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In the unfolding timeline of the deep history of Earth, our human epoch, or the “Anthropocene,” is a mere blink of the eye, the tiny dot of a period punctuating the most recent sentence in an epic ballad. Yet, that tiny dot, like a traumatic event in a childhood left unhealed, has flowered into a paralyzing, cultural madness in which many of us are now immersed. Donna Orange's book, Climate Crisis, Psychoanalysis, and Radical Ethics, calls us to use our psychoanalytic sensibilities to understand how our cultural ontology allowed us to at first blindly and now, with eyes opening, engage in the dysfunctional process of suicide via ecocide. It is scientific fact that we have only several years' time to begin a process of radically reducing our carbon emissions for many decades to come, to avoid the extinction of our species within a century or two, or perhaps much sooner (Wilson, 2016; Kolbert, 2014; Hamilton, 2015). In her unique text, Orange sees a panic about this fact as appropriate and necessary to lead to adequate action.
Orange steps out of the typical territory of psychoanalysis, and invites us to deeply examine our unconscious and conscious beliefs about our “rights” to own and use, however we see fit, the landscape and resources of the earth. Orange ties the current environmental crisis to roots in colonialism and chattel slavery. Most contemporary environmentalists do not
focus on causal effects from the 16th through the 19th centuries, and instead place blame primarily on the steep rise in fossil fuel consumption from the early 20th century onwards, and on our addiction to lifestyles based on this. Orange turns the psychoanalytic lens to explore the psychological underpinnings of our current environmental crisis, focusing on Enlightenment egoism and Descartes's splitting of the human mind from nature. These Western developments allowed individuals to objectify a formerly contiguous and often deified nature, setting the stage for the large-scale objectific