Climate Anxiety and its Antidote

Talking about the crisis is its own form of action.

Dear friends,

I am grinding my teeth in my sleep. Some nights I remember to imagine that my tongue is melting into my jaw, like my dental hygienist taught me. Or I wedge a heating pad under my shoulders for the last 10 minutes before I nod off. But most nights I remember neither. Consequently, I’ve bitten two chunks of ceramic off my lower-right crown this year. And on many a morning, I wake up feeling like I’ve been lugging something heavy and awkwardly shaped through the night.

Even as I start my day, enacting the roles I’ve signed up for—parent, wife, editor, neighbor, friend—the part of my brain that spends much of the night processing the latest information about the climate crisis begins sending me small, persistent messages: How many cities are flooding today? How many farmers are watching their crops wither and die? How many animals are going without food? Are you doing enough to stem the tide? Is anyone? And (the big one) how much of this modern, convenient life would you give up if it meant you could somehow help lessen the suffering that’s ahead?

As we’ve sailed past another series of terrible, rapidly escalating climate indicators this week (record-breaking winter temperatures in South America, a previously unfathomable absence of Antarctic ice, confirmation that the average planetary temp was a full 1.5 degrees Celsius higher than preindustrial levels in July, etc.) these responses don’t seem inappropriate. And yet, I also realize they might sound extreme to people who don’t watch climate news as closely as I do.

Is this climate anxiety? Or fear? And where is the line, exactly? Anxiety is set apart from fear in important ways. Where the former is a direct response to danger and serves the purpose of survival, anxiety is less obviously useful.

When I read that the medical examiner’s office in Phoenix has been using trailer-sized coolers to store the bodies of people dying during the city’s “month in hell,” much like they did in New York City in the Covid spring of 2020, for instance, I felt a destabilizing, palpable sense of fear. And yet, I can’t—we can’t—live with that level of fear all the time. We have to suppress it consciously or repress it unconsciously, at least some of the time, in order to get through our days. Those feelings can resurface in the form of anxiety.

A comprehensive 2020 Yale study found that climate anxiety can be motivating for some people and completely debilitating for others. It’s also, in some ways, new territory for psychologists. “As an environmental stressor, climate change has some distinctive attributes: it is a real threat, so it is rational to experience some worry; it is ongoing and developing, so simple adaptation to the change is not completely possible; it is uncertain, so anxiety may be a more common response than fear; it is globally shared, so the responses of others may be used as an indicator; and it is a major, significant threat,” the study reports.

Many articles about climate anxiety—and I’ve surveyed dozens this week—assert some version of what this Guardian piece says: “The huge, slow-moving, complex issue of the climate crisis doesn’t have a lot of answers on the individual level. Most of us feel—and really are—pretty helpless.”

I agree that individual action alone is not enough. And I loathe the fact that individual responsibility has been used to distract many of us and keep us mired in guilt, while the oil and gas industries have moved full steam ahead over the last 50 years. But I don’t see us as “helpless” either—far from it.

Most experts on climate anxiety point to the fact that taking some form of collective action is a proven antidote. One often-mentioned 2022 study of young adults from Yale found that young people coped with climate anxiety much better when they were engaged in activities such as community outreach, peer education, or advocacy groups. Meanwhile, those who were not taking action were much more likely to experience symptoms of depression.

I’ve found that being able to say some version of “This is scary!” or “I’m so angry!” can be hugely helpful even if I’m just saying it to myself—or to you, reader. But saying those things out loud—and saying them in concert—is much more than a form of therapy: Shifting the way we talk and think about climate crisis is an important form of action, even if it’s just one step in an evolving process.

In March, the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication’s massive survey on American beliefs and attitudes about climate crisis found that 66 percent of the respondents were at least somewhat worried about global warming (and this number has likely risen in the last five months of climate extremes). At the same time, most Americans said they rarely or never discuss global warming with family and friends. Only 5 percent said they discuss it often.

This silence has very real repercussions—especially when it comes to influencing lawmakers’ willingness to act. Anthony Leiserowitz, the director and founder of the Yale program, was a guest on FiveThirtyEight’s Politics podcast last week to talk about how this summer’s heat and wildfire smoke might impact national politics. In the interview (which I recommend), he broke down the way climate shows up across the political spectrum and said that while liberal Democrats rank climate among the top three issues impacting the way they plan to vote, the bulk of voters rank it much lower and many Republican voters have barely ranked it in their top-20 issues.

According to Leiserowitz, while the majority of GOP lawmakers are reading the science and know climate change is human-caused, the fact that they don’t see it turning up in the polling means that many are still reluctant to go along with policy changes for fear they will risk their political careers. (I’d add that many of them also receive sizable donations from and actively invest in the oil and gas industries, as well as the plastics industry and others that rely heavily on maintaining the status quo.) Leiserowitz also confirms that the direct experience of the recent climate impacts, such as heat domes and wildfire smoke, are starting to turn the tide for some centrist voters. And polling backs that up.

According to one poll released in June, 77 percent of adults who report they have been personally affected by extreme weather events in the past five years see climate change as a crisis or a major problem. Among those who have not been directly affected, that number is 46 percent. But getting from “it’s a major problem” to “it matters as much as the economy or healthcare” is another story, and that’s where you and I are needed.

“Climate change isn’t just in the backyard, it’s in the basement,” said Leiserowitz. “The call is coming from inside the house. And that lived reality is increasingly starting to dawn on American consciousness. We first detected that signal of direct experience rising out of the noise of our politics, which had been mucking this up for a long time, in about 2016, and that little signal has started to grow and grow. It grows the more we actually talk about it.” [emphasis mine]

So here I am, talking to you and hoping you’ll talk to your family, friends, and colleagues so that when a pollster asks them to rank the issues that will impact the way they’ll vote, they’ll be more likely to rank climate at or near the top. Just thinking about that possibility makes me feel a little bit less anxious.

Climate news you might have missed

Global boiling

In late July, the United Nations’ Secretary-General, António Guterres, gave a bold speech at a press conference on climate, saying, “The era of global warming has ended; the era of global boiling has arrived.” 

While his use of that phrase has been widely reported on, there are other parts of the speech worth mentioning. Although the UN is pushing for net zero, a concept that leans heavily on carbon-capture technology that hasn’t yet proven effective and has been called “magical thinking” by critics, Guterres took the time to push on the fossil fuel industry, saying “fossil fuel companies must chart their move towards clean energy, with detailed transition plans across the entire value chain: No more greenwashing. No more deception. And no more abusive distortion of anti-trust laws to sabotage net zero alliances.” Those are strong words coming from the entity that typically chooses to play nice with the world’s largest companies and most powerful governments, and it speaks volumes about the gravity of this moment.

Desert plants are struggling

Image by Bernd from Pixabay.

The fact that desert plants and animals are acclimated to warm, dry temperatures doesn’t make them immune to the changing climate. This week, my mind has been on the Joshua trees in California’s high desert; in recent years, they’ve been under threat due to drought and increased heat, and they’ve finally received protections under a recent state-level conservation effort. But much of that momentum has been lost in the face of this week’s York Fire, which burned 100,000 acres in California and Nevada and was fueled by invasive nonnative grasses that helped spread the fire between the iconic trees. As Cameron Barrows, a retired conservation ecologist, told the Los Angeles Times the Joshua tree is a keystone species that provides shelter and reprieve from the heat for countless insects, birds, lizards and snakes.

The massive saguaro cactus is another keystone species that lives in Arizona’s Sonoran Desert, and its future is also in jeopardy. Scientists say that saguaros are breaking, losing limbs, and falling over at record rates since the heat waves of 2020, and they worry that this year’s heat dome will lead to similar fallout. The record-breaking heat also threatens to prevent new cacti from establishing themselves, raising significant questions about the future of desert ecosystems.

One professor is forced to exit the revolving door

You might think someone couldn’t be an environmental law professor at Harvard and a highly paid board member and active lobbyist for ConocoPhillips, the company behind the much-disputed Willow oil drilling project in Alaska. I had assumed so before reading about Jody Freeman, who has been doing both simultaneously — to the tune of 350K a year in salary and stocks — for years.

In the spring, the Guardian and the Bureau of Investigative Journalism reported on emails Freeman sent the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission advocating for ConocoPhillips, and since then groups such as Fossil Fuel Divest Harvard have worked hard to put pressure on her. In an open letter, the coalition of students, alumni, and faculty wrote: “Professor Freeman, until now, you have justified your position as helping reform ConocoPhillips from the inside. The Willow Project makes clear that this isn’t working. Despite your years of service, ConocoPhillips remains further from Paris alignment than almost all of its peer investor-owned fossil fuel companies.…It is important to ask yourself whether you are being used—if ConocoPhillips isn’t paying for your expertise, but instead co-opting the respect and legitimacy accorded to someone of your position.” Last Friday, she resigned from the company’s board.

A call for art to evolve in response to the climate crisis

ArtReview recently ran an unusually direct op-ed, arguing for a shift from art that merely comments on the climate crisis to “ecological artistic praxis,” or a physical, tangible embodiment of the theories artists often put forth in passive, research-oriented ways.

“What feels different about ecocritical art is that the very topic it engages with proposes widespread ruin and demands that action be immediately taken to counteract such an apocalypse,” writes Marv Recinto, ArtReview’s managing editor. Shifting toward art-as-projects with the larger purpose of engaging viewers in action, he says, is what’s called for given the high stakes. “Does this necessitate a fundamental shift in how we define art?” he asks. “Yes. But in times like this such rules are made to be broken.”

On the brighter side

• A youth-led movement in Ecuador has worked for a decade to prevent oil drilling in a section of the Amazon rainforest known as Yasuní National Park. Later this month, the nation’s citizens will have a chance to vote on whether to indefinitely leave the oil in the ground, which would provide a model that activists say “has the potential to lead the way in the global ecological transition.”

• In Southern California, communities are shifting from building underused separate cooling centers for unhoused folks and other people living without air conditioning, to instead retrofitting existing community spaces into “resilience hubs” with solar panels and backup power sources, which cool community members while offering free classes and other supportive resources.

• After months of organizing on the part of Sunrise Movement Dallas, the city of Dallas has agreed to launch a pilot program that will provide free rides on public transit for students. The hope, said the organizers, is to help kids get around and to create “lifelong public transit riders.”

• A few weeks ago, I mentioned the massive push to begin storing CO2 created in ethanol production underground and transporting it using interstate pipelines throughout the Midwest (recall the recent “zombie apocalypse” leak). Well, this week, a group of regulators in North Dakota have chosen not to grant the company Summit Carbon Solutions a permit to run 320 miles of pipeline through the state to an underground carbon storage site. The decision comes after an active campaign by advocates, a petition, and five public hearings that drew large crowds of outspoken dissenters.

The Visual

Sean Gallagher’s photos of the aftermath of Typhoon Doksuri and the floods it caused in Beijing are striking and worth taking in:

Sean Gallagher

Sean Gallagher on Instagram: “Scenes in the aftermath of devastating floods in western Beijing yesterday. The Chinese capital was hit by record rains this week, as Typhoon Doksuri hit the capital. According to the Associated Press, in was the city’s “heaviest rainfall in at least 140 years, causing severe flooding and 21 deaths.” These images were made in the Tanwanglu area of Mentougou, in the west of the city. #china #chinafloods #floodsinchina #Beijing #beijingfloods #floodsinbeijing #tanwanglu #mentougou #climate #climatechange #climatecrisis #climateemergency”

August 4, 2023

Top banner by Mara Greenaway.