In satellite imagery, California looked as though it had been cut open. The small fires were puncture wounds; the larger ones, deep gashes. From each, a dense plume spilled across the landscape, like something leaking from the earth. In my Sacramento backyard, it was impossible to tell where the smoke was coming from or where it was going: the whole thing faded into a sunless, washed-out grey. On the worst days, visible flecks of ash filtered through the air, settling on rooftops and windshields.

Autumn usually marks the beginning of wildfire season in California. This year it came earlier and bigger. In mid-August, a lightning storm sparked hundreds of fires in dozens of counties. Over the ensuing weeks, they merged into several record-breaking megafires.

Orange skies, red moon, raw throat, Excedrin. Watch the air purifier’s LED flip from purple (bad) to red (worse).

From late August to mid-September, the smoke was constant. Panic quickly faded, replaced by a low, constant hum of dread. Orange skies, red moon, raw throat, Excedrin. Patch the gaps in the windowsill with painter’s tape. Refresh AirNow.gov again. Watch the air purifier’s LED flip from purple (bad) to red (worse). Remind my mom in Oakland to make sure her air filter is HEPA-certified. Search Zillow for condos in Minneapolis.

Like most Californians, my home has not been threatened by flames. But if every fire is a natural disaster, each releases into the atmosphere another, more subtle disaster, one that diffuses, settles and lingers.

Clean air is a gaseous soup composed primarily of oxygen, nitrogen, carbon dioxide, and water vapor. Wildfire adds to this mixture such unsavory ingredients as carbon monoxide, ozone, and microscopic flotsam termed “particulate matter,” all of which can make it harder to breathe. Measurements of these and other pollutants are used to calculate the Air Quality Index (AQI), a rating of 0 to 500. An AQI above 100 indicates possible health effects for sensitive groups; at 150, air is considered unhealthy for the general public.

On September 8, Sacramento recorded an AQI of 484. In some places, air pollution was so intense that measurements exceeded the usual top end of the index, clocking in above 700. Such was the poisoned soup that poured into millions of nostrils, down bronchial tubes, in and around alveoli.

There aren’t many studies exploring the health effects of repeated, severe wildfire smoke exposure. Partially because, until recently, not many people had experienced repeated, severe wildfire smoke exposure. It is clear that wildfire smoke, like other kinds of air pollution, exacerbates asthma and other respiratory diseases. Researchers from the University of Montana found that air pollution from the 2017 wildfire season more than doubled the state’s influenza cases the following winter. The authors suggest that — as has been shown in mice — smoke exposure impairs the immune system’s ability to fight infection. They and other researchers anticipate that people exposed to smoke may also be more easily infected with Covid-19, and more likely to die from it.

Researchers anticipate people exposed to smoke may be more easily infected with Covid-19, and more likely to die from it.

Other studies have linked smoke exposure to a variety of health effects, including premature birth, heart attacks, and overall rates of death. But according to Dr. Colleen Reid, a University of Colorado environmental epidemiologist, most of the research has only examined the effects of a single period of smoke exposure. “I think we’re missing the fact that there are these repeated wildfires over time,” she said.

Since the onset of the fire season, Reid has received near-constant inquiries from media outlets and concerned citizens about how to stay safe. The compounding health demands of the pandemic (stay isolated), heat waves (stay cool) and smoke (stay inside) have made it hard to give advice people want to hear.

I, like many other Californians, spent weeks sandwiched between my window air-conditioning unit and air purifier. But that’s not feasible for thousands of unhoused people, hundreds of thousands of agricultural workers, and millions of families who simply cannot afford a $200 air purifier. Even for those who can, “telling people to shelter in place for long periods of time has mental health implications,” said Reid. She has experienced those implications firsthand, as smoke from Colorado fires kept her family in Boulder indoors for days on end.

“When you have a few days in a row where you can’t get outside and exercise because the air pollution is so bad — or when you have a few days in a row where I’m telling my children that we’re going to just stay inside and play — it’s hard,” she said. “If that becomes normal, that becomes really hard to think about.”

And there is every indication that yearly megafires and smoke warnings will become normal. As University of Illinois atmospheric scientist Dr. Cristi Proistosescu wrote in probably the pithiest and most unsettling climate tweet of September: “Don’t think of it as the warmest month of August in California in the last century. Think of it as one of the coolest months of August in California in the next century.” At a recent conference, Reid says a speaker paraphrased the tweet thus: “Don’t think of 2020 as the worst fire season yet, but as the best of what’s to come.”

While that may be true in spirit, fire ecologist Dr. Allie Weill told me, it probably isn’t literally accurate. The lightning storm that ignited record-setting fires in August is still considered a rare event, one that made 2020 unusually destructive. “Every year is different, and that’s going to continue to be true,” Weill said. But in general, California fires are becoming larger and more destructive. Explaining why isn’t easy. There are “a lot of different reasons that combine into an almost a perfect storm,” she said.

First is what she calls “the story everyone knows”: fire suppression. For thousands of years, Indigenous peoples have used small, controlled burns to promote the growth of important plants and limit the amount of dried brush that could fuel larger fires. But starting in the early 20th century, US forest managers forbade the practice and attempted to completely eradicate wildfire from the western states. More recently, ecologists have come to see fire as an integral part of California’s landscape, even partnering with tribes to bring intentional burns back to the forest. But fire suppression has left forests in the Sierra Nevada dense and fuel-laden, making wildfires larger and more destructive.

Don’t think of 2020 as the worst fire season yet, but as the best of what’s to come.

The 2013 Rim Fire — at the time the third-largest fire in the state’s history — was touted by some ecologists as a consequence of decades of forest mismanagement. Two years after the fire, I picked up a summer job mapping the trees left in its wake. Though it had burned over 100,000 hectares of Sierra Nevada forest, it hadn’t done so evenly: some stands were transformed into meadows dotted with charcoal obelisks, while others seemed nearly untouched.

It was in one of these more intact pieces of forest, kilometers into the backcountry and hours away from cell service, that I smelled smoke. Under the canopy, there was no telling how far it had travelled. But the scar of the Rim Fire, my boss assured me, was the safest place to be. The new flames, even if they were close, would flow toward more overgrown forest, away from us. She was right, although I never got used to the smell of burning pines.

The complex history of fuel buildup and fire suppression is presumably what President Trump was trying to invoke with his 2018 remarks about the virtues of forest-raking. But that history does not apply to all of California. Some of the state’s deadliest fires occur not in any kind of forest, but in the shrubby chaparral of Southern California and the grasslands of wine country.

In these environments, Weill says an oft-neglected factor is the continued intrusion of humans into lands that were formerly wild. In the past 30 years, California’s population has grown by nearly 10 million people. While cities have become denser, development has also sprawled into sparsely populated foothills and valleys. More development means more power lines, more cigarettes, more gender reveal explosions. In many of these areas, dry grass and shrubs can fuel even a stray spark into a megafire.

Weill, like me, lives in Sacramento, an urban center surrounded by miles of irrigated farmland. Exposed as we are to smoke, we’re pretty sheltered from actual flames. “It feels like a fire is very close when there’s smoke,” she admitted. “Especially when there’s ash dropping from the sky.” But in September, when she learned that some of her nearby friends had bags packed, she reassured them their chances of being evacuated were slim. “I don’t know where you would go that’s safer,” she said.

She may have meant that as a comfort, but I paraphrase it in my head — there’s nowhere safer for you to go — and it’s chilling.

It’s also somewhat true. Friends of mine, after fleeing north in September, were quickly chased out by Oregon’s own record-setting fires. Throughout their road trip through Montana and Idaho, smoke followed.

Although changes to fire patterns have been most obvious in California, they’re occurring all across western North America. As climate change creates hotter, drier conditions, fires in all ecosystems are growing larger and more destructive. Even if ideal forest management practices reduced fuel levels in forests, even if centralized development stemmed urban sprawl into wildlands, climate change would still cause more extreme fires. Things would still be on track to get worse as global temperatures continue to rise.

What we’re living right now is the future I was told about 20 years ago. I thought it was maybe 50 years out, but really it’s already happening.

Colorado’s Reid, who has studied fire for decades, knew climate change would produce massive megafires. She didn’t anticipate that it would happen so soon.

“I feel like what we’re living right now is the future I was told about 20 years ago. I thought it was maybe 50 years out, but really it’s already happening,” she said. “To think it’s on track to continue to get worse is really depressing.”

When I ask ecologist Weill if she plans to stay in California, she registers somewhere between resigned and sanguine. “We have our fires, but other places are having floods and hurricanes and whatever else,” she said. “There are few places that aren’t going to have issues.”

I too have no immediate plans to relocate. Periodic fantasies of moving to the Upper Peninsula of Michigan aside, my life is firmly rooted in California. I’m not sure how much more smoke will fill the sky before I reconsider.

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A new UN report on climate change is out, prompting yet another wave of ritualized hand-wringing from mainstream news outlets. A much-mocked tweet from CNN urged readers concerned about our swift descent into global disaster to eat less meat and take the bus. This advice approaches self-parody, given that 100 companies contribute 71% of the world’s emissions, and the report itself says its goals will not be met without sweeping national and international changes to policy and development.

CNN on Twitter

Scared by that new report on climate change? Here's what you can do to help: * Eat less meat (about 30%) * Swap your car or plane ride for a bus or train * Use a smart thermostat in your home, and upgrade to more efficient appliances More: https://t.co/m6JnG7mUsx

It’s a familiar trap for climate writing. Pop science books regularly lay out chapter after painstaking chapter showing how sea level rise (or mass extinction, or marine pollution) is a product of a systemic corporate and governmental malpractice, a fundamental flaw in the fabric of our political and economic system, only to muster up an rose-tinted epilogue urging the reader to call their Senator and shop with reusable bags. It feels like being lied to, or worse, like the author is lying to themselves, pushing hope as a sedative and getting high on their own supply.

Roy Scranton’s 2015 book Learning to Die in the Anthropocene is a notable exception. Scranton does not perform the elaborate dance of hemming and hawing that others have called scientific reticence, a tendency to downplay the empirically-supported realities of our situation for fear of being seen as overly political or hyperbolic. Indeed, he makes a convincing argument that climate science is inseparable from politics, and the times we live in so dire as to be immune to hyperbole. Nor does he offer suggestions for averting our path to destruction. Rather than breathlessly pursuing technological interventions or political action, he argues, we would be better served by coming to terms with the impending collapse of civilization. He is not the first to make this argument (the green anarchist tract Desert has enjoyed a cult following since 2011), but he is among the first to present it for a general audience.

Scranton’s most recent book, We’re Doomed, Now What?, has a wider scope than its predecessor, including essays on war, police brutality, and the relative merits of public discourse. It’s chief concern, though, lies with the titular question: if climate change is unstoppable (and it is), how do we live with ourselves and each other?

One version of his answer lies in the book’s final essay, “Raising My Child in a Doomed World,” a version of which ran in the New York Times. The piece’s vision of a future promising “a global catastrophe whose full implications any reasonable person must turn away from in horror” raised ire from conservatives, so much so that The National Review published a limp attempt at a take-down impressive in, if nothing else, its ability to articulate a defense of the status quo with a mouth full of sand. But Scranton has equal ammunition for liberals who locate the solution to climate change in individual actions. In response to a recent paper claiming that staying childless is the biggest way to cut your carbon footprint, Scranton notes,

“If you really want to save the planet, you should die.”

In April of this year, a man named David Buckel woke up early. He walked a short distance away from his Brooklyn home to Prospect Park and texted a coworker, explaining that he would not be coming into work. He emailed a letter to news outlets and left a copy neatly ziplocked and taped to the inside of a nearby trashcan, adding a note for the police: “Sorry for the mess.” Then he doused himself in gasoline and set himself on fire.

Interestingly, Buckel’s self-immolation is mentioned in the NYT version of “Raising My Daughter In a Doomed World,” but is absent from the book’s version, suggesting that the suicide took place after Scranton’s sardonic advice was initially written, but before it was ever published.

But Buckel’s actions did not, as Scranton writes, take “the logic of personal choice to its ultimate end.” Buckel did not kill himself in an attempt to cleanse the world of his personal emissions. (Had that been his goal, I imagine there are many less carbon-intensive forms of self-annihilation.) His intent was to shock the country into making collective, large-scale change. His letter ends, “Here is a hope that giving a life might bring some attention to the need for expanded actions, and help others give a voice to our home, and Earth is heard. ”

It was about as hopeful an act as any suicide can claim to be.

A gay man and former civil rights attorney, Buckel fought for LGBT rights at a time when Don’t Ask Don’t Tell and civil unions were the progressive platform, and trans people were the subject only of punchlines and hate crimes. In the mid-nineties, stonewalled by homophobic adoption agencies, he and his partner decided to jointly raise a daughter with a lesbian couple.

In 2008, increasingly preoccupied with environmental concerns, he left law to oversee an urban composting program in Brooklyn. He walked over a mile each day to the composting site, where he worked with volunteers to turn over massive piles of produce guts with shovels, laboriously picking out rubber bands and fruit stickers.

Even these efforts must have seemed insufficient; as he wrote in his letter, “Many who drive their own lives to help others often realize that they do not change what causes the need for their help.”

It is easy to lionize Buckel for paying the ultimate sacrifice. Having decided that making individual choices to live in an environmentally ethical way made no appreciable difference, he decided to shock an entire country into collective change. And yet in the resulting articles and obituaries, unspoken is the deep, bitter irony: his death made no difference either. The American public were not shocked; they were barely titillated, if they paid attention at all. The ultimate sacrifice, and all it left in its wake were a few thousand words and a wounded family.

Scranton justifies his continued existence thusly: “I’m committed to life in this world, the world I live in, in all its stupidity and suffering, because this world is the one everyone else lives in too: my colleagues and students, my friends and family, my partner and daughter.”

I can’t escape the thought that Buckel’s daughter and I are almost the same age.

Buckel, as suggested by his manner of suicide, was a Buddhist, as is Scranton. In fact, judging by the eight of eleven attendees to my local temple’s Climate Sangha who had read Learning to Die in the Anthropocene (two had it in their bags), it’s probable that the former was familiar with the latter’s work. A Buddhist ethos is woven into Learning to Die, but in We’re Doomed, its influence becomes explicit. In “The Dharma of Failure,” Scranton wrestles with the conflict between trying to live an ethical life, and knowing that such efforts are doomed to fail. The essay ends thusly:

“[T]he only free choice we can make is to work for the freedom of sentient beings. Failure may be inevitable, but recognizing that is the first step in becoming free.”

Compare this to a recent tweet from the author:

Roy Scranton on Twitter

You think your intransigent self-righteousness is going to save even one life? You think your feelings will change physics, politics, history? You think this story's about what YOU do? This is childish and arrogant behavior that will only increase suffering. Go meditate.

It’s arguably stupid of me to put stock in a post to a site made exclusively for bad posts. But I was shaken by it, wondering if his book was lying to itself, angling its analysis as to appear more palatable. Pushing (forgive me) diet hope.

A cynic might say that David Buckel’s mistake was not in setting himself on fire, but for being considerate enough to do it early in the morning, out of public view. Thích Quảng Đức’s self-immolation, after all, occurred in a busy intersection, in full view of journalists; if not for Malcolm Browne’s iconic photo and numerous eye-witness accounts, a monk’s suicide would hardly have warranted mention in the international media. What the monks harnessed, and Buckel did not, was the power of narratives; it’s not the act that matters, but the story that can be told about it.

Scranton is a big believer in narratives. The penultimate chapter of Learning to Die is not about policy or science but about stories, the power of the narratives and meta-narratives to shape our understanding of ourselves and our world. Tracing the history of storytelling back through the Iliad, The Epic of Gilgamesh, and the earliest sparks of civilization, Scranton writes:

We live in and orient our existence through conceptual and narrative structures that rationalize our impulses, pattern our habits, and connect our behaviors to collective rhythms.

Invoking the common narrative of “continuing the fight” against climate change is one of the things that incenses Scranton the most.

Roy Scranton on Twitter

I increasingly find myself more appalled by the scientists, writers, and activists who know how serious climate change is yet continue to insist that we must continue to hope and pray and "fight" for solutions than I am by everyone ignoring the problem.

Edgelord tendencies aside, he has a point. It is necessary to critically examine what we are fighting, what we hope to gain, and what we have already lost, rather than simply echoing the rally cry and marching self-righteously towards nowhere in particular.

And it’s easy to see why Scranton is so opposed to fighting; it is, in many ways, the opposite of learning to die. But there are two kinds of dying one can do. One is accepting, intellectually and spiritually, that the decaying empire in which we live has trapped the foot of the world beneath a cosmic domino that will in a matter of centuries destroy, if not everything on Earth, then most things. The other kind of dying is dying — being poisoned, drowned, starved, bombed. Fighting the first kind of death produces the feel-good denialism of straw bans and carbon credits. Fighting the second kind of death is an ethical imperative.

Acceptance of suffering is a powerful thing. It is less powerful when someone else is doing the vast majority of the suffering. We’re doomed, yes — but we’re not all doomed in the same ways, or to the same extent. To be sure, no one is truly safe; I could, along with the greater Central Valley, be annihilated by a thousand year flood. Notre Dame could be leveled by blizzard- fed tornadoes. But both Scranton and I could afford a plane ticket to avoid an inbound hurricane. We do not live on islands being swallowed by the sea. Both of us will probably be okay, at least in the short term. Many people, within our own communities and around the globe, cannot say the same. To accept these harms and simply meditate away any resulting anxiety is a luxury few are afforded.

In the end, it’s Scranton himself who provides his own best critique, writing in “The Idea of Order I Can’t Breathe”:

“I admire the desecrators and cynics in history because they strike at idols of dogma and irrationality, because they strive to pierce through to reason and truth, because so often they stand alone and embattled against institutions, mobs, and blind adherence to tradition. […] All too often, however alone they might think they are, it turns out that the desecrators, debasers, and cynics stand not against but alongside the mighty. And it turns out that sometimes when they thought they were spitting on a false idol, they were desecrating the faith and hope of those who have been told again and again that their lives and dreams don’t matter.”

It’s difficult, in a sense, to find fault: if there has ever been a time for cynicism, it is now. We are arriving at a moment in which people are increasingly open to the possibility that we are, really and truly, fucked. There’s potential, in this moment, for new forms of radical thought and visions for the future, but there is also the potential for it to be co-opted by nihilists and fatalists who think themselves enlightened for deciding that the only winning move is not to play. The truth is, of course, that not playing is also a losing move. They’re all losing moves. But people are suffering, and will suffer in the future on an unimaginable scale. The rest of us, as we cope and mourn and learn to die, have an ethical mandate to do something, whether that is mitigation, or adaptation, or planning new ways to live in the rubble yet to come.

It is hubris to believe that we can alter the arc of human history, yes. The trick lies in running a fingernail down the thin margin between baseless hope and hopeless apathy, and finding what possibilities might lie within the creases.

Following his graduation from undergrad and the loss of his mother to breast cancer, Buckel worked as a personal attendant to hospice patients, providing care for those in their final days. I don’t know if he believed in an afterlife. Maybe, as a Buddhist, he thought his consciousness would be polished down and poured into a new body, ready to start the cycle of suffering anew. If he could see the world now, half a year after his self-imposed martyrdom, would he still think his decision justified?

Saṃsāra, after all, is the ultimate losing move.

Meanwhile, the Atlantic creeps, millimeter by millimeter, up New York’s beaches and seawalls. The minuscule scraps of ash and flesh that escaped the body bag settle into the soil beneath the lawns of Prospect Park. Nearby, the discarded crusts and cores of Brooklyn continue to pile into large mounds, to break down and re-integrate themselves into new forms of food and new forms of waste.

Now what?

Take stock of your body: your heart rate, breath, overall mood. Investigate the level of tension in your jaw and between your eyes, the weight of your gut, the physiological equilibrium at which you’ve found yourself. Then read the following passage.

Even if we meet the Paris [climate accord] goals of two degrees warming, cities like Karachi and Kolkata will become close to uninhabitable, annually encountering deadly heat waves like those that crippled them in 2015. At four degrees, the deadly European heat wave of 2003, which killed as many as 2,000 people a day, will be a normal summer. At six, according to an assessment focused only on effects within the U.S. from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, summer labor of any kind would become impossible in the lower Mississippi Valley, and everybody in the country east of the Rockies would be under more heat stress than anyone, anywhere, in the world today. […] By the end of the century, the World Bank has estimated, the coolest months in tropical South America, Africa, and the Pacific are likely to be warmer than the warmest months at the end of the 20th century.

Where is your body now?

Have the metrics of your physiological arousal spiked? Maybe you are unlike me, a person who visibly jumps every time someone enters a room in which I am sitting. Maybe you do not walk through life with the limbic system of a small animal constantly preparing for death. But it doesn’t feel good to read, does it?

And yet now, with the distance of maybe five or ten seconds, you may find your body already slipping back towards equilibrium, that fleeting flash of terror fading into a vague sense of dread in the back of your throat, becoming something easier to ignore. When you are done reading this post, when you are cooking dinner or making out or preparing for sleep, it’s likely that the knowledge of civilization’s eventual collapse, even if it does cross your mind, will arouse no emotional response at all.

This propensity to ignore tragedy is known in psychology as psychic numbing, a term coined by psychiatrist Robert Lifton, who in 1982 examined the psychological response to another existential threat both terrifying in its immediacy and altogether intangible — nuclear war. He opens thusly:

Human existence itself may be absurd, as many have claimed, but we live now in a special realm of absurdity; we are haunted by something we can neither see nor imagine. We are afraid of something we call “nuclear holocaust” and at the same time are removed from, and have little awareness of, that threat.

The nuclear sword of Damocles, the ignored prophecies of climatic Cassandras; like characters in any Grecian tragedy, we face a choice: to move steadily towards our ends, or, even in the face of seemingly omnipotent forces, to oppose them. But a third, even more insidious, choice exists:

As the numbing or diminished feeling breaks down, our leaders, along with various leaders in different parts of the world, tell us: “Numb yourselves some more, don’t feel; above all, don’t question.” That is the situation we have to confront.”

The public’s numbness , convenient as it may be for some, is largely the result of the human brain’s breathtaking margin of error for emotional arithmetic. Empathy may be a powerful force, but it does a remarkably poor job at scaling up. Author Annie Dillard illustrates this miscalculation by inviting us to consider the nation of China: “There are 1,198,500,000 people alive now in China. To get a feel for what this means, simply take yourself — in all your singularity, importance, complexity, and love — and multiply by 1,198,500,000. See? Nothing to it.” Faced with such staggering numbers, we run into what behavioral psychology professor Paul Slovic terms “the collapse of compassion.” Slovic investigated how humanity can witness genocide without acting to stop it. He concludes that statistics describing severity of the situation do not help people’s sense of empathy; in fact, seeing the seven-digit numbers associated with genocide or mass famine actually make people less inclined to give to a charitable cause, compared with the donations garnered from the narrative of a single impoverished girl.

Even on a much smaller scale, empathy works in strange and illogical ways; a study by Israeli behavioral researchers found participants more likely to contribute money to a single child’s cancer treatment fund than to a fund for the treatment of eight children with cancer. The reason? Decision making is based largely not on rationality, not even by emotion, but by something deeper, a primordial lurch of the gut towards the positive or negative, what Lifton and Slovic term affect. Affect is a cognitive shortcut, a heuristic device with an easily-diluted power. We care about a single starving polar bear , considerably less about the one-fifth of invertebrate species potentially facing extinction, less still about carbon dioxide concentrations reaching 410 parts per million. The brain, in short, is smarter than the gut, but the latter is generally in the driver’s seat. The death of a planet is an idea so large and so terrifying, our affect short-circuits. And we see it happening in real time, and we feel nothing.

On an intuitive level, the instinct to numbness makes sense; disquiet is painful, terror more so, and when afforded the opportunity, it is usually preferable to not be in pain. An animal cannot maintain a state of arousal indefinitely, and like cows by a highway learning to ignore the sound of passing semis, we remain calm, far enough removed from catastrophe to let it bead up and roll off our collective psyche. So it’s an unappealing question, how to bypass our brain’s defenses in order to feel the full weight of what is to come. But according to Lifton, accessing affect produces “the tension and the beginning anxiety we need to experience, and embrace, and put to good use in the form of action, in order to bring about collective survival” — a statement as pertinent to climate change as it is to nuclear weapons.

Lifton claims that this anxiety is predicated on our ability to “imagine our own death,” a phrase which brings to mind the opening scene of Phillip K. Dick’s seminal sci-fi novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, in which the protagonist’s wife makes use of a palliative mood-altering machine to feel the full emotional weight of a world decimated by nuclear winter and all but deserted by humans:

“At that moment,” Iran said, “when I had the TV sound off, I was in a 382 mood; I had just dialed it. So although I heard the emptiness intellectually, I didn’t feel it. My first reaction consisted of being grateful that we could afford a Penfield mood organ. But then I read how unhealthy it was, sensing the absence of life, not just in this building but everywhere, and not reacting — do you see? I guess you don’t. But that used to be considered a sign of mental illness; they called it ‘absence of appropriate affect.’ So I left the TV sound off and I sat down at my mood organ and I experimented. And I finally found a setting for despair.” Her dark, pert face showed satisfaction, as if she had achieved something of worth. “So I put it on my schedule for twice a month; I think that’s a reasonable amount of time to feel hopeless about everything, about staying here on Earth after everybody who’s smart has emigrated, don’t you think?”

I like the idea of periodically scheduling a few hours of self-accusatory depression. The trouble, though, is this: why go through the trouble of baring your psyche to the prospect of planetary annihilation, unless you believe you can stop it? Terror demands action, and for Lifton and Slovic, this is the goal: to stop atrocities (nuclear war and genocide, respectively) by using affect as a motivating force. But in the case of climate change, how much agency do we really have? Is there any hope for salvation, or are we better off leaving on our blinders, knowing the worst will come long after we’re dead?

These are real, terrifying questions with no simple answers. But if they engulf you in anxiety, don’t worry — it’ll wear off soon enough.

I don’t know why. Worse things have happened, closer things have happened. I was ninety miles away when I saw the photos of the highway in Southern California set ablaze. I was raised on the idea that the earth is changing for the worse. A degree in wildlife biology convinced me that ecology is synonymous with obituary. The photos told me nothing about the world I didn’t already believe. And yet they still hit me deep in the gut, reverberated until that feeling of unease crystallized into a singular thought:

Oh god, we really are fucked.

The strange thing about despair is that when it can be ignored, it is. It is possible for me to make this fear smaller, to rationalize it away, to believe I have overcome it. But with every news alert and each rainless winter day, it grows.

In many ways, climate-related depression feels familiar to me, because I had the regular kind first. I was first diagnosed at seventeen, and in the six years since have developed a sort of laymen’s expertise in the ins and outs of the disease. I’ve read the workbooks, taken the workshops, spent thousands of dollars on medication and therapy. Dealing with climate change, though, is its own beast, which renders many traditional tools of the trade all but useless. Case in point: the first-line treatment for depression, Cognitive Behavioral Therapy.

CBT is predicated on one simple belief: you cannot trust your brain. Your thoughts, beliefs, assumptions: all these have been co-opted by a foreign agent, a ramifying force that penetrates and controls your conscious and unconscious mind. The appropriate response, according to CBT, is firstly to identify the emotional fallacies- termed cognitive distortions- in your beliefs, and secondly to see if there is actual evidence to support your thoughts.

An example:

You make an error in a report at work, which is corrected by your boss.

Thoughts: I always mess up at this job. I’m such a failure. My boss thinks I’m incompetent.

Cognitive Distortions: All or nothing thinking (I always mess up), namecalling (failure), mindreading (My boss thinks…)

Evidence-Based Thinking: My boss corrected my report, but he didn’t give any indication that I would be punished, let alone fired. I made a mistake this time, but I’ve also done a lot of good work. My boss gave me a good review last week, so he clearly doesn’t think I’m incompetent.

Of course, understanding conceptually that you are not a failure is very different from believing you aren’t. The theory goes, however, that with enough time and persistence, the irrationality of despair and self-hatred will sink in, and those thoughts will become quieter and easier to manage.
But what if the thoughts causing you so much worry and despair weren’t based on cognitive distortions? What if they were evidence-based?

Which brings me back to climate change.

Things are happening to the world. Huge things, irreversible things, things that will have catastrophic consequences. We have seen graphs, projections, pictures of starving polar bears, all indications that things are bad and getting worse. In CBT parlance, this line of thought would be called catastrophizing- assuming the worse will happen. But what if all evidence points to catastrophe? What is the rational response, if not despair?

That’s not a rhetorical question, by the way.

The only answer I can think of is to dig deeper, to read more, write more, and maybe start to construct new ways to think about mental health, climate change, hope, and despair.

These are the questions I want to address in this series:

1. How bad is it? — What is the current state of climate change, what is projected for the future, and what is the degree of certainty for those projections?
2. What can I do? — Can individual action change the course of climate change? Can collective action? What is the best-case scenario for the future, and what would it take to get there?
3. What now? — If we are past the tipping point, how do we live in a dying world?

If you have any answers, let me know.