ABSTRACT
This final chapter explores the shifts in self–world relationships that come with increasing public awareness of environmental damage and of the prospect of irreversible climate change. Practices, ideas and emotions linked to climate change are indicative of imagined future worlds – worlds that may be the same, better or worse than now, but about which we cannot be certain. I discuss some of the insights of depth psychology that have informed analysis of death, immortality and the future in cross-cultural perspective. I draw on material from interviews with spirituality adherents undertaken over several years as part of the Hunter Valley study, exploring residents’ thoughts and feelings about their future in relation to environmental change. These discussions provide insights into concepts of ecological deterioration, the collective nature of anxiety defences and hopes for survival. Spirituality adherents’ realism about climate change is then contrasted with the heroic myths of consumer cultures that promise immortality through capitalist accumulation, not beyond it. The ‘new worlds’ of the Christian Apocalypse and of science utopias are then explored as parallel edifices of mortality denial – the former through God’s salvation of the faithful, and the latter through the harnessing of technological innovation in the service of capitalism’s endless growth and renewal. Different and more adaptive imaginings come into view when people talk about intimations of dystopian futures in relation to their hopes for their children and grandchildren. The last section of the chapter explores the strivings for generational immortality as a counteractant in the trajectory of planetary collapse.
