Jonna Bornemark: the Experience of being pregnant can help us in the fight against the climate crisis

Klimatångesten grows. And with it our feelings of guilt and shame – flygskam was, for example, one of last year's nyord. Now writes Hanne Kjöller in DN ( 4/3) that we should also have a growing ”flerbarnsskam”, because the kids will create even more carbon emissions than air travel.

This anxiety, guilt, and shame, however, is not something completely new. Karl Jaspers describes in his philosophy of debt as one of life's inevitable existential terms, a debt that you yourself are to and thus takes up space for another life. But when the climate becomes all the more real for us both civilisationsångest that existential guilt is undeniably a new character. It becomes a tangible and concrete fear of what we have made of ourselves and what we have done with our world.

Read more: Flygskam is good for the climate – but flerbarnsskam is better, writes Hanne Kjöller

the shame, the guilt and the anxiety plays a role. They are preparing us to think in new ways. Anguish the other side is freedom, we need to be able to feel anxiety and guilt to realize that we are headed in the wrong direction. Man can be so many different things, but all are not equally good. A man who only looks out for himself and mindlessly take it she thinks the need is dangerous: a man who is not even seeing the needs of his children of a future. When such a man has put the world in itself becomes the ability to the anxiety, suddenly a wealth.

But how shall we be able to formulate any alternative? How should anxiety be able to be put into productive work? I think we need to use all the muscles in our culture have developed and to find new technical solutions. But it will not be enough. We will not be able to solve all the problems by the same thinking that created them. We need to change our idea of what it means to be human.

old ways of thinking, we can find nourishment in overlooked experiences. One of these experiences that I believe that we have much to learn from is precisely that as Hanne Kjöller want us to feel shame in the face: pregnancy. The pregnant body is not one, and not two. It belongs no longer only to himself, but not just to the unborn child. It is not centered around a counting sense – but does not exclude it either. It is an experience that holds the potential to a realization about how life is intertwined and dependent. How we physically come out of the bodies of others, and therefore can never fully be isolated in an independent I am.

Why not look on the pregnant experience can also link the travel, the accommodation and the eating to others ' well-being?

Pregnancy means that the boundary between self and other is not as absolute. When I eat, I eat for someone else. It can, of course, mean that I create a new selfishness, a little larger only, and isolating myself and the child. But we would also be able to let the experience challenge us.

so easy in the medical pages and ignores its existential significance. The pregnant can, for example, have a hard time defending themselves in the face of the feelings which are crowding in by the world around – it is usually interpreted as a hormonal hypersensitivity. But I wonder if we don't have passiviserats of the medical gaze that mean that such a condition only to be expected: because it depends on the hormones so it will soon be over.

This experience can also be seen as a valuable expertise that gives weight to the feelings of others, others ' experiences and involve them in the world that is our. It could be seen as a call to think about how we allocate resources, how our private life affects others and turn it into action.

already, a variety of documents. As pregnant, it may be easier to eat healthier, stop smoking and drinking – because it affects someone else. Why not investigate if the pregnant experience can also link the travel, the accommodation and the eating to others ' well-being, to the life we belong together with both today and on into the future. An experience that not only saddled with a debt over to take up space from the other, but also giving place for the other.