Source: BBC Radio 4: Costing the Earth
URL: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m00050qr
Date: 15/05/2019
Event: Costing the Earth: Eco-Anxiety
Credit: BBC Radio 4
People:
Tom Heap: This week, Hello I am Tom Heap and this is Costing the Earth from BBC Radio 4.
Audio montage of different voices: People on Caribbean islands in the path of Hurricane Maria are taking shelter as the second powerful storm in a fortnight approaches... a century ago as as many as 10 million African elephants roamed the continent... now, growing scientific evidence that the toxins in the air are more damaging to our health than previously... devastating tornadoes have ripped through Alabama in the United States, killing at least... saving Planet Earth - scientists warn the way we treat our soil is fuelling climate change... swifts, sparrows and bluebells, how the loss of pollinating insects... wild fires burning out of control in California killed at least... India's praised for its evacuation of a million people... the world's top scientists say dramatic action is needed now to save the world from climate catastrophe... rising global temperatures spell disaster... [Richard Dawson singing] these are the final moments of the universe...
Verity Sharp: I'm Verity Sharp. I'm a music broadcaster and also someone who's had a deep love of the natural world for all of my life, but with all these reports coming thick and fast about ecosystem collapse, I find myself feeling more and more anxious - anxious about what to do personally, about what we're doing nationally and the effects that this is already having globally. My concerns - the fact that it's affecting my sleep and colouring my daily life - means that I may have what's being called "eco-anxiety" and I'm sure I'm not alone in feeling it. Alice Brown is a vivacious, intelligent, passionate young woman and sitting cross-legged on her sofa in her flat in Bristol she told me about the time that she went to get a cup of coffee with her dad and burst into tears.
Alice Brown: I went to a work meeting with him, we had a coffee beforehand and the woman handed us disposable cups, without me even getting a chance to say we were drinking in, and it seemed like such a minor thing but everything ripped open, I bawled my eyes out, I was just blubbing away and he said "We'll get there, you know, it will save the world" - no, Dad, you don't understand what needs to happen. He went away and honestly by the end of the weekend he called me and he said "I understand now and I'd go as far as to be willing to go to jail for this".
Verity Sharp: Alice is one of a growing number of young people who have decided not to have children because they fear the future is too unsafe. She's a spokesperson for Birth Strike and I asked her if she joined the group to make a political statement.
Alice Brown: To me personally, I see it more as a - it's almost like a support group, really. It's hard to, you know, go out and just engage with people about normal things, whatever that is.
Verity Sharp: And there is this term "eco-anxiety", which frankly doesn't seem to cover it, in a way, because anxiety and to be anxious is quite a normal thing, isn't it, but do you recognise eco-anxiety in all your you know, sort of fellow activists and even actually in the world at large?
Alice Brown: It's almost the norm now to talk about this level of hopelessness. I, over the last six months, have cried every single day and when I started to tell people that, that's the same for them.
Verity Sharp: What were you thinking about your personal life? Were you thinking that you would have children, get married, all of that? What was your view of all of that, when you were younger?
Alice Brown: When I met my partner that I have now, about four or five years ago now, and you know we both wanted to do a lot of travelling and - yeah, of course, you know, have a family but everything to me just looks so toxic in the world. What is that going to look like, you know, when it comes to my child being a bit older? Seriously, what is that going to look like? We have already proven that we are not heeding these insane warnings, you know, about the collapse of nature, the collapse of ecosystems - environmental breakdown isn't something that's coming, it's here already, we're losing 200 species a day, it's not something that's coming in the future. I really don't have trust or faith in the people that, you know, have the power to control that situation, that there will be a safe world for me to have a family, so...
Verity Sharp: I have so much empathy for what Alice is saying, but what does eco-anxiety or indeed anxiety mean to a mental health professional?
Daniel Maughan: My name is Daniel Maughan - I am the Associate Registrar for the Royal College of Psychiatrists. The fundamental aspects of anxiety are avoidance of stressful situations and autonomic arousal. What does that mean? It's the heart beating faster, it's the breathing faster, sweaty palms, feeling a sense of panic or alarm. There are lots of different types of anxiety disorders, so we would separate out, for instance, generalised anxiety disorder from a phobia from a post-traumatic stress disorder from an obsessive- compulsive disorder.
Verity Sharp: So does the Royal College of Psychiatrists recognise eco-anxiety as a specific condition?
Daniel Maughan: We use the WHO - that's the World Health Organisation's - criteria of illness, it's called the ICD-10 and that does not include eco-anxiety. I think we really need to tease out the difference between worried well and anxiety disorders - people can be incredibly worried but they're still functional, they're still able to help themselves and I think it's really important that we don't impose a model of illness, necessarily.
Verity Sharp: Would you accept that it's increasingly becoming something that we should be preparing for?
Daniel Maughan: I think as our awareness grows, yes I can see that it might lead more people into experiencing anxiety and that might tip over into an anxiety disorder.
Verity Sharp: So how would you know when they tip over into what would be a clinical disorder?
Daniel Maughan: I think there's two ways that I find really useful. So one is all about functionality - can you concentrate or are you just thinking about climate catastrophe? Can you actually work? Are you able to sleep and eat - these basic things - what's your functioning like? The other thing is: can you help yourself? So people get low mood all the time, people get anxious all the time but we know we can go for a run, we can go outside into nature. We can do things that are good for ourselves, we manage our mind. But some people, their experience is such that actually whatever they're doing, they're employing all of their tactics to help themselves and it just isn't working. The anxiety is getting worse. That would be a point where I would say: we need to help you, here. But I don't think I've noticed an increase in morbidity or illness rates around specifically climate anxiety, as yet.
Verity Sharp: But other mental health practitioners have noticed an increase. Caroline Hickman is a fellow at the University of Bath and a psychotherapist with the Climate Psychology Alliance. From where she's standing, eco-anxiety is on the rise.
Caroline Hickman: I'm getting referrals on a daily basis from people who are feeling the anxiety and the terror - it's making it hard for them to function and it's not just about anxiety. It's a whole mix of feelings which people are finding really difficult to cope with - it's grief, it's rage, it's despair, it's loss, it's guilt, it's shame. I've been talking with women who are fantasising about killing their children. This is a sort of apocalyptic thinking. This is it taking it forward in the next 10 years - what if? What if there are food riots, here? What if there is not enough water to go round? What am I going to do? How am I going to look after my children? And that's touching an ordinary human anxiety of vulnerability - we are not in control - and that's one of the roots of anxiety for all of us. But they are imagining what they will do to take care of their children.
Faith Elliott [singing in background]: Today, I couldn't leave my bed because I feel so anxious. I watched three hours in a row of Carl Sagan's Cosmos, and I guess it helps a little bit to put things in perspective and think about how the universe is so complex and infinite... [Normal voice] It consumes every thought, in that way, where you're sort of sitting on a bus and like surrounded by other people and you're like "How are you guys not panicking?"
Verity Sharp: Faith Elliott is a singer-songwriter and artist.
Faith Elliott: ... and I would just read about it obsessively and not be able to sleep. And I guess I thought a lot about how to make art that would change people's minds or stir them into doing more about the environment, but I don't think I made very much good art around that time. You can't do anything about this stuff if you can't sleep and if you're panicking and if you really have really terrible anxiety. [Singing in background] ... fungus as tall as skyscrapers and colour changing...
Verity Sharp: George Marshall is the the director of Climate Outreach, an organisation specialising in climate communication. He is also the author of Don't Even Think About It, which examines the psychological mechanisms of denial, to explain why climate change so often fails to connect with people.
George Marshall: Most people, if they are asked about climate change, will say "Yeah, that's a big problem". If you delve a little deeper, you will find that they're saying "Yeah, that's a huge problem for the future" - or future generations or different species of animals or polar bears or things that are a long way away. And that's an active socially constructed narrative - they are creating what we would call a psychological distance or more commonly also people distance it by not actually talking about it at all. Now hopefully that's changing a bit now but the tendency has been for people to avoid the subject altogether and to deliberately shut down the conversation when it emerges.
Verity Sharp: Which is why I guess we aren't all suffering from eco-anxiety. There's also something called cognitive dissonance, the discomfort that occurs when one's ideas, beliefs or behaviours are contradictory. Here's Tim Jones, a teacher from Sheffield.
Tim Jones: I felt that I was doing a job that's really important but I wasn't talking about what's important. I was trying to teach kids how to succeed within a system that's killing us, and that led to a kind of disconnect between my feelings and my actions, and because climate change and ecological breakdown are such massive problems it does seem like there's really not a lot that you can do about it, and the more you think about it the more you realise how massive the challenge is so the more you feel disconnected from reality, from truth. So you have to escape from reality and bury your feelings and think other thoughts and do other things, and that is profoundly unhealthy.
Camille Parmesan: Butterflies wake up at 10 o'clock, they go to sleep at 4 pm. You are in this gorgeous habitat and I just fell in love with it. And I felt: I can do this for a living? Okay...
Verity Sharp: Professor Camille Parmesan is a climate change biologist who works on reports for the IPCC, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
Camille Parmesan: I, you know, went down to Mexico and that was when this first really hit me. It's like, oh the habitat was beautiful! Fields of flowers and I'd go there and say "Oh yes, I can see all of those plants - the butterflies should be here", and there was nothing. And site after site of recording these extinctions and spending days censusing all the plants I could in the site, sometimes going back the next year to make sure: are they really extinct? And in the end, 80% of those sites were extinct, even though the habitat was still beautiful. As a scientist, it's thrilling for me to see the policy process taking in the science very rapidly, understanding it and translating that into these enormous policy documents. But the action is just not matching what are your policy agreements are saying.
Verity Sharp: And you've described yourself in recent years as having professional depression, so presumably brought on by exactly this - it's all falling on deaf ears.
Camille Parmesan: Yes, I really was saying to my husband "You know, I give up". I altered my research career to actually address the questions policymakers are interested in. What policymakers wanted were these big meta-analyses these you know big modelling exercises which got me into this whole realm of staring at computer screens - really not what I personally get the most enjoyment and satisfaction out of, so I'm altering my research career to try to tend to the needs of the policy community and society, and you come up with these really powerful results and you get them published in the top journals and yet no action is taken, or very little action is taken.
Verity Sharp: So what about the emotional impact of witnessing first hand, as you are - I mean, your job is to just present information in quite a cold way, really, to policymakers, but you're having to deal with the emotional knowledge that you know that you've seen it and yet you can't - er, you can't communicate the emotion of that. Does that have an impact on you, personally?
Camille Parmesan: I do feel like, you know, I have two different - well, it's not that I'm two different people but I go into professional mode and the professional mode is: you know, what are the facts? What is happening? How can I summarise this simply so that you understand? But of course there is an emotional side, and I tried to keep that separate from the professional side but I have to admit it's very depressing. What's really been depressing is actually going to tropical coral reefs, going to back to a site I was at years ago that was teeming with life - beautiful blues and purples and reds of the corals and of course these brightly coloured tropical fish everywhere, and going back and seeing the corals white or, even worse, sort of brown, covered with an algal scum because they died during the bleaching event and haven't recovered. That kind of more permanent flip is quite depressing to see, and I'm going to be honest when I vacation, I make sure that I'm going somewhere that's still healthy in terms of biodiversity because I don't want to vacation somewhere where I'm just going to be depressed and looking at dead corals or looking at a tropical forest that's gradually dying because of, you know, increasing drought conditions. So, as a professional person I'll visit those places to document what's happening - as an individual I want a holiday somewhere that has gorgeous, beautiful biodiversity, and that's getting harder and harder.
Verity Sharp: Jem Bendell is Professor of Sustainability at the University of Cumbria.
Jem Bendell: Yeah, the first time I began to doubt that we could stop disruptive climate change was after I became a professor and I gave my inaugural speech and I came down with the flu just for three days with a fever in bed - I started looking at some of the latest climate science I hadn't looked at for years, and it started to look really worrying. And at that moment - that was about four years ago that I had my first moments of despair, but I kind of put them away and I just thought the implication of that is just to be bolder with what I was already doing.
Verity Sharp: Last July, Jem Bendell wrote a paper called Deep Adaptation - a Map for Navigating Climate Tragedy, a paper I have to admit I was dreading reading. The abstract says the purpose of this conceptual paper is to provide readers with an opportunity to reassess their work and life in the face of an inevitable near-term social collapse. It's gone viral, with the PDF being downloaded over 400,000 times. Many of the people we spoke to while making this programme had read it.
Jem Bendell: It really doesn't look like we can cut carbon in time to make much of a difference now - not that we shouldn't try, but I don't think it's going to work and so that's ended up with me doing the Deep Adaptation paper, but it was a bit of a goodbye to my sector. I didn't expect it to go viral and have the impact it's had, which is I think not a reflection of the paper - what it is is a reflection of I was helping people to connect with what they already knew, actually have a way of talking about the anxiety that they have about where we're at with climate and how fast things are changing.
Verity Sharp: So in your paper you talk about near-term societal collapse, which some people might think is actually not helpful because it will just instil panic - what would you say in response?
Jem Bendell: I understand people who think that "collapse" is a very emotive term and perhaps not that specific. I define it as an uneven ending in a normal means of substance, shelter, security, pleasure, meaning and identity, so it is a very general term but I used it to emphasise that this isn't just like a financial crisis - this means something significant is going to change in our way of life. And that's because of how climate's going to impact on - particularly on the big breadbaskets of the world. We saw in the summer of 2018 the destruction to agricultural production across the western hemisphere - that's the new normal. We're going to see more of that, and and worse. Once people are going hungry in the west, normal life is going to break apart so we need to really need to think about how we cope with that, but I'm hoping that by talking about what may now be coming down the road, we can begin to prepare and that means preparing not just practically, through sort of irrigated potato farms but also psychologically, so that we don't make matters worse through our panic reactions.
Verity Sharp: Do you feel any, kind of, regret that you know you've opened up those - in a way you're, sort of, making people face this sense of despair?
Jem Bendell: I wrote the paper to speak to people in my profession, my sector - so, sustainable business - and I felt that many of them, like me, were seeing all the latest bad news and we're just pushing it away. And so they're all going to work in environmental NGOs or as corporate responsibility managers in companies but - and they were doing useful work but they had a role really and I was inviting them to wake up and change. So that was - so I really didn't think about who else would be affected by it. So looking back at it now, I don't regret it but I - there are many people struggling with many difficult emotions, either reading my work or reading everything else that's coming out. I mean, when it came out in July it was unusual but the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in October last year has said very similar things, so these difficult emotions are inevitable and so it's how we share this information, it's not whether we should or not - we should - but how do we support each other, knowing that this is going to be really tough to hear? And so that's why I think it's really important that not only does the psychotherapy profession, counselling and coaching professions get better at looking at climate anxiety or climate trauma but also I think we need to look at ways that we can democratise access to psychotherapeutic support - you know, get it off the couch and make it more normal in society and help each other have conversations about difficult emotions.
Verity Sharp: This is a lot to take in, I know and there's something about Jem, his calm tone of voice, that makes it all the more unnerving. It is so hard to hear, but as more and more people really start absorbing all this, how are mental health services - which are already stretched to breaking point - going to be able to support us? Dr. Daniel Maughan again.
Daniel Maughan: One of the things that we are doing is we're educating - we are trying to get it into the curriculum. We already have online teaching about this issue - there are health impacts from climate change so we need to be concerned and we need to be prepared to adapt services. One of the most alarming things about the current situation is that people are really talking about this now in a very meaningful, powerful, galvanising way and things don't seem to be changing, and we know that in depression certainly learned helplessness can be very disabling. I would hope if the government makes some changes, if we as a society can start responding in a positive way to this potential catastrophe, then that might help alleviate this learned helplessness. Yes, if nothing changes, anxiety might increase but if we are seeing changes, if we can plug into social movements, if we can do something about it as a societal treatment, that we can really use.
Verity Sharp: Dr Daniel Maughan's idea of getting this subject into the curriculum seems imperative. It's lacking at the moment and our teacher Tim Jones has decided to leave the profession and become a full-time activist with Extinction Rebellion.
Tim Jones: I went to an NVDA training, which is Non-Violent Direct Action training, learned how to be arrested and the following week was the first big action that we did which was when we blockaded the five bridges in central London. And this weight lifted off me, and it was just a beautiful moment. I saw 5,000 people who didn't know what the - they were doing, they had no idea what they were doing but you could see it in their faces as they stood on the sides of the bridges. I was on Blackfriars Bridge and there were loads of police and I thought they were just going to, you know, clean us up and chuck us in the river or whatever, and we were all waiting and waiting then suddenly someone ran out and said "Now! Now! Walk into the road!" So we all walked into the road and it was nothing, you know - we blocked the traffic for a few hours, we really didn't do anything. No-one really noticed, it wasn't in any of the papers, but I suddenly felt like I done something. I'd - in a very minor way, I had stood in the road for a bit and then moved when I was told to move but I felt like I had done something and it just makes sense.
The only thing that matters is how we act with the time that we've got - of course, we are going to be depressed if there is this disconnect between what we feel and what we do, and so, yeah, now I feel even though I am constantly in it - I am still going through a process of grief at the loss of what has been and still is just a profoundly beautiful natural world that is full of the these miracles of nature, species going extinct by the hundreds every day through our want of cheap holidays and hamburgers - but I'm doing better in myself because I feel now that I'm doing something real that may or may not have an effect, but it feels like there's a better chance of something changing with me doing what I'm doing than me not doing what I'm doing, and it's as simple as that.
Verity Sharp: Action certainly does help but I have to say the decision to make this programme wasn't perhaps the wisest of moves, and on top of that there's always the guilt, the guilt about indulging in this first-world problem of mere anxiety while around the world, communities are having to deal with the actual reality of climate breakdown. A week after recording the interview with psychotherapist Caroline Hickman, I decided to see her again.
Caroline, I've made this programme about eco-anxiety and spoken to a lot of people, I heard a lot of very raw emotions from people, and to be honest I'm actually feeling very anxious myself and actually quite kind of sick and and I wouldn't say I'm not sleeping but I'm fearful that that's going to be the norm from now on, now I've turned the stone over.
Caroline Hickman: No, I understand that. So you're talking about trying to bring together two worlds. You cannot honestly expect me to, on the one hand, think about what to cook for tea tonight and on the other hand, think about the end of the world. You can't immerse yourself in that world fully and survive all the time. You have to keep a foot in the "What shall we have for tea tonight?" world. And whatever emotional responses you're having are right, and we need to feel the despair and feel the hope at the same time, and in the middle of that, there is a way forwards. It's not all bad and it's not all going to be wonderful, either - we have to hold the tension between the two. You should not be facing this on your own - you really need to connect with community - any community - so find your pack, find your clan and join with them, so you're not on your own. And that is part of the solution. There are Carbon Conversations going on. There are Earth Protectors groups, there's parents' groups, there's climate cafés, so act on all of that. Think about where you're banking, look for ethical investments, look for ethical farming. But those are all things that we could be doing and all of that will reduce that anxiety.
Verity Sharp: So if you're feeling anxious about climate breakdown, good. Put it to positive use - all efforts are needed and welcome in this biggest ever challenge... So, what am I going to cook for tea tonight?