Our mortality and climate change are intrinsically linked

Awareness of our mortality is part of being human. As author and existential philosopher Irvin Yalom said, we are “forever shadowed by the knowledge that we will grow, blossom and, inevitably, diminish and die”.

There is growing research exploring the overwhelming anxiety that the inevitability of death, and our uncertainty about when it will occur, has the power to create. A social psychological theory, called terror management theory (TMT), is one way to understand how this anxiety influences our behaviour and sense of self.

Read the piece on The Conversation – “Fear of death underlies most of our phobias.”

(Our fear of death, or at least dying, can be extrapolated without much trouble, to illustrate that many of us psychologically attempt to assert our existence through the accumulation of material goods around us and enabled by modern technology, that voracious consumption manifests in the depletion of Earth’s resources and the worsening human caused climate change. Read Ernest Becker’s, “The Denial of Death” – Robert McLean).