Tough Love and a Prescription for Climate-Induced PTSD
If you’ve been paying the slightest bit of attention to the recent extreme weather events exacerbated by climate change in this year of 2021 (Texas Freeze, 1-in-1000 year Pacific NW Heat dome and rain/floods in China, Tennessee and the Northeast, nearly unprecedented flooding in Germany/Benelux, massive wildfires in the American West, Category 4 hurricane Ida and an ongoing Megadrought in the American Southwest), then you are likely starting to understand that the climate that you’ve grown up with is gone. And this thought is reinforced by what has become a predictable, annual accounting of disaster, as I personally wrote about regarding events in 2020 and 2019. And those years followed 2018 when the town of Paradise burned and 2017 when Hurricane Harvey inundated Houston. Five years of catastrophic rain, wind, snow, fire, cold, heat, flood and drought, all made stronger and more likely due to anthropogenic climate change, with no end in sight. If you’re like me, you may very well be dealing with some climate-induced PTSD, eco-anxiety, solastalgia or a combination of all three.
And maybe like a lot of people, you’ve known things are bad, but you haven’t fully made the connection between the existential threat of climate change to human civilization and the real-time damages that it is imposing on many of the most climate-vulnerable communities. Maybe your community suddenly became part of this club, one you never wanted to join as a member. Nearly one in three Americans has had some personal experience with a weather disaster this year. But climate change is a hoax, right?
Okay, let’s forget about outright climate change deniers at this point — there’s no hope for these people…. they are literally just one rung up from Q-Anon believers. For them, science and data are meaningless, and the current rollcall of catastrophic events will be explained away by any number of ludicrous banalities (“the weather’s always changing” and “we’ve had different climates in the past,” etc., etc.). Indeed, the much bigger issue is with people who are rational and informed (i.e., YOU), but who fail to make the connections between our climate reality in the now and a certain, locked-in future that it guarantees. This is abetted by the lack of fundamentally changed behavior by our governments, public companies and private citizens — behavior that continues to compound the acceleration towards a disaster from which we will not recover and rebuild.
The vast majority of you reading this op-ed are among the most privileged people on this planet: in terms of education, resources, healthcare, material comforts, travel, etc. and the attendant consumption of material goods, energy and natural resources that have enabled this lifestyle. With that position on the societal ladder comes responsibility, the kind that a certain Camelot-era, martyred President used to ask people to have for their country, except that this time it’s for the world. But the good news is that by taking responsibility, you will feel better! Fact: you will feel less depressed if you take positive actions towards mitigating the constant harm.
That said, it’s not only okay, but imperative, to recognize that individuals alone cannot resolve the harms that we are doing to the planet and our ability to continue inhabiting it. Don’t buy into Big Oil’s “Big Lie,” the one that puts all the responsibility for change onto individual carbon footprints, rather than onto the massive conglomerates making billions off of the sale of fossil fuels. That’s like a heroin dealer marketing his product as unharmful while making $$$ from your addiction to it. Or like a Sackler. Or Big Tobacco. The analogies are many, but the message is the same: we need to cut off the source AND help people cope with their addiction. Get into rehab AND kick the dealer off the block. Or put him out of business with a class-action lawsuit.
The first step to recovery is to recognize that you have a problem (and by you, I mean WE). WE collectively have an enormous, nearly intractable problem and it will kill us. Not all of us equally, but that shouldn’t be a case for your inaction. Things are guaranteed to get worse, but they can get better at the same time, as counterintuitive as that sounds. Our world will continue to warm and the effects will become more severe, but the way that we interact with one another as humans (and the way we treat the flora and fauna of our common home, the planet), can change in the same way that cooperating with neighbors after a disaster can bring out the very best in people — this is a hope for us as a species. And by acting now, we can avoid the outcomes that will cause our civilization to collapse.
We CANNOT keep doing the same things that we’ve been doing in the past (unless your name is Greta Thunberg). We CANNOT keep buying new things whenever we feel like it, to feed our dopamine rushes or make things as convenient as possible, particularly if these things are fossil fuel intensive. We CANNOT build houses with large energy footprints that aren’t part of a sustainable future. We CANNOT keep planning exotic overseas jet travel to feed our thirst for new adventure and to stave off boredom. We CANNOT eat the same meat intensive diet or one that constantly relies on globally sourced food. We SHOULD think about the purchases that we make and the number of resources that went into creating and shipping them, as well as the lifespan of the purchase itself. We SHOULD think about cutting our energy footprint in half. We SHOULD think about acting more locally, even as we recognize that the climate crisis will only be solved globally. We SHOULD think about the fact that “business as usual” condemns millions of people, mostly in the Global South (but also in the most impacted communities of our own first world countries) to an early death. Think about the disconnect between posting pictures on Instagram of your high consumption and luxury travel lifestyle while climate migrants are starving at the border. That’s not a far-fetched comparison, that’s happening right now, every single day and that’s cognitive dissonance at its finest.
I don’t know how much more depressing the news can get these days, but I do know that if you want to feel better about our future, then you must do something about it. The old saying is still applicable, perhaps more now than ever before: if you aren’t part of the solution, then you’re part of the problem. Don’t be part of the problem.
Note: If you want tips for alleviating your worst climate-anxiety, check out my previous piece “Drawing Down with the Joneses” for more actions you can take to avoid being part of the problem.
