Discussion of “Getting beyond ourselves: The transformative potential of awe” by Margy Sperry

Sperry has written a very gripping and timely paper. Furthermore, repeated readings disclosed the paper to be surprisingly complex and multi-layered, a paper that admits to at least two and possibly more discourses. I say surprising because my initial reading brought forth the most surface aspect (by surface I do not mean superficial) a paper that constitutes a coherent and well-organized linear discourse in two parts. In Part One (statement of the problem), Sperry expounds on the tragic realities of climate change, realities that flow from a misguided anthropocentric view, a view that “skips along hand in hand with colonialism, industrialism, and capitalism.” (Sperry, 2023, p. 563) and a view that disconnects us from the other-than-human. Sperry begins with her moving personal encounter with climate change, and how she and many others “flip flop between panic and numb complacency.” Sperry draws on the works of multiple authors who expound on the complexities of climate psychology, a discourse that well explains both why we got to this place and to the collective responses/non-responses that appear to leave us in “hopeless collapse.” Sperry is careful to include herself as complicit in the problem. Sperry then follows with the central question of this paper: “What will motivate us, collectively and individually, to change our attitudes and lifestyles? How do we . . . ‘actively unlearn’ the anthropocentric values that are literally killing us?” (Sperry, 2023, p. 565). This question is followed by a moving personal account of Sperry immersing herself more directly with nature out of which came an emerging sense of wonder for the world around her, a sense that offered a possible pathway out of the above apparent collective impasse. Part Two (Possible solution of the problem): This part constitutes a thorough and welldocumented account of the new science of awe, an experiential state that promises transformative power on how we experience our world, especially the sense of vastness beyond our “small self” reconnecting us to the other-than-human world, perturbing our assumptions and “expands our horizons . . . [challenging] us to actively unlearn anthropocentrism” (Sperry, 2023, p. 567). Sperry’s account of the phenomenology of awe is both gripping and compelling, Sperry ends with an example of a patient experiencing awe in the context of her encounter with the eyes of a giraffe. My initial reading therefore disclosed a clear and straightforward account of the dangers of climate change, its origins in colonialism, individualism, and anthropocentrism, the human phenomenological/psychological response, both collective and individual, a response that appears to lead to impasse, followed by the central question: Is there