Louisiana slowly sinks. Florida, too. (A building just collapsed there; perhaps it’s unrelated.) The American West is bone dry and bracing for a historic wildfire season. The Northwest bakes; city streets buckle. Hundreds have died in the heat in British Columbia. It is enough for a time to take your mind off the prospects of American democracy collapsing.
The Washington Post’s Charlie Warzel ponders “a lingering existential dread about the future” in Bellingham, Wash. in a region where air conditioning is rare:
All week, a sinking feeling has accompanied each day’s heat; there’s a distinct psychological pain that accompanies the thought that the unbearable present is only a preview of the extreme climate to come. It was 116 degrees in British Columbia on Sunday. And it was 73 degrees on snow-covered Mt. Rainier, above 10,000 feet. In one city in Pakistan, a different system pushed temperatures to levels “hotter than the human body can handle.”
It’s not hard to imagine what comes next. And that’s what makes it so horrifying.
The phenomenon of climate anxiety has sharpened for many over the past few years. In a poll from October, 55 percent of respondents said they were “somewhat or extremely anxious about the impact of climate change on their own mental health.” People who had been insulated from the disastrous effects of warming — thanks to geography, or privilege, or both — are newly confronting this uncomfortable reality in their daily lives.
Americans are painfully slow to confront inconvenient truths that take us out of our “you can have it all” comfort zones.
Slow enough that, over a century and a half since the end of the Civil War, Americans are still trying to come to grips with our 400-year legacy of slavery and its lingering harms.
Slow enough that multiple red states have passed Stalinesque “memory laws” to prevent the teaching of historical facts that might induce (in white students) “discomfort, guilt, anguish or any other form of psychological distress on account of the individual’s race or sex.”
Slow enough that we are just now considering removal of memorials to Confederate traitors from town squares and the halls of Congress.
Slow enough that many in that same Congress oppose acknowledging climate change, sea level rise, blackouts in Texas and California, and the 40-year failure of trickle-down economics to trickle down.
Slow enough that those same politicians oppose investigating a bloody insurrection at the Capitol that just months ago threatened their own lives and the unmaking of American democracy.
Slow enough that one of the Internet’s most persistent memes shows a cartoon dog surrounded by raging fire and dismissing it with “This is fine.”
Britt Wray, a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford University and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, suggests one way for coping with climate anxiety is by embracing it:
It feels unfair to come out from pandemic lockdowns and confront yet another crisis that requires reserves of resilience. But Wray argues that squaring up to your anxiety and dread around climate change “gives you resources to draw from and ultimately makes intense moments like this heat wave easier to bear.”
“If we can acknowledge our feelings and bear the fact that we’re faced with extremely difficult truths about the planet, we can use that to gather strength,” she said. “This is not easy. You need to know you’re not alone but also know that you’re not going to find a silver-bullet solution.”
We should talk about the climate crisis with friends and family, Wray suggests. Weave it into our social fabric so it is not such an uncomfortable topic.
Squaring up to your anxiety is fine. Acknowledge our feelings is fine. Talking with friends and family is fine.
Doing is better.