Environmental News is a Depressing Mess
My weekly digest of news is always harrowing. Just this week, I received the news that hundreds of acres of ecologically important Amazon Rainforest are burning, The Great Barrier Reef in Australia is on its last legs, and our Executive Branch is planning on giving away more public land to energy exploration and extraction. As I read this tough to swallow news, it all gets registered with my eyes, is attempted to be rationalized by my brain, with anything I cannot fathom finding its way into my stomach to be improperly digested. It keeps me up at night, makes me feel hopeless, and yes can even lead me to panic or not get sleep. It’s a growing phenomenon affecting many of us, many of whom are young people bearing the brunt of future devastating climate and environmental outcomes. It’s name is climate anxiety, and it’s getting so prevalent that organizations like the Good Grief Program have been established to help people cope with its effects . My first instinct in all cases of handling news is to read the headline, see the picture showing bleached coral, rhinos running from fires, or devastated indigenous villages, and simply not click on the link. I know that what I am going to see is apocalyptic, dire, and depressing. I know I should be keeping my eye on the news, but it hurts me to the core how impotent I feel reading such articles.
I know I’m not alone in feeling this way. For many this encroaching reality is finding root in our everyday lives, causing us to make some really difficult decisions. Many young adults are deciding not to have kids due to the climate crisis, wishing to spare their would be children from a dire future. I personally have to wrestle with my future decisions as I hope to start a family someday, but it's impossible to make such decisions when it is hard to rationalize one’s emotions. Much like depression or anxiety (two conditions which share a lot with each other), one of their biggest consequences is in isolation, feeling hopeless in how you can change your reality, and distancing ourselves from friends and loved ones. This isolation is an emotional defense mechanism which keeps us from confronting our discomfort with the situations we face, but ultimately is a mechanism of avoidance. That avoidance of our reality makes us terrible at doing what needs to be done. It can make us real ineffective activists. We use our inability to handle the immensity of climate change as an excuse to not do anything about it. It’s human, it’s understandable, but it is not helpful.
Reframing and externalizing as therapeutic techniques
The reason I know as much as I do about depression and anxiety is that I have dealt with it for much of my adult life. Internalized negative narratives of failure, and guilt precede my willingness to change my own reality and the reality external from me. It took spinning my wheels for 15 years before I decided to see someone about it, and what I learned from that experience may be reflective of what to do in the case of climate anxiety. One technique that was taught to me was reframing. Reframing is taking those internalized negative narratives and interrogating them. Checking the logic of our narratives makes it so we do not stew in the hopelessness of how we perceive our world. For example, I could get caught up for a whole day thinking about how I messed up something at work, and instead of thinking “I’m bad at my job”, or simply “I’m bad” I can think “was this mistake indicative of me as a person? Does this really mean I’m bad”, and allows me to get out of my lonely loop of guilt. Then I go to the next phase externalizing. This means sharing what you felt, how it affects you and how you perceive it in a safe place with people you care about. Doing this helps you find that your perception of the situation is well off. Often times this sharing can happen in a group setting with people also feeling how you feel, and the issues of hopelessness, isolation and loneliness can be alleviated towards a positive future.
Using these techniques in your activism
All this is to say it is important to read those articles, but we need to reframe them and externalize them in a way that informs action and community towards a common goal. Instead of this (real) headline that says Outlook For The Great Barrier Reef Is Now ‘Very Poor,’ Australian Government Says. Reframe it, and say “Due to our reliance on fossil fuels lobbied for by fossil fuel billionaires Outlook for the Great Barrier Reef…”. There! Now you know what is to blame and where to dedicate your energy. Try it with this article It’s Really Close’: How the Amazon Rainforest Could Self-Destruct. I would tackle it by saying “Jair Bolsonaro a right wing idealogue is burning down the rainforest to grow more soy for the Chinese”. If you got somewhere around there you are getting the gist of it. Once you have a better conceptualization of the problem you can then safely externalize it. Tell your friends, family anyone who can hear you that our problems are not massive they are small. Powerful, but small. We are dealing with a small group of very powerful elites damning us all for their own personal profit, and that should send you from hopeless to angry. Angry is a hell of a lot better than hopeless. Find commonality with the angry people in your life, or find community with those also feeling your senses of anxiety and elevate them to a place of action. Whatever you do, make sure you know that everything you are feeling now is shared by someone else, and that is in sharing our grief where new power can grow, and that can change our future. Don’t let your potential for action end with the next depressing headline.