Americans are increasingly struggling with a new form of anxiety disorder related to climate change, according to a report from Phys.org, and it’s throwing psychologists for a loop.
The anxity, it seems, stems from climate activists’ latest claims — that the world as we know it will likely end in just over a decade unless a massive, international effort is undertaken to halt the effects of carbon emissions. But as with many activist claims, the timelines vary, as do the proposed solutions, but that hasn’t stopped environmental groups across the board from ramping up their rhetoric.
“Fears about climate change are prompting worldwide action, but one knock-on effect in the United States is mounting anxiety about everything from plastics to class-based environmental disparities,” Phsy.org reported.
Some climate activists say we have under a decade to make major changes in our lifestyles, including abandoning domestic air travel, ditching single-use plastic items like straws, and regressing to a more rural way of life (a change that, in some cases, includes an entirely plant-based diet to avoid the “scourge” of industrial agriculture and bovine methane emissions). Other groups suggest even more radical approaches, like refusing to have children (the UK’s Prince Harry, for example, ascribes to population self-control), abandoning fossil fuels and their byproducts, and even “dismantling capitalism.”
In many cases, these “solutions” are just cover for other political goals (the “dismantling capitalism” one, in particular is odd, given that most socialist and communist states rely heavily on industrialization) but everyday greenies don’t seem to grasp that, according to Phys.org, forcing some climate proponents to seek mental help for the anguish they feel over not meeting climate goals personally.
in 2014, [Brown University English professor Kate] Schapira started setting up a ‘climate anxiety’ booth in public spaces, such as farmers’ markets. It’s a bit like Lucy’s psychiatry stall from the beloved comic ‘Peanuts,'” the outlet reports. “‘Climate anxiety counseling, 5 cents. The doctor is in,’ the booth’s sign reads, welcoming passersby in Providence to talk about their fears.”
It turns out, the booth is very popular, as are more organized efforts to control “climate anxiety.”
“For Lise Van Susteren, a Washington-based psychiatrist who has been studying the mental health impacts of climate change for 15 years, refusal to recognize the potential hazards is common for ‘people who are trying to deny that they too are vulnerable.’ ‘I actually have no hesitation in saying that on some level, I believe that everyone now has some climate anxiety,’ Van Susteren said.”
Climate anxiety might not present itself as traditional anxiety. The American Psychological Association suggests that it could manifest as “conflict avoidance, fatalism, fear, helplessness and resignation,” and it could “coincide with an array of physical health impacts, such as asthma and allergies.”
It might also lead people to question whether their own individual actions — declining a plastic straw, say, or refusing to have that second kid — are making any impact at all.
The truth is, they’re probably not. Straws make up less than 1% of the “microplastics” clogging the oceans, and most of that waste comes from southeast Asia, not the United States (though some American waste does end up in landfills in that part of the world). Efforts to curb the use of plastic items like straws are mostly informational, aimed at spreading awareness, not enacting permanent — or even effective — solutions.
The same is true for the notion that population must be curbed. Fertility is declining in most of the world, and humans are more likely to go extinct than they are to cause a climate-killing population explosion. Refusing to procreate because is mostly a first-world proposal to an absent problem.
As for the prediction that the Earth will be dead in ten years, well, it seems, some climate activists were making the same claim twenty years ago.