By Kira Logan
Kathleen Woodward, a University of Washington humanities scholar, has discovered key connections between climate and aging – both crucial challenges to our society in this moment.
Kathleen Woodward, a continuing lecturer at the University of Washington, spoke at an IHC Key Passages talk last week.
Photo courtesy of the Simpson Center for the Humanities
“Like climate change, population aging is a slow-moving, catastrophic event,” said Woodward at a Key Passages Talk, held by UC Santa Barbara’s Interdisciplinary Humanities Center.
Introduced by IHC director Susan Derwin, Woodward gave a talk titled “Falling Off a Cliff, the Tyranny of Numbers: Antidotes to Aging in the Anthropocene.” She said there are both parallels and points of connection between ageism, as a phenomenon, and the greater Anthropocene era — the age in which humans have had an environmental impact on the Earth.
“By adding climate change to the world’s agenda, it might have added to ageism inadvertently,” said Woodward, who teaches in her university’s English department.
Woodward said that over 70% of those who perished in Hurricane Katrina were elders, and called it an “unreasonable number” that affects elders.
“The disproportionate death toll is sometimes the only way to narrate the story of elders in the Anthropocene,” she said.
The recent pandemic experience informed Woodward’s foundational argument, particularly the negative relationship between nursing home staff and elders.
“Nursing home COVID-19 death rates were more than 100% higher than elsewhere,” she said. “Many elders were treated with disregard and appalling ageism.”
She cited an anecdote found in the book Climate Change in an Aging Society, by Harry Moody, about how a woman in a nursing home called 911 to be saved from her nursing home during COVID-19.
“I want to go to a hospital and they’re not letting me,” said the elderly woman, who passed away in a hospital a day later.
Woodward argued that when COVID-19 began, ageism was yet to be widely recognized and elders suffered because of it.
Kathleen Woodward’s IHC Key Passages talk on ageism and the Anthropocene dealt with literary connections between the two.
“For years, ageism has largely been avoided in the United States,” she said, adding that Americans fear aging, so many people try to repress the act of aging.
Woodward pointed out that even in public, certain rules and regulations are directly related to the suppression of aging.
“Maximum age limits are there to limit the aging in the public eye,” she asserted.
Woodward also cited Sigmund Freud’s concept of “becoming old.”
Woodward described how Freud found himself judging an elderly man who stumbled into the psychoanalyst’s cable car. Freud saw him as incompetent and elderly, then realized that by looking at the old man, Freud was looking at his future, essentially looking in the mirror.
“He realized that he hated what he saw inside the looking glass. He hated getting old,” Woodward said.
After speaking about aging and ageism, Woodward linked that to climate change. She said society’s view of aging is that it’s a fast regression — people think aging is like falling off a cliff — much as they see the Earth heading for disaster because of global warming. “Climate change and aging share a similar feeling of impending doom,” Woodward said. “The apprehensiveness of what lies ahead gives the metaphor of falling off a cliff.”
She urged her audience to view age as more subjective than objective, rather than assuming age is only just a number that people carry with them. One’s era in history is more meaningful than one’s chronological age, she said.
“What if we locate ourselves outside of years in age and instead indulge in generational age?” said Woodward, in an attempt to normalize aging.
In relation to climate change, Woodward believes that we, as a society, are about to enter an era of losses in longevity, meaning that people won’t live is long and life expectancy will start plummeting downward.
“Perhaps that future time is already here,” said Woodward. “The experience of aging will change irrevocably because of climate change.”
Woodward provided the audience with a list of references and encouraged those present to read many of the sources she had cited throughout the talk. And she showed the audience a short film called Annie Lloyd, by Cecelia Condit.
Cecelia, Annie’s daughter, captured her elder mother collecting leaves that had fallen around her neighborhood. The film ends with Cecelia telling her mother: “If I could make you younger I would.”
Woodward ended her lecture with what she called her “favorite quote,” which perfectly merged both the concept of aging and the Anthropocene.
“‘Old trees are our parents, and our parents’ parents,” she said, citing the 19th century American philosopher Henry David Thoreau, who wrote Walden.
Kira Logan is a third-year UC Santa Barbara student majoring in English. She is a Web and Social Media Intern for the Division of Humanities and Fine Arts.