the world generates each year. If you were to add up all the stuff people around the world consume, everything from food to birthday presents to toilet-bowl cleaner, it would total a whopping 60 percent of greenhouse gas emissions and between 50 and 80 percent of total water, land, and material use, according to a 2015 study in the Journal of Industrial Ecology.15 It’s shocking to realize that by slamming people with messages of climate doom, no matter how well intentioned, we may inadvertently escalate the environmentally destructive shopping we so badly need to stop.
The finite pool of worry triggers emotional numbness
Other researchers explain our failure to act, despite high levels of concern about environmental crises, through a phenomenon known as the finite pool of worry. According to researchers at Columbia University’s Center for Research on Environmental Decisions, there are limits to the number of concerns a person can deal with at one time. Overburdening people’s capacity for worry with too much doom and gloom leads to emotional numbing. We tune out or feel immobilized. “When we’re scared, we can freeze,” says Susan M. Koger, a psychology professor at Willamette University in Oregon, who teaches and writes about psychology for sustainability.16
The trouble is, emotionally numb can look a lot like not caring. My friend Carrie teaches high school. She recently told me that she’s been showing her classes increasingly graphic images of climate change devastation to try to shock them into caring. “They are so apathetic,” she says.
Apathy can easily be mistaken for a lack of compassion, but many psychologists interpret it as quite the opposite. Apparent indifference or dissociation often serves to mask a person’s feelings of helplessness.
Apathy is produced as a response to feeling powerless in the face of political realities we cannot control.17 To avoid feeling helpless, guilty, and afraid, we create a veneer of not caring in order to maintain an image of ourselves as smart, tough, and in control. Apathy stems from fear and a lack of capacity to tackle what seems like an insurmountable task. When we believe nothing will change for the better, then any positive action can feel useless or pointless.
So if the students in Carrie’s class already know about climate change (which, according to research, it’s pretty well guaranteed they do), and if they keep being slammed with examples of how unjust it is or how little society is doing to correct it, her lessons may unintentionally create the apathy she is trying to cure.
There is a worrisome connection between apathy and cynicism. People who fall prey to apathy then may end up transforming their original political frustrations into longer-lasting expressions of skepticism, cynicism, and mistrust. Indeed, you don’t have to look far to see this happening writ large.
A rise in cynicism and drop in trust
Pessimism and cynicism are on the rise in many countries, according to Our World in Data, a research project based at the University of Oxford that analyzes big data trends. Meanwhile, feelings of trust are plummeting. The Edelman Trust Barometer measures levels of trust in business, media, government, and nongovernmental organizations. In 2017, the barometer revealed a global implosion of trust. In nearly two-thirds of the twenty-eight countries surveyed, the general population did not trust these four social institutions to “do what is right.” We’re rapidly shifting from the Age of Anxiety to the Age of Cynicism.
People trust each other less in the US today than forty years ago. Indeed, the US ranked the lowest in the most recent barometer reading, positioning it as the country with the least-trusting informed public. Decline in trust between Americans is coupled with a reduction in trust in their government, which, according to the Pew Research Center, is at historically low levels.18 Distrust is growing fastest among younger Americans.
Not surprisingly, trust is actively undermined by fake news and gaslighting. Gaslighting is when someone manipulates the facts so often, it leaves you second-guessing your reality. It causes you to question your own judgment. If gaslighting had a mantra, it would be “repeat a lie often enough and it becomes the truth.” This is especially true when the person gaslighting is in a powerful position. I imagine you can think of a few prominent politicians that fit that description. The more a gaslighter fuels our mistrust of others, the more cynical we become of other people’s motives, and that spirals into pessimism, distrust, and disappointment more generally.
While intelligent skepticism is warranted—after all, one is wise to distrust untrustworthy sources—the double whammy of rising rates of kneejerk cynicism about human nature, combined with apocalyptic forecasts about the future of the planet, leaves many with the helpless feeling that the world is too broken to fix. We may become so overloaded with worries that we disconnect from the suffering of others or lose motivation to lend support, a condition psychologists call compassion fatigue. We detach, withdraw, and disengage. Fear and despair mute our ability to find creative solutions. They cause us to self-isolate. Hopelessness becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Are you feeling eco-anxiety?
If you picked up this book because you are personally experiencing eco-anxiety, or climate grief, or deep worry, I hope this chapter reminds you that you aren’t alone in these feelings. You aren’t crazy. Lots of people feel the same way, and psychologists confirm that it makes sense. According to the Canadian Mental Health Association (CMHA), fear is a reasonable, even healthy response to the enormity and urgency of the planetary crisis.
Dr. Courtney Howard speaks on behalf of the Canadian Association of Physicians for the Environment when she says, “The intersection between the climate emergency and mental and physical health will become one of the world’s major issues.” The CMHA labels the climate emergency as a mental-health emergency. More than a thousand psychologists signed an open letter endorsed by the Association of Clinical Psychologists UK demanding immediate and effective action on climate change in light of the enormous mental-health impact of the climate crisis.19 Tackling climate anxiety and tackling climate change are inextricably linked.
Your feelings are real. But the point I want to keep driving home is that they are also inflamed by a flow of information in which positive developments are almost entirely missing.
You feel deeply about the environmental crisis because you have a deep love for this magnificent planet. That love is a strong and wonderful quality, and it’s empowering to find a way to excavate it from beneath all your fear and anger and grief and disappointment. When you look through the research at what triggers and sustains personal environmental behaviors, it’s things like compassion rather than shaming. It’s showing empathy when someone does something that they know they shouldn’t do—reminding them that we’re all human and mistakes are just a normal part of life. It’s finding meaningful purpose in the actions. It’s getting support from important relationships.
All of us experience a vast range of emotions, and it is the interplay of these feelings that enables us to move toward the world as we would wish it to be. Acceptance of what is is not the same as fatalism about what comes next. We need to be wary of seeing climate demise as a foregone conclusion. A 2018 study of fifty thousand people from forty-eight countries, reported in the journal Climate Policy, found that people who believe climate change is unstoppable were less likely to engage in personal behaviors or to support policies to address climate change.20 Conversely, according to a 2014 study by leading climate change communication researchers, when someone understands that climate change is a truly dire problem and they have a sense of the effectiveness and feasibility of the ways people are collectively acting to solve it, then they are more likely to take action themselves. Recognizing both the threat and the potential solvability of the climate crisis is paramount to mobilizing action.21
Fatalistic forecasts are also being
