Carol Smaldino's The Human Climate

The human climate as I see it is the human atmosphere in which we live: the ways we solve or don’t solve, the host of problems in our midst. Emotions, I saw (as I wrote my own book The Human Climate: Facing the Divisions Inside Us and Between Us, 2018) were driving our actions and decisions. They were pushing us to extremes, and they were also often obliterating the capacity to think or care.

Carl Jung’s theory of the shadow: Emotions we hide, out of our own dread and shame, become the stuff of projection onto others, either demonizing and degrading them or putting them on pedestals. Or instead those hidden feelings could push us to explode or implode, sinking us into psychological dirt. Yet still they could render us numb and detached. The situation might well stay wretched if we can’t get a handle on the deep feelings that might just keep us divided and paralyzed to the point that we remain unable to heal the divides, or to manage the resolution to fight for social and economic justice and against climate change.