Could metal help us save the world? When you accept that metal builds communities (and frequently functions like a cleansing primal scream), it follows that headbanging could help us survive tough times—including, one scientist argues, the impending climate apocalypse.
Bear with us here. Maintaining mental and emotional resilience—that is, processing difficult feelings—will be key to both surviving the upheaval and building a stronger future. That’s why David Angeler, an ecologist and complex systems researcher, published a 2016 paper in
SpringerPlus on metal’s potential to keep us afloat. According to Angeler, building resilient societies depends on a complex set of factors affecting both systems and individuals. Anything that helps people cope with their own emotions, including the catharsis many feel while listening to metal, also helps keep their communities strong.
But Angeler’s ideas go beyond that. What if metalheads could collaborate with the sustainability community? “We need to return to the era of Romanticism, where different fields, such as the arts and sciences, are not mutually exclusive,” he says. If you think about metal and sustainability as complex ecosystems analogous to the ones we see in nature, it’s easy to envision how the two could interact and create change at the systemic level for humans.