Climate Anxiety Is Real but Should Be a Source of Inspiration.
Climate Anxiety is something that many people suffer from every day. A study done by The Lancet, an academic article database, found that 84% of people between the ages of 16-25 worry at least to a moderate extent about climate change while 59% experience stronger feelings of anxiety about Climate Change. This is no accident. Climate Change has an incredible amount of effects on us. Further floods, droughts, waves, and much more have come together to cause us to be incredibly anxious about the future. I touched on this in the last article about Held vs Montana, a trial that took place in Montana, which originated from a discontented group of young people, feeling that the State of Montana had not done enough to protect not only their state constitutional rights but also their futures. During the trial, Dr. Lisa Van Susteren testified:” Being surrounded by wildfire can have mental health impacts. It tells you the world is not a safe place, you can’t go outside and breathe.” This is certainly believable considering how many of us like to go outside and play sports, go for runs, or just go for a nice walk to clear our heads after a long school day. To have that disrupted in such a hard way is not a good feeling to possess.
I would like to take a moment to discuss my personal experiences with Climate Anxiety. Let me get this straight, I am a cold-weather person. I love going outside, bundled up, and seeing my breath form into little dragon breaths . To me, there is no other feeling like it. It is just a mixture of happiness, contentment, and almost, and weirdly, Purity. I find it hard to even fully describe it. I just feel so happy. So to see my beloved Winters getting warmer in Virginia is heart-breaking. That feeling that I love to experience in the dead of winter, will not happen as much. Last winter, temperatures went up to almost as high as 70. 70! That to me is completely unacceptable. What happened to the cold, dark, windy, snowy winters? Yes, I was angry but there was also a degree of hopelessness. The feeling that I couldn’t do anything meaningful to help not only myself but others too. I'd often find myself on the internet, googling Climate Change, and fearing the worst. There would be long sleepless nights where I would lay in bed and just think about Climate Change. I would almost cry at the prospect of the Planet in 50 years. I couldn’t sleep for about an hour. I go to bed at 10:30, Climate Changes go into my head preventing me from sleeping, then once the nightmares are done, my clock would read 11:40. Looking back, I don’t think my brain was fully a brain in those moments in bed. I think of it more as half movie projector, half a doomsday clock. The movie reel in my head, playing images in my head, the clock ticking in my head, all combined to give me a real feeling of sadness, anxiety, anger, and a sick feeling in my stomach that would not go away.
How do I cope nowadays you may be asking? Well, for me, writing and to an extent, public speaking is something I enjoy thoroughly. I used all of this anxiety in my junior year to write an article in the school newspaper, urging students at my high school to eat less beef because not only does Methane, a greenhouse gas, is often emitted from Cows but the deforestation that took place to build Cow Farms, was slowing down our attempts to fight Climate Change as trees suck up lots of Carbon Dioxide from the atmosphere. That is why when you look up ways to fight Climate Change on your own, planting trees pop up as one of those fast and friendly ways. I have pledged myself to get off beef(which I don’t eat very often anyway) by the end of the Summer of 2023. But writing is where I have found my voice. I've written a poem about Climate Change(Watch out for that soon, maybe next week or the week after). I have read a lot of speeches, opinions, and books from famous politicians, diplomats, lawyers, and more. They have inspired my writing. Through writing, I have coped with Climate Anxiety because I feel it gives me power. Maybe someone, just someone, literally anyone, will be inspired to take further action to fight. Maybe a random politician who didn’t take Climate Change particularly seriously at first, will stumble across these pages, and be inspired.
To those who think Climate Anxiety is nothing but a configuration of our imagination, think about the past. Think back to the Red Scare throughout the last 1910s and the late 1940’s-late 1950s in the United States. We feared communism. We feared that sometime in the future, communism would infiltrate from Russia and destroy our democracy, turning us into a Communist country. We worried about our futures. That is why people like Senator Joseph McCarthy gained so much attention with his hearings accusing high-ranking government officials of being communists. That is why people like Republican Dwight D Eisenhower won the presidential campaigns in 1952 and 1956 after 5 straight Republican presidential losses. It was because he campaigned on the fear of Communism. If only we could react to Climate Change with the same urgency and intensity(but not his methods) that Senator Joseph McCarthy demonstrated in response to a fear of communism and Russian Spies, perhaps we wouldn’t be in this position today. Think about how the South thought and reacted to the Civil Rights movement. To use a more recent example, think about 9/11. There is a common feature with Climate Change and all these historical examples: Fear of the future and what it could hold.
I urge you all to be inspired. Having Climate Anxiety is normal and should be acknowledged. But don't let this anxiety paralyze you. Use it as a springboard to fight it. Don’t just sit around with your teeth nibbling your nails. Get out there and plant trees. Write letters to politicians. Go Vote. Climate Anxiety is powerful lemme tell you. But we can’t let it stop us. What hurts us will only make us stronger.
Author’s note: A research journal was used in this paper. To preserve some writing integrity, here is the citation of that journal:
Hickman, C., Marks, E., Pihkala, P., Clayton, S., Lewandowski, R. E., Mayall, E. E., Wray, B., Mellor, C., & van Susteren, L. (2021). Climate anxiety in children and young people and their beliefs about government responses to climate change: A global survey. The Lancet Planetary Health, 5(12). https://doi.org/10.1016/s2542-5196(21)00278-3
