Hope Matters. Elin Kelsey

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СКАЧАТЬ years old. According to a 2019 World Economic Forum survey of thirty thousand individuals under the age of thirty across 186 countries, climate change and the destruction of nature is the biggest global concern for young people around the world.⁹ The same year, a survey of over ten thousand eighteen-to-twenty-five-year-olds across twenty-two countries by Amnesty International found Generation Z fears climate change more than any other issue.¹⁰

      We’re beginning to see the results. For the first time ever, in 2019, climate change was a top issue in Canada’s federal election. As I write this, the world’s youngest prime minister, Sanna Marin, has set an ambitious target to make Finland the first carbon-neutral welfare state in the world. Bhutan and Suriname have already won the net-zero-greenhouse-gas-emissions race, with Norway and Sweden coming up close behind. Meanwhile, in Australia, climate politics is burning as hot as the devastating bushfires.

      Fear, guilt, and shame are powerful levers in political movements. However, fear tactics are a double-edged sword. On an individual level, fear is a good indicator that something is broken or has gone wrong. But, when it becomes entrenched, as it has in the doom-and-gloom narrative, it is demotivating. When we are afraid, we become less creative, less collaborative, and less capable of perseverance. And that’s where the paradox comes in. As a global community, with climate concern at a record high, we are better positioned than ever before to take urgently needed action, yet the collateral damage on individual people of being constantly bombarded with environmental catastrophe is inhibiting our capacity to tackle the climate crisis.

       New words to express profound feelings

      The emotions people feel around the planetary crisis can be intense, life-changing, and overwhelming. Many describe being terrified, floored, or swept away by grief. “Global dread,” “eco-anxiety,” “environmental grief,” “climate rage,” “eco-paralysis,” “environmental cynicism,” “climate change distress”—despair about the future of the planet has garnered many labels in the research literature as academics try to understand and study the emotional and psychological complexity of our feelings about the state of the planet. Glenn Albrecht, a sustainability professor in Australia, says we simply don’t have enough words to express how profoundly environmental changes affect us. He has created a new lexicon of terms, including solastalgia—the feeling of homesickness we experience when we are still in the same place, but it has been irrevocably changed. Solastalgia is distress caused by the transformation and degradation of one’s home environment.¹¹

      Worries about climate change impact our most intimate decisions. A third of Americans reportedly consider climate change in their decision not to have children or to have fewer children, according to recent polls in the New York Times and Business Insider.¹² A growing number of people around the world are experiencing real anguish over whether or not to have children. They worry about the harm an additional person could do to the planet, and they feel genuine anxiety about whether a child could lead a good life on the hotter, less stable world they fear is coming.

       Eco-anxiety is overwhelming kids

      It’s not just adults who are suffering. In our noble zeal to emphasize the urgency and enormity of environmental issues, we appear to be inadvertently raising a generation that feels hopeless about the future of the planet. A 2018 international review of recent research on the psychological impacts of climate change on children published in Current Psychiatry Reports reveals that many kids honestly believe the world may end during their lifetime as a result of climate change or other global threats. In-depth interviews with ten-to-twelve-year-olds in the US found that 82 percent of children expressed strong feelings of fear, sadness, and anger when discussing environmental problems.¹³

      I want to underscore that these are kids who have not directly experienced catastrophic floods, droughts, sea level rise, or bushfires. These findings are from researchers who specifically study the psychological impact of indirect or gradual climate change effects.

      The reason I think that is such a sad and important point is that children are suffering emotional and psychological anguish not from their lived experience, but as a result of their anticipation of a dystopian future they believe is inevitable. They see planetary destruction as a foregone conclusion. They are so deeply embroiled in the narrative of doom and gloom that they have no idea other futures are possible.

      It’s not surprising they feel this way. They are growing up in a media storm of end-of-the-world threats and getting graded on homework assignments that hammer home the magnitude of environmental problems. This pervasive and skewed orientation toward analyzing what’s broken follows them throughout their school careers.

      Though it’s natural and responsible to try to protect the people we love by focusing on the dangers they may face, lots of studies now show what parents and teachers already know. The best way to equip kids to handle challenges in their lives is to help them learn how to develop and maintain strong social networks within supportive communities. They also need to learn how to develop effective, creative problem-solving abilities to overcome adversity. These same strategies are true for the challenges they may face from climate change. The Australian Psychological Society provides more details on how to do this in a helpful online guide called “Raising Children to Thrive in a Climate Changed World.” In it, they remind parents: to talk about but not catastrophize the problem of climate change; to validate and help children learn to recognize their feelings; to offer emotional support; to take positive environmental action together; and to nurture kids’ capacities for resilience, flexibility, and adaptability.

       The more we worry, the more we . . . shop?

      A fatalistic focus on climate doom triggers a host of what psychologists describe as conscious and unconscious concerns about our own deaths. The result is an emotional state of “existential anxiety.”

      Psychologists use the term terror management theory to describe the constant tension each of us experiences in our day-to-day lives between our desire to live and the fact that we know that one day we will die. Without realizing it, we develop defense mechanisms to manage this psychological tension.

      Fears about the death of the planet are even more visceral because we know how completely dependent our own lives are on the health of living ecosystems. Climate change is a primary driver of biodiversity loss, just as the loss of biodiversity contributes to climate change. Both of those fates—and our own—are inextricably linked.

      The trouble is, depictions of climate change as an inevitable, sweaty death sentence trigger these defense mechanisms. We protect our sense of security by subconsciously denying the problem or minimizing the credibility of the threats.

      So even though you might assume that people who fear death by climate change would be motivated to change their behavior, it doesn’t work that way. When we already know there is a massive problem, and people just keep telling us how bad it is, we suffer real fears about our survival. In fact, fearmongering amplifies our existential anxiety, which sets off a chain of protective reactions that can cause us to downplay the issue and reduce our likelihood to take action.

      Surprisingly, these fears can actually lead us to shop more. Researchers have found links between existential anxiety and hyperconsumerism. Shopping (for people who derive personal validation or identity from their stuff) decreases our sense of vulnerability.¹⁴ In our materialistic, consumerist culture, a common response to soothe our unconscious fears of death is to hop online for some comfort shopping.

      This could help to explain why Black Friday 2019 hit a record $7.4 billion in US online sales at the same time concern about climate change was at a record high. Mass consumerism is bad for the environment in a myriad of ways. Millions of shoppers buying and then discarding smartphones СКАЧАТЬ