Pirate's Cove

I was having a conversation with someone about how they have a chemical imbalance that can cause anxiety. She can’t just not get that way. It’s real. As opposed to some people claiming non-medical conditions as real ones because they’ve made themselves that way. Just because you get anxious because you’re potentially reading some signs (right or wrong, we’ve all done this), because a customer, friend, relative, has made you that way, doesn’t mean you have a real medical condition. Or if you’ve been indoctrinated to a doomsday cult that is always yapping about doom

Climate Anxiety Makes Good Sense

Even as we begin to emerge from the stress of the pandemic year, mental-health professionals are noting a steady uptick in a different form of anxiety—the worry over climate change and the future that it will bring. The latest survey research from Yale and George Mason universities shows about forty per cent of Americans feeling “disgusted” or “helpless” about global warming; a poll from the American Psychiatric Association last autumn found that fifty-five per cent of respondents were concerned about the effects of climate change on their own mental health. The effects seem particularly harsh on new mothers, and, indeed, a fear of adding to the climate problem and of the disintegration it might cause seems to be deterring large numbers of young people from having kids of their own. Understandably, the fear of a wrecked future increases as you descend the age scale: a March survey of Gen-Z Americans aged between fourteen and twenty-four found that eighty-three per cent are concerned about the health of the planet (although nearly half said that they have been feeling a little better since Biden took office).

Realistically, they’re making themselves crazy over slightly more than a nothingburger. It’s utterly normal for the climate to warm during the Holocene (and other periods over the last 4.5 billion years). It gets warm, then it’ll flip to a cool period, then back to warm. And it’s not even as warm as previous Holocene warm periods. But, hey, if climate cultists are so anxious, why are they not changing their own lives and doing their part? Oh, and it’s apparently mostly a white thing

Perhaps there are ways in which this fear is a luxury—Sarah Jaquette Ray, who literally wrote the book on climate anxiety, noted recently that it is an “overwhelmingly white” phenomenon. Not because people of color care less about the climate crisis (in fact, they care more), but because they’ve faced other existential crises. “The prospect of an unlivable future has always shaped the emotional terrain for Black and brown people, whether that terrain is racism or climate change,” Ray wrote. “Exhaustion, anger, hope—the effects of oppression and resistance are not unique to this climate moment. What is unique is that people who had been insulated from oppression are now waking up to the prospect of their own unlivable future.” Eric Holthaus, in his always interesting Substack newsletter on climate, echoed some of these thoughts, after describing his own anxiety as so crippling that, during attacks that lasted weeks, he’d “been unable to write, unable to interact with friends, unable to function normally.” But, he said, since those “who have already been marginalized by centuries of oppression will be hurt the worst  . . . our job, as the climate anxious, is to repair that oppression, repair that marginalization, to make sure you’re not offloading your anxiety onto someone else in ways that are causing more harm.”

Let’s be honest: it’s mostly white, middle and upper class Leftists who are claiming they have climate anxiety. It is rather a privileged thing, or, as Bill McKibben, who wrote this piece, calls it, a luxury.

All of which is to say that we are right to be anxious. There are profound reasons to hope that we’re about to make serious progress: the sudden arrival of cheap renewable energy; the shifting zeitgeist. (As is often the case, Rebecca Solnit sums them up with particular power.) Even if we catch some breaks from physics, though, it’s going to be a tough few decades. And what will make it toughest may be the (very American) assumption that we have to endure the anxiety by ourselves, in our own heads. I’ve found the simple solidarity of movements at least as useful as the opportunities for action that they provide; just knowing that lots of other people are at work on the same problem is a solace, and a goad to keep working. It’s one reason that I’m glad that vaccinations are proceeding apace. It’ll be strategically useful to be back in the streets, but it will also be psychologically useful: we are shoulder to shoulder on Zoom, but it’s not quite the same.

A tough few decades, folks. Nothing like fear mongering and doom talk to help out the fellow climate cultists, eh?