Climate Madness or: How I Learned to Become Radical in the Face of Hopelessness

A number of studies in recent years have focused on the relationship between global climate change and mental health. Particularly concerning is the effect the crisis is having on the world’s youth. As unfortunate as this trend is, it should not be terribly surprising. The deleterious impact humans are having on the environment has been widely discussed for the entirety of my own life, and in the case of anthropogenic climate crisis as the result of atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide (CO2), the jury could not be less out. The confluence of climate and mental health crises strikes close to home for me: As a boy of 10, I became aware of stratospheric ozone depletion and greenhouse gas emissions as potential drivers of global greenhouse effect. I presented this problem in front of my class for a social studies project, undoubtedly conflating and misrepresenting many of the issues, including the adorable suggestion that we simply synthesize ozone in a lab and deploy it in the stratosphere to rebuild the ozone layer. However, while researching the project, I focused closely on The Montreal Protocol of 1987, which had recently been ratified, and seemed to be somewhat effectively addressing the issue of stratospheric ozone depletion by banning the catalytic chlorofluorocarbon (CFC) emissions. This early experience taught me the value of science (then my primary academic interest) informing policy. I have followed the topic of climate change closely ever since, and while I saw significant gains in stratospheric ozone replacement, I soon became obsessed with the rising levels of atmospheric CO2. Why, I wondered, had this issue not been addressed by an international agreement analogous to The Montreal Protocol? As I investigated this discrepancy, I became aware of political forces and ideological viewpoints that at first glance made little sense: As a longtime devotee of science, I could not reconcile the wealth of conclusive data with the near total lack of action at a policy level. I believe that this very cognitive dissonance is directly related to the increase in mental health issues, particularly among our youth.

From this confused and angry vantage, I witnessed the 2000 election, in which George W. Bush, not yet the climate skeptic he would later appear to be, but certainly representative of the interests of the fossil fuel industry, was chosen to become President over perhaps the most outspoken proponent of government action with regard to climate policy, Al Gore. Nearly two years before the 9/11 attacks, I experienced this seemingly stolen election as a horrifying shock, a dark preview of things to come. In an effort to understand a political system to which I was a wide-eyed newcomer, I dug into the works of Howard Zinn, Noam Chomsky, Naomi Klein, Michael Parenti, and others. Naturally,I became increasingly radicalized, discovering that the prevailing political economy was based on centuries-old concepts of imperialism, resource extraction, and socioeconomic domination of the many by the few. These values had, in the course of my lifetime, become wrapped up rather neatly in a neoliberal oligarchy, perpetrated by those in power at the expense of those they ostensibly represented, as well as the planet of which they were meant to be stewards. I joined the anti-war protests following 9/11, and when they failed to prevent the illegal wars in the middle east, I became dejected for a time, immersing myself in the hedonistic pursuits of sex and drugs for much of the remainder of Bush’s rule. Following the 2008 recession, my hope slightly renewed by the election of Barack Obama and the resurgence of the “reasonable” party, I joined in the Occupy Wall Street movement, and began calling again for a rejection of the status quo in favor of science-based climate policy and an egalitarian approach to the distribution of wealth and power. It is hard to quantify how desperately I was let down during this period, but suffice it to say that my faith in humanity was once again shaken hard.

Personally, I likely would have had mental health issues regardless of my interest in the climate crisis, or the exposure to global politics that followed. I have been diagnosed with bipolar disorder, so the fact that I struggled to function normally within society, particularly from adolescence to early adulthood, is not particularly shocking. What is shocking, and should remain so as long as the case persists, is that in the 45 years since the scientific community reached a consensus as to the dire consequences our species faces from further climate inaction, not only do we not have a binding international agreement to halt greenhouse gas emissions, those emissions have increased every single year. If this situation leaves you feeling depressed, anxious, conflicted, or scared shitless, as it does me and countless others around the globe, then perhaps the best possible therapy is to rise up and demand that the changes we needed to make decades ago be made tomorrow, if not today.