Climate change and the psycheClimate change and the psyche
All In The Mind
In his new book, Why We Disagree About Climate Change, top British climate scientist Mike Hulme wants to understand climate change as a psychological and cultural force. Anthropologist Jonathan Marshall has just edited a provocative collection of Jungian perspectives on climate change. They join Natasha Mitchell to discuss mythology, mental ecology and a changing climate.
30:07•21 Nov 2009
Climate Change, Myths and the Hidden Life of Our Minds
Episode Overview
- Climate change is framed as a cultural and psychological issue as much as a physical one, shaped by long-standing human relationships with weather and nature.
- Mike Hume outlines four recurring myths around climate change: Eden (lost innocence), apocalypse (catastrophic endings), Prometheus (technological mastery) and Themis (justice and fairness).
- Jonathan Marshall explains how Jungian depth psychology treats storms, fires and floods as powerful symbols that shape emotions and behaviour, rather than neutral events.
- Fear-filled, apocalyptic messaging can leave people feeling helpless, whereas meaningful change may require more engaging stories, poetry and imagination around climate science.
- Both guests suggest that new, motivating myths about giving things up and living differently cannot be manufactured on demand but must emerge from people’s own images, dreams and inner lives.
“"Science is great at talking about physical realities. But it's not good at actually talking about how we animate those physical realities and intuitively and emotionally engage with them."”
What drives someone to seek a life-changing response to climate change — cold, hard facts or the stories running through their head? This conversation on All In The Mind turns the spotlight from the atmosphere to the inner life, asking how climate change lives in our myths, emotions and collective imagination. Climate scientist Mike Hume, author of *Why We Disagree About Climate Change*, argues that science alone can’t carry the load.
He suggests that climate change is "as much a phenomenon of the mind and culture" as it is of physics, and that policies built only on data miss how people actually think, feel and argue about the issue. He sketches four big mythic storylines many people fall into: paradise lost (Eden), end-of-the-world anxiety (apocalypse), faith in technological mastery (Prometheus) and moral outrage over injustice (Themis).
Anthropologist Jonathan Marshall, editor of *Depth Psychology, Disorder and Climate Change*, brings Jungian psychology into the mix. He explains how storms, fires and floods act as emotional symbols we dream about, and why our response to climate change is a "struggle with ourselves" as much as with the physical environment. Rather than reducing everything to childhood trauma, he argues for taking symbols seriously and letting them point towards new ways of living.
Along the way, host Natasha Mitchell steers a lively, sometimes unsettling discussion about why fear-based messaging can leave people paralysed, why science often sounds "very depressing", and why new motivating myths can’t just be written like a policy paper but have to arise from people’s deeper images and dreams.
If you’re curious about why climate arguments get so heated, why some people shrug and others panic, and how imagination might shift our behaviour more than another graph, this episode offers plenty to chew on and maybe a few questions to sit with too.
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