Pirate's Cove

And here’s what you can do about it

Climate Change Despair Is Real. This Is How You Fight It

In 2015, Bay Area lawyer and activist Sarah Jornsay-Silverberg found herself in Paris representing island nations at the United Nations Climate Change Conference. She was thrilled to be there.

As the event progressed, however, “it was really clear that we were not going to achieve what we’d hoped,” she said.

I’m glad she took a long fossil fueled flight there.

What she and her colleagues had hoped for was a deal to limit global temperature rise to 1.5 degrees Celsius this century and a binding mechanism to enforce that. What they got was the Paris Agreement, which aims to keep global temperature rise to “well below 2 degrees Celsius” — and which countries have signed on to through voluntary pledges.

Instead of celebrating in the streets, she found herself curled up in her hostel bed, crying.

The depression that struck Jornsay-Silverberg, 34, in 2015 still comes and goes today. She worries about ecosystems, native people and their habitats, the Amazon. She is also grieving a vision of her future that may no longer become a reality.

“People like myself are deciding whether [we] even want to have children,” she said. When she was younger, she always assumed that she would.

Is this the very definition of 1st World Problems? And probably mostly 1st World White Leftist problems?

Environmental activists like Jornsay-Silverberg are not the only ones feeling overwhelmed with despair as the climate changes. While “eco-anxiety” is most commonly used to describe these feelings, therapists and others have bandied about different labels, too: climate anxiety, climate despair, eco-despair and eco-grief.

The American Psychological Association even published a guide for therapists to help them assist their patients. In it, they wrote, “the psychological responses to climate change, such as conflict avoidance, fatalism, fear, helplessness and resignation are growing. These responses are keeping us, and our nation, from properly addressing the core causes of and solutions for our changing climate, and from building and supporting psychological resiliency.”

In reality, this is real. But, it’s not from a minor 1.5F increase in global temperatures since 1850, but because other people are teaching people to be unhinged. Have you ever worked yourself up into a lather over something minor or non-existent? We’ve all done that, right? These people have created this for themselves on a daily basis.

Experts seem to agree on a three-part strategy:

1. Come together in community. “Find allies who understand what [you’re] feeling… and get together with them,” said Craig Chalquist, a psychologist and professor at the California Institute of Integral Studies. He said it can even be something informal. Often, people struggle with these feelings in isolation, since bringing up climate change is taboo in many social situations.
2. Process your feelings. This can happen through talking, grief groups and spending time in nature. Really? Just talk about such a huge issue? Chalquist said yes, adding that people with eco-anxiety then “quickly move from that phase into, ‘What can I do?'”
3. Identify what specific problems speak to you, and get to work. Interested in oceans? Food systems? Reforestation? Chalquist said because all these aspects of the environment are connected, “to work on one is actually to bring some healing to the whole thing.”

I would think that joining with other people who have the same crazy climate beliefs and anxiety would be the worst thing, since they aren’t coming together to support each other, like with AA, but to reinforce their climate cultist beliefs.

Read: Climate Change Despair Is Real Or Something »

Really, should it be RUINING YOUR LIFE AND WE’RE ALL DOOMED? In all caps? Because they’re always losing their mind

What to Do If Eco-Anxiety Is Ruining Your Mental Health

When you’re young, you look to the future with equal doses of dread and optimism: fearing the obligatory baggage that comes with getting older but craving responsibility all the same. 30 years ago, the baby boomer generation was threatened with the possibility of war causing a kind of nuclear apocalypse. Nowadays, that sense of your life’s ambitions being thrown into disarray is marred by something different.

The climate crisis has drastically shaped the fate of the planet. You know the deal at this point. Scientists have claimed we’ve got just 12 years to save ourselves from impending doom, but corporate greed and climate crisis deniers in positions of immense political power are stalling us from making crucial, global changes. How does one process that information?

Fred is 20 years old and from Sydney. “I read somewhere that climate change is a concept too large for someone to ever fully understand, and I guess my relationship with it is like that too,” he tells i-D. “It’s too huge and scary and vague for me to comprehend how to cope, or even how exactly it causes my anxiety. I know that it’s real, and catastrophic.” Fred is one of many young people whose visions of the future have been clouded by the possibility of the climate crisis taking it away from us. A dark thought, but one that can’t be ignored if we stand any chance in stopping it.

I’d recommend he not use fossil fuels, get rid of the energy hogging smartphone, grow his own veggies, give up meat, move into a tiny apartment (can’t use natural gas!), and live like it’s 1499. Anyhow, what can they do per the story

That aforementioned report by the APA points out four ways in which we can collectively keep check on our own mental health in a moment of crisis like this, stating that we should build belief in one’s own resilience, foster optimism, cultivate active coping and self-regulation skills, maintain practices that help to provide a sense of meaning, and promote a connectedness to family, place, culture and community.

So….nothing about making their lives carbon neutral, giving a large chunk of their money to the Government, along with most of their freedom and choice? Huh.

“I have a lot of anxiety about the future,” says 15-year-old Ontario-native Sagan. “Like, on Friday there’s a climate strike going on where I live, and I can’t go because I have a cross-country meet, and it’s just eating me up inside because, like, why can’t I just be inconvenient and go?” These decisions are hard for kids like Sagan to make because, as much as the pressure to rebel exists, the demands Gen-Z put upon themselves to be studious and work hard to get further in a more cutthroat job market do too. To escape it all, he runs, makes art and plays music: “I just try to get off the internet and do things in real life.”

ZOMG, someone has anxiety about the future? And turns to music and art to escape? Gets outside? Welcome to the Real World, where that’s been happening for thousands of years.

“We have to make a distinction between anxiety and eco-anxiety,” child psychologist Rafael Dupré says. “Most other forms of anxiety are based on an irrational fear of a danger that is very unlikely. Eco-anxiety, however, is based on a danger that is very real, it exists and is proven to be a threat to human life.”

So, here you have a child psychologist telling kids they’re doomed. That’s helpful

Hannah is a 21-year-old senior at NYU. She suffers from a form of solastagia, and has taken Julie Scheiner’s advice, spending last weekend at the climate protests in Manhattan. “I find it interesting that when I went to my school’s counselling centre, they didn’t have any information about dealing with climate anxiety even though all my friends say that is the main thing making them anxious,” she says. Instead, to quell her nervous episodes, she meditates. Hannah is also comforted by the fact that she has the right to vote; to make a difference of some kind, no matter if it feels insignificant at the time. Is there a mantra that she wants to get out there, to help others paint a vision of the climate crisis that doesn’t exacerbate fear, but offer a promise of change?

Wait till life truly kicks her, rather than this imaginary fear of a tiny increase in the global temperature which is completely within the norm for a Holocene warm period. Really, blame the adult Warmist for causing the kiddies to have irrational fears.

Read: Say, What Can You Do If Eco-Anxiety Is Ruining Your Life Or Something »