Is there an antidote to eco-anxiety?
COP 26 is on and I’m not sleeping
“Last chance saloon”
“Too late for humanity to avert a climate catastrophe”
“Digging our own graves”
3:00am: I am doomsday scrolling the headlines about progress — or lack thereof — of the UN Climate Change Conference of the Parties, known as Glasgow COP26. Almost exactly this time last year, I had a similar pattern of behaviour. In the very early hours of the morning, I would obsessively scroll the headlines as the US Presidential elections unfolded. Post-election result, I purged all social accounts from my phone for a lengthy period of time to rehabilitate myself. This is a relapse.
3:10am: I stop scrolling just long enough to absorb this quote: “The antidote to eco-anxiety is action.”
3:11am: I momentarily feel better as I press the heart button. Action achieved.
3:12am: The satisfaction is short-lived. I descend once again into a (coal) pit of despair. Does liking the post really equate to action? If I share the post later today is that better action? What constitutes enough action, especially when “the house is on fire”?
3:14am: Despair morphs into outrage, the type of outrage that is only felt at this time of night/day. I could take all the action I could but that won’t be enough. It can never be enough. It is the decisions being made by others, i.e., the leaders at COP26, that are more consequential and influential than whether I remember my re-useable cup for my 6am coffee. So why bother.
4:10am: I think about how the Australian PM’s marketing team totally misinterpreted the message of Frank Sinatra’s “I did it my way” when they titled their 2050 Net Zero roadmap, “The Australian Way.” Somehow, I fall asleep.
6:00am: First coffee of the day. In a disposable cup. I wonder whether coffee will exist in ten years time. The doomsday scrolling begins again.
630am: I start editing a social tile for my podcast, Local Environmental Heroes, and I remember the second episode with Professor Mark Howden.
My friend, Ryan, and I started a podcast five months or so ago, Local Environmental Heroes. It has a very simple premise: interview Canberra locals who are doing good stuff for our environment. We call these people “heroes”. Mark was our second interviewee and he is certainly a superhero of the climate world. In fact, after listening to him, I am sure you will agree with me that he is a superhero of any world.
In addition to many other roles, Mark is:
the Director of the Institute for Climate, Energy & Disaster Solutions at The Australian National University;
a Vice Chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (he has been a major contributor to the IPCC since 1991); and
the Chair of the ACT Climate Change Council.
Mark has worked on matters related to the world’s climate for over thirty years, longer if you include the fact that he wrote an essay on climate change when he was in Year 11. He has covered climate variability, climate change and innovation and adoption issues, across research and science-policy roles. Mark has assessed sustainable ways to reduce emissions and helped to develop both Australia’s and the international greenhouse gas inventories. If all of that is not amazing enough, Mark also shares the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize with Al Gore, and other IPCC participants AND has a signed letter of thanks from Barack Obama!
Mark is in the enviable (or perhaps unenviable) position of seeing the findings from his research become reality although, as he tells Ryan and I, while his predictions have been pretty accurate, “climate change is hitting us faster and harder than…projected”. Given how much he knows does he doomsday scroll? And if he does, does he like posts? Does he share posts? Or, would he be like me at 3:12am and lie completely inert, pessimistically wondering if there is any point in getting up to take the kids to school: is education pointless if all that we are leaving for them is a dystopian future?
Mark does none of this. To be completely honest, I never asked him specifically about doomsday scrolling. I am just assuming, from everything he said in our interview, that he does not. Instead, because of what he knows, and certainly because of who he is, Mark has chosen to have his personal life be “congruent with my professional life” and has chosen to:
switch to renewable energy with the installation of 28 solar panels, a big battery and, at the time we spoke, the imminent purchase of an electric vehicle;
ride to work every day;
grow his own vegetables (with two hydroponic systems and seven wicking beds), make his own beer and keep chickens for eggs; and
urban forage, and harvest plums from the street trees for his Christmas plum jam.
Again, he chooses action because he knows.
There was a whole lot of goodness in the chat Ryan and I had with Mark. However, on my specific issue of late night doomsday scrolling and whether to linger long enough to press like and/or share or whether that, or any action that I do, being just one person, will ever be enough, I gleaned three really important life lessons from Mark.
Firstly, because I live on this planet, I have an obligation and a responsibility to act. I am part of the problem because “every bit of greenhouse gas that we emit is sheeted home to someone somewhere”, so said Mark. But I am also part of the solution. We all are.
“We need to recognise our own individual contributions, take action to reduce those because that is actually contributing the collective and climate change solutions have to be a collective action.”
Secondly, do not under-estimate the importance of signalling, (which includes liking and sharing posts on social feeds). By sharing my actions, (I planted a wheelbarrow on the weekend full of tomato plants btw), talking to someone/anyone about what I am doing (see my podcast), I help to normalise an action and, while my immediate network of colleagues, friends and family is small, the ripple effect can be huge. Who knows who I might encourage or inspire to take action and who knows who they, in turn, might inspire. By telling someone about what you are doing, you will lift the whole
“You always approach the whole thing [life] with respect: respect for yourself respect for others and respect for the earth.”
Thirdly, and this is a common trait across every “hero” that we have interviewed as part of our podcast project so far, choose to live with intent. Be deliberate and purposeful about what you do. Mark recounted the following anecdote to Ryan and I when we asked him whether he had a particular mantra that he lives by.
“I don’t have a particular mantra but one of the underlying things that I have lived with, which came from my Mum, was always the concept of ‘be useful’. Don’t live a life which is useless, actually live a life which is useful…from my perspective, usefulness is about purpose. That I leave a planet that is better off than it would have otherwise been.”
Tonight, I will not doomsday scroll. But, I will still read things about COP26 because I have a responsibility (by virtue of the privilege of being here) to be more aware and informed. And I will share, in ways that will probably include pressing a thumbs up button. While this, in and of itself, is not be the biggest action one can take, it is an action nevertheless and my action just might lead to another action — by me or by someone else, somewhere else. In any event, I’m trying. And this effort (any effort) helps to live a life that is a little more deliberate. While it might not completely cure my eco-anxiety it might just help me sleep a little more. And I need my sleep because tomorrow will be a beautiful day, full of nature, beauty and wonder and I want to make the most out of it!
