by Chris Zelglia

There is a continuous and risky argument to transform discussions about the climate emergency into motivational messages. 

As if the planet’s survival were conditioned on optimism, gratitude, or an individual mindset that could prevent the structural crisis.

The narrative shift is not without pretension, when politics becomes a refrain, responsibility leaves governments and passes into the hands of individuals.Thus, soon, caring for the environment seems only a matter of mindset and no longer one of equity, budget, social justice, and rights.

Emotional capitalism found a new opportunity in the environmental issue: converting the historical crisis into breathing exercises. However, facing the climate collapse requires something completely different: public policies as social analysis.

It’s not a matter of changing emotions for “generating hope”, but of recognizing collective pain, real conflicts, and the structural networks of centuries of inequality, colonialism, racism, and environmental exploitation.

The climate transition demands the courage to listen and transform ravaged lands, assaulted populations, accumulated grief, and denied futures: everything that was suffocated for centuries.

Psychoanalysis warns us that ignoring symptoms only deepens the crisis.

When governments address climate change as a topic of “positive communication,” they avoid the deep work: confronting traumas, holding those who cause the crisis accountable, redistributing power, modifying modes of production, and healing historical inequalities.

It is easier to call for “hope.” It is less costly to recommend resilience.

However, resilience without reparation, is more violence.

The hope exploited as anesthesia doesn’t offer a true horizon.

Public policies must be a counterpoint to climate self-help.

They should not aim for comfort, but rather restructure the material and symbolic conditions, ensuring that care does not become individual sacrifice, but a collective construction of the future.

This includes an economy that, to operate, does not need to destroy bodies and territories, guaranteeing the protection of environmental activists, financing the forest economy, public mental health, land demarcation, and ecological education.

It is not enough to wish; it is necessary to create a world: social, affective, political, and economic.

Psychoanalysis demonstrates that everything that is not processed comes back to repeat itself. While politics validates it: everything that is not institutionalized becomes rhetoric.

The ecological transition is not an exercise in positive thinking, it is arduous psychological, political, and material work to undo centuries of violence.

Climate policy begins with recognizing traumas and the formulation of public policies that have care as a civilizing principle, not just an emotional appeal.

The planet does not lack beautiful words, but it needs reparation, cooperation, and institutional courage to name the cause of the pain: inequality, exploitation, and the neoliberal madness of saying that an individual can solve the world’s problems by themselves.