ABSTRACT
Bill McKibben’s foreword to the section underscores the importance of formulating ways of thinking and addressing climate grief and anxiety. Communicating a sense of shared grief and anxiety over climate disruptions allows individuals to feel part of a larger community of those with similar concerns. The sense of commonality can spur one to activism which is both our best hope for change and a powerful source of solace for these understandable reactions.
A good question is, who wouldn’t be feeling climate grief and climate anxiety and sometimes even a certain amount of climate terror these days? I’m writing these words from inside my house – it’s summer, but every window is shut tight because the air is filled with smoke from forest fires to the north in Canada. I’m lucky to be just smelling smoke: too many others, by this point, have felt fire, or been driven from their homes by flood. The trauma has been concentrated in the poorest parts of the world (which, of course, have done the least to cause the problem) but it is now reaching out to everyone.
I’m lucky in another way, in that I’m old. I know I will be dead before the very worst of this happens. That imposes other psychological costs (I have much clearer memories than the young of the things now left behind, like deep cold winter) but at least I do not have to plan the course of my life in the shadow of this ongoing, deepening crisis. We should feel no little guilt for the emotional damage we’ve caused, and no end of empathy for the young who must deal with it above all.
That’s why this section is so important. It lays out coherent lines of thinking for understanding, and more importantly addressing, some of that grief and anxiety.
Speaking for myself, after a lifetime of climate activism, I find that such action is one form of important solace. The most terrifying idea is that one has been left more or less alone to deal with all of this, and that of course is the message our hyperindividualized society delights in sending. Even the solutions – which car to buy? – are usually posed as individual. But I think the most effective thing an individual can do is to be a tiny bit less of an individual, instead joining with others to build the movements large enough to have some hope of making change.
And I sense, at least for me, that that may be the most emotionally healing thing one can do as well. The sure knowledge that there are many others who share your sense of the world, that they are committed to action instead of cynicism, that they have figured out at least some ways to make an effective stand: these things make the nighttime easier to bear.
They also provide us the best hope for lessening the damage to the planet, and with it the scale of the strain that the next generation will have to bear, and the one after that, and the one after that.
Action alone is not the answer, of course, and there are many wise strategies limned in these papers. But I have known many thousands of effective high school, middle school, and college-age activists, and to a person they have told me this is one way they address their sadness. It is incumbent on the rest of us to back them up, which is one reason I helped form Third Act, which organizes people over the age of 60 for climate action. We owe a lot, and we can do a lot, all of us.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Bill McKibben
Bill McKibben is one of the founders of 350.org, and the founder of Third Act, which organizes people over the age of 60 for action on climate and justice. His 1989 book The End of Nature is regarded as the first book for a general audience about climate change and has been followed up by numerous books and publications. He serves as the Schumann Distinguished Scholar in Environmental Studies at Middlebury College and has won numerous international awards.