An honest question for you this week: how are you coping? The news about climate change seems ever more dire but sometimes it feels the world just keeps marching on. Or even the opposite — a drop in public priority and political battles about rolling policies backwards. Who knows what will happen in the U.S. next week but there is (somehow) an even chance for the return of Donald “Green Scam” Trump. The provincial elections in Canada haven’t exactly been heartening on the climate front — including an invigorated BC Conservative party that includes outright climate deniers among its ranks — nor is the lead-up to the next federal election.
So, it’s an honest question to you: How are you coping? Are you finding it hard to cope with the dissonance or are you seeing reasons for encouragement? And the literal meaning of the question, too: are there things you’re doing that you’ve found helpful? Maybe something you could share with other readers? It’s been a while since we’ve plumbed the wisdom of the crowd, so if you’d like to weigh in, please email with your thoughts and suggestions.
I suppose I should go first. I’ll admit to being rocked this week by the images flooding out of Spain. Shaky cellphone videos of cars sweeping down roads have become a whole morbid genre. But the pileup in Valencia seemed to take the genre to a new level. Rushing water turned streets into death traps. Over 200 people were killed according to Spanish authorities and crews are now digging more bodies from the vehicles and mud.
The images would be striking in isolation but they come among a flood of so many others — torrential destruction across North Carolina and the Philippines, across South and Southeast Asia. And the inverse — drought across the Amazon Basin and South Africa while crops wither in Zambia where the world’s largest human-made lake can no longer generate electricity.
The climate impacts are anguishing enough but they bring that sense of dread over what the current trajectories portend.
Those trajectories are more abstract. But I hear first-hand that they are doing nasty things to the mental health of climate advocates who follow the various reports and summaries that land ahead of each year’s UN climate talks.
Every fall, the UN’s Emissions Gap Report tracks the divergence between current laws and promised action. This year’s edition highlights a “massive gap between rhetoric and reality.” Greenhouse gas emissions reached record levels last year. And the rate of growth was faster than it has been over the past decade. And this week, the World Meteorological Organization issued its own report saying much the same thing.
Current policies are driving “towards a catastrophic 3.1 C temperature rise,“ says the UN Secretary General. That’s double the level world leaders pledged to avoid. Scientists figure that level of heating would push places where billions of people live outside the human “climate niche.”
The New York Times’ headline writers kept their summary simple: “The U.N.’s Verdict on Climate Progress Over the Past Year: There Was None.”
Of course, there is progress beneath the overall tally. Many thousands of people are beavering away on clean energy and nature protection, organizing in communities and leveraging laws and policies. And there are advances that seemed impossible a few short years ago on the tech front. Solar power is surging. Battery deployment is booming. Our southern neighbours installed the battery equivalent of 20 nuclear reactors in the past four years. But so far, on aggregate, we’re not bending that curve of ongoing climate pollution and very, very far from driving it to zero so the heat stops rising.
It would take a “quantum leap” to do so, according to that Emissions Gap report. At the moment, that seems nowhere on the landscape of political possibility. And so, yeah, it’s understandable if anxiety keeps rising. It might not be the most healthy reaction but it’s a natural one.
What do I find helpful? Well, first off, let’s be clear that I’m not a doctor. And it’s important that people in real distress get good therapy and/or psychiatry. But I’ll tell you that the most useful complements to professional help that I’ve found are time in nature and meditation.
Whatever else we do in terms of pushing for climate action or ruggedizing our own lives, we can also become more personally resilient. We’ve covered several coping strategies in this newsletter before: We’ve talked to a medical doctor issuing “nature prescriptions”; We’ve interviewed grief workers on “good grief”; We’ve discussed managing “Generation Dread” with mental health researchers.
The real lifelines for me have been getting out among the trees and regular meditation. Neither are magic pills and both can actually accentuate anxiety at times. Getting out in nature often makes the strain on ecosystems more visible — droughts become more obvious and certain plants and trees are already succumbing to climate change. But it is also a centering experience and a gateway to gratitude (which the Buddhist meditation masters assure us is an antidote to despair).
And meditation is not always a blissful ride either. Cultivating awareness can mean becoming more mindful of fear and foreboding. But it also clarifies the difference between valid fear and neurotic rumination. It’s really a baffling aspect of our educational systems: we are entirely at the mercy of our own minds, and we dedicate years to stuffing them with information but so little time learning how to train them.
“I find it to be a gem of a practice,” said NASA’s Peter Kalmus. “When I stop practicing the anxiety floods back. Meditation is one of the most important things I do — it lets me keep going and with joy.” Kalmus is one of those extraordinary climate scientists who has resorted to civil disobedience to underscore the severity of our predicament. (You can hear more from him and other climate VIPs on the usefulness of meditation in Zen and the art of not freaking out.)
And what about you? How are you managing and what have you found helpful? You can let me know by emailing chris[at]nationalobserver.com.