Until very recently I had no idea that there is a growing phenomenon that sees people stricken with worry, anxiety, and fear – presenting no different than a mental health condition, although it is not. According to the Harvard Medical School: “Climate anxiety, or eco-anxiety, is distress related to worries about the effects of climate change. It is not a mental illness. Rather, it is anxiety rooted in uncertainty about the future and alerting us to the dangers of a changing climate… Anxiety about the climate is often accompanied by feelings of grief, anger, guilt, and shame, which in turn can affect mood, behaviour, and thinking.”
Researchers have dug into this area, with their peer-reviewed work studying over 10,000 people, aged 15-25, spanning 10 countries. The work, published in The Lancet medical journal, found that more than 45 per cent of the study group stated that anxieties around climate change were severe enough to negatively impact their daily life. According to the American Psychological Association, more than two-thirds of Americans deal with climate anxiety.
March is the season for farmers meetings and it has been jam-packed with the finest hotel conference food, free pens, and tasty morsels of information. Last week my winter meeting tour stopped in Guelph for the Ontario Pork AGM. Delegates heard from Dr. Sean Lyons of the University of Guelph, who shared his research into demographics and how different groups respond to issues based on when they were born. Generation Z, the youngest of the four groups that Dr. Lyons talked about, is the only group to have lived their entire lives after humanity had jumped into the cauldron of the internet and constant information bombardment.
While we Ontario pig farmers were sitting comfortably in Guelph learning about demographics and other interesting tidbits, the UN was releasing its latest report on climate change. Here are the top three Google News searches for that report:
“UN climate report is latest in string of cataclysmic predictions stretching back decades”
“UN climate report: Scientists release ‘survival guide’ to avert climate disaster”
“UN climate change report: Catastrophic warming will claim lives without action”
With headlines like this, is it any wonder that we see a majority of young people feeling overwhelmed, anxious, or most perilous of all, hopeless?
This is not a piece pretending that all is OK when it comes to our planet. Mother Nature has been pushed and pushed and pushed. It should be no surprise that there is a reaction to human activity and that the impacts of our consumption will continue to wreak havoc on our climate. Yet if we allow the challenge to take away our superpower, then I will join the folks in the eco-anxiety line.
The strength of humans is our brains. There are plenty of animals that can out-perform us physically, yet there are none that can complete the complex orders of thinking needed to do really cool stuff. Cool stuff ranging from curing diseases to building rockets to fly to Mars and all points in between. The human brain is only constrained by its host – remove the barriers and we can do amazing things.
I am 39 and have now lived through a couple different iterations of Malthusian-themed talk around the demise of the planet. My first fragments of environmentally-scary news was acid rain. I remember as a kid being told that all the fish would die and we wouldn’t be able to swim in our lakes and rivers. Work between the U.S. and Canada, including cap and trade emissions reductions being employed effectively to lower pollution (something that is ignored by too many policy makers today in the carbon discussion), solved that problem. As a result, at age 40, I will still be able to splash around in the waters of Diamond Lake.
The next was the ice caps. While walking the halls of LDSS in the late 1990s, we were warned that the polar ice was melting at an increasing rate and human life was in peril in low-lying areas. In 2001, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), released its third report on climate change that stated in 2022 five key tipping points would be passed. Over the past few years there have been more, including methane emissions and temperature fluctuation; there is no shortage of ways that have been outlined for the impending climate doom.
Going back to our superpower… the thing that is going to help us make sure there is still a beautiful hospitable planet for folks going forward: our brains. They work best when they are NOT in an anxious state. Our minds take on a lens of our mood. If we are constantly stressed, triggering those fight or flight responses, we are not letting our brains work properly.
We need to dream of new possibilities, not be scared into a self-prophesied demise. By always framing everything as an emergency, we are doing a disservice to those who were not born before instant information. I am blessed to be able to remember a time before cell phones and the internet. Today, when I want a break I can go back to that time, leave the phone behind, and walk outside no different than the generations before me.
There are very good reasons to be focused on finding solutions to human impacts on climate change. At our own farm it has already begun. We are working to decarbonize our business, not only because it is good business, but because I love nothing more than a challenge that initially seems impossible.
We need people who are excited to dream about a better future, not be scared of what tomorrow might bring. We cannot ‘fix’ climate change on our own as individuals. You can drive an electric vehicle, eat fake meat, and cover your house in solar panels, but alone you accomplish very little. If we are going to make real inroads on improving humanity’s resilience to climate change, it means starting to frame the challenge differently.
Inspire people to find solutions and you create the conditions for people to invent the next humanity-saving technology. Tell them they have a problem on repeat, and the only winner is the coffee shop where we can sit and gripe about the problems we see all around us without getting up and doing anything about it.
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Stewart Skinner is a local business owner, former political candidate, and has worked at Queen’s Park as a Policy Advisor to the Minister of Agriculture, Food, and Rural Affairs. He can be reached at stuskinner@gmail.com or on Twitter: @modernfarmer.
