Last spring I visited Istanbul and Scutari, where Florence Nightingale spent much of her time during the Crimean War. I was reminded of the poem The Second Coming, in which Yeats wrote how “things fall apart; the centre cannot hold”. Nightingale knew about things falling apart in the midst of war and pestilence, and her response was to dedicate herself to nursing action.
We live in times when so much that has been familiar to us – our ‘centres’ of political, national and economic structures – seem to be falling apart.
Our epoch’s falling apart is of an altogether different order than Nightingale’s. Over and against transnational upheaval, way beyond a localised war, is climate change so dramatic and accelerating that many scholars and climate scientists are now convinced that it is unstoppable, that it is going to get worse and will bring aggravated collapse across global economic, political and national systems.
Whether we’re conscious of it or not, everybody is afraid of climate change and its accelerating effects on all of life. Chronic anxiety, we know, is more likely to produce mental and physical illness. It is also provokes all manner of coping strategies – such as denial, drugs and alcohol, leaning towards political demagogues who offer simplistic solutions, and outbreaks of anger and violence.
The Secretary-General of the United Nations, António Gutteres, has described the climate crisis as the biggest threat that humanity has ever faced. None of us will have our lives untouched by it in the coming decades. Furthermore, laudable as our efforts are at recycling or carbon reduction, much evidence suggests that these are too little and too late. We’re going to have to engage with major adaptation in the ways we live our lives.
Nurses and health care systems have made great strides forward, for example with the ‘three Rs’: reduce, reuse, recycle. But what are we doing to prepare ourselves when health care resources, supply chains and systems become increasingly compromised? We have a track record of caring for individuals and communities across the spectrum of human need, but now we have a whole planet, in every sense, that needs nursing. The planet itself is sick. It’s plunged into a condition of multiplying polycrisis and permacrisis. What contribution can we make as nurses to assist in reducing the worst aspects of human behaviour when enormous numbers of people get scared and deprived?
Nurses, with our values of compassionate action, are needed more than ever. Not just to respond to the dilemmas of social and climate conflict and the illnesses that will follow in their train, but to be the ‘centre that holds’. We’ll be called on to face a frightening and traumatic emerging new reality, avoid denial, and deepen personal inner peace and resilience if we’re not to be sucked into what Pankaj Mishra has called the ‘age of ressentiment’ – a raging inclination to disconnect and blame others.
In the face of such dilemmas, we nurses are going to have to do more than master the three Rs. We’ll need to beware our own human inclination towards avoidance in the face of catastrophe. We must build individual and collective emotional, physical and spiritual resilience. We’ll be summoned to develop immense adaptability in our practices to meet times of vast change. We’ll be called to actively contribute to social cohesion and personal and community wellbeing. We’ll need to be an outstanding part of those communities, affirming the values of human goodness planted more deeply than all that is wrong.
Nightingale faced a relatively local tragedy. Ours is a summons to meet an undreamed-of global one.
We live in times when so much that has been familiar to us – our ‘centres’ of political, national and economic structures – seem to be falling apart.
Our epoch’s falling apart is of an altogether different order than Nightingale’s. Over and against transnational upheaval, way beyond a localised war, is climate change so dramatic and accelerating that many scholars and climate scientists are now convinced that it is unstoppable, that it is going to get worse and will bring aggravated collapse across global economic, political and national systems.
Whether we’re conscious of it or not, everybody is afraid of climate change and its accelerating effects on all of life. Chronic anxiety, we know, is more likely to produce mental and physical illness. It is also provokes all manner of coping strategies – such as denial, drugs and alcohol, leaning towards political demagogues who offer simplistic solutions, and outbreaks of anger and violence.
The Secretary-General of the United Nations, António Gutteres, has described the climate crisis as the biggest threat that humanity has ever faced. None of us will have our lives untouched by it in the coming decades. Furthermore, laudable as our efforts are at recycling or carbon reduction, much evidence suggests that these are too little and too late. We’re going to have to engage with major adaptation in the ways we live our lives.
Nurses and health care systems have made great strides forward, for example with the ‘three Rs’: reduce, reuse, recycle. But what are we doing to prepare ourselves when health care resources, supply chains and systems become increasingly compromised? We have a track record of caring for individuals and communities across the spectrum of human need, but now we have a whole planet, in every sense, that needs nursing. The planet itself is sick. It’s plunged into a condition of multiplying polycrisis and permacrisis. What contribution can we make as nurses to assist in reducing the worst aspects of human behaviour when enormous numbers of people get scared and deprived?
Nurses, with our values of compassionate action, are needed more than ever. Not just to respond to the dilemmas of social and climate conflict and the illnesses that will follow in their train, but to be the ‘centre that holds’. We’ll be called on to face a frightening and traumatic emerging new reality, avoid denial, and deepen personal inner peace and resilience if we’re not to be sucked into what Pankaj Mishra has called the ‘age of ressentiment’ – a raging inclination to disconnect and blame others.
In the face of such dilemmas, we nurses are going to have to do more than master the three Rs. We’ll need to beware our own human inclination towards avoidance in the face of catastrophe. We must build individual and collective emotional, physical and spiritual resilience. We’ll be summoned to develop immense adaptability in our practices to meet times of vast change. We’ll be called to actively contribute to social cohesion and personal and community wellbeing. We’ll need to be an outstanding part of those communities, affirming the values of human goodness planted more deeply than all that is wrong.
Nightingale faced a relatively local tragedy. Ours is a summons to meet an undreamed-of global one.
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