avoidance, anxiety, apocalypse
Maddened, I left the office—in the Standard Oil Building, no less—and wandered for a while with the crowd. For several minutes I stood on a concrete barrier by the Charging Bull as people flowed past me. Children held a banner, chanting, We have to try or we’re all gonna die. An inflatable globe bobbed along beneath the corporate towers. Marchers held signs, burned Earths in colored paper, slogans of various causes. Kitsch, banality, cleverness, righteousness, incoherence, awe—like any demonstration, an imperfect but earnest display. At Battery Park, Greta Thunberg gave her stump speech: This is an emergency. It was a Friday afternoon in September. Stories above, the powerful and influential agents of the crisis looked down in bemusement or ignorance. Or they did not look down at all.
In talking and writing about climate change, even as a dilettante blogger, I am surprised at how often I am still met with avoidance, trivialization, and bewilderment, even from friends and colleagues who believe climate change to be a serious problem.
To look away in the name of self-preservation or to problematize this newsletter as melodramatic or hypocritical is understandable. But I cannot help the larger feeling that what was once bad-faith skepticism over the causes of climate change has transferred to the urgency of its rhetoric. The vociferous, cross-ideological scolding of the Just Stop Oil kids for throwing soup at famous art (chosen because they were protected by glass) is the most recent example, regardless of the action’s incoherence. Complacency has shifted from the source of alarm to the mounting expressions of it. The thing has been proven; would that it be believed.
The result of refusing to face climate change—refusing even to begin to look at it—is that you will always conceptualize it according to your deepest fears, or refuse to conceptualize it with the force of your most desperate denials. Refusing to engage with climate change is to let powerful, imaginary forces loose in your head: as terrifying as the present crisis is, your imagination will always make it worse.
For your imagination will not take the forms of reality; it will take the forms of myth, nightmare, paranoia. The angel with the fiery sword guarding a lost Eden, Pandora’s jar, unending fires, meteoric ruin, Final Judgment, skyscrapers bulldozed by freak waves. The imagination will look for mystical etiologies and parabolic meanings. It will imagine itself enduring the awful fates that are already befalling the Global South, even though it sits on the other end of such destruction. Exhausted by fantasies of doom, it will shut down, grow tired, refuse. And each new day will continue in that refusal, building up new beachfront condominiums of thought.
What leaves you exhausted and benumbed to face the climate crisis is not the full force of its reality, in all its grim happenings, because it cannot be. It would be like being exhausted and depressed by a famine that you will never experience. Those who in Pakistan still look out over the water that, after ruining their homes, now breeds malaria and ruins crops, do not have the luxury of turning away, least of all under the pretense of existential dread.
What has kept you from looking, instead, are the forms that climate change seems to take. A crisis in which the best solutions still assure vast devastation, and in which each warming threshold unlooses new and worsening plagues, is hard not to conflate with two similar but ultimately inadequate analogs: anxiety and apocalypse.
To the extent that anxiety is an agitated and constant imagining of possible, unpleasant scenarios, climate change is anxiety on a planetary scale. The IPCC reports feature images of possible worlds, each small ellipsoid a deeper red, or marked with further loss. The daily anxieties of being alive are difficult enough; the thought of escalating the scope of those anxieties to their maximum scale is terrifying, almost preposterous. If climate change seems to take a monstrous form of anxiety, in which you’re doomed to watch your fears of the future projected on an entire planet, how could anyone take on that impossible burden?
To the extent that an apocalypse is a mythic, ineluctable, and even deserved end of the world, climate change is the closest thing we have to a real-world example, aside from nuclear war. The climate crisis is a crisis brought about by greed and growth at the expense of all else. In this, its structure feels allegorical, like something we’ve long anticipated: man digging too deep, insulting the gods, unleashing the forces buried in the earth. There are plenty of analogs in the Bible: the ejection from Eden, Yahweh’s world-destroying flood, the final return of Christ. Weep and howl for your miseries that shall come upon you. Mirroring the Biblical Fall, Ovid recounts the Greek myth of the Four Ages of Man, in which the Golden Age successively corrodes to Silver, Bronze, and finally Iron, where men plunder the earth and wage endless war: “Hard steel succeeded then: / And stubborn as the metal, were the men. / Truth, modesty, and shame, the world forsook: / Fraud, avarice, and force, their places took. / Then sails were spread, to every wind that blew.” So ancient of a precedent seems insurmountable. If climate change takes the form of an apocalypse, or of man’s innate fallenness, how could anyone be expected to stop it?
Both of these forms would be valid reasons to look away from the climate crisis if they were actually fitting analogs for it. To think of climate change as anxiety rendered globally is to indulge in a grandiose solipsism, to ignore the unequal distribution of future ruin, and to flatten the crisis’s entangled problems into a simple schema of bad and worse. To think of the crisis as an apocalypse misrepresents it as something linear, with a dramatic and moral end, rather than a multipolar complex of processes that is already eroding seasons and shorelines and species. What is at stake is not the world, but which world. And the old world is not an option.
Everyone approaches crisis in their own way. But for those of us who sit in comfort in the Global North, I imagine what has ground you down is not climate change itself. Not yet. What has ground you down, instead, is a lack of facts, agency, power, understanding, and reassurance to weigh against such a crisis. What has ground you down are conceptualizations of the crisis that deepen your daily anxieties and loom with mythic terror.
What has ground you down is not your ability to understand the crisis, its complexities and scenarios. What has ground you down is not the possibility of finding meaning and usefulness in the fight to address it. What has ground you down is not solidarity or opportunity or the achingly ancient feeling of kinship with other species. What has ground you down is not your staggering capacity for bravery and new ways of thought. What has ground you down is not even the prospect of unbearable loss, of childhood memories of snow or the swarms of migratory butterflies that once, not long ago, you could scoop from the trees with your hands. All those things could stir to thought or action.
What has ground you down is the desolation of modernity, the exhausting consumerism of self-care, the inbuilt cruelty of American life, its diminishment of its citizens, its absolute forsaking of the future. What has ground you down is the smug squandering of powerful people’s influence. What has ground you down are the cartels of industry whose profits are predicated on your numbness, your misunderstandings, your lack of knowledge that widens with each passing day of choosing not to look. To avoid the climate crisis is not to deny it; it is to deny the admirable parts of yourself that could try to rise to meet it.
For the future is not fixed but scatters forth in urgent renderings. There will be things to salvage. There will be things required of us. We live in a time of forecasts. Live, if you must, in the dead time of foretellings. Consign yourself to the deepening crimson of your anxiety, to whatever Age comes after the one that’s most debased. But there will be no end, no reward. There will be no angel guarding whatever’s left of Eden.
ben tapeworm