A few weeks ago, I started watching the eight-part series Our Planet with my daughter. I thought it would be a good alternative to cartoons. “Ahh, a nature documentary,” I thought. “She gets to watch TV. I get to feel like she’s learning something. Win-win.”
I was so wrong. The show delivers spectacular footage and animal antics, sure, but the content is hard to stomach. Even the soothing sound of David Attenborough’s voice can’t soften the main message: climate change is profoundly affecting all life on this planet and, unless we do something fast, we’re all screwed.
How do you explain this to a three-year-old? Mostly I don’t.
When a polar bear killed a baby seal, we both cried. She was crying for the seal. I was crying for the seal too, but also for the polar bear and for us. I was crying for everything.
I don’t need a nature documentary to tell me that it’s time to panic. I think about climate change almost constantly. Even when I’m not consciously thinking about it, I still experience low-level dread. It’s hard to imagine how the news could be worse, yet somehow it always is. On Monday, the United Nations released findings from its first report on biodiversity. Because of human activities, as many as a million species face extinction. Their loss would be a tragedy, but also a crisis for humanity.
In a Slate essay published this week, Susan Matthews calls Our Planet “unwatchable” because it makes viewers “profoundly uncomfortable.” And while I’ve managed to watch three episodes, I can’t disagree. One particularly grisly scene shows walruses, desperate for somewhere to rest as the sea ice disappears, humping their massive bodies up rocky cliffs in Russia and then plummeting to their deaths when they try to return to the sea. The footage made me more than “profoundly uncomfortable.” It made me feel sick, and angry, and utterly helpless.
That last feeling is problematic. The goal of Our Planet is to inspire action. But who should act and how? Can my Energy Star refrigerator give the walruses back their sea ice? Will forgoing meat every Monday prevent a mass extinction?
Of course not. Individual actions aren’t enough. The sweeping solutions we need — new legislation and innovative technologies — are not solutions I can provide.
Doomsayer David Wallace Wells agrees. “… the effects of individual lifestyle choices are ultimately trivial compared with what politics can achieve,” he writes. “Buying an electric car is a drop in the bucket compared with raising fuel-efficiency standards sharply.”
Politics, he continues, offers “an exit from the personal, emotional burden of climate change and from what can feel like hypocrisy about living in the world as it is and simultaneously worrying about its future. That is the purpose of politics: that we can be and do better together than we might manage as individuals.”
In some ways, this feels like a cop out. If I’m talking the talk, shouldn’t I be walking the walk? But maybe I need an out. If I can set aside the crushing guilt of my Western lifestyle and accept my carbon footprint, maybe I can let go of the idea that I have to do everything — or nothing. I just might be able to find a way to cross the vast chasm between terror and action.
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Image courtesy of Curt Carnemark / World Bank via Flickr
As with most things, knowledge reduces anxiety and increases one’s ability to make important decisions and changes. A good place to gain knowledge is here: https://lithub.com/every-day-is-earth-day-365-books-to-start-your-climate-change-library/?single=true
I don’t feel undereducated. Maybe that’s the problem. In this case, ignorance might very well be bliss.
Cassandra, I read all your work. Obviously, you are highly educated and highly intelligent. Usually, I too am blissful in my ignorance. With climate change, however, bliss is a luxury. Something that comes long after survival-which may not occur if we all stay ignorant.
As much as would like to run and hide I think we are beyond the luxury of having an option. An option of pretending we don’t want to be involved. Are we going to sit back and task our children with the burden of leading the world towards a safe, carbon neutral future? Are we going to watch the world’s billionaires build their doomsday shelters? I am beginning to think that acting like a blinded deer is exactly what the fuel lobby and certain politicians want us to do.
I am exhausted, unwell, but I am also angry and I am cursed with the knowledge that we must act. I am also a mother and a grandmother and I have no place to hide. I am not ready to give up. Actually, it’s not complicated and we don’t need to watch polar bears in despair to figure out what to do. Science has told us what to do for 30+ years. Keep fossil fuels in the ground, allow nature to repair her wounds, get involved. Two links:
https://youtu.be/rbzhc1BlvvI ( a talk by British philosophy reader Dr Rupert Read on Extinction Rebellion)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J9mjbzqqA_M (natural climate solutions, an initiative by British journalist George Monbiot)
Having ranted like this, of course I agree that we all need a break from time to time.
David Attenborough has been gently trying to prod people into action on climate change for decades, I guess he got fed up of waiting for action, so his latest offerings have been a good deal more explicit. See ‘Climate Change: The Facts’ for his most explicit to date, I’ve yet to watch it though, have to psych myself up first…
The chasm between terror and action is a hell of a thing to cross, but the crossing gets easier with practice, and there are folks out there to help us cross. Three I’ve found helpful:
Hope in the Dark by Rebecca Solnit – particularly good if what you need is a call to action
Despair, and it’s Cure by Emily Nagoski (https://medium.com/@enagoski/despair-and-its-cure-1befc3ae8717) for when my body can’t begin to shake itself loose
The Miraculous Hope of Climate Realists by Erika Spanger-Siegfried (https://blog.ucsusa.org/erika-spanger-siegfried/the-miraculous-hope-of-climate-realists) for the catharsis of grief and the will to keep working anyways.
On the other side of the bridge, I work with others to make political change reality. For me that’s Citizen’s Climate Lobby, for you that might be a different group. A group helps, a lot, to keep you on the action side of the chasm and to get you back over when you’re not. But I hope you make it over the bridge, we have a lot to get done over here, and it’s easier if you’re working with others.