Coping with the Trumpsterfire

Thank you for all of your responses to last week’s question: “How are you coping?” 

Your answers feel even more on point with Donald Trump headed back to the White House. You are certainly not alone if you’re feeling dread or even despair this week, although a lot of us seem to be feeling isolated.

“One thing that helps me is talking to other like-minded people,” wrote one of your fellow readers from B.C. Climate impacts keep mounting and this will be the first calendar year hotter than 1.5 degrees. “But it’s hard to find other people to talk to; to be really honest with… most people don’t want to talk about it.”

I wish you could see my inbox — you would quickly be disabused of the notion that no one wants to talk about it. In fact, the most common sentiment is: “Thank you for asking.” As one reader described the predicament, most people just don’t “feel comfortable sharing without a sanctioned space.”

It’s certainly understandable that we’d feel isolated. For all the talk of a climate “crisis,” almost no one seems to be acting like it. And, on Tuesday, a clear majority of Americans voted the world’s loudest climate denier back to the most powerful office on the planet. Now we’ve got a couple months of added anticipatory anxiety, waiting to see what the “Trumpster fire” (h/t Mark from Ontario) decides to torch first.

There’s no way to spin Trump’s victory as anything but “extremely dangerous” for climate efforts. But the more obstinate optimists point out that the first coming of Donald Trump was not enough to stem the closing of America’s coal plants or the momentum of clean energy. “The result from this election will be seen as a major blow to global climate action, but it cannot and will not halt the changes underway,” wrote Christiana Figueres, the former head of the UN climate secretariat and architect of the Paris Agreement.

Rebecca Solnit declared as the election results became clear: “You are not giving up, and neither am I. The fact that we cannot save everything does not mean we cannot save anything and everything we can save is worth saving. You may need to grieve or scream or take time off, but you have a role no matter what.”

Last weekend, even before Trump’s win, Kathleen emailed from Redbridge, Ont., with similar determination: “I will not give up, I will not give in, I will not stop fighting.” In case you’re imagining a case of naive idealism, Kathleen says she’s turning 76 this month.

Many of you expressed similar determination. “So the fight must go on,” wrote Mark from Thorold, Ont. “What informs me of the issues is real news articles from Canada’s National Observer, The Guardian and other independent news sources. What motivates me are the environmental groups who enable regular folks like me to make a contribution – to be part of the fight. Environmental Defence, Ecojustice, and here in Ontario, the Ontario Clean Air Alliance are great organizations, to name just a few. There are many more great groups taking climate action at the provincial, federal and local level. Without you and them, I wouldn’t know what to do.”

“Get engaged,” he urges. “Not just in signing petitions, but in volunteering to help them make things happen. We cannot motivate our politicians or change the system without constant and increasing pressure.”

Claudia wrote with a similar suggestion: “I am a member of a group called Climate Safe Cities which is working to get B.C. municipalities to adopt building codes which ban gas hook-ups in new buildings. We work with Stand.earth and there have been some successes.”

“These groups do good work, but joining in also gives me a chance to meet like-minded people — a big bonus as in their company, I feel encouraged. And I feel hope. Without those kinds of contacts, I am sure I would go crazy!” 

Claudia’s advice for collective action was twinned with personal steps: “Follow Voltaire's dictum, ‘il faut cultiver notre jardin,’” she says. “We follow this literally and metaphorically! We built a passive house and moved into it in April of 2023…. We also turfed our turf and turned our front yard into a vegetable patch. This summer we cultivated potatoes, garlic, tomatoes and lots of herbs and salad greens.”

Getting our hands down into nature through gardening came up repeatedly in your responses, both as a practice of self-care and a way to open conversations. “Personally, I cope by planting pollinator gardens,” writes Gail from Alberta. “I use the Neighbouring for Climate resources from our city (Edmonton) to open up discussions.” 

Scott is an engineer who works on decarbonizing buildings and says he finds his work “collaborating with other climate champions” really helpful. He also endorses “regularly connecting with nature… even in the area around my house, seeing plants change with the seasons, listening to birds, celebrating rain, blue sky and sunsets. In the Buddhist spirit, I try to remain detached from thinking of the climate future, focusing on trying to make it a little less bad, while living a good life.”

James offered a different take on peering into the climate future: “I try to keep the long view because change is a chaotic process and the political/economic chaos we're seeing on the climate front is just part of a natural process that is not linear. If one studies the latest science on the dynamics of evolution, for example, we see a change process that is not long, slow, and linear as scientists had previously thought, but fraught with building pressure to change, building resistance to that change, then a period of chaotic turbulence, followed by a rapid sudden paradigm shift.”

In the more immediate term, however, many of us admit to struggling. “My response to your question, ‘How are you coping?’ Not very well,” acknowledged one reader. “Coping is becoming increasingly difficult,” says another. 

“How am I coping? I'm just not,” admits Keith. “How do I find comfort? I think I often go back to the soothing words I heard first from my mother and father: ‘It’s going to be alright, it’s going to be alright.’”

“And then I realize, now from more adult experiences, that those are also the words often used to comfort someone who is dying… You know, and I know, and everyone knows… it’s NOT going to be alright. The coming disasters are ‘locked in’ no matter what we do. Things are going to get worse, much worse, and we already consider the steady onslaught of extreme weather calamities ‘the new normal.’”

Grim as it sounds, Keith is surfacing fears that many feel. And have so little space to express. Even among climate advocates, there can be a cavalier insistence on the brave face, the cheerful attitude. No one wants to be the downer at dinner, but we are left alone with the implications of the information we ingest.

“Something that confounds me,” wrote Ken from Ottawa, “is the cheerleading heard from those who, perhaps like yourself, are sensitized to a perceived need for silver linings.”

It’s an emotional trap that Courtney Howard wrote about after Trump’s victory. A medical doctor and emergency physician from Yellowknife, she prescribes starting with the heart: “It’s a time for big feelings. Feel them.”

“Many of us are doers. We want to spring into action, make things better. We are tempted to blur bad spirits with substances of various descriptions. However, when we shove aside our feelings or try to step over them on our way to a goal, they inevitably show up later in our bodies or pop out sideways to surprise us in our interactions with others.”

Some of you emailed with very practical practices. “You need to feel it to heal it,” one reader advised me. It’s such a great expression that I suspect I might be the only one not to have heard it before. It definitely echoes the advice from experts on grief and anxiety who warn against leaping exclusively toward positive thinking or collective action and bypassing our authentic experience.

“Daily meditation is so important,” emailed Patricia. 

“Nature and meditation help me a lot,” she reports. Along with music: “Music helps me a lot and keeps me sane. I sing in a choir and I do some solo singing.”

Music came up several times in your suggestions for coping. “I use music to insulate myself for self-preservation. That’s how I cope,” wrote Bernie. “Sometimes music helps — classical, for me,” says Sara.

If that resonates for you, but classical isn’t your thing, another suggestion was to check out the Anti-Apocalypse Mixtape by Ayana Elizabeth Johnson, marine biologist and author of the recently published What If We Get It Right? Visions of Climate Futures.

Somewhat surprisingly, not many readers talked about physical exercise. The doc from Yellowknife recommended “exercising for 30 minutes most days” and, to be fair, your responses included a fair bit of walking. But it fell to someone with a lot of experience coping with real fires to advocate for serious sweat. I’ll leave you with advice from Mary in B.C., a long-time firefighter with a toolbox packed with several of the strategies we’ve covered, along with a surprise — a shoeless one.

“The stress is real and incessant. I often think it would be better to put my head in the sand, but I can’t; I want to know what’s going on around me. After 20 years as a firefighter, I’ve had to learn and maintain good coping mechanisms. The more options/tools for caring for your mind and body in your toolbox, the better.”

“In addition to meditation and getting into the forest, I walk barefoot on the earth as often as I can. With time, it desensitizes the foot and reawakens mind to foot connections we have lost with wearing shoes. It becomes an additional form of meditation. The other stress relief, and also very good for health, is doing hard cardio for short periods. HIIT (high-intensity interval training) and interval workouts are crucial to releasing stress, and finding calm in mind and body.”

“I hope that these strategies will help,” Mary concludes. And so do I. Thank you for sending in your insightful, honest, even vulnerable, responses. And take care of yourselves as you take care of our precious home.