusion is necessary to fight climate change, but designers have a knack for avoiding it, how can we bridge the gap? We must first digest the climate crisis as people, then as designers. We have to strap into the emotional rollercoaster that it is.

A ‘climate journey,’ as this rollercoaster is often called, is not unlike the stages of grief; what we’re grieving for, in this case, is a relationship with the planet that we’ve let languish. But it’s a relationship that can be rekindled over months or years, gradually moving from ignorance to action.

I’ve come to understand this in four non-linear stages:

Awareness

A logical, information-driven understanding of what’s happening: deforestation, biodiversity loss, CO2e emissions, etc. There’s an understanding that emissions = bad. Here, people learn about nature and are generally convinced by technical solutions.

Embodiment

Although it’s the second stage, this is where disillusionment lies. We often skip or don’t notice it because we’re trying to implement the solutions we learn about in the Awareness stage.

Organization

Here, we start to search for a broader community:

What groups should I join?
Who are the people to know?
Who can I trust?

We start talking openly about the climate because it validates the feelings we all have individually. This lets us know we’re sane. This stage may be why you signed up for this newsletter in the first place.

Action

Finally, we do something. Together or alone, we try to make the future different than the past, whether through technology, culture, or policy.

A hand reaching into space. It has a grain effect applied and the lighting makes it look heavenly.

Of these stages, embodiment feels like a crucial moment. While you can skip this step altogether—as noted by the entire movement of green growth—doing so also avoids a transformation in what society is working toward.

Like the immersion phase in a branding project, embodiment gives us a deeper context for what we feel, what we want to say, and how we want to say it. It helps us understand why we organize and why we take action. It (ideally) gives us an ethical compass rather than seeing our current situation as a technical problem.

Here, we start forming a stronger emotional connection with the earth. We often feel distraught over the state of the world and the loss of environments that have existed for millennia, epochs, and eons.

Embodiment is the stage of eco-anxiety—sometimes called “solastalgia”—which is sorrow due to unfavorable environmental change that’s out of one’s control. This might be mixed with rage and confusion. But it’s also a stage where compassion and love appear, otherwise known as “soliphilia.”

These two rather foreign-sounding concepts animate the sensitivities that capitalism numbs us to, and these sensitivities nuance our arguments. If the current system, and the poly-crisis that stems from it, survive because of our numbness, then it makes sense that the only way to change the system is to amplify sensitivities—to feel the emotions we’re often pulled away from or don’t have time for.

In a way, the solution to the climate crisis is inside us. Experts agree that the technical solutions already exist. What’s missing is the grief. The rage. The love.

But without an outlet, this cocktail of emotions can turn to depression, especially in individualized societies. In that context, emotions become a liability more than anything. However, a liability in an individualized context becomes an asset in a collective context. Sharing your thoughts and experiences publicly helps build connections with others who feel the same way; it lets them know they're not inventing emotions. It validates them.

On the back of this validation, we collectively push and pull, organize and act, to build power and shift culture toward a place that works for more people. And for the planet.

That's all for this week! Thanks for reading.

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