Environmental Paralysis - and Hope for the Future

Yesterday I attended a session (1) entitled "Coming of Age at the End of the World: An Existential Toolkit for the Climate Change/COVID Generation" with Sarah Jacquette Ray, professor at CSU Humboldt in the sociology of climate change. She is the author of A Field Guide to Climate Anxiety .

Her college students co-opted her class with their many anxieties about a world they did not want to see themselves, or children to come, living in. They felt hopeless that most did not want to see or acknowledge the climate change data that inevitably points to degradation of the planet. A feeling shared by many older adults, such as me, who having been ringing the death knell of the planet since OUR college days.
My college days included much hope...for equality, that we'd be better off financially than our parents, that science would save the day. The reality for Gen Z (in the US), though, is not the same:

• - They graduate less financially secure - more college debt, lower lifetime salaries, no pensions.
• - Unprecedented online access...to bad news, too much information, too much distraction
• - More lonely, more likely to be suicidal (several of her students took their own lives)
• - Most stressed but least likely to vote (until 2020)
• - The models for climate future are terrible. Concurrently they are anxious about (and sometimes experiencing) hunger, homelessness, sexism, racism and apathy.
• - They feel the good they can do for the climate are vastly outweighed by the harm that they and others do to the environment. They feel they are past the point of no return.
• - 71%, since COVID-19, do not want to bring more children into the world
• BUT they...
• - Are the most ethnically diverse generation
• - Care greatly about climate change and social justice and the links between them
• - Are politically engaged at unprecedented levels

After acknowledging the depression/ennui/hopelessness of many in her classes she tries to move the mark by engaging them in imagining and being what it takes to thrive during change, rather than fear it. Develop a desire for, rather than fear of, the future. Some approaches include:

• - Seek joy in activism
• - Be less right and more in relation
• - Feelings and emotions are important so seek out trusted others who support and encourage you. We are not always aware that we are not acting alone. - find your peeps!
• - Become schooled in the role of emotions in climate justice work
• - Claim your calling and scale your action
• - Ditch guilt, move beyond hope and laugh more! Be joyful in your militancy!
• - Develop resilience - hope against all odds. Imagine hopeful futures. Accept less than perfect!
• - Find the power in story - hack the story! Realize that we can't act in a story of apocalypse.
• - Embrace life. Resist burnout (even though activists LOVE burnout).
• - We can't always see around the corner to the solutions that are in process

Solutions are no longer about more data; there is plenty but many do not respond to it.

• - Act in rational ways
• - Most Americans ARE concerned about the climate, across political boundaries
• - Feeling & emotions are important so many climate "deniers" need to hear confirmation about solutions from TRUSTED acquaintances that share their values.
• - For many the grief of the realities of inevitability climate change causes them to participate in non-sustainable distractions & actions that make things worse.
• - We must work on personal feelings as well as actions.
• - COVID anxiety is being heaped on top of climate anxiety.
• - We must flex the muscle of radical imagination. Imagine hopeful futures. Envisions what want to see then walk backwards to how to accomplish it.
• - "We can choose to walk through it, dragging the carcasses of our prejudice and hatred, our avarice, our data banks and dead ideas, our dead rivers and smoky skies behind us. Or we can walk through lightly, with little luggage, ready to imagine another world. And ready to fight for it." - Arundhati Roy (Author, "The Pandemic as a Portal")

Resources:
(1) Oklahoma Center for the Humanities Speaker Series
The Pandemic is a Portal: Creating a Just Future on Earth
"The Pandemic as a Portal" by Arundhait Roy
"The Unbelievable Weight of Climate Anxiety" Scientific American, April 2021