I just can’t read the news.

Everywhere there seems to be some new report about some other environmental disaster.

The latest is the fires burning the Amazonian rainforests.

Before it was the Greenland ice sheet melting at an unprecedented rate.

Then let us not forget this summer’s record heat wave in Europe.

I have only listed three recent news reports. There are many, many more.

There are names for what I feel after reading these reports:

Climate grief

Eco-anxiety

The feelings I experience now about the environment are comparable to the ones I had as a teenager in the 1970s. Like how my throat felt squeezed shut after my school held disaster drills where we hid under our desks or curled up in the hallways with our arms over our heads so we could survive a nuclear bomb or a tornado. Like how I could not sleep for dread after reading science fiction books like Fail Safe about the world after an imaginary nuclear holocaust caused by the USA and the USSR.

Right now it seems pretty clear that we are headed to a collapse of civilization as we know it because of the current climate crisis. And that is the best case scenario.

The worst case scenario is that we actually destroy the world and cause a sixth extinction. This is the title of Elizabeth Kolbert’s 2014 non-fiction book describing the rapidly accelerating die-off of many species of flora fauna.

Look at what is happening right now around us.

The pendulum is swinging.

Nothing we can do can really stop the pendulum or change the course of the arc. At least not in the short term. We are going to have to suffer the effects for decades (if suffering is an option) even if we start making the necessary changes NOW.

Climate grief.

Yeah.

Climate despair.

Doctors say you have to combat that climate despair by taking small active steps to feel like you are working to help heal the world. Here is a typical article — from 2017! Or this one from 2018 that talks about developing resilience. Or this one from 2019 which suggests you can’t change governments or big corporations, so change your own habits.

I call that nonsensical drivel — trying to calm the single individual when we all should be screaming at the top of our lungs.