A Raw, Existential Void in the Chest — The Impact of Environmental Anxiety and Grief on the Individual and Society

 

Two headlines caught my attention this week, one from the BBC News, “Climate change: Young people very worried - survey,” and another from Time Magazine, “75% of the Young People Around the World are Frightened of the Future Because of Climate Change.” The period of our youth is a time that, ideally, should be opening up to expansive possibilities for the future — for optimism, for excitement, for hope. It should not be an age for growing anxiety and deepening despair. And yet that is what it has become, thanks to the undeniable reality of Climate Chaos and its increasing disruption of what had been relatively stable natural systems for millennia.

 

My last professional educator position was at a public charter school focused on sustainability and preparing young adults to enter the world to create a sustainable society and future. For the first time in my career I was able to honestly discuss human responsibility in ecosystem degradation and global warming; in systemic racism, a toxic planet and resource exploitation; in species’ extinction and public health threats. We were all — faculty, staff and students — speaking the same language. The problem boiled down to putting a positive spin into the narrative. After a certain point, the difficulty of shifting gears and convincing students that there were solutions available or yet to be discovered and that they could be the ones to bring about that change began to lack resonance — especially since so many were borderline nihilists to begin with even before the academic year began.

 

And who can blame them when they see the lackluster response to the Climate Crisis from world political leaders. Despite the lofty climate package President Biden put together, he still gave a green light to restarting drilling in the Gulf of Mexico and building smaller modular nuclear reactors. China has touted its zero carbon emissions plan yet continues to rely heavily on coal fired power plants and environmentally devastating hydroelectric dams. According to CNN reporter Ivana Kottasová, “Not a single G20 country is in line with the Paris Agreement on climate, analysis shows.” (3:02 AM EDT September 15, 2021). In one profoundly ridiculous (from an environmental standpoint) decision, El Salvador voted to make Bitcoin@ legal tender; Bitcoin@ being the most energy consumptive of all cryptocurrencies (the energy needed to “find” 5 Bitcoin@ could power the city of Albany). Soon there will be no more road left for governments to kick the can down.

 

Of course it’s not just governmental decision makers who appear oblivious to the dire — CODE RED — status the world is in. We have titans of capitalism — Jeff Bezos, Sir Richard Branson and Elon Musk — building rockets to go into space whether to take supplies and personnel to and from the International Space Station, market tourist space cruises, or to inaugurate humanity’s odyssey beyond earth — to Mars and beyond. The latter would elicit sublime and unbridled joy in me (being a diehard Gene Roddenberry Star Trek aficionado), if I didn’t recognize how dire the situation was for earth and how much that money should be devoted to solving problems here before looking beyond. These men are capitalist tycoons who play at philanthropy while expending vast sums of money for flashy sideshow ventures when they could be doing real good for humanity and the planet — and the pathetic part is, they don’t realize how readily people see through them. Certainly my students did.

 

Of course there’s also the new company called Colossal with $15 million of start up money planning to resurrect the Woolly Mammoth under the pretense that these relics of the Pleistocene would help preserve the Siberian tundra and thus combat Climate Disruption. Let’s not bother to consider that the DNA required to make this extraordinary feat of genetic engineering possible will be derived from the bodies of Mammoths recovered from the rapidly thawing permafrost due to Climate Change, or that said reborn hybrids (not wholly Mammoths, rather a little Asian elephant in the mix) would be the only component of that ancient paleo-ecosystem present; or that the whole process will take decades to achieve. For the concept to have even the most minuscule hope for a positive outcome, many more elements — flora and fauna — of the extinct ecosystem would need to be recreated. As proposed, the project appears to be an outlandish waste of resources far better allocated elsewhere if combatting Climate Disruption is truly desired.

 

When young people — or anyone of any age for that matter — read of Mammoth resurrections or the several incredibly expensive and experimental methods of carbon sequestration or ideas of shading the earth to cool it through various (unproven) methods of geo-engineering, their level of skepticism and anxiety increases. They are very much aware of news reports featuring “increases in extreme weather events,” “the hottest summer on record,” “wildfires in the west affecting air quality on the east coast,” “Hurricane Ida brings flooding to NYC subways” and “record Manatee die off due to starvation.” And on top of all of this we have the COVID-19 pandemic still blasting its way around the globe, randomly mutating and taking advantage of the unvaccinated pockets of people wherever it can. How can people not feel the loss of the security of the known, the familiar, the possibility of hope and a better future.

 

When I was young, the same age as my recent students, I remember being greeted at dawn by the most amazing variety of birdsong in the late spring and summer. There were sparrows, finches, warblers, wrens, chickadees, the occasional crow or blackbird, robins, cardinals, and more. Birds were everywhere. The barn swallows dive bombed my poor cat for hours (I actually think they were playing because they stayed just out of his impressive seven-foot range). And there were butterflies and fireflies in the hundreds — fireflies enough to light up fields like sparklers. Now, though I live only five miles away from where I grew up, the birds are sparse and the species fewer — I haven’t seen a swallow in years — and the butterflies and fireflies are few and far between.

 

Obviously some of this could be youthful recollections seen through rose colored glasses, but the overall decreasing trend is real, and I’ve been observing it for decades. And every year I grieve a little more for what was and is no more. I also think of my mother who died back in the 1980s. She was always curious about the world, loved to travel, and believed in a brighter future for humanity. She was also an educator. Though I miss her daily, in some sense I am glad she is not here to see what is happening to the planet because I know how much it would devastate her, just as it is causing so much emotional and psychological anguish to so many now (in addition to the physical traumas unleashed in the wake of the impacts of Climate Chaos).

 

I make no claim to be anything other than a layman observer and fellow sufferer. This problem is so vast, no article I can write can really do it justice or fully explicate the breadth and scope of the issue. There are many books that attempt to do so, some of which I include at the end of this article. Just as there seems to be no clear pathway out of the predicament of Climate Disruption (or at least not one we are collectively willing to take), there appears to be no obvious remedy or cure for the accompanying anxiety and grief. But, perhaps, that’s the way it has to be. Anxiety may spur us to action, and grief is not unwarranted. It is appropriate to mourn that which is lost, and, in so doing, honor the fact that it existed but now lives as a memory.

 

Ultimately, we must trust in the resilience and enduring nature of relationships and community to survive. Relationships with one another, with other living beings, with the planet itself, because those connections are truly the only things that matter.