Читать книгу Hope Matters - Elin Kelsey - Страница 11

THE BELIEF THAT fear is a better motivator than hope is amazingly pervasive when it comes to the environment. The funny thing is that it runs counter to our own experiences in other parts of our lives. Think back to how you’ve felt when you had the misfortune of working for a tyrannical boss or a professor hell-bent on using cutthroat exams to reduce the class size. What you no doubt experienced is that fear can be a great mechanism to alert you to situations where failure is unacceptable. But fear of failure doesn’t propel you to greatness. In fact, fear leads most of us to panic. We can’t think straight. We stop looking for creative solutions or imaginative ways forward. Students and employees make more errors when they are operating in cultures of fear; because everyone is afraid of screwing up and being found out, we hide our mistakes, which means no one can learn from the mistakes of others.

Trying to avoid failure is a familiar but ineffective strategy. Failure, it turns out, is an essential prerequisite for success, according to a massive study of three-quarters of a million grant applications to the National Institutes of Health published in Nature in 2019. Yian Yin and his colleagues at Northwestern University set out to create a mathematical model that could reliably predict the success or failure of an undertaking. In addition to the grant applications, they also tested their model on forty-six years’ worth of venture capital startup investments. The result?

Every winner begins as a loser. But the old proverb if at first you don’t succeed, try, try, again only works if you learn from your previous failures. You need to keep doing what works and focus on changing what didn’t. Plus, you should get right back up and try again. The more time you leave between attempts, the more likely you are to fail again. Rather than trying to avoid failure, what matters is what we learn when we fail, the changes we make based on that learning, and how quickly we try again.¹

Fear can manifest as anxiety and hopelessness, which keeps us from being productive. Hopeful action, on the other hand, breeds confidence, happiness, and freedom to experiment—emotions that are tied to better performance and a better sense of well-being.²

Fear alone is not an effective strategy

Despite the well-documented ill effects of creating cultures of fear, I often meet people who believe fearmongering is necessary to spur environmental action. In fact, they tell me that the real problem is people aren’t scared enough. Hope, they say, creates complacency at the very time we most need people to be scared into action. Clearly, that’s the sentiment David Wallace-Wells channeled in his 2017 essay “The Uninhabitable Earth.” The article delineates the effects of the worst-case scenarios of climate change, crafting a horrifying, dystopian vision of a near future destroyed by runaway climate change.³ Within a week, it had become the most widely read article ever published in New York magazine.

There’s no doubt fear makes a deep impression.⁴ And it’s true that fear-based messages can be effective, especially for simple, short-term, or specific behavior-changing interventions. Yet a 2014 meta-analysis that looked at the effectiveness of fear campaigns across sixty years of studies concluded that increasing people’s confidence is a more successful approach than just trying to scare folks straight.⁵

Fear alone doesn’t help us to address broad, complex, emotion-laden, societal-level issues, like the ones we face with climate change. Indeed, Anthony Leiserowitz, director of the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication, describes what he calls a “hope gap” between people’s fear about climate change, and their feelings of powerlessness to do anything about it. Even those people identified as “most concerned about climate change” in research studies don’t really know what they can do individually or collectively, he says. It’s a serious problem. As Leiserowitz puts it, “Perceived threat without efficacy of response is usually a recipe for disengagement or fatalism.”⁶

The hope paradox

We find ourselves, therefore, in a paradox. As I described in chapter one, climate change communication to date has overwhelmingly relied on negative emotions. One could argue it’s been a highly successful tactic. American concern about climate change is higher than ever before, jumping 9 percent between 2018 and 2019.⁷ Evidence from polls in many parts of the world indicates that concern about climate change is at a record high. Increasing numbers of people believe climate change poses a severe risk to themselves and the countries where they live, according to a survey of twenty-six nations conducted by the Pew Research Center in the spring of 2018.⁸ Though the levels of concern vary by country, people rank climate change as the top global threat.

What all these polls confirm is that a critical mass of people all over the planet now know about and are also worried about climate change. This is an astonishing accomplishment. The effort required to focus global attention on a single issue is beyond challenging, especially for a problem as complex and difficult to communicate as climate change.

This mass demonstration of collective worry is driving political will toward change. Half of the world’s population is younger than thirty years old. According to a 2019 World Economic Forum survey of thirty thousand individuals under the age of thirty across 186 countries, climate change and the destruction of nature is the biggest global concern for young people around the world.⁹ The same year, a survey of over ten thousand eighteen-to-twenty-five-year-olds across twenty-two countries by Amnesty International found Generation Z fears climate change more than any other issue.¹⁰

We’re beginning to see the results. For the first time ever, in 2019, climate change was a top issue in Canada’s federal election. As I write this, the world’s youngest prime minister, Sanna Marin, has set an ambitious target to make Finland the first carbon-neutral welfare state in the world. Bhutan and Suriname have already won the net-zero-greenhouse-gas-emissions race, with Norway and Sweden coming up close behind. Meanwhile, in Australia, climate politics is burning as hot as the devastating bushfires.

Fear, guilt, and shame are powerful levers in political movements. However, fear tactics are a double-edged sword. On an individual level, fear is a good indicator that something is broken or has gone wrong. But, when it becomes entrenched, as it has in the doom-and-gloom narrative, it is demotivating. When we are afraid, we become less creative, less collaborative, and less capable of perseverance. And that’s where the paradox comes in. As a global community, with climate concern at a record high, we are better positioned than ever before to take urgently needed action, yet the collateral damage on individual people of being constantly bombarded with environmental catastrophe is inhibiting our capacity to tackle the climate crisis.

New words to express profound feelings

The emotions people feel around the planetary crisis can be intense, life-changing, and overwhelming. Many describe being terrified, floored, or swept away by grief. “Global dread,” “eco-anxiety,” “environmental grief,” “climate rage,” “eco-paralysis,” “environmental cynicism,” “climate change distress”—despair about the future of the planet has garnered many labels in the research literature as academics try to understand and study the emotional and psychological complexity of our feelings about the state of the planet. Glenn Albrecht, a sustainability professor in Australia, says we simply don’t have enough words to express how profoundly environmental changes affect us. He has created a new lexicon of terms, including solastalgia—the feeling of homesickness we experience when we are still in the same place, but it has been irrevocably changed. Solastalgia is distress caused by the transformation and degradation of one’s home environment.¹¹

Worries about climate change impact our most intimate decisions. A third of Americans reportedly consider climate change in their decision not to have children or to have fewer children, according to recent polls in the New York Times and Business Insider.¹² A growing number of people around the world are experiencing real anguish over whether or not to have children. They worry about the harm an additional person could do to the planet, and they feel genuine anxiety about whether a child could lead a good life on the hotter, less stable world they fear is coming.

Eco-anxiety is overwhelming kids

It’s not just adults who are suffering. In our noble zeal to emphasize the urgency and enormity of environmental issues, we appear to be inadvertently raising a generation that feels hopeless about the future of the planet. A 2018 international review of recent research on the psychological impacts of climate change on children published in Current Psychiatry Reports reveals that many kids honestly believe the world may end during their lifetime as a result of climate change or other global threats. In-depth interviews with ten-to-twelve-year-olds in the US found that 82 percent of children expressed strong feelings of fear, sadness, and anger when discussing environmental problems.¹³

I want to underscore that these are kids who have not directly experienced catastrophic floods, droughts, sea level rise, or bushfires. These findings are from researchers who specifically study the psychological impact of indirect or gradual climate change effects.

The reason I think that is such a sad and important point is that children are suffering emotional and psychological anguish not from their lived experience, but as a result of their anticipation of a dystopian future they believe is inevitable. They see planetary destruction as a foregone conclusion. They are so deeply embroiled in the narrative of doom and gloom that they have no idea other futures are possible.

It’s not surprising they feel this way. They are growing up in a media storm of end-of-the-world threats and getting graded on homework assignments that hammer home the magnitude of environmental problems. This pervasive and skewed orientation toward analyzing what’s broken follows them throughout their school careers.

Though it’s natural and responsible to try to protect the people we love by focusing on the dangers they may face, lots of studies now show what parents and teachers already know. The best way to equip kids to handle challenges in their lives is to help them learn how to develop and maintain strong social networks within supportive communities. They also need to learn how to develop effective, creative problem-solving abilities to overcome adversity. These same strategies are true for the challenges they may face from climate change. The Australian Psychological Society provides more details on how to do this in a helpful online guide called “Raising Children to Thrive in a Climate Changed World.” In it, they remind parents: to talk about but not catastrophize the problem of climate change; to validate and help children learn to recognize their feelings; to offer emotional support; to take positive environmental action together; and to nurture kids’ capacities for resilience, flexibility, and adaptability.

The more we worry, the more we . . . shop?

A fatalistic focus on climate doom triggers a host of what psychologists describe as conscious and unconscious concerns about our own deaths. The result is an emotional state of “existential anxiety.”

Psychologists use the term terror management theory to describe the constant tension each of us experiences in our day-to-day lives between our desire to live and the fact that we know that one day we will die. Without realizing it, we develop defense mechanisms to manage this psychological tension.

Fears about the death of the planet are even more visceral because we know how completely dependent our own lives are on the health of living ecosystems. Climate change is a primary driver of biodiversity loss, just as the loss of biodiversity contributes to climate change. Both of those fates—and our own—are inextricably linked.

The trouble is, depictions of climate change as an inevitable, sweaty death sentence trigger these defense mechanisms. We protect our sense of security by subconsciously denying the problem or minimizing the credibility of the threats.

So even though you might assume that people who fear death by climate change would be motivated to change their behavior, it doesn’t work that way. When we already know there is a massive problem, and people just keep telling us how bad it is, we suffer real fears about our survival. In fact, fearmongering amplifies our existential anxiety, which sets off a chain of protective reactions that can cause us to downplay the issue and reduce our likelihood to take action.

Surprisingly, these fears can actually lead us to shop more. Researchers have found links between existential anxiety and hyperconsumerism. Shopping (for people who derive personal validation or identity from their stuff) decreases our sense of vulnerability.¹⁴ In our materialistic, consumerist culture, a common response to soothe our unconscious fears of death is to hop online for some comfort shopping.

This could help to explain why Black Friday 2019 hit a record $7.4 billion in US online sales at the same time concern about climate change was at a record high. Mass consumerism is bad for the environment in a myriad of ways. Millions of shoppers buying and then discarding smartphones and TVs, for instance, contribute to the fifty million tons of e-waste the world generates each year. If you were to add up all the stuff people around the world consume, everything from food to birthday presents to toilet-bowl cleaner, it would total a whopping 60 percent of greenhouse gas emissions and between 50 and 80 percent of total water, land, and material use, according to a 2015 study in the Journal of Industrial Ecology.¹⁵ It’s shocking to realize that by slamming people with messages of climate doom, no matter how well intentioned, we may inadvertently escalate the environmentally destructive shopping we so badly need to stop.

The finite pool of worry triggers emotional numbness

Other researchers explain our failure to act, despite high levels of concern about environmental crises, through a phenomenon known as the finite pool of worry. According to researchers at Columbia University’s Center for Research on Environmental Decisions, there are limits to the number of concerns a person can deal with at one time. Overburdening people’s capacity for worry with too much doom and gloom leads to emotional numbing. We tune out or feel immobilized. “When we’re scared, we can freeze,” says Susan M. Koger, a psychology professor at Willamette University in Oregon, who teaches and writes about psychology for sustainability.¹⁶

The trouble is, emotionally numb can look a lot like not caring. My friend Carrie teaches high school. She recently told me that she’s been showing her classes increasingly graphic images of climate change devastation to try to shock them into caring. “They are so apathetic,” she says.

Apathy can easily be mistaken for a lack of compassion, but many psychologists interpret it as quite the opposite. Apparent indifference or dissociation often serves to mask a person’s feelings of helplessness.

Apathy is produced as a response to feeling powerless in the face of political realities we cannot control.¹⁷ To avoid feeling helpless, guilty, and afraid, we create a veneer of not caring in order to maintain an image of ourselves as smart, tough, and in control. Apathy stems from fear and a lack of capacity to tackle what seems like an insurmountable task. When we believe nothing will change for the better, then any positive action can feel useless or pointless.

So if the students in Carrie’s class already know about climate change (which, according to research, it’s pretty well guaranteed they do), and if they keep being slammed with examples of how unjust it is or how little society is doing to correct it, her lessons may unintentionally create the apathy she is trying to cure.

There is a worrisome connection between apathy and cynicism. People who fall prey to apathy then may end up transforming their original political frustrations into longer-lasting expressions of skepticism, cynicism, and mistrust. Indeed, you don’t have to look far to see this happening writ large.

A rise in cynicism and drop in trust

Pessimism and cynicism are on the rise in many countries, according to Our World in Data, a research project based at the University of Oxford that analyzes big data trends. Meanwhile, feelings of trust are plummeting. The Edelman Trust Barometer measures levels of trust in business, media, government, and nongovernmental organizations. In 2017, the barometer revealed a global implosion of trust. In nearly two-thirds of the twenty-eight countries surveyed, the general population did not trust these four social institutions to “do what is right.” We’re rapidly shifting from the Age of Anxiety to the Age of Cynicism.

People trust each other less in the US today than forty years ago. Indeed, the US ranked the lowest in the most recent barometer reading, positioning it as the country with the least-trusting informed public. Decline in trust between Americans is coupled with a reduction in trust in their government, which, according to the Pew Research Center, is at historically low levels.¹⁸ Distrust is growing fastest among younger Americans.

Not surprisingly, trust is actively undermined by fake news and gaslighting. Gaslighting is when someone manipulates the facts so often, it leaves you second-guessing your reality. It causes you to question your own judgment. If gaslighting had a mantra, it would be “repeat a lie often enough and it becomes the truth.” This is especially true when the person gaslighting is in a powerful position. I imagine you can think of a few prominent politicians that fit that description. The more a gaslighter fuels our mistrust of others, the more cynical we become of other people’s motives, and that spirals into pessimism, distrust, and disappointment more generally.

While intelligent skepticism is warranted—after all, one is wise to distrust untrustworthy sources—the double whammy of rising rates of kneejerk cynicism about human nature, combined with apocalyptic forecasts about the future of the planet, leaves many with the helpless feeling that the world is too broken to fix. We may become so overloaded with worries that we disconnect from the suffering of others or lose motivation to lend support, a condition psychologists call compassion fatigue. We detach, withdraw, and disengage. Fear and despair mute our ability to find creative solutions. They cause us to self-isolate. Hopelessness becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Are you feeling eco-anxiety?

If you picked up this book because you are personally experiencing eco-anxiety, or climate grief, or deep worry, I hope this chapter reminds you that you aren’t alone in these feelings. You aren’t crazy. Lots of people feel the same way, and psychologists confirm that it makes sense. According to the Canadian Mental Health Association (CMHA), fear is a reasonable, even healthy response to the enormity and urgency of the planetary crisis.

Dr. Courtney Howard speaks on behalf of the Canadian Association of Physicians for the Environment when she says, “The intersection between the climate emergency and mental and physical health will become one of the world’s major issues.” The CMHA labels the climate emergency as a mental-health emergency. More than a thousand psychologists signed an open letter endorsed by the Association of Clinical Psychologists UK demanding immediate and effective action on climate change in light of the enormous mental-health impact of the climate crisis.¹⁹ Tackling climate anxiety and tackling climate change are inextricably linked.

Your feelings are real. But the point I want to keep driving home is that they are also inflamed by a flow of information in which positive developments are almost entirely missing.

You feel deeply about the environmental crisis because you have a deep love for this magnificent planet. That love is a strong and wonderful quality, and it’s empowering to find a way to excavate it from beneath all your fear and anger and grief and disappointment. When you look through the research at what triggers and sustains personal environmental behaviors, it’s things like compassion rather than shaming. It’s showing empathy when someone does something that they know they shouldn’t do—reminding them that we’re all human and mistakes are just a normal part of life. It’s finding meaningful purpose in the actions. It’s getting support from important relationships.

All of us experience a vast range of emotions, and it is the interplay of these feelings that enables us to move toward the world as we would wish it to be. Acceptance of what is is not the same as fatalism about what comes next. We need to be wary of seeing climate demise as a foregone conclusion. A 2018 study of fifty thousand people from forty-eight countries, reported in the journal Climate Policy, found that people who believe climate change is unstoppable were less likely to engage in personal behaviors or to support policies to address climate change.²⁰ Conversely, according to a 2014 study by leading climate change communication researchers, when someone understands that climate change is a truly dire problem and they have a sense of the effectiveness and feasibility of the ways people are collectively acting to solve it, then they are more likely to take action themselves. Recognizing both the threat and the potential solvability of the climate crisis is paramount to mobilizing action.²¹

Fatalistic forecasts are also being co-opted and used for ulterior motives. Climate doom, according to Michael Mann, distinguished professor of atmospheric science at Penn State, is the new climate war—and it’s just as dangerous as the old one, which focused on the denial of the science. If people aren’t causing climate change, as the deniers purport, then there is no reason to limit the use of fossil fuels or make the societal-level transformations necessary to achieve a zero-carbon economy. Likewise, if it’s already too late to make change or we’re past the point of no return, as those expressing climate doom say, then there’s no point to policy reform or for the largest emitters to change their ways. In a 2019 interview for the Guardian, Mann says that propagating frightening environmental narratives “leads people down a path of despair and hopelessness and finally inaction, which actually leads us to the same place as outright climate-change denialism.”²²

Dire predictions and apocalyptic claims from the past are also being used to undermine the need for urgent climate action now. President Trump did just that when he dismissed environmental activists as fearmongering “prophets of doom” in his 2020 speech to the World Economic Forum: “They predicted an overpopulation crisis in the 1960s, mass starvation in the 70s, and an end of oil in the 1990s,” he said. “These alarmists always demand the same thing: absolute power to dominate, transform, and control every aspect of our lives. We will never let radical socialists destroy our economy, wreck our country or eradicate our liberty.”²³ It’s a clear example of how alarmist rhetoric can backfire and give ammunition to deniers.

WHEN YOU CHOOSE to reject doom and gloom you are caring for your own well-being—and standing up for badly needed changes. As we’ll see in the next chapter, hope is not complacent. It is a powerful political act.