Eco-anxiety got your tongue?

 And so it feels as if the world is slipping from beneath our feet.

Or burning. Or melting. Or freezing. All at once.

And it’s not just a feeling anymore. Apart from a privileged few in the Global North, the effects of climate breakdown affect us all, as our life-support systems crumble under the footprint of the Global North.

It has been like this for decades, centuries even. As the Global North pined over foreign lands for their own colonial expansion, subjugation, suppression and extraction stole from sustainable livelihoods and churned out mainstream Western ideals of consumerism, individualism and growth.

The resulting crimes led to environmental injustices, where degraded lands, pollution and health problems became enlaced with racism, sexism, albleism and other forms of othering. Now, the scale of climate change and biodiversity loss has encroached so far as to alarm people in the Global North, but the culprit remains the same.

I came into the climate movement about 5 years ago through concern over the inaction against climate change. It seemed that although people around me talked about it in school, at work and on the TV, we merrily sleepwalked into the very doomsday scenario we so eagerly branded as ‘the future’.

However, as I have engaged more in climate conversations and listened to diverse activists, I have come to realise that the future destruction I feared is already a lived experience for the Global majority. Among them, histories of theft and colonial abuse towards the Global South continue to make communities less able to respond to climatic changes, which primarily impact their geographies.

It's a grim reality, and one that I in the Global North can find it all to easy to shy away from. Annual climate negotiations send out messages of hope through the media, while increasingly alarming data from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) are siphoned off into declarations for greater recycling, net-zero targets and ‘green technologies’ like carbon-capture and storage, which attempts to trap greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide and shove them into the ground.

And so the cycle continues. The ‘leaders’ of the Western world suggest to us that everything will be fine, so long as we each do our little bit to recycle more and go electric. Soothed, we sink back into our daily routine and learn to block out the murmur of dying bees, the rising cost of living and the violent whirring of chainsaws. Business-as-usual.

Except it’s not. Gaia is dying. The delicate balance that humans have evolved to live within is being thrown into chaos, and as some in the Global North bare witness to this destruction, they continue to feel trapped by the need to feed their family, study, get to work. This means buying packaged goods, using electricity and travelling. There are ‘more sustainable’ options. Yet in the grand scheme of things, buying a bamboo toothbrush and moving pension schemes does little to incite the wide-scale shift needed to cut ties with fossil fuel companies, especially when governments continue to make dirty options the most affordable. Did you know that the production and burning of coal, oil and gas is subsidised by $11 million every minute (Thunberg, 2022)?

It's terrifying. Not only that, but looking back at the history of governmental inaction, activism can feel hopeless. At the same time, we are often told that the onus is on us. You want to make a difference? You must buy less, drive less, live less. We are told that individual actions got us into this mess, and you alone can get us out.

So if you’re not subdued back into routine, you may be left feeling like a “bad activist” (Bad Activist Collective, 2021). You try, but try as you might, no action is perfect and climate breakdown continues. In this state, climate doomism can become all-consuming, leaving us paralysed and numb to it all.

But It’s Not Just You.

Image of Tori Tsui's (2023) new book, 'It's Not Just You'.

Image source: Author's own.

As climate activist Tori Tsui writes in her debut book, eco-anxiety can manifest in so many ways, and “it’s not as simple as ‘being anxious about climate change’” (Tsui, 2023, p.6). It is about concern for the systems of oppression that perpetuate the climate crisis, the biodiversity crisis, crises of racism, sexism and neo-colonialism. This climate crisis is part of a larger sustainability crisis, and it is not your fault that you feel overwhelmed.

What matters now is how we channel our eco-anxiety. It may be daunting, but I think it is time for communities like mine to learn from those already fighting for their rights in the Global South, as well as marginalised communities in the Global North. For many, activism is not simply done out of compassion for the environment, but it is a demand for climate justice. It is a demand for the right to cultural traditions. It is a demand for the right to a sustainable income. It is a demand for the right to live on the land and breathe the air and drink the water of ancestral lands.

And in a system that survives on individualism, I think Tori could be on to something when she suggests that building community could be the key to more sustainable ways of living.

There is a way forward and we can work on this together. But we need to take action. Our emotions are there for a reason; they signal to us when something is good for us, and when something is dangerous. If we listen to our eco-anxiety, it will tell us where to act. But we cannot just sit and wait for the storm to pass, because another will come back bigger, stronger and faster. Every action counts, and it is never to late to join the fight for climate justice.

Together, we can build communities of change. Will you join me?

 

H_M

Bibliography:

Bad Activist Collective. 2021. Episode 2: What is a Bad Activist?. Bad Activist Podcast. [Podcast]. [Accessed 27 July 2023]. Available from: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/bad-activist-podcast/id1456912145

Thunberg, G. 2022. ‘Hope is something you have to earn’: What Next?. In: Thunberg, G. ed. The Climate Book. Dublin: Penguin Random House Ireland, pp.450-464.

Tsui, T. 2023. It’s Not Just You. London: Simon and Schuster.