Climate Anxiety

The Anthropocene is the “age of humans.” A corollary for many is an ever-increasing sense of urgency about the human predicament. As awareness and information about how climate change affects every ecosystem, increases floods, droughts, disease, agricultural integrity, and more, increases—so does anxiety. A cursory internet search of “climate anxiety” turns up millions of hits. Although psychologists disagree about whether “climate anxiety” belongs in the DSM, the fact that mental health professionals have this discussion means they have patients with what is termed “eco-anxiety,” patients who suffer from what atmospheric scientist Michael Mann calls “climate doomism.”

 

Charles Eisenstein isolates a related problem: “climate fundamentalism,” or, how, when gripped by anxiety, some believe that no action is worthy unless it directly addresses climate change. Eisenstein argues that becoming obsessed with climate metrics may impede attending to our embeddedness in unjust social institutions and living, natural processes. Some may feel as though focusing on anything other than the climate is an “unjustifiable distraction.” Eisenstein builds on Murray Bookchin’s social ecology and argues that the way forward must be through creating just institutions as a foundation for coping with environmental challenges.

 

Eisenstein wants to motivate a broad consensus “to protect and heal the planet.” So, like Bookchin before him, he argues for shifting the narrative from a celebration of individualism and predatory capitalism to one of healthy institutions that meet people’s basic needs and mirror the interdependence of all elements in living systems.

 

 

Critics have claimed that climate anxiety is “overwhelmingly a white phenomenon” and that it is perhaps time for a new term, one that acknowledges the embeddedness of capitalism in extractive enterprises that have disproportionately affected people in marginalized communities and in the global south. There is no denying that marginalized communities and the global south have borne and continue to bear the brunt of degraded ecosystems and neglect—pure and simple. However, environmental justice has been an important part of the environmental movement for decades, especially given Robert Bullard’s pioneering work. This is not to say that we have anything like true environmental justice. That is an ongoing struggle.

 

 

However, the term “climate anxiety,” whoever articulated it, has started an important conversation, and I think Eisenstein is correct. If huge swaths of the population are worrying about basic necessities while suffering the most from pollution, violent floods, droughts, and fires, their anxiety is multiplied, and it creates immediate specific problems. Larger environmental changes are still the catalyst in the background. Those still temporarily protected from the worst effects of climate change have a bit more time, at least in human terms, to listen to and to reflect on alarming stories about the dire straits in which our species finds itself. Hence, the amorphous threat that the word “anxiety” conjures up. So, even though climate anxiety—as an identified phenomenon—may have been articulated by relatively more affluent people, it embraces something beyond itself as we make its everydayness more concrete. Sarah Jacquette Ray claims that the “climate anxiety discussion has a whiteness problem.” By that she means that vulnerable communities are not facing an “amorphous threat”; they are facing extreme heat waves. She also aptly states: “climate anxiety is a phenomenon that does not discriminate by race, class, or geography.“

 

This is exactly my point. If there was ever an issue that could potentially bring humans together rather than divide them according to ethnicity and color, climate change is that issue. The challenge, in my view, is getting past the divisiveness and finding ways to see ourselves as one species facing the same overarching problems. Yes, some have greater resources and with greater resources comes greater moral responsibility.