It was three and a half years ago that I began writing letters to the editor on the subject of climate change. This daily "practice of conscience" has had its good impacts on my life: the ego boost of publication in a major or unusual venue; the satisfaction of a well-turned phrase; the honing of my craft as a writer; the occasional approbation of my colleagues and peers. It's also had its negative effects, mostly due to this regular ritualized immersion in dire news and the self-imposed discipline involved in summarizing and commenting on it.
Carolyn Raffensperger accurately speaks to my condition in her essay, "Moral Injuries and the Environment: Healing the Soul Wounds of the Body Politic."
The moral injury stemming from our participation in destruction of the planet has two dimensions: knowledge of our role and an inability to act. We know that we are causing irreparable damage. We are both individually and collectively responsible. But we are individually unable to make systemic changes that actually matter. The moral injury isn’t so much a matter of the individual psyche, but a matter of the body politic. Our culture lacks the mechanisms for taking account of collective moral injuries and then finding the vision and creativity to address them. The difference between a soldier’s moral injury and our environmental moral injuries is that environmental soul wounds aren’t a shattering of moral expectations but a steady, grinding erosion, a slow-motion relentless sorrow.Pre-traumatic stress disorder. Let that marinate in your mind for a moment.My environmental lawyer friend Bob Gough says that he suffers from pre-traumatic stress disorder. Pre-traumatic stress disorder is short hand for the fact that he is fully aware of the future trauma, the moral injury that we individually and collectively suffer, the effects on the Earth of that injury and our inability to act in time. Essentially pre-traumatic stress disorder, the environmentalist’s malady, is a result of our inability to prevent harm.