#13 Climate Anxiety, (My Attempts at) Healing it with Research, and the Missing Climate Movement
The Origins of My Climate Anxiety
Despite being raised by a devout environmentalist and growing up learning about the various environmental crises that will continue to escalate in my lifetime, climate anxiety only became a perennial feature of my summers beginning in 2022. This was in large part thanks to a political awakening I experienced in 2020 as I was moving away from home for the first time to attend UC Davis.
The summer of 2020 was a whirlwind for the vast majority of us humans. A society put on pause by a pandemic happened to be the perfect substrate for one of the most explosive social movements that I’ve had the privilege of witnessing and participating in. I was bored in this new city, and was therefore very receptive to the deluge of progressive content being presented online in the wake of the Black Lives Matter movement. My tepid liberalism slowly transformed into a more hot blooded left-wing radicalism as I engaged with content about the various movements of people who have wanted to improve society and correct its injustices. My new online community of ‘Leftists’ was helping me navigate a political landscape that seemed to deteriorate further with every passing month. They gave me every theoretical reason to believe that a better future was possible for our species, while at the same time showing me every unfolding tragedy. It made the world feel like a scary place (which it is) and made me feel like there was nothing we could do to change that (which there is).
Two years into my education, the socialist professors I had been promised by conservative media had failed to materialize. I was pleasantly surprised to have Mark Fisher’s Capitalist Realism as required reading in an introductory CRD course: The Community. Another class on Food Systems featured in-depth discussions about the colonial violence that precipitated agricultural industrialization, and agroecological movements in rural agricultural communities (where I first learned about the inspiring Landless Workers Movement in Brazil, my second home). That was the extent of the endorsed radicalism I would encounter. What I encountered more often was a university complicit in the destructive systems that a few pioneering professors sought to demystify. This was never more clear than when I was reading about the Mars candy company using cacao harvested by child slave labor in the same week I visited the UC Davis Mars-funded cacao research facility as part of an Intro to Plant Sciences class. Millions were being spent on genetically “improving” plants that would eventually be harvested by the hands of enslaved children on the opposite end of the planet.
Many of my classes in the Sustainable Agriculture and Food Systems program highlighted the solutions being invented to minimize agriculture’s role in climate change, biodiversity loss, deforestation, pollution, and soil degradation. But the solutions being pitched to us were mild: feeding seaweed to cows, encouraging farmers to plant cover crops, rotational grazing regiments, replacing synthetic fertilizers with compost, and so on. They constituted minor tweaks to the broader agricultural system. I wanted to be hopeful, but my education gave me little hope. In our classes we were often reminded that the environmental crises we face are so dire that a World War II-level mobilization of society would be necessary to reverse course. Yet the more ambitious solutions to this crisis were discussed in the abstract because they are not feasible under current political realities. The summer of 2022 was the first time I experienced the chilling dread of knowing I was living through the coldest summer of the rest of my life.
On Current Political Realities:
When I say current political realities, I am referring to the fact that we are living through the late stages of neoliberal capitalism. Alfredo Saad-Filho (2021) offers a relatively concise summary of the rise and fall of globalized neoliberal capitalism, with special attention paid to the COVID-19 pandemic and its relationship to the dynamics of global neoliberalism. He offers two paths out of the neoliberal phase of capitalism: the rise of new left movements that propel us towards a pro-social and ecological future, or the emergence of modern forms of fascism. Rosa Luxemburg referred to these paths as socialism or barbarism. There is also the third option: mass-extinction.
In short (I’m using that word loosely), Saad-Filho argues that neoliberalism arose in opposition to keynesian social-democracy in the west and soviet-style socialism in the east, and as a solution to the falling rate of profit in the 20th century. Establishing neolieralism involved a process of financialization where social and economic reproduction were subordinated to interest-bearing capital, and led to “the transfer of control over resource allocation from the state to a globally integrated financial system, dominated by institutions based in the US,” a process most people refer to as globalization. The institutionalization of neoliberal democracy “reduced drastically the policy space available to nominally democratic states” and disabled policymaking capacities, leaving political space to be taken up “by matters of culture, religion, nationalism and racism”. The result of this: a state apparatus largely subservient to profit-seeking multinational financial institutions, has pushed millions of people out of the relative comfort once offered by the Keynesian social-democratic welfare state. These economic losers are offered no alternative to the neoliberal state (a phenomenon described by Mark Fisher’s book Capitalist Realism), making them susceptible to the distracting far-right narratives (racism, nativism, antisemitism, great replacement theory, etc) that channel their otherwise righteous anger towards some of capitalism’s greatest victims (e.g. immigrants, the colonized, the formerly enslaved, the poor).
If you want to better understand neoliberalism and where we exist in its historical trajectory, read the whole article. It's important to note that universities, including UC Davis, have largely been captured by the same multinational financial institutions and are now mostly subservient to their interests. Is it not strange that our Chancellor Gary May sits on the board of directors at Leidos, a weapons manufacturing company? More on this later.
Figure 2: A vineyard in Clearlake, sampled as part of our ISVS project
Seeking Catharsis in Research
The summer of 2022 was also when I first started working as a research assistant in the Gaudin Agroecology Lab. Part of me hoped I would find some catharsis by assisting researchers who were reforming the agricultural system for the better, and to a certain extent I did. I was being paid to travel across Northern California to conduct fieldwork in vineyards as part of our lab’s project investigating integrated sheep-vineyard systems. I was spending full days running analyses in the lab which I had only been exposed to for a few hours every week in classes’ lab sections. As someone who came from a working class family, it was incredibly exciting to learn the ins and outs of research. It was a welcomed departure from my last six years of working in the service industry, and for a while it was enough to stave off the dread I felt regarding the deteriorating biosphere.
In the fall of 2022, at the end of our fieldwork season, graduate students and academic researchers in the UC System went on their historic strike. It left me almost completely alone in the lab for a couple months. It also taught me that most of the people in the lab were energized participants in the growing labor movement that seemed to be sweeping the nation. Over the course of the next year as the strike wound down, I became well acquainted with the lovely community of graduate students, post-docs, and student assistants hosted by this lab. To my pleasant surprise, I learned that the political opinions I had developed over the last two years were not uncommon in this space. Over bags of soil and insects preserved in ethanol, I participated in conversations about grand visions of the future, bleak visions of the present, and theories of how changes are made to society. Perhaps it's not a surprise that a lab concerned with agroecology would attract people with such transformative views.
What also became clear in the first half of 2023 was that many of the people in this lab did not feel like their work was as productive and progressive as they had hoped. They wanted to be participating in bigger movements to reform the food system, to make ecology a core principle of how we organize society, and to make the socioeconomic aspects of agroecology a fixture of their work. It was clear that there was a dissonance between the work they wanted to be doing and the work they were doing (see blog post #12 for Kyle Moeller’s deep dive into this lab’s perceptions on agroecology, I won’t be exploring this much further).
The longer I stayed at this lab, the more I could sense the endemic mood. People here seemed to have a cynical (or skeptical, or pessimistic) view of the research we were doing. I had gone into this position hoping it would give me even more reasons to hope, or that it would be offering the political catharsis I sought. But it slowly started to give me even more reasons to despair. It was becoming clear that many of the people doing the research that was supposed to ‘save the world’ did not believe their work would have much of an impact.
Figure 3: A view of the Sawtooth Mountains in Idaho, during a wildfire that burned near my family’s cabin.
Climate Anxiety Peaking
In June of 2023 I was getting ready to graduate. Many of my friends were getting ready to move on from Davis. I had just gone through the first serious breakup of my adult life. Change was in the air and it was making me feel uneasy. I soon after came across a post from a digital social activist I had been following for the past few years. They recommended the medium article “The Busy Worker’s Handbook to the Apocalypse”. I wouldn’t recommend reading it, it makes claims that are both harrowing and difficult to refute. Reading it gave me a panic attack that seemed to last all summer. To summarize the article, here is the first paragraph of its abstract:
Climate change will cause agricultural failure and subsequent collapse of hyperfragile modern civilization, likely within 10–15 years. By 2050 total human population will likely be under 2 billion. Humans, along with most other animals, will go extinct before the end of this century. These impacts are locked in and cannot be averted. Everything in this article is supporting information for this conclusion.
Then, the summer of 2023 began to unfold. It seemed like there was a near weekly reminder of the unpredictable and increasingly catastrophic consequences of climate change, whether it be the record breaking summer temperatures, the Antarctic sea-ice recovery that was 6 standard deviations below average, the record-breaking Canadian wildfire season, a report describing the impending collapse of the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation, or the devastating flooding that hit 10 different countries over the course of 2 weeks killing thousands (especially in Libya). It was only in July of this year that our planet ended the 13-month long streak of record temperatures that began in June of 2023. For months I was crippled by dread.
It became abundantly clear that working in research was not doing much to ameliorate my feelings. I was working on projects that would conclude in a couple years; then they would be published as papers; then those papers might inform scientific consensus, and then policy; then those policies might begin to reform the farming system that was contributing to the changing of our climate. Based on my understanding of the timeline for the work I was doing (according to that dreadful medium article) my impact might materialize around the time agricultural systems of production and exchange begin to collapse globally. Even more gut-wrenching was the realization that if I was having these feelings, surely other people were having them too. I had many questions. Why hadn’t I heard climate change discussed in those terms before? Why weren’t more people panicking? Where was the urgency? How could people talk about having kids or traveling or buying land to build communes with friends or doing anything other than getting to work on transforming society? Where is the climate movement that will prevent extinction?
In the year that has passed since then, I have spent a lot of time in the lab despairing over the lack of answers to those questions (other than the horrific answers offered by the author of that medium article). I started writing this blog post in November of 2023 with the intention of discussing the relationship between Israel’s war on Gaza, climate change, and global neoliberal capitalism, but I rarely took the time to write. Social media had come to dominate my attention with a constant stream of graphic imagery showing murdered palestinian men, women, and children. Sprinkled in were reminders of the ecological disasters occurring globally. Engaging with these issues in this way only made me feel more hopeless. This google doc became scary to look at.
A few months ago I realized that it was no longer sustainable to give all my attention to the social media sites where I had been receiving near constant updates about the horrors. If our time on this planet really is short, it makes sense to not waste any of it by allowing predatory algorithms to enslave my attention. After listening to an interview of Jonathan Haidt (author of The Anxious Generation) I decided to quit social media. After listening to the advice of a couple close Buddhist friends I decided to start meditating. A suite of these and other positive habits finally helped me enjoy life again. I had also spent the last year doing a lot of reflecting in the lab, but it was only recently that I have managed to achieve the relative psychic stability necessary to condense my reflections into coherent text.
The Missing Climate Movement
In my reflection I have come up with some answers to the question: where is the climate movement that will prevent extinction? I do not offer these answers as definitive conclusions, but rather as starting points for further discussion. I refuse to believe that it is too late to save Earth. She is still alive, as are we. But with every day we continue to go about business as usual, the task at hand becomes more difficult.
In short, I believe that the climate movement we need has failed to materialize because of an abundance of alienation and a deficit of hope.
On Alienation:
As I understand it, the Marxist definition of Alienation views it as the result of Capitalism’s core contradiction: workers participate in the social (in shared space, on shared machinery, using shared standards) industrial production of goods and services, while the profits from that production are privatized by an arbitrarily designated owner and accumulated in the form of capital. The thing most of us spend our daily lives doing (laboring physically, emotionally, or intellectually) provides our ruling classes with more wealth, and therefore more power over us. In other words, the existence of capital allows for the product of human labor to be turned into something that hinders human potential rather than enhancing it.
And thus, Alienation is born. Because humans come to understand the world through our interactions with it, we learn to believe that Alienation is the basic model of how our political/social/economic world functions (e.g. ‘Elon Musk makes Tesla cars’ rather than ‘Elon Musk’s hired workers make Tesla cars’). Rather than viewing society as the product of our own labor, we view it as the product of our favorite (or most hated) political figures, or as the result of random natural/social processes, or as the creation of God. When experiencing alienation, we rarely view society as something we actively help shape.
In this version of the world, we helplessly participate in research that further justifies the systems we seek to reform. We have to take money from multinational agribusinesses and the neoliberal government institutions that represent their interests before ours because that is where most of the grant funding exists. As a result, we are coerced to focus our research on topics that are acceptable to those dominant forces (part of why most climate researchers describe unrealistically tame versions of the climate change problem). We get exhausted by our labor and then further depleted by the emotional toll of doing work that feels more harmful than helpful, more reinforcing than revolutionary. The consequences of swimming upstream are less degrees earned and less jobs funded. It leaves us feeling powerless over our own lives, and the issues we thought we were solving. It gives us little time to take care of ourselves, let alone the planet as a whole.
Every successful social movement has motivated its participants by giving them a narrative that competes and eventually usurps the worldview of alienation. The best movements provide people with strong supportive communities that are locally accessible, with hopeful visions of the future, and with the political consciousness necessary to be a knowing participant in history. It is these kinds of movements that are able to overwhelm alienation, by giving people a space where they can reassert their role in shaping society.
If the missing climate movement is going to be powerful and sustained, it will have to do those things to overcome the alienation that paralyzes so many of us. It will have to be a place where people feel like they are being reconnected with their communities. It will have to be a place where people learn with each other, and become more conscious of their role in society and history. It will have to be a place where people are taken care of with food, shelter, and other necessities, especially as climate change begins to displace us. It will have to be a place where we learn to survive with each other, rather than on our own.
On Hope:
Hope can be simply defined as a motivating expectation. Hope is what dopamine makes us feel in regards to the completion of evolutionarily advantageous tasks (e.g. eating, reproducing, socializing, etc.). Hope is most people’s reason for being. We hope to succeed professionally, romantically, interpersonally, intellectually, athletically, etc. Hope can also be a faith-based feeling. We hope for outcomes that we can’t necessarily rely on, and yet the knowledge of their possibility can encourage us to embark on adventures of varying uncertainty. Hope is often a prerequisite for action and subsequent achievement.
Without hope, there is very little we will go out of our way to do. The hopeless things we do, often out of obligation, drain us of our precious energy. Spending our time on hopeless tasks is often distracting us from doing the things that would actually fulfill us. Without practice at being faithful (i.e. believing in things because we feel they should be true, rather than because of what we know is true) it becomes difficult to be hopeful. Scientists seem especially bad at being hopeful (when I’ve confided in other scientists about my climate anxiety, I’ve often been told to seek solace in the fact that our species represents a tiny blip in the geological timescale). Who can blame us when we are discouraged from articulating what we believe, instead focusing on maintaining objectivity. When our worldview is solely based in empirically understanding society in ways allowed by hegemonic powers, the evidence we see will point us down a path of despair.
I’m not an expert on hope in any sense. But I have worked hard over the last year to cultivate hope in the face of the almost certain extinction of our species. One of my greatest teachers on the topic of hope is my mother. Despite the fact that she’s a devout evangelical Christian, and I am not, I continue to learn so much from her. She is one of the most humble and generous people I’ve ever known. She doesn’t care much for politics, but her rather difficult upbringing in rural Brazil has endowed her with an intrinsic class consciousness that's hard to find in the US. Since converting to Christianity in her late teens, she has served others in ways that would truly make Jesus proud. I’ve come to learn that her core motivation has always been hope.
Figure 4: Some of the lettuce crop planted on Macarrão’s farm in rural Taubate
In March of this year, my mother and I traveled home to São Paulo to visit my Mom’s side of the family for the first time since the pandemic started. It was one of the most profound visits to my other home I’ve ever had. Usually I find profundity in the jungles I hike through, although it feels like more of them become cow pastures every time I visit.
This time, I was far more moved by the conversations I had with some of my mothers religious mentors and peers. A pastor she affectionately referred to as Macaroni (Macarrão) was living on a ranch of a few acres with his wife, some workers, and a dozen previously homeless people he was putting through college. My mom had told me many stories about him. Like when she met him in the 90’s, and he was living in the big city of São Paulo. In between weekend sermons, he spent his days clothing and feeding people who lived on the streets. He would invite people to sleep in his apartment as long as they quit any drugs they were using. He only got robbed a handful of times. When I met him, he was living on his farm. He was still helping homeless people get sober and off the streets, but now he was earning enough money to pay for their living expenses and college tuition. His farm had the contents of an entire produce aisle in production, and even had some livestock on the property. They got all their money from crop sales at church services and donations. Being there was like peering into the imagination of a graduate student in the ecology program.
While we were there, he and my mother talked at length about their lives: what they had been up to since the last time they met, the incredible feats of compassion that they used to pull off together, and what kept them going. He talked about the path he had taken since leaving the city for the countryside. She talked about her divorce, leaving the church she had worked at for almost two decades, and her new job at a non-profit that helped victims of human trafficking escape their dangerous situations. Here were two people who had spent their entire lives around people in some of the worst situations imaginable. They had both gone through periods of difficulty I couldn’t fathom. Yet, neither of them had ever learned to be hopeless or cynical. It was their faith in God and in the inevitability of good in the world that kept them going.
It was a sobering lesson. These two adults did not have the same kind of political consciousness I thought I needed, but they had managed to sacrifice so much of themselves to alleviate human suffering. I had spent most of my adult life cultivating the most correct opinions possible; I had learned how to be critical of almost every facet of society; I had developed ways to articulate how much better things could be; but I had neglected to learn how to inspire hope in other people, let alone myself. My lack of hope had paralyzed me, preventing me from doing anything unprecedented in service of the natural world I love so much and the suffering people in it.
I don’t think it would be fair to say we have hope of solving climate change, and those of us who manage to ride it out will bear witness to unparalleled levels of destruction and suffering. But each step of my ideological journey has given me a new and different perspective on where I can find hope as my life goes on and crises intensify. It has been interesting to notice that every worldview that has resonated with me (e.g. Marxism, Ecology, Buddhism) has the same fundamental basis: interconnectedness, or, the fact that everything that exists can only exist in relationship with everything else.
Figure 5: A Bewildered Hillary Clinton in an East Harlem apartment.
In Marxism, interconnectedness is most evident in the theory of dialectical materialism: that all social, political, and economic phenomena arise through contradictions between different classes of people with different material interests. Contradictions in this context are relationships where two forces (e.g. property owners vs workers) oppose each other, leading to mutual development. Engaging with dialectical materialism has helped me comprehend the complex political landscape we live in, and has allowed for a deeper understanding of politics beyond the flowery language of neoliberal politicians who have more contempt for their working class constituents than they have for their wealthy conservative counterparts (see Figure 5). It has helped me understand the social forces that allow for revolutionary change to occur and I’ve found hope in knowing that change is not linear, that it happens in bursts when the conditions are right. As V. I. Lenin is often misquoted as saying, “there are decades where nothing happens, and weeks where decades happen.”
In Ecology, interconnectedness is the name of the game. I might roughly summarize ecology as the study of how interconnected organisms create the emergent properties that define ecosystems. If you’re reading this blog, you’re likely well versed in the field of ecology, probably more-so than I am, so I won’t dwell on this too long. I will say that being in nature has become a borderline spiritual experience since learning more about the mechanisms through which ecosystems self regulate. The impressive resilience of living things gives me hope that even if humans don’t reverse course, even if we change the ecosystems on this planet so drastically that we no longer have a place in them, our living planet will get on just fine without us. As long as we’re around, we will have the opportunity to do the hard work of setting our planet up for a quicker recovery, even if our species will not be around to enjoy the planet once the climate has restabilized. Humans were never a virus to our planet, we were one of the most interesting tools it used in pursuit of global homeostasis. Our collective consciousness just happened to develop the disorder that is capitalism.
In Buddhism, interconnectedness is described in the key doctrine of ‘Pratītyasamutpāda’, or dependent co-arising. I’m new to this religion, and for a while I avoided exploring it out of fear of becoming yet another earthy chaco-wearing white person who self identifies as a Buddhist. But a couple months ago, I must have been in the right headspace when a dear friend recommended Joanna Macy’s book World as Lover, World as Self: Courage for Global Justice and Ecological Renewal. In it she blends her knowledge of buddhism, ecology, and politics to encourage readers as they cultivate a deeper relationship with the Earth in pursuit of healing it. She describes the mission of every activist as guiding people towards the Great Turning of society towards an ecological organizing principle. I’m still working my way through it, but so far it has addressed almost every concern I’ve had in dealing with the climate anxiety that has plagued my adult life. It has helped me begin to sort out my priorities, and if you’ve experienced any of the concerns I have, it could do the same for you. Before I conclude this long-winded blog, I’d like to share an excerpt from the book:
“We have received an inestimable gift. To be alive in this beautiful, self-organizing universe–to participate in the dance of life with senses to perceive it, lungs that breathe it, organs that draw nourishment from it–is a wonder beyond words. And it is, moreover, an extraordinary privilege to be accorded a human life, with self-reflexive consciousness that brings awareness of our own actions and the ability to make choices. It lets us choose to take part in the healing of our world.”
Joanna Macy
In conclusion, we have a seemingly insurmountable task ahead of us with no certainty of success. Addressing it will require a revolution in how we live, what we prioritize, and how we connect with each other. We will have to stop getting lost in the daily tasks that distract us from our mission and become serious about participating in new ways of living. We will have to use whatever positions of power we can access in service of this new way of life. We will have to sacrifice some of life’s pleasures that cannot be sustainably provisioned to all, such as meat and lawns and excessive fossil-fuel powered travel. We will have to develop radical forms of compassion for each other, especially those of us who fear the new way of life and seek comfort in reactionary conservatism. We will have to learn how to welcome all kinds of people into our movement with open hearts and open arms. Billionaires are building bunkers, what will we build?
Recommended Reads (that can be shared with non-scientists)
For hope:
World as Lover, World as Self by Joanna Macy
Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer
Becoming Earth by Ferris Jabr
Entangled Life by Merlin Sheldrake
For understanding:
Caliban and the Witch by Silvia Federici
How Europe Underdeveloped Africa by Walter Rodney
Washington Bullets by Vishay Prashad
State and Revolution by V. I. Lenin
Works Cited
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Filmer, A. (2024, May 31). Mars extends its partnership with UC Davis and city of davis for a new research program on Cacao. Department of Plant Sciences. https://www.plantsciences.ucdavis.edu/news/mars-extends-its-partnership-uc-davis-and-city-davis-new-research-program-cacao
Gaudin, A. (2023, September 26). #12 exploring agroecology through ethnography: A 10-week inquiry into the perceptions of Agroecology and positionality on the Gaudin Lab Team. Gaudin Lab. https://gaudin.ucdavis.edu/news/12-exploring-agroecology-through-ethnography-10-week-inquiry-perceptions-agroecology-and
Macy, J., & Kaza, S. (2021). World as lover, world as self: Courage for global justice and planetary awakening. Parallax Press.
Mintz, B. (n.d.). The American Journal of Economics of Sociology, 80(1), 79–112. https://doi.org/10.1111/ajes.12370
Patta, D., Carter, S., Guzman, J., & Breen, K. (n.d.). Candy company Mars uses cocoa harvested by kids as young as 5 in Ghana: CBS News Investigation. CBS News. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/children-harvesting-cocoa-used-by-major-corporations-ghana/
Saad-Filho, A. (2020). Endgame: From crisis in neoliberalism to crises of Neoliberalism. Human Geography, 14(1), 133–137. https://doi.org/10.1177/1942778620962026
Wang, S., & Smith, A. (2020, September 23). Bold and fair climate mobilization looks different from WWII. The Breakthrough Institute. https://thebreakthrough.org/issues/energy/ww2-climate-mobilization