Japanese artisans, going back centuries, have repaired broken pieces of ceramic using lacquer and gold pigments. The art of Kintsugi (‘to patch with gold’) or Kintsukuroi (‘to repair with gold’) does not seek to hide the break or the repair but on the contrary throws them into sharp relief. The imperfections and flaws of a mended object are thus granted enhanced beauty and seen as more resilient than the original. The evident marks of breakage and repair speak to the object’s unique history and its regenerated utility.
When seen as a metaphor of life, Kintsugi points to how we can become stronger, wiser and more compassionate through the struggles and calamities of life. Building on Buddhist and Wabi-sabi traditions of thought, people are marked by their life experiences, but so too can they heal and better recognise their strengths and weaknesses. In such ways, they may display increased humility and even equanimity in the face of suffering and change. The art of Kintsugi also holds, I suggest, metaphorical insights for our world-in-crisis, and not only in respect of how we must each individually recognise and reorient ourselves to change. Our world is now visibly cracking and breaking, but this same world also gives rise to emergent ideas, cultural flourishing, imagined futures and possible solidary remedies. These regenerative ideas and practices borne from a world-in-crisis help to throw into relief our place in the web of life and how an ecologically sustainable and more socially just (and survivable) world could yet be imagined and come about.
To recognise today’s planetary demise and to want to better understand and communicate something of its endemic and unsustainable nature to others need not, of course, cancel out the equally felt imperative to find positive communicative ways of responding and intervening within these structures of risk, destabilisation and breakdown. It is only on the basis of communicative engagement and a realist understanding of today’s existential threats, rather than complacency or simplistic optimism, that we can start to create with others collective, innovative and meaningful expressions of active hope (Macy and Johnstone 2021). And this is now finding expression in and through different communicative realms including media and creative practices.
All the contributors to Communicating a World-in-Crisis, a book published later this year, deliberately explore different cultural fields and creative practices and how each is currently responding to today’s planetary emergency, polycrisis or meta-crisis (Cottle 2024a). All the contributors have sought, through their reflections on different media and communicative fields, to identify examples of innovation and creative practice that can better intervene into this world. From eco-literature, eco-art and eco-cinema to climate emergency photography and participative documentary; from hidden theatre and immersive museums to green festivals and popular music; from sustainability education and journalism training to communicating whole intelligence ‘for a world waking up’ and to the need for AI (artificial intelligence) to move beyond instrumental rationality to integrative intelligence and ecological relationality – so each identifies how different cultural forms and creative practices are playing their part in re-envisioning and reorienting society to a better world.
The volume also includes studies of First Nation community media, local television programmes reporting on local climate actions, different reporting roles in climate change, and different news platforms and how these delimit or deepen reporting of direct-action protests. Together these explore important communicative possibilities found within the different forms of contemporary journalism including its potential, whether cultivated or compelled by accelerating catastrophe and breakdown, for better representing our world-in-crisis and reorienting society to more ecologically sustainable and socially just ways of living in the web of life.
These communicative and creative interventions confound simplistic claims of ‘doomerism’ or ‘catastrophism’ when directed at those engaging with the cascading crises unfolding at planetary scale. This article, the first of two, addresses from a personal perspective some of the difficulties and dilemmas that can be encountered when trying to communicate something of today’s planetary emergency, as well as possible sources of solace and yes, even hope, when doing so. No doubt some of these experiences and thoughts may resonate with your own communicative engagement with today’s meta-crisis, whether in your personal or professional life, or in other ways. If, like me, you sometimes feel dismayed or even overwhelmed by what we now see looming on the horizon and also by what is inexorably pushing it there, by what we see nightly on our TV screens, or algorithmically via social media, and by the evident lack of serious attention and sustained response to this, whether by governments and corporations, colleagues, family or friends and vast swathes of the world’s populace, something here may strike a chord.
When communicating something of the dark telos of today’s planetary plight, many will attest to how this can be deeply unsettling and emotionally upsetting. The psychological processes of recognition, response and eventual formation of resilience have often been likened to the processes and stages of bereavement and grief. This is understandable given the sense of loss and disorientation that follows the disappearance of society’s traditional moorings or rooted expectations about our world, whether its continuity, the arc of life, and imagined futures for ourselves, our loved ones, and those yet to be born, or for humanity and Life in general on planet Earth. It is an inescapable part, it seems, of being a sentient being communicating a world-in-crisis.
It’s worth saying at the outset, I know of no authors or artists, academics or activists, who relish painting hellish scenes like Hieronymus Bosh, imparting bad news like a late-modern Cassandra, or prophetically predicting calamity like Nostradamus. And even fewer, I suggest, would want to risk being cast in the cloak of early Christian millennialism that drapes talk of the apocalypse. It is also easy to feel overwhelmed not only by the sheer size and complexities of the ‘wicked problems’ now being played out at planetary level (Cottle 2023a) but also by the daily sense of cognitive dissonance and isolation when positioned outside of the normative, some may say increasingly deranged, continuation of business and daily life as normal (Ghosh 2016).
The simplistic charge of doomerism or catastrophism levelled at news output is sometimes also muttered in response to those academic and activist whistle-blowers of ‘planetary emergency,’ ‘global polycrisis’, ‘world at risk’ and ‘civilizational collapse.’ And this notwithstanding the rapidly accumulating evidence, reasoned extrapolations and informed theorisations of eco-societal destabilisation and breakdown at world scale (Cottle 2023a, b).
Too many of us, it seems, continue to see the world’s problems in single issue terms and not as an integral expression of complex systems and some continue to bury their heads in the (tar)sands of a hubristic faith in last-minute techno-fixes and large-scale geo-engineering projects. Others take solace in piecemeal consumerist agendas on the home front, whether the increased uptake of EV’s, recycling of rubbish or healthier lifestyles. But we thereby leave the underlying and systemic nature of today’s world-in-crisis, as well as its cast of political and corporate spoilers and underpinning materialist culture and value systems, relatively untouched. And some of us manage to practically disavow in our daily routines and actions that which is quietly recognised but kept at bay and out of mind. Such existential aversion becomes banished from thought for a mix of powerful professional, psychological, political and phenomenological reasons (Cottle 2023b). The relative safety of intellectual silos, comfort of narrow specialisms and the established parameters of disciplinary agendas and institutional outlooks, amongst other factors, can all detract from planetary vision and engagement.
I personally have felt intense feelings of eco-grief and eco-anger, including solastalgia (the deep sense of sadness following the degradation and loss of known environments) and terrafurie (the feelings of anger at continuing ecological devastation) amongst others (see Albrecht 2019), and how these can weigh heavily when thinking about and writing on communications and our world-in-crisis. I know I am not alone. This increased salience of complex emotional responses to a faltering, failing world moreover, does not always sit well inside institutional expectations and outmoded academic discourse.
Notwithstanding earlier interventions by feminist and ethnography scholars, as well as more recent calls for pluriverse views and differing epistemological standpoints, academic language and discourse still tends toward the logocentric, analytic, distanced and impersonal. This communicative register all too often displaces the emotional underpinning of much academic labour as well as first-person reflections on the author’s hopes and fears. While there may sometimes be a good case for communicating in and through the impersonal and emotionally evacuated discourse of traditional academia and science, when writing on the plight of the planet, its devastating consequences and the hopes invested in pathways of transition and transformation, it seems that innovative, creative, visual and emotionally evocative forms of communication can and should be deployed when practicable and impactful.
It was for this reason that I wanted to include Guno Park’s exquisite, symbolically resonate and arresting art drawing – Nature of Things – on the front cover of Communicating a World-in-Crisis, reproduced here with kind permission.
Guno Park, Nature of Things, reproduced with kind permission. Copyright@Guno Park.
The original drawing standing over six feet tall, is an impressive and perfectly executed depiction of the entanglement of human life, and death, with nature. It powerfully symbolises the interwoven dependence of human life with nature, of how we are ourselves inextricably part of nature and symbiotic with it — and how we forget this at our peril.
Some of us, whether academics and/or creative communicators may also want to now go beyond the delimited politics confined to analysis and critique. In our world-in-crisis is it now time to expand upon the hermeneutics of critique, (or hermeneutics of suspicion to use Paul Ricoeur’s earlier literary phrase), to something more akin to a hermeneutics of engagement? At this perilous juncture on planet Earth, are we not obligated to seek to go beyond detached and siloed academic critique and make our research agendas, words, arguments and concerns intervene within the wider world, and to do so with compassion and care that extends to all sentient beings and surrounding eco-systems?
A useful parallel is found, surprisingly perhaps, in the world of journalism. Here journalists sometimes demonstrate how they can go beyond the prevalent and professionally institutionalised response to the reporting of humanitarian disasters in faraway places (Cottle 2013). Their usual ‘calculus of death’ reporting stance to human suffering and deaths is based on a discriminatory frame of national geopolitical interests and historical and cultural proximity. Exceptionally, however, this is sometimes replaced by crafted journalist packages inscribed with an ‘injunction to care.’ In comparison to detached, distanced and dispassionate ‘calculus of death’ reporting, an ‘injunction to care’ is crafted through close-up images, personalised stories and experiential and emotional accounts as well as the incorporation of multiple sensory invocations all designed to ‘bring home’ something of the human tragedy involved. When done well, such news reporting communicates across both informational and imagistic, analytic and affective, expositional and expressive, and deliberative and display modes of communication – and thereby invites audiences to engage empathetically and with compassion as well as cognitive awareness.
There are numerous instances of where and how these and other communicative forms and appeals are now being deployed in different communicative fields and creative practices responding to the planetary crisis (Cottle 2024a). And so too is it the case that to be an academic and creative practitioner as well as an activist or advocate for change in a world-in-crisis need not always be seen as mutually exclusive. Today, both the hermeneutics of critique and hermeneutics of engagement are needed in our communicative responses to today’s planetary plight.
My personal experience also tells me that when writing about today’s planetary emergency and meta-crisis, we need the support of others, if only by communing with thoughts and feelings shared in print. Many of us will commune with our personal bookshelf of old dust-covered friends as well as the latest glossy newcomers. For my part I recall, for example, the pleasure and excitement of reading Jeremy Lent’s (2021) The Web of Meaning which encapsulated so clearly and insightfully much that I had been reading and thinking about for some years. It is an extraordinary, expansive and wonderful book that integrates the new philosophy of science alongside traditional wisdom and thereby helps to underpin emergent ideas of ecological civilisation as the only viable way forward from today’s world in crisis.
Other recent personal notables include Ian McGilchrist’s (2021) The Matter With Things and Fritjof Capri and Pier Luigi Luisi’s (2014) The Systems View of Life, both in their different ways offering a profound reorientation of evolutionary neuroscience and contemporary science that speaks to our current planetary predicament – and in so doing deepening our understanding beyond the historical determinants and political economy of capitalism. Joanna Macy’s (2021) World as Lover, World as Self and Robin Kimmerer’s (2013) Braiding Sweetgrass also stand out, offering deep insights into differing cosmologies and social relations of care and reciprocity, providing seeds of hope, both active and ecological, for sustaining a possible future. Kate Raworth’s (2017) Doughnut Economics, Kohei Saito’s (2022) Marx in the Anthropocene, John Bellamy Foster’s (2022) Capitalism in the Anthropocene, and Jeremy Rifkin’s (2022) The Age of Resilience, have also all proved instructive companions for thinking through the historical rapaciousness of capitalism, the changing metabolic rifts of human life and ecology, and possibilities for future societal transformation.
There have been so many insightful interventions recently (see references in Cottle 2023a. b.). I have taken heart from their multifaceted contributions to the ‘great awakening’ in print as well as how they invariably converge on remarkably similar conclusions, despite their different intellectual roots and philosophical vantage points (Cottle 2023a, b). Each in their different ways unmasks the ‘unmaking’ of today’s world and contributes intellectual and affecting resource for imagining plausible (ecologically sustainable and socially just) futures. We will each, of course, have our preferred book companions or e-versions of the same. Keep them close and let them speak to each other as well as to the new kids on the bloc. They may yet help ground those islands of coherence visibly rising from surrounding seas of chaos.
Listening to expert podcasts, such as energy-expert Nate Hagen’s interviews in ‘The Great Simplification,’ (https://www.thegreatsimplification.com/), reading daily contributions to Resilience, published by the Post-Carbon Institute (https://www.resilience.org/), or participating in virtual spaces with others from around the world, such as the Deep Transformation Network (https://deeptransformation.network/), or meeting like-minded people face-to-face in local settings and actions, have also proved to be incredibly supportive. You are not alone! All this is good for the soul, of course, as well as engendering a sense of solidarity beyond sociability. And moments of quietude, appreciation and reflection when walking in nature and through different seasons, I can confirm, have also been both restorative and emotionally balancing (Hanh 2013). This recuperative ‘gift’ often helping to physically ground and nourish at the same time as sensing oneself inside the web of life (Macy 2021, Macy and Johnstone 2022).
Just a few personal thoughts, then, on the humanly inescapable intertwining of feelings and emotions within communicative processes when focused on the dark telos of planetary exhaustion and the determinants of its destabilisation, breakdown and possible collapse, as well as some of the ways that have proved personally restorative and helpful for building resilience. A gentle reminder, and a note to self also, that the power of communication is as much cultural and symbolic as political and strategic. Whether academic or activist, artist or advocate, we would do well to recognise that communicating to others something of our world-in-crisis and its continuing assault on the web-of-life is not only a cognitive and informational affair but also deeply infused with emotion and affect and that this can extend meaningfully beyond analysis and critique. Symbols, story, soundscapes and song, all, for example, have their part in communicative knowing, imagining futures and in the mobilisations for change – as explored further in Part 2: Creative Resilience in a World-in-Crisis: It’s more than Doomerism!
References
Albrecht, G. (2019). Earth Emotions. Cornell University Press.
Capra, F. and Luisi, P. L. (2014) The Systems View of Life. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Cottle, S. (2013). ‘Journalists Witnessing Disasters: From the Calculus of Death to the Injunction to Care’, Journalism Studies, 14(2), 1–17.
Cottle, S. (2023a). ‘Reporting Civilisational Collapse: Research Notes from a World-in-Crisis’, Global Media and Communication, 19(2), 269-288.
Cottle, S. (2023b) ‘Reporting a World-in-Crisis: The Axial Crisis of Perception and Beyond. Part 2.’ Resilience October 18, 2023. https://www.resilience.org/resilience- author/simon-cottle/
Cottle, S. (Ed)(2024) Communicating a World-in-Crisis, New York: Peter Lang (in press)
Foster, J.B. (2022) Capitalism in the Anthropocene, New York: Monthly Review Press.
Ghosh, A. (2016). The Great Derangement. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Hanh, T.N. (2013) Love Letter to the Earth. Berkely: Parallax Press.
Kimmerer, R. (2013). Braiding Sweetgrass. London: Penguin.
Lent, J. (2021). The Web of Meaning. London: Profile Books.
Macy, J. (2021). World as Lover, World as Self. California: Parallax Press.
Macy, J. and Johnstone, C. (2022). Active Hope. California: New World Library.
McGilchrist, I. (2022). The Matter With Things. London: Perspective Press.
Raworth. K. (2017) Doughnut Economics. London: Penguin.
Rifkin, J. (2022). The Age of Resilience. Swift Press.
Saito, K, (2021). Marx in the Anthropocene. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
