Question No. 10 How Do I Deal With Climate Stress?

I find myself very stressed out about the climate situation. What are simple things you are doing to ease the stress? Should I quit my job and go all in on permaculture? And maybe that leads me to my next question: Should I get all the people I love to join a little self sufficient colony with me? And if so, where would be the ideal place?

—M

PERSPECTIVE #1: rose

Dear M,

I, too, am stressed about the climate situation! I have to imagine anyone who isn’t feeling some level of stress about it must not be paying attention. You asked about simple things to do to ease the stress, and your question happens to catch me just after I finished Jonathan Safran Foer’s book about climate change, We Are the Weather. In it, he argues that the single most meaningful thing we can do to play our part is avoid eating animal products. Specifically, he advocates for a “no animals before dinner” policy, which if adopted by everyone on Earth, would change the trajectory of human civilization.

I will admit that I have not suddenly become a vegan after reading it, but I have certainly reduced my already-low consumption of animal products. But above all, I came away from the book convinced that we, or at least I, have to stop letting internal debates about purity (“There were bits of bacon in the baked beans I just ate, how can I call myself a vegetarian?”) or futility (“I am just one human, and my individual behavior will not have any effect”) justify inaction.

So I guess to answer your inquiry I would say that I don’t know if you should quit your job and go all in on permaculture. But I do know that you should not let your decision not to take such extreme measures lead you to think you should otherwise do nothing.

There is a way in which living through this planetary crisis as a single human being is similar to being a single voter in a nationwide election. Just as your vote is practically meaningless in the vast pool (especially if you live in a reliably blue or red state, but really always), your own choices in the face of climate change will not have an effect. But that is very different from saying those things do not matter. The way I think about it is to consider what kind of human being I want to be, how I want my children, or my friends, to think about me. Or maybe most important – what will make me proud of, or at least content with, my own personal choices in this one life of mine?

This brings me to the second part of your question, about starting your own self-sufficient colony. I have to say my first thought was of zillionaires heading into the cosmos for escape. That kind of fleeing is not something I respect. But if, on the other hand, your impulse is to be near the ones you love, to scrap some elements of the ratrace together and live differently, then I am all for it! In fact, can I join you? This makes me think of what writer/artist Jenny Odell calls “standing apart,” not to be confused with retreat. In her words, “[S]tanding apart represents the moment in which the desperate desire to leave (forever!) matures into a commitment to live in permanent refusal, where one already is, and to meet others in the common space of that refusal.”

Disasters, such as the slow-motion but harrowing one we are currently living through, remind us of our finite time. The best thing we can make of that is to consider how we want to live while we are lucky enough to be alive.

Sincerely, 

Rose

Rose is a gray haired and wise future version of one of the many middle-aged Sarahs in Flyover Country.

PERSPECTIVE #2: jean

Dear M,

I remember watching Melancholia some years ago when I was living in New York and very depressed. I found solace in the fact that I identified not with Kirsten Dunst’s character but with Charlotte Gainsbourg’s. If you haven’t seen the movie, I’ll spoil it for you here: essentially the people on Earth discover that a secret moon has been hiding behind our moon this entire time and it is on a collision course with Earth. Basically, everyone has to face the fact of their mortality and that their entire world will end as they know it within the month. Kirsten Dunst’s character is too depressed to care; in fact, she is so depressed, she can’t even taste her food. Charlotte Gainsbourg’s character veers towards the other extreme; she is so anxious and fearful she cannot sleep. All her worries are centered on herself and her family -- her sister (played by Kirsten Dunst), her son (a little boy), and her husband (played by Kiefer Sutherland) who himself cannot handle the impending doom so ends up offing himself before the apocalypse.

Even though I was very depressed, identifying with Charlotte Gainsbourg’s character made me realize I was still very much alive. I would be anxious in that situation because I would be stressed, and I would be stressed because I still very much cared to live, and wanted my family to live, and the people of Earth to live, and the plants and animals and all the rest of it. It seemed like a great, big, gaping loss of life in all its forms to me.

We are, I suppose, on a similar collision course headed towards facing our own mortality, towards the extinction of the human race, albeit on a slower timeline, and living out a slower death.

But if you are stressed, I guess it means you are paying attention. You are reacting to the news, to the changes in weather where you live, to social media posts, to neighbors talking and parsing the various goings-on of your town, your state, country, and world. It means you are engaged, and choosing to remain engaged. It’s hard to remain engaged. A lot of people check out. I know I have from time to time, maybe even now. It’s hard to pay attention all the time, because it is stressful to do so. 

So what I do, I set boundaries. I bound my time -- for work, for writing, for socializing, for phone, for social media, and news. The only time I don’t bound is the time spent with my dear ones, my near ones, and for my solitude. My default is to pay attention to where I am right here, right now, not to the news from beyond here, or the news of impending doom. I do what I can here and now. Anything else outside of here and now is just an illusory grasp… it is grasping at something that cannot be controlled. The world will continue spinning, there is no secret moon hiding behind ours, and any apocalyptic event will likely take time to unravel. And if the world does end sooner than later, well… 

(from Reunion, an episode of Love and Radio) 

"the older you get you realize you pay for everything you do

when God made the earth in the first place He put rules down

you don't live by the rules, you pay a price

you read the Bible you find out that everybody paid the price"

"when I stop and think about the condition the world is in

and it's in bad condition

we're breaking laws all the time, we're breaking rules all the time and that's why it's so bad

all we do is murder each other, kill each other

everything is terrible

the world's a time bomb

it's waiting to go off

I think Trump's in there for a reason

because he's here to destroy the world

and I think he's gonna succeed

this is why it's gonna end

the Bible has said that from the beginning

thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on EARTH as it is in heaven

the world is gonna be restarted again and it's gonna be replenished"

The world will be replenished. Progress occurs in spirals. What goes up, goes down and around, and up again, a little more each time. 

Yours truly,

Jean

Denny, Sunnie, or Jean — Denny and Sunnie are retired Korean American boomers who are also ex- husband and wife. Jean is their daughter.

PERSPECTIVE #3: DELTA

Dear M,

I’ve been thinking about this question daily since you asked it. The news about climate change has been getting more frequent and more daunting, and beyond the news, many of us are living climate change moments in action: wildfires and hazy skies reaching across the United States and beyond; drought and impending water restrictions in the country’s already-dry locales; hurricanes, derechos, flooding. 

I appreciate that your question doesn’t actually ask how we should go about solving climate change; in fact, your question asks What are simple things you are doing to ease the stress? An interesting twist! We are talking about the existential stress of a changing climate, the stress of the inevitable end of each of us, coalesced into stress around the knowledge of a larger future end of this earth we call home. It seems generally unlikely that we are going to be around to see the earth’s ultimate destruction or, conversely, its complete jettisoning of the human race, but we can still feel the earth’s hot breath at our ankles and throughout our burning forests and on our evaporating water sources.

I am not sure I am exactly finding ways to ease the stress of climate change, so much as I am working to understand that this is a problem I cannot fix myself; it is out of my control as a single individual; and yet I can do my best to participate in activities and actions that tip toward climate responsibility. Full disclosure: the scale of the problem is so significant that I have generally been blind to it. I haven't thought deeply about the possibility of the earth fundamentally breaking or kicking us out, because it seems to keep going no matter what; so far, we haven’t been able to quit it, and it hasn’t completely quit us just yet. But even I now see that, even if we can’t individually solve climate change, there are things we can all be doing to push our communities and leaders toward change, and that is something that can help ease the stress. 

Maybe before any of us move to our self-sufficient colonies we should first each work on moving the people in our circles to push the movement for change in our existing communities, to make all of our higher-ups hear that people are talking about the climate and that we aren’t going to stop, that this is a problem that isn’t going to blow over (though it will probably also be literally blowing over, hopefully not taking our roof with it).

We exist in interaction with other people and their contexts; as climate change changes the livability of our world and our current locations and communities, we’re going to be pressed into greater proximity with each other rather than having all the space in the world to spread out and carve out locations of our own. I’m wondering about permaculture on a community scale; self-sufficient colonies on a community scale. 

The first impulse is to save ourselves and those closest to us, but we humans live on this planet together and in order to ensure our own safety we’re also going to have to do what we can to ensure the safety of our fellow humans. Before we run for the hills (and the lakes) let’s tell anyone and everyone in charge that things have to change. 

Warmly,

Delta

Delta is a curious observer and dedicated student of humans and their intriguing ways.