**4. The unconscious is not a historic: there are consequences if you poison your mother**

As climate collapse accelerates, and as the scale and timelessness of this disruption takes hold, there will be massive material effects: forced migrations; tremendous food insecurity; international tensions if not strife. Consideration of these outcomes is not the business of the current exercise. What is in-focus is the consequences that will befall inner life.

Broadly speaking, a de-normalized nature can be expected to fold back into, provide content for, and play a role in in shaping the flow of energies of the unconscious. Witnessing more death, pestilence, famine and flood will quicken core anxieties. It seems almost unimaginable that a radically greater experience of precarity, and a more unchecked Thanatos, will not infiltrate the deepest workings of the psyche. In this scenario it can be predicted grief and despair will be prominent. Confusion and anger, fear and anxiety too.

The situation will also summon attributions concerning fault and blame. For example, who is 'they' in the following?

*What have they done to the earth What have they done to our fair sister? Ravaged and plundered and ripped her and bit her Stuck her with knives in the side of the dawn And tied her with fences and dragged her down*

When the music's over Jim Morrison (1969)

Mother Earth, the life-giving womb, has been vandalized and can no longer look after her own. This is a terrible sin, an unimaginably heinous crime. Who did this? Who is the guilty party?

Responsibility might be slated to bad luck, but assigning culpability is an ad hominem practice. In the latter case attributions can be projected out, or they can be projected in. For example, Exxon, and its public relations company Edelman, might be blamed; we know the former cynically funded climate denial programs, but less known is that the latter – the world's biggest advertising firm – organized 'astroturfing' campaigns to set up myriad groups, both of a grassroots and scientific composition, that advocated climate change denial.
