This isn’t going to be the most cheerful roundtable, so if that sounds like something you cannot deal with right now, this is the time to opt out! Right here, this sentence, this is your chance. This roundtable is also not here to convince anyone of the facts of climate change. There are numerous sources that confirm climate change is accelerating and which detail its potential effects such as this guide from NASA, or this detailed report out of the EU. Autostraddle published a two-part series on climate change resilience by Caroline Contillo in 2017 that holds up really well! Now, I’m not a climate scientist (or even a scientist) and I can’t tell you how fast certain effects of climate change will be upon us, nor can anyone predict the exact trajectory that various increased threats to human wellbeing due to climate change will take, but we can see it all around us, in hurricanes, mudslides, fires and new or more prevalent diseases. Again, I encourage you to do your own research, but, here, we’re going to talk specifically about our personal outlooks on climate change and how we as individual humans are coping. My goal here is that you will, I hope, find parts of what we say that resonate with you, and that you’ll take advantage of the comment section to share.
I really want to know how you’re coping — or not. Above all, I want you to know that you’re not alone in this. We are all, quite literally, in this, on this planet together. The way we’re going to get through this is together.
Lastly, I want to make sure that — though this will be a sensitive topic for I am sure literally every person reading this — we keep the comments section as kind and open and generous as possible. We are going to practice giving each other the benefit of the doubt, here! This isn’t normally reserved for other places of the internet, I know, but here, I think we should be able to swing it. Thank you for being here, thank you if you share, thank you if you’re an expert in this area and you want to bring any info to share, thank you if you just read and choose to process by yourself and not share right now. Both are very valid, and also, hey, you’ve got this.
Love,
Nicole
this…was actually really helpful. because i absolutely share the experience of despair when contemplating the enormity of what lies ahead, but feeling hope – not optimism, but hope – when i witness and (in my tiny way) contribute to everyday acts of resilience in the face of climate disaster. so thank you all for sharing your experiences – this was actually what i needed to hear this morning ❤️
i would add that my coping has been giving myself permission to skim the headlines but not to read the articles. knowing the details doesn’t help me practically or emotionally, but implementing a new sustainable gardening practice or having a productive conversation that plants a seed with someone in denial (i live in a very conservative area) or donating to an environmental justice project – i can do that without obsessing over scary numbers i can’t do anything about.
I’m so glad it was helpful to you 💜💜💜
“AND ALL THAT IS VERY GRIM LOL” – Nicole Hall, 2022, summing up my general background mood for life in general.
I don’t know. I don’t know? I don’t know what to do with any of it. For reference, I’m 24; as an elder Gen Z, it feels like global warming has been a known and generally accepted fact for my entire life. The melting ice caps, the dying Amazon – I don’t know a time before this destruction. People have always been screaming that we need to fix it and fix it NOW, and then they never did.
And then COVID came and millions of people died and/or suffered, and/or are currently dying or suffering, and that doesn’t seem to matter. It doesn’t seem to have changed much of anything; America’s public health policy right now is “deny we’re in the middle of a fucking plague”.
And I guess part of my climate grief and anxiety is that for the past 2 years it’s been made VERY clear that there is no communal goodwill to fall back on. Yes the politicians and industry bigwigs have failed us but – we, as citizens, don’t have much interest in saving each other either.
ALSO all the Forbes and Business Insider-type magazines keep hyping up the Sun Belt as the next regional hub for development and tech. This pro-desert propaganda is getting on my nerves lmao, the Hoover Dam and Colorado River are evaporating and these bitches are speed-building expensive-ass housing developments.
On a practical level, I know I’ll never be able to leave the East Coast, because everything west of Yellowstone is gonna be scorched within the next decade or two. And that makes me sad, because I’ve always wanted to live in the Pacific Northwest (Vancouver, specifically). I predict a wave of climate-based fiction being in vogue, similar to the YA dystopia rush, so I’m trying to throw some manuscripts together and start publishing. Y
Yes the world is ending but I want to be counted as The Great American Novelist As America Ended.
Totally hear you on the Sun Belt thing – my family lives in southern New Mexico and I’ve watched over the years as Las Cruces has exploded, and not a single one of those new builds requires any kind of oh, I don’t know, low-flow faucets? Solar panels on the roof? Nevermind something like composting toilets when the earth is literally cracking in places from the water table being so tapped out.
I too live in the Northeast, and I find half of my response to climate anxiety is trying to plant native things in my yard as fast as humanly possible. I cried massive tears this morning when I saw deer had eaten a bunch of the milkweed I planted. DO THE DEER NOT KNOW ABOUT THE MONARCHS. APPARENTLY NOT.
The other half of my response is leaning in to human indigeneity; shifting my budget to pay Indigenous folks as directly as possible, looking into an easement on “my” property for Indigenous people to grow and use whatever they want (the tax structure is often more beneficial to fund-strapped tribes than an outright sale), learning more about what my own ancestors did before the mindsets that created this mess.
I don’t know how many people have read this far in a comment reply but I would like to draw your attention to the following fact: in Celtic languages, there is not really a verb for “to have.” I think about this a lot. I think about how possessive the English language is – even things that are joyful, we talk about as obligations with a weird possessive element (“I *have to* go to my friend’s party this weekend,” “I *have* children”). What would the world be like if our very mouths did not speak such possession? If, as in Welsh and its cousin languages, we don’t *have* anything but there are things and people *with us*?
Ohhh I did not know that about the Celtic language verbs, thank you for sharing! I don’t know if I can envision a world without possession as a concept, honestly. It’s so foreign to everything I know the world to be. Especially when I think about obligations regarding relationships and how a lot of action when you *have* a child or parent or friend is taking care of them because no one else will. Is possession even a bad thing or did we ruin it with greed and ego? Maybe we’ll never know for sure.
I am genuinely curious about what’s going to happen to all of those millions of people in the Sun Belt when the water runs out (or the fires get too big, whichever comes first). They’re going to have to move east and north *eventually* and no one ever seems to think about it. Can’t wait for those culture wars! *scream*
As a zillenial I too feel very disillusioned that anything will get fixed, but as a scientist I have eternal hope in the innovation of humans. It is very easy to think the greed of the few represents the ideals of the many; and I really have to fight myself to remember that that is not true. I really feel a lot of the paradoxical opinions presented here.
Interestingly, I do want to probe into something Nicole said–that the fish will be gone by 2048. I got my degree in marine science and we actually spent quite a bit of time dissecting this particular piece of research, stemming from the 2006 paper “Impacts of Biodiversity Loss on Ocean Ecosystems” (https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.1132294). This paper, while the dire wake-up call the fishing industry needs (which, population biologists do predict sustainability levels the industry needs to catch under, the industry mostly ignores these to maximize profit–discussed here https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0308597X06000613?casa_token=7CmhgDJtBgAAAAAA:7nAgRlDFTEk7xKDOpVigk3TXnQ7ndUezirtP1Hq-nYaUHM53XbMasXLkOW3QutBVhddbCMGr), had some pretty dubious science that essentially involved extrapolating models beyond what they predicted. However, the biggest faux pas of this paper was that it ignores the extreme efforts of fisheries biologists, aquaculturists and marine scientists in general put forward to combat this very threat. It’s one of my favorite stories in science–a fisheries researcher, Ray Hilborn, got into a really heavy debate with the og author, Boris Worm (his direct response here: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10021-007-9100-5), but in the latter half of the year, started actively working on ways the industry can combat what Worm had published, leading to the industry management paper linked above, and culminating in this paper here: https://www-science-org.proxy-um.researchport.umd.edu/doi/full/10.1126/science.1173146, which rather than fearmongering, gives concrete ways the industry can actually improve the way they do their work.
The only reason I bring this up is to give an example of hope–that in addition to the individual efforts put forward by people, real effort is being made to change things on a greater scale–like the Detroit case Carmen cited and the book Lily cited. I personally believe that fish are the future, just the right kind of fish (low impact species like tilapia, yellowtail, shellfish and seaweed), and sustainable practices like multi-trophic aquaculture; but this is one solution among many. Anyway thank you for listening to my rant.
I resonate so *hard* with each author’s piece. Tragically comedic as this timeline is, having my realistic thoughts and feelings validated is like taking a deep breath, and autostraddle is one of the only places I find that. I think a lot about the fact that the majority of humans are conformist personality types or innately selfish. And how that spells doom for the planet when what we need is way more creative and compassionate thinkers. I keep thinking I’ve accepted all of this and then I wake up the next day and go to work and contribute to my IRA and a bunch of charities, as though that’s enough. As if I’ll even be able to use retirement funds. Will there even be a banking system then? Will those zeroes and ones that are modern money have any value when we’ll simply be trying not to die of thirst? I grieve for all the people younger than me, especially babies born right now. So I do my best, contribute what I can, and try sometimes to party like there’s no tomorrow. Cause there very well may not be.
I remember reading something on Twitter, “What’s a headline you want to read in 10 years? Ex: more affordable housing built in x city or country.
What can you do right now to make that headline a reality?”
For me it was more people in my city using a bike and/ or public transportation to get around. I started an org with a few other people and I feel good about what we’ve accomplished so far.
I’m a little late to the conversation here (I heeded the warning at the beginning haha!), but I found this incredibly useful. I work in international climate policy, so I spend pretty much my whole time thinking about this, and I always feel like I’m not doing enough. Policy moves slowly and even though the conversations seem to be globally, on the whole, mostly moving in the right direction, the pace of (in)action is absolutely infuriating. I do see small wins, which I grab onto, as others have mentioned, they give hope. I used to think climate change and wider environmental destruction were the biggest problem we faced, but I’ve come to see it really as a symptom of a worldview, mindset and values that support a capitalist economy, that support colonialism, that support racism and a whole host of other issues. As other commenters mentioned, it’s evident in the language we use every day. Coming off the back of an awful heatwave where I live, I did spend a couple of days terrified, and I took the time to just feel that, sit with it, and then got back to work a little more determined than before. I think any action, even if it’s small, is beneficial – a little chip taken out of the beast that’s facing us. Even if it should, change sure as hell isn’t coming from the top down, so somehow it has to come from us.