My bargains with climate grief

There’s a distinct nausea which is becoming a more frequent occurrence when I see a headline on climate change. I now actively decline reading anything overly familiar to avoid how numb it will make me feel.

This didn’t use to happen. I enjoyed the tussle of reckoning with a new facet of climate change. Climate change is so pervasive, all-encompassing, complex and abstract, that I was endlessly fascinated with navigating the emergent landscape it was unfolding in real-time.

But now I have climate vertigo. The endless gymnastics, negotiation and re-orientation of attempting to stand still has chewed me up and spat me out. I’m tired and exhausted; in love with this world while mourning it.

Upon chants of ‘Keep 1.5 alive’ I silently scream – Do you have any idea what that involves? We need to halve global emissions in 9 years, reliably decrease emissions in the range of 7-15% year-on-year, get every country in the world to increase the ambition of their climate commitments by FIVE and we are nowhere near on track- only I’m not brave enough to articulate the scream because I know it will make people flinch.

Of course – it’s not really about 1.5 degrees or any one identifiable threshold. There’s no binary of too late (even though sometimes a non-negotiable deadline feels like it might be preferable versus the gradual foreclosing of alternatives). It’s just I wish I wasn’t a living witness to death unfolding at planetary scale, of loss which is not only continuing, but accelerating. It makes me feel like a living embodiment of the starfish parable, only, unlike the boy in the parable, I don’t know if I have done anything to save even a single starfish, I’m a lot less gracious, my arm aches, and the sheer senselessness of the situation is driving me insane.

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In Aeschylus’s tragedy Agamemnon, Cassandra, the princess of Troy, is blessed with seeing the future, but her gift is accompanied by a counterbalancing curse: no one believes her prophecies. The environmentalist Alan AtKisson connects the myth to climate action: the more a person knows about environmental destruction, the more they will try to warn others, and the more others will, in fear and defensiveness, resist them. AtKisson calls the predicament Cassandra’s Dilemma.

I have found my climate grief to be like Cassandra’s prophecies: othering. My strength of feeling exists outside of our tacit premise of safety. It makes me a harbinger of death. Honesty about climate grief incites either admiration or condemnation, and both feel alienating.

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And so it is that I find myself bargaining with climate grief. Some days I disbelieve my climate grief, dismiss it as self-indulgent and overdramatic, or choose a willed-unknowing in an attempt at respite. I am aided by the fact that I can’t sustain an intensity of anger or grief for long: the object of my anger is too disperse; the subject of my grief too large.

Other days, or the very same, there is no escapism available. I am acutely aware that the very fabric of life is being thinned to breaking point while I busy myself accruing the necessary number of National Insurance contributions. We are in the midst of a slow catastrophe and our response is catastrophically slow, my own included.

This would be a farce if it wasn’t so tragic.

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All this is to say, that despite being upsettingly conscientious, of a largely sunny disposition and steady on my feet (and therefore all too ready to compromise and moderate anything too offensive and unpalatable away), I am in fact grieving.

I guess I just need you to know that there was a time when the campaigning was to limit the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide to 350ppm and we are now at 419ppm, and it makes campaigning for a limit of 1.5 degrees feel like a charade. I guess I just need you to know that integrating our collective hemorrhaging of the future into normal daily existence is a difficult circle to square. I guess I just need you to know that becoming a purist or a martyr, taking on as much sorrow and suffering as you can, feels cogent when attempting to reconcile your starfish-throwing with a seashore of dying starfish.

Finally, I want to respond to any Christians tempted to talk about ‘prophetic young people taking climate action’. Make no mistake. I’m not young and prophetic. I’m 24 and heartbroken.