Rethinking Eco-Emotions, Time, and Nature: Toward More Reflexive, Expansive, and Pluralist Mental Health Research Post-Modernity

Research on mental health and climate change is undergoing a paradigm shift, influenced by theorists who challenge conventional conceptions of “nature” and call for relational, situated approaches to ecological crises. These perspectives urge us to “stay with the trouble” and confront the complicities embedded in modernity’s dichotomies that shape our responses to climate and social disruptions. Against this backdrop, unfolding crises such as accelerating global warming, pandemic disruptions, and local ecological degradation highlight how narrowly we prioritize threats. How do cultural imaginaries of “nature” and “modernity” shape mental health experiences of intersecting crises? This paper turns to a Metro Vancouver urban forest, where the felling of thousands of trees infested by hemlock looper moths coincided with the public attention drawn to Chris Bailey, a long-term forest resident. His story, framed as harmonious coexistence with nature, was received with fascination, while parallel crises of precarious housing and the opioid epidemic nearby attracted scorn. This juxtaposition illustrates how cultural imaginaries valorize certain lives and landscapes while marginalizing others, reinforcing problematic binaries inherited from modernity. The paper argues for cultivating connections across species, peoples, and ecologies by unsettling entrenched notions of progress, purity, and distance. For researchers, this entails methodological and epistemological shifts: assuming interconnectedness rather than isolation, seeking knowledge across disciplines and traditions, and embracing cultural humility.