Climate Change Makes Me Anxious
This essay was originally published in Oasis as part of a topical issue on anxiety in late capitalism.
I want to understand why societies organize themselves the way they do, and how we can use this understanding to build better societies. It was quite by accident that I learned how coupled oceanic and atmospheric physics work in concert with our planet’s orientation and rotation around our sun to create our climate, and how different mixtures of gases in our atmosphere could tweak those physics. However, I soon realized that climate change provides an obvious lense with which to study my original interest: the dysfunctions in our social status quo, and how we could be doing better. Since the mid 2000’s research about climate change has exploded in volume, reducing our uncertainty about its social and physical causes to all but triviality. We are not facing a problem of insufficient knowledge, not of volume or precision. Can we improve the skill of our models? Yes. Are there some things we do not know? Yes. Do we not know enough to act? No. Make no mistake — the only roadblocks to solutions are social and political.
Climate is a global phenomenon, and understanding the social causes and consequences of its change must be done structurally. The only place to start when setting out to mitigate climate change or its effects is with social theory. And it’s an important cause, according to the World Health Organization, “between 2030 and 2050, climate change is expected to cause approximately 250,000 additional deaths per year, from malnutrition, malaria, diarrhoea and heat stress.” That’s five million deaths in the next 20 years, a number that excludes the millions more who will suffer alive. These are the low numbers, mere fractions of the totals that will be seen in the next century.
Climatologist and geographer Mike Hulme borrows from sociologist Nico Stehr, and the philosophies of Durkheim and Foucault to explain the role that climate has in our collective consciousness (or, conscience collective). Historically, climate as an idea has played a role in righting a topsy-turvy world, in reassuring us that despite droughts and floods, freezes and thaws, on the whole, the world made sense, had order, and was stable. We knew that we couldn’t count on weather with it’s unpredictable extreme events and perilous impulses. But climate was our friend, climate we could count on, climate was steadfast, strong, predictable and benevolent. Weather changed, climate did not. And perhaps it is precisely for this reason that the threat of climate change is so distinctly unnerving. Climate change is not only an attack on our physical habitat, but an attack on our cultural cosmology, on our understanding of how we relate to our world.
Working in this field everyday I see what’s at stake, and I understand the consequences if we as a society fail to address this ongoing disaster. The scale of the problem and the degree of its seriousness is so vast and so intense that it can be a challenge just to hold those thoughts and feelings on the forefront of my mind; fully seeing them and appreciating them and thinking them is often too overwhelming. As Valentine Michael Smith might say, we don’t really grok[1] injustices on this scale. We quickly shut down; we escape in nihilism, cynicism, and apathy, or we move forward aware only of an anemic shadow of alarm. And this overwhelming unfaceable, ungrokkable challenge feels all too familiar: police brutality, starvation, homelessness, genocide, war, poverty. It’s all too much. Psychologists refer to this as the finite pool of worry. On top of our finite pools of worry, of our vague dismissals from our consciousness of what we chalk up to simple existential woes, we still have our day-to-day anxieties. We still need to go to work to afford a home to go back to, to have access to health care, to support those we love, to eat, bathe, and sleep. But really, it doesn’t matter that these tangible daily needs are real and that our limited time and energy are real. It doesn’t matter because they’re just as real as the fact that somewhere there hasn’t been any rain this season, that crops are dying, that streets are flooding.
What can we do to stop global warming? Use our refillable water bottle? Try and remember our shopping bags? Is that going to help? We try to tell ourselves it will, but we know it won’t. These solutions presented to us by neoliberal capitalism can never work because they’re solutions that are being provided by the same system that is creating the problem. Our entire global economy is built around the false idea that individual actions have individual consequences, but climate change is not caused by individuals, and it can’t be solved by individuals. The climate itself exists only at a global scale, and only the actions of a collective of individuals can cause or mitigate it’s change.
Anxiety serves a purpose in our lives. If pain tells us when we’ve already done something we shouldn’t have (you shouldn’t have touched fire, it burns you) anxiety tells us what we should or shouldn’t do preemptively (we should find some shelter before nightfall so we don’t freeze, we shouldn’t walk with our eyes closed because we could trip). But while our anxiety about climate change tells us we need to do something to preserve our habitat, capitalism tells us that all we can do is buy something, share a Facebook post, take more Xanax. We’re staring down the barrel of a gun, and we know it. We can only move out of the way together, and the only way to do that is to organize democratically, through collective accountability and the power of the people not the power of individual people. Capitalism tricks us into thinking that the world works by every person acting for themselves and earning for themselves. It tricks us by naturalizing itself, by making us think that what is is what ought to be, and is what has always been (what David Hume called the is-ought problem). It does this by enforcing its artificial reality on our physical one; through the power of State violence it keeps us in a struggle for real essentials, it keeps us anxious. And through the coupling of the State with industry and the belief that without capitalism there could be no State we now live in a world where there is no meaningful distinction between our government, our civics, or our politics, and our industry, our norms of consumption, production, and distribution. And for exactly this reason, the only way to challenge capitalism is to challenge the State, is to challenge industry, to challenge our norms and our neighbors. And this can only be done through solidarity, both locally and internationally, solidarity across cultures and oceans because we are all suffering the ill effects of state-empowered, military-backed capitalism, and we can only challenge it together.
Capitalism’s operation is conditioned upon infinite inputs and expansion, two conditions that are not met — that can never be met — in our finite world. Climate change is only one of many manifest problems that are all ultimately rooted in this lack of accord. By naturalizing itself, capitalism tricks us into thinking that consumption is the only way to save our homes, but consumption is driving our homes underwater, eroding our soil, and poisoning our water. There is in fact nothing at all natural about capitalism, it is perhaps the most unnatural political economy we’ve ever had, based quite literally on conditions that are at odds with nature. In fact, the nature in our own physiology is at odds with capitalism. If anxiety tells us preemptively what we ought to be doing to protect ourselves, to help ourselves, then it’s been telling us quite clearly and for some time that we need to begin to behave differently, that we need to interact with our world differently. We need to acknowledge that life expectancy nor net-worth are faithful measures of happiness or fulfillment, that we should be measuring the quality and the equality of our lives, not the number of things we can accumulate and the number of years we have to do so.
The really interesting thing about the climate change challenge is that it is both a large-scale problem unto itself, and yet still only a symptom of an even larger more systemic problem. In the same way, a move away from capitalism and a fundamental reimagining of what our purpose is as human beings — away from consumption, competition, and accumulation and toward mutualism, compassion, and wellbeing — is both the means to solving the climate change problem, and the end in itself. Global warming and its harmful effects are caused not only physically by capitalism’s demand for unrestrained growth and the nonstop combustion of carbon-based fuels, but culturally by capitalism’s myriad social injustices, by its mathematically optimized blindness to any concepts of value that cannot be represented with a dollar sign fore. Only by working together instead of apart can we tackle an endeavor so large that it will require an unconditional reimaging of our global political economy, and have no doubt — that is the challenge ahead of us. Only through a complete reorientation of what we think the purpose of life is, through a total break from continued cycles of unrestrained consumption and accumulation, of a revolution in our social and political consciousness do we have any hope of “solving” climate change, of beating our collective anxiety, and of making sure that we are living good lives.
[1]grok is a Martian word from Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert A. Heinlein first published in 1961 (though the uncut edition from 1991 is the one you want to read, with 60,000 additional words included that were cut by the original publishers). Few definitions are given explicitly in the book but the word is used extensively throughout, and the concept it embodies is an important force in the novel. It has since entered limited everyday english use, Merriam Webster defines it as, “to understand profoundly and intuitively,” though it’s nuance gets at a more dialectical root of understanding. “You cannot hate anything unless you grok it, understand it so thoroughly that you merge with it and it merges with you — then you can hate it. By hating yourself. But this implies that you love it, too, and cherish it and would not have it otherwise.” — Heinlein. I use it here because similar to the Martians in Stranger in a Strange Land, I do not believe that we can truly destroy The Anxiety until we completely understand its whatness, until we grok it, and in doing so will know why we hate it, that we hate ourselves, and also only because we love ourselves, and our anxiety, we will be able to destroy it. “The Martian Race had encountered the people of the fifth planet, grokked them completely, and had taken action; asteroid ruins were all that remained, save that the Martians continued to praise and cherish the people they had destroyed.” — Heinlein