Coping with Climate Dread

[GliderGuider]

Here is some straight talk from people on the front lines. There are a lot of dark nights of the soul going on in the scientific community.

Coping with Climate Dread

It's not just crazy people with the sandwich boards anymore: a lot of level-headed professionals believe the end of our world is nigh. Some top scientists see global warming making much of the planet barely habitable within a few generations. Or sooner.

How then do experts who believe such dire findings, yet plug away at eco-sustainable practices, still find purpose in their work? What keeps them from succumbing to climate despair?

"This year is the first time in tens of thousands of years you could take a kayak to the North Pole," Rees (GG: William Rees, father of the ecological footprint) continues, his voice rising and his tone taking on a harder edge. "That's the evidence. So don't give me optimism about technology moving us forward, because it isn't."

Rees says he gets very tired sometimes, when it seems people aren't interested in saving even themselves.

"Are you despairing these days?" I ask.

"Yes, sometimes I am."

"What do you do about it?"

"Um, keep working," he responds quietly. "Pace up and down. Read a good book. Listen to some fine music. Sometimes I have a bottle of wine. But you've got to...you know. What are the options? I just keep on plugging away; I don't think there is really anything else you can do."

I called up Dr. Daniel Pauly, director of the Fisheries Centre at UBC and a principal investigator of the organization The Sea Around Us, who told me some mornings he has trouble getting out of bed. How does he cope with the prospect of a dying future on those days?

"I concentrate on some technical problem instead," he says, which takes me by surprise a little, even though it shouldn't.

"We have nice technical problems, as scientists, that you resolve. Most of us who are discouraged do end up doing that: looking at nice technical problems."

I rang up Patrick Condon, who holds the UBC James Taylor Chair in Landscape and Liveable Environments and designs sustainable cities, to gauge his level of depression.

"I'm personally pretty discouraged often," he admitted. "Not a single week goes by without some new, extremely credible group coming to the same conclusion, and that conclusion is always that it's happening faster than even the most pessimistic scientist would have predicted, those who were scoffed at years ago."

I listened to Karen Campbell, environmental lawyer with western Canada's Pembina Institute, admitting she gets so distraught over current events, she purposefully avoids reading the news for weeks sometimes. And that there have been times where governmental repeals of hard-won environmental legislation have left her feeling crushed.

"I've had days where I've left my office in tears. I've had days where I've just said, 'That's it! I can't handle this, it's just too depressing. I'm leaving.'"

"The very tendencies that gave such us a leg up in the competition with the other species 50,000 years ago are maladaptive today," Rees concludes.

"Now, if we are intelligent enough to recognize that, at least in theory we should be able to over-ride our biological predispositions. If we don't, we're doomed."

[phantom power]

1. The Schumann Computer

Larry Niven wrote this humorous short story about building a self-aware supercomputer. The computer keeps learning and learning and then one day it shuts itself off. The straight-man asks the narrator "Well, did you ever find out why?" and the narrator says "Heck no, we figured if we ever learned why it shut itself off, we might too."

[snagglepuss]

2. A Must Read. K & R. nt

[LynzM]

3. Interesting read.

I struggle with the same up-and-down, can we possibly change enough to save ourselves vs. every little change I make or encourage others to make matters kind of thing. Today, I'm the pessimist.

[GliderGuider]

4. I went through three years of the kind of dread and despair they describe.

It can be crushing, even suicidal. My escape route was to find hope in an orthogonal set of human values: compassion, cooperation and community. Developing those has let me balance out my cold awareness of human actions with the warmth of the awakened human spirit.

[LynzM]

5. Thanks :)

Yes, I had some very bad nights when I first started really learning about peak oil, and climate change, and the implications of both. Nights of wondering what was the point of staying alive, and regretting having had a child.

Mostly I don't have those nights anymore, and like you, find hope in making the changes I can make, encouraging others to do the same, enjoying sunshine and playing music and growing my group of friends. We are all transient, in the end.