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The well-known fable of the frog in boiling water was retold by environmentalist and former politician Al Gore in his groundbreaking film, An Inconvenient Truth (2006). It was invoked as a metaphor for human nature and our collective non-response to the existential danger of Global Warming. Climate change, the now, politically correct term for what we are currently living through, began slowly and almost imperceptibly. We adapt to the increasing storm surges, the flooding, the shrinking of our land mass, and the megastorms. The prospect of milder winters, however, does appeal to many, although that kind of change is not happening across the board. Any short-term benefit to warming, physical or psychological, is far outweighed by the negative consequences. In the meantime, the rate of sea level rise, due in large part to increasing water temperatures, along with the melting of the Arctic, Greenland, and Antarctica, is occurring at an alarming rate, in large part due to human, “anthropogenic” factors. To that end, the U.S. median sea level has risen 9 inches since the early 20th century, and fish and shellfish populations are retreating northward in search of cooler waters (Jay et al., 2018).
Is this increased acceleration paralleling the famous “hockey stick” graph depicting the unprecedented acceleration of global temperature that Mr. Gore demonstrated? In that model, the changes occurred slowly at first, and then the anthropogenic factors greatly increase the rise in temperature, moving us ever more quickly toward utter disaster. Through denial and a multitude of psychological, sociological, and political factors described in this Special Issue, we may get lulled into a state of complacency or resignation. Or we may become galvanized into taking action.
The necessity for members of our field to apply psychoanalytic thinking to address this most pressing issue facing our species is not up for debate. Our very survival may be at stake. Yet it has taken our field a curi