To Cope With Climate Anxiety: Give Up Hope of Salvation
The news lately has not been great. Reports from the scientific community suggest that climate change is happening faster than anticipated. Major storm events, droughts, and flooding coasts are becoming routine. The Amazon rainforest is on fire. And now, some are suggesting that it is already too late to prevent catastrophic global warming. And yet efforts at preserving the environment are halting-at-best. With all this happening, it’s easy to become demoralized — helpless, fearful, depressed.
When we talk about climate change, it’s mostly in terms of what’s happening — the damage being done and what can be done about it — but there’s much less talk about how it feels. By and large we try to avoid feeling it, whether by reassuring lies, or pure ignorance. It’s certainly more comfortable to believe the problem’s not serious — but self-deception has its own psychic and behavioural costs. In my own struggle to cope with the looming existential threat, losing hope of preventing climate collapse has been both incredibly painful, and a necessary part of the healing process.
Since my earliest childhood, I’ve had a passionate concern for ecology. I’ve always deeply appreciated the beauty of the living world, and it pained me to see my favourite trees felled — the forests steadily giving way to subdivisions and strip-malls. And even in the ignorance of youth, I recognized a terrible contradiction: I learned from school, my parents, and TV documentaries that Earth’s ecosystem was under threat. If this were so, why wasn’t everything possible being done to protect it? If resources were limited and garbage doesn’t just disappear, why would we be making so much just to be thrown away? With only a little thought, I could see the terrible trajectory: the planet is of finite size, and the rate of destruction accelerating. Some day, possibly in my lifetime, it would all be gone.
But that couldn’t be right, could it? The grown-ups who run the world wouldn’t let these evil people destroy it. Surely, someone would step in and stop them — arrest the polluters and punish them for their bad deeds. Imagine my horror when I realized those same grown-ups *were* the ones responsible…
And so I pushed to make the most responsible choices possible. I recycled, I picked up litter, I furrowed my brow and nagged at people I perceived as part of the problem. I even pleaded with my parents to stop mowing the lawn, to let it grow into a forest. I thought that if everyone did what they could do, that we could “save the planet”.
But here again a contradiction arose: I often found myself in situations where there was no good choice. No matter how careful I was, I couldn’t avoid contributing to the problem, and even my most effortful deeds were offset by a single careless act by myself or someone else. Sure, living “green” could offer a sense of smug moral superiority, but no amount of personal choice could meaningfully affect the clear-cutting of rainforest, or the accumulation of greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere. All my efforts were individual, but the problem is systemic.
This fact has become the source of far more anxiety than the looming catastrophe itself. The fault doesn’t lie with irresponsible individuals but with the very structure of society itself. The choices we make as consumers are constrained by the economic system that constructs these options. You can choose to contribute less to the destruction, but short of living radically off-grid you cannot choose not to contribute. What’s more, even if your personal impact is eliminated it will make no measurable difference on the overall problem — there is simply nothing anyone can meaningfully do on an individual level.
Instead, to address the problem would require a fundamental reorganization of the world. Our entire society, from the international scale down to each individual in their communities, would need to be oriented toward ecological preservation. The vast majority of energy would need to be from non-destructive, renewable sources. Everything we make would have to be fully recyclable, bioregenerative, or permanently useful. Our food-production practices would need to be radically reinvented, with animal agriculture reduced to a tiny fraction of its present size. Still-existing biodiversity would have to be aggressively protected, while ecosystem restoration becomes the largest productive industry. We would have to abolish (not individually forego) many of the luxuries we now enjoy — air travel, cheap imported food and goods, lawns, and more.
This would probably prevent climate collapse…
…if we had done it decades ago…
…but we didn’t.
And so a catastrophic decline of habitability is strictly unavoidable. If we take the drastic actions above immediately the severity of the problem will be reduced somewhat, and recovery might be easier as a result. But by all (credible) accounts a crisis of some degree definitely cannot be averted.
It will be gradual — severe storms and flooding here, extreme heat and droughts there — but slowly it will add up. Crops will fail, mass animal die-offs will occur with increasing frequency, and a steadily-growing number of people will be displaced from their now-uninhabitable homes. We’ve already witnessed the first examples of this happening. For now, it’s mostly “over there”, but soon, it’ll be right here.
Imagine it: tens and then hundreds of millions of people driven from their communities by rising floodwaters, famine, and deadly heat. Forced to simply abandon their assets (who would buy a house that’s underwater or destroyed by storms?), waves of climate refugees will be in need of care. Those with wealth will flee to their private enclaves, but the rest will be hung out to dry. Places with still-functioning ecosystems will be quickly overrun, taxing already-strained or marginal lands to their breaking point.
Governments will struggle to maintain stability under status quo politics, but eventually the disruptions will come. Economic convulsions like that of 2008 will become more frequent and severe. Borders will snap shut in the face of mass climate migration. Democracies will constrict into dictatorships as anxieties about security curtail freedom of thought and action. Strongmen will emerge, promising salvation but demanding obedience. Arguably, we are already witnessing this; the underlying cause is not obviously climate, but many of the threads of this authoritarian turn can be traced to environmental factors.
If you’re even still reading this, you’re probably thinking I’m an alarmist — that I’m blowing the problem out of proportion, or just being dramatic for the sake of attention. That with a little hard work and ingenuity, we can fix this right up! Sure, it might be a little rough for a couple years, but everything will be back to normal just as soon as we —
But no, I’m not. And it won’t. We have already irrevocably altered the functioning of the ecosphere by removing large parts of it. A system as large as a planetary climate has massive inertia, and many of the processes now underway would continue even if we disappeared overnight. And even if we were to somehow stop the momentum of collapse, pre-civilization ecology can’t be restored — even in part. We cannot simply return the planet to its ‘natural’ state, because the ecosystem is not a ‘natural’ phenomenon.
It’s not a divine miracle, or some incredibly fortunate coincidence that Earth is so perfectly suitable to life. Life made it that way.
From its very emergence in the planet’s early history, biology has been conducting terraforming. The oxygen in the air is the product of cyanobacteria respiration, followed later by plants. The surface temperature needed for liquid water is stabilized by biotic greenhouse gas exchange, carbon capture in biomass, and albedo-altering vegetation. The very land itself is shaped by life — erosion is slowed by biomass, while roots pulverise rock into soil. And beneath every process, an unfathomably complex network of feedback mechanisms sustains and regulates the overall functioning of the system.
In a very real sense, this planet is alive. The mild climate we have enjoyed thus far is not natural — it has been produced, moderated, and maintained by the functioning of the ecosphere over the course of billions of years. Without biology, Earth would more closely resemble Venus — hot, caustic, turbulent, and bleak. And it may yet.
By best estimates, homo sapiens emerged at a time of exceptionally rich biodiversity and climactic stability. But in our relatively brief time as a global actor, humans have all-but destroyed the temperate forest (etc.), poisoned the oceans and air, and re-emitted billions of tons of carbon locked away for eons. In just a few centuries, we have devastated the most life-sustaining parts of the planet’s surface, and altered atmospheric chemistry moreso than in millions of years prior.
Life will certainly continue after this event, but it will never be as it was. Ecosystems are generally resilient to disruptions — adapting to a shift in climate or recolonizing after a disaster — but they do not return to some perfectly balanced ‘natural’ equilibrium. The new normal can be quite different, depending on the new conditions, the lifeforms available to repopulate, and the speed of the transformation. After a dramatic disruption, this could mean a total loss of biodiversity as food webs collapse and a small set of simple, hardy species comes to dominate — if it’s even still habitable at all. The scale and speed of our global impacts more closely resemble a meteor strike than a creeping ice age, which could mean an ecosphere not conducive to human life at all: too hot, too toxic, too stormy, too sad.
This is the very real future we face. It’s a knowledge I wake up to every morning, and one which keeps me up at night. Everywhere I go, I get little reminders — an unusually powerful storm, a diseased tree — that this will not last forever. I’ve long struggled with depression, and this awareness has contributed in no small part. Those in the mental health field have observed a significant number of people suffering climate-related clinically-diagnosable mood/anxiety disorders. We’re not alone.
I’ve been doing a lot of reflecting about the nature of my own pain, and I’ve come to realize that much of it results from hope. Understandably, I don’t want to experience the breakdown of the world as I know it, which motivates a strong and hopeful desire to “save” it. But despite these aspirations, I’ve watched as the situation has worsened: symptoms becoming more frequent and severe, efforts to stop the damage coming too slowly, or even being rolled back by money-hungry sociopaths. Failure upon failure takes its toll. Eventually one’s hope begins to turn sour, sapping one’s will to do anything at all.
There are few feelings worse than helplessness. To know a problem exists and generally how to solve it — but to be impotent to act — is a special kind of torture. It’s like those dreams where you’re trying to run but your legs feel like concrete, or (a common theme in my dreams) desperately trying to warn someone but can’t seem to communicate. Rationally, there are a few ways to deal with feelings like these. You might recognize them as the stages of grief, but it’s certainly not a linear process.
The strategy most seem to be using is denial — pretending the problem doesn’t exist, or won’t be that bad. Climate change denialists come in many flavours. Some are motivated by economic necessity or pure greed — those whose livelihoods (or obscene profits) are derived from ecologically-destructive industry. The Amazon rainforest is on fire because of this; to make money enough to sustain themselves, farmers are economically compelled to clear more land as the fertility of their existing farms degrades. Meanwhile, the oil industry (and their puppets in government) spins a grand deception to downplay the problem and impede efforts to limit their profitability.
Given how necessarily destructive many facets of the global economy are, some level of denial is needed just to remain sane. Even with the evidence and theory in plain view, many prefer to listen to ‘alternative facts’— not because they’re stupid or malicious, but so they can continue to live, work, and consume in good conscience. In the words of Upton Sinclair: “it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.”
At best, denial manifests as a form of bargaining — a belief that with the right tax policy and some magic bullet technology we’ll be able to prevent collapse and reverse the damage. This is the default option for eco-conscious liberals, and the coping strategy I’ve used most of my life. Through this lens, individual choices and politics-as-usual retain value; every policy achievement and heartwarming tale of individual effort is celebrated as a sign that things are getting better.
But this relies on a strict framing of the situation — the picture is cropped to exclude all but the Good News, breaking the Big Bad into a collection of minor setbacks. It’s entirely rational to adopt this view, simply to keep one’s morale up in the face of bleak prospects and a torrent of bad news. In the aftermath of 9/11, rescue dogs became so depressed that their handlers had to plant fake survivors in the rubble for them to find to cheer them up. And indeed if you do suffer depression, you should really stop watching the news at all. Having hope can feel good — even if it’s baseless — but the facade eventually crumbles on deeper inspection, leaving one worse off than before.
The despair I’ve been feeling comes out of this disappointment. I’m angry that I’ve been lied to, and sad that no salvation is coming. From here, it’s easy to slip into destructive nihilism — existential dread, antisocial ideation, or a desire to hasten and worsen the problem. If we’re doomed and nothing can be done, then nothing means anything — so why not self-destruct? Throw recyclables straight into the trash, run your air conditioner with the windows open, “roll coal” in your XL diesel pickup truck! For me it’s mere hedonistic inaction; if there is no hope, then why bother getting out of bed at all?
I’ve come now to realize I’ve been trying to solve the wrong problem. Instead of trying to retain hope in the face of certain doom, what I need is a way to maintain resolve in full view of the crisis.
Acceptance — full, unqualified acceptance — is a monumental task. This is not the same as uncritical assumption of the worst-case outcome, nor irrational panic at the dire possibilities. It also does not mean cynical disregard of any positive potential or rejecting any available remnant of the past. The truth lies at an indistinct and flexible point between total pessimism and total optimism. But rather than the facts of the matter, it’s the narrative that shapes our reality.
While it may be true the apocalypse is coming, it is not necessarily the end of the world. Apocalypse is a Greek word meaning “revelation” — an unfolding of possibilities not yet foreseen. The post-apocalyptic world is by definition unknown and unknowable — the product of technological, biological, geological, and sociological factors that cannot be predicted in advance. But some things are for certain: we know significant ecological collapse is unavoidable. We know we will face an unprecedented, global humanitarian crisis, which will affect the lives of every person on the planet. What remains uncertain is how we will respond as events unfold.
Much like my own realization, as a society we need to focus on the correct problem. Rather than expectantly hoping for a return to “normal”, we should be preparing a plan for mitigation, transformation, and recovery. The ultimate goal of our efforts is to restore the viability of the biosphere — rehabilitating ecosystem services as quickly as we can, and finding a way to live in benign partnership within them. Although we can’t stop the process, limiting damage now will slow and soften the collapse, making it easier to cope with and recover from. None of this will be possible without a near-complete transformation of economy, social organization, and even what it means to be a human being. Whether we intend it or not, such a transformation is inevitable; we can either seize the new narrative, or allow the future to unfold as it will.
The currently dominant narrative of Western society is one of scarcity, which breeds ruthless competition, exclusion, and contempt. By this reasoning, we can’t “afford” to stop consuming ecosystems for fear of angering the economy and disrupting GDP growth. Refugees and immigrants are cast as invaders, come to deprive us of what’s “ours”. Even domestic social supports become a target when society is viewed as a zero-sum equation; cruelty and deprivation are easily justified as punishment for failure at survival-of-the-fittest. Informed by this worldview, the “haves” will continue to consolidate wealth at the cost of the rest — even wilfully harming the vulnerable out of pure spite.
This is also what informs the mainstream environmental movement — conservation of environmental resources to ensure their continued availability for exploitation. Driven by such objectifying logic, a complex situation reduces to a set of discrete problems to be solved — at the core motivated by a need to maintain stability in a growth-based economic model. The oft-touted “market solutions” are all based on the premise things will continue to function much as they are — but they won’t. And without any way to comprehensively measure ecosystem health in monetary terms, success on paper can have horrifying consequences.
Left unchanged, this model of social organization and the selfish, individualistic norms it creates will cause untold atrocities. Like cornered animals, we will turn on each other — fighting for scraps without concern for the bigger picture. Resource wars, manufactured famines, and intentional acts of destruction are the product of such cynical narcissism. On this trajectory both the global economy and social polity will destabilize long before the ecosphere — which will in turn accelerate and worsen environmental damage. Even if a punctuating event like nuclear war is averted, this is the worst-case scenario; coordinated efforts at recovery will be impossible, leaving pure individual survival as the only viable option.
These are the fruits of senseless hope. As we cling to the outcome we wish for, desperation drives our reasoning and actions. We keep struggling to maintain normalcy, but the trouble with normal is that it always gets worse. To avoid this terminal decline, we need to acknowledge the facts, but alter the narrative. This is no longer a story about salvation — it is one of rebirth.
Most of my dreams in the last few years have been post-apocalyptic in some sense. Some take the form of frightening dystopian scenarios, but many are quite beautiful. Trees grow everywhere in the city beyond tomorrow — lush wetlands and vibrant meadows flourish where once a concrete jungle sprawled. The people are happy: well-loved, cared for, suffering no lack for want of money, nor the violence of desperation and oppression it creates. The breakneck pace of accelerating growth has eased to comfortable linearity; we make and take only what we need — no more and no less. Wonders of technology are deployed to serve and enrich life, not to dominate and consume it. In time, a new health returns to the ecosphere, as humanity moves out among the stars.
These utopian dreams are laughable to the common sense of this age — unrealistic, unbelievable, even contrary to human nature — but the age is rapidly coming to a close. The future is not constrained by the limits of the present, nor is what’s imaginable the extent of what’s possible. A radically changed world presents radically different ways of being, co-creating a radically new society. More than mere fantasy, such visions are a vital part of intentional transformation; the narrative gives birth to itself.
What stands in the way is not inadequate technology, nor a shortage of resources, nor even a lack of popular desire. It’s a failure of imagination; an inability to envision a better world as possible. Spellbound by what we’re told is realistic (by the people who most benefit from the current arrangement), we don’t recognize how absurd these assumptions are. After all, it’s all we’ve ever known.
Very few people consider themselves to be selfish, greedy, and uncaring, but most seem to insist this is immutable, essential “human nature”. We accept strict fiscal restraint, full-time waged labour, and accelerating economic growth as necessary for prosperity, but industry often produces more than we need — destroying the surplus to keep prices high. Since the fall of Soviet-style bureaucratic totalitarianism, it’s been presumed laissez faire “market democracy” rests as the sole viable way to run the world. The very notion of alternatives is dismissed, citing the failure of previous models as evidence against considering possibilities. At its essence, appealing to realism is a belief that we can do no better.
But we can. Instead of hoping for the return of normal, we need to be a people who dream. Removing the blinders of artificial scarcity, cynicism, and fatalism, the singular path forward becomes a multitude. Even though the coming decades will bring epic challenges and grave hardship, it is possible the post-apocalyptic world can become better than this one. Knowing the goal is recovery rather than stability, we can begin to make changes now which may take generations to bear fruit.
The worst-case scenario can still be averted but only if we start doing everything possible right fucking now. More than just stopping the damage, we’re necessarily and permanently tasked with the regeneration and maintenance of every damaged ecosystem on the planet. Parking lots will need to become forests again, fences and walls be torn down, and trees planted absolutely everywhere. The process of re-wilding can be as simple as to stop mowing a grassy field, or as involved as, for example, the unpaving of the LA River or the Great Green Wall of Africa.
Many of the needed changes are practical like these, but some of the most important are social, psychological, and spiritual. Even when future conditions can’t be changed, our values can. How we think about ourselves and our relationship to others determines how we treat people, including ourselves. Accepting the cynical notion of an unchanging, essential “human nature” can only produce more of the same — an endless and escalating conflict of all against all. But human beings are not mere slaves to biology nor fate; our nature is built by our experiences, but shaped by the stories we tell.
It’s not laws or logic that shape our behaviour, but the content of our character. A society that teaches obedience, competition, and strength produces very different character from one which values sensitivity, cooperation, and kindness. Cultural tropes featuring unyielding avengers and self-made men valorize aggressive confidence and unseen privilege. But a culture whose heroes are gentle, collaborative leaders inspires the same in its youth. In times of crisis, our chosen narrative determines whether we hate or heal, share or shun. When everything falls apart, will we respond with courage, generosity, and wisdom, or become the tyrants of our own private wastelands? Do we welcome those in need and work to correct our mistakes, or accept a cruel world where only the strong survive?
If we are to meet the coming challenge with our humanity intact, it’s through a narrative of radical compassion, informed by love and driven by a collective will. Many already live this story, drawing inspiration from examples both real and imagined. At its best, this is a role spirituality and religious narratives can play — drawing awareness to the vital interconnectedness of our lives. Fiction can be the catalyst too. It’s not always obvious, but Star Trek is a post-apocalyptic setting; from the ruins of the 21st century, a new and united humanity works never to repeat their past mistakes. People who have had profound mystical or near-death experiences often report this kind of changed outlook — including those induced by psychedelic drugs. My academic work focuses on this phenomenon, and how these tools could be used to aid the ongoing process of changing minds.
Adopting this narrative en masse is no small task, but it is vital to a worthwhile survival. The most important action we can take right now is to change this society in preparation for what’s to come. The punishing austerity of this age makes us weaker and more uncaring as a whole, which will make coping with collapse so much more difficult. Although the spectrum of mainstream politics is vanishingly thin, even the smallest benefit can increase our long-term chances. Social welfare, education, and economic justice may not solve The Problem, but they will cultivate healthier, wiser, more capable people. A single vote cast now may seem meaningless, but those affected by today’s government policy will be building tomorrow’s world.
And finally, consider a new kind of hope. This isn’t the blind, backward-looking hope of denial — waiting for political saviours and technological miracles — but rather an intentional, progressive, sober resolve: faith. It’s not a wishful expectation or fanciful belief; it’s a commitment to acknowledge the facts, and work toward the best possible outcome with confidence. Faith motivates us to action, even and especially in the face of long odds and poor prospects. Faith won’t save us, but it may keep us from barbarism and extinction.
This has been the most difficult part of my own struggle. Being so keenly aware of an unavoidable problem makes it difficult to genuinely believe things can be okay. I’ve chosen not to have children in part to spare them the experience of collapse, but what does this say about my confidence in the future? The situation is so complex, and delicate, and huge that it hardly seems my efforts matter. But while paralysed by this despair, I can make no efforts at all. Rationally, I know the prescription above will shake me from my slumber, but knowing and believing are two very different things. I still feel stuck in the valley between empty hope and driven faith.
This piece started as a pithy Facebook aphorism inspired by this article, which grew into a paragraph, then into an essay — first short and then long. Now it feels like the first chapter of an even longer work. Perhaps as I continue thinking through these issues, my perspective will change. If anything, I hope I can help others in this valley find their way out. Hang in there…
