And how are you today, as we edge ever closer to planetary catastrophe?
By: Sam Murphy
Tags: Climate Action, Ecoanxiety, Eco Grief, Conservation, Nature

‘How are you?’ It’s a question I’ve struggled to answer with anything approaching reality in 2020. Whatever lens you choose to view the world through — political, ecological, humanitarian, economic — the picture is bleak. Incompetent and untruthful world leaders, coronavirus, police brutality, mass unemployment, climate change, hungry kids — and human contact replaced with Zoom’s hollow echo.

My focus, increasingly, is on the health of our planet and the plight of nature. This year has seen global forest fires, floods, species extinctions and an unwelcome surge in single-use plastic. A further 800 square kilometres of the Amazon rainforest were cut down in just the first three months of this year. February saw the hottest day ever recorded in Antarctica, while August saw the hottest temperature ever recorded on the planet (California). The UK experienced its wettest day ever in October. I’m frustrated, grieving, torn-up inside, weepy. How could you not be?

And yet… some people seem to be getting on fine. Maybe they are better at hiding their distress than I am, or better at turning away from the causes of that distress. ‘It is what it is,’ people say. It can sound philosophical, almost heroic, to accept ‘what is’ with equanimity. But it can also be a way of keeping the uncomfortable realities of where we’re at — and worse, where we’re headed — at arm’s length… absolving oneself of responsibility and resigning ourselves to a future we don’t believe we have any control over.

It puts the words of that Peggy Lee song in my head:

‘Is that all there is?

If that’s all there is, my friend, then let’s keep dancing

Let’s break out the booze

And have a ball

If that’s all… there is.’

Tempting as it is to break out the booze, I’m making myself stare down the barrel of the future — because I believe it is my responsibility to effect change if I can.

But I need to find a way to care that doesn’t devastate me, that doesn’t drain me of anger and passion and leave me with hopelessness and helplessness. Those terrible twins are the enemy of action — they leave you feeling ‘What’s the point? It’s too late to turn things around…’ or ‘What difference can I make? I don’t have the power to change things…’

I’ve thought a lot about this recently and I believe there are three things we can all do.

The first is to take small actions. Action is energising — it rids you of the torpor of despair. But big acts and changes take time and consideration, while small actions can be simpler to implement and more immediate. For example, going vegan might represent too major a lifestyle change for many, but cutting meat and dairy intake by a fifth (as recommended by the Committee on Climate Change, a UK independent statutory body, earlier this year) is not such a big ask. Similarly, you might not have the means or inclination to swap your petrol/diesel car for an electric one but you can make the decision right now to cycle, walk or run your next short journey instead of getting in the car.

The second is to share how you feel. One of the best reasons to do this is because you will find that you are not alone. Voicing your concerns, your fears and your grief is important for your mental health. Also, you have a duty to make your views known — because the collective voice has power (look at the government’s recent U-turn on free school meals in the holidays). If you don’t tell people how you feel — your local MP, the council, the supermarket you use, local action groups, charities — then no one knows you care about this stuff. Don’t underestimate the power of your voice — we are all ‘influencers’ to some degree. Research is 2017 found that 42 per cent of people actively reduced the number of flights they took as a result of a friend, colleague or family member having done the same.

And the third? Engage with the natural world as much as you can and encourage others to do so, too. The further we disconnect ourselves from nature, the less we care about it or the threat of its decline and ultimate demise. Why care about scrubland if you don’t know what species covet it as a home? Why care about the High Brown Fritillary butterfly teetering on the brink of extinction if you’ve never heard of it, let alone seen one?

The more we engage with nature, learn its language, watch, listen, touch and taste what’s out there, the more we create a bond with it. Just as building a closer relationship with a person makes you care more about what happens to them, so too with nature.

In Melissa Harrison’s wonderful nature podcast The Stubborn Light of Things, she puts it so poignantly when she says that while we can still look around and ‘pretend that everything is going to be OK, the organism that is the earth is sick, and we don’t know how it is going to turn out. I don’t know what to do with this knowledge — whether I can make a difference.’ She offers the advice a friend gave her: ‘You do what you would do for anyone you love who is sick. You love them. You just love them.’ I think of that every day as I walk, run, kayak or cycle in the Sussex countryside. I love the birds and the trees, the sun and the clouds, the waterways and hedgerows. I try to drink them in with all my senses, as if they may not be there to appreciate tomorrow.

The other option we have, of course, is to give up caring. Some people don’t care because they aren’t aware of (or can’t accept, or don’t believe) what’s going on. That’s fixable, because awareness and knowledge can be changed. Some people don’t care because, well, they don’t care. They see the planet as one giant service station — here entirely to meet our many and various needs — its resources there to be exploited and commoditized in the name of growth and progress. And while I commend Jeff Bezos for committing $10 billion to initiatives to combat climate change (‘we are starting to bump up against the absolute true fact that Earth is finite’ he said in 2018), it scares me that he sees venturing into space, rather than changing the way we live, as the answer: ‘Space has plenty of energy and resources for future generations,’ he says.

The situation we face is overwhelming in its complexity and scale. Just like nature itself. In ecology, the natural world is viewed in terms of ecosystems — not because individual ecosystems exist independently of each other, but because it’s a way of breaking down something giant and multifarious into something more manageable. We’d do well to take the same approach. Small steps.