I’m attempting to write about an issue for which I have no answer and it’s puzzled me for a long time. Just to say at the outset, in writing about this, I really don’t want to criticise or guilt trip anyone. I’m not trying to convert anyone or make anyone feel guilty about their own habits or lifestyle. 

So the issue I’m referring to is this: we are in a crisis such as the human species has never ever faced in our entire two to three hundred thousand years of existence as homo sapiens. The climate and ecological catastrophe is crashing down, the sixth mass extinction is accelerating. But we don’t behave as if that were true. Why aren’t we greatly impacted? And why is there generally in most of us, so little urgency to do anything about it?  

I’m writing this because I find the collective phenomenon of our seeming psychic removal from the crisis quite extraordinary and thought provoking. I’m often surprised when talking with friends and acquaintances and the general subject comes up; everyone then tends to express varying degrees of concern but it’s clear that mostly it’s not a huge factor in their lives, nor on what they do. And I’m talking about people who are sensitive, caring, who keep abreast of global news and are green-inclined; often Guardian readers – a paper which covers the climate catastrophe far more than any other UK national newspaper.   As I said, I really don’t have an answer but I’ve been pondering this disconnect so much that I thought I would try writing to perhaps see if I could clarify it in some way.

I’m not going to list reams of climate data here to back up my claims that we’re in a megacrisis. It’s all widely available and endlessly endorsed by the overwhelming majority of scientists in the relevant fields and by the UN and other responsible bodies. Yet it’s become apparent that people are generally not that moved by facts or by being presented with even more facts. What moves a person seems to be what touches them emotionally and has meaning for them.

These days, outright old school climate deniers are in the minority except in the US Republican party, oddball contrarians and right wing ideologues. Today’s form of climate denial recognises at least verbally that climate change is an important issue among others, and tends to assume and assert (groundlessly) that we are dealing with it.

The climate chaos is leading to significant regions of the world becoming unlivable within a few short years, and especially for our children and grandchildren. The natural world, the life support systems upon which all beings – human, animal and plant – depend, are collapsing; more lands are becoming desert, crop failures are increasing, there’s the threat of world bread basket failures. Wildfires, floods, killer heat waves, polar ice melts, and other extreme weather events are increasing. Rivers are polluted and dying, wildlife is exterminated, the oceans are poisoned and overfished, intensive farming is despoiling the land. 

COP 26 was a failure; countries are not reducing their emissions in line with a habitable future and now use the excuse of Ukraine to row back from even those commitments; fossil fuel use and development is expanding with fatal consequences etc, etc. On this trajectory, there will inevitably be societal breakdown in some regions with crop failures and consequent mass migration of desperate starving people.

An alien visiting planet earth might observe the suicidal spectacle of the dominant species recklessly destroying the conditions which support their own lives on this jewel of a globe. That alien might also puzzle over how this species, despite its great technological wherewithal to deal with problems, seemed only marginally concerned about it all – at least, judging by their lack of action – even though it would inevitably lead in time to collapse of their own lives and especially their descendents’ lives. Seeing how this species was fouling its own bed, the alien might well figure it best to give this planet a wide berth.

So why aren’t we devastated? It seems to me that being shattered would be the most sane response to our existential predicament. Reading this, you may justifiably say, “So, what about you then? Are you devastated?

Well, as for me, it’s only in the last several years that I’ve begun to let in about our situation. I certainly wasn’t remotely ‘devastated’ for most of my life. Why wasn’t I impacted before then? I don’t know; it’s all part of the puzzle. I’m a lifelong nature lover and had long lamented the destruction of nature and of much of the biodiversity that I knew well as a child. I have always kept up with ecology news worldwide and in recent years, the vast majority of that news was becoming depressing with ever more species extinction and habitat loss. I would hang onto the much less frequent glimmers of hope: a rewilding project created here, or a rare species increasing slightly. Yet a rising hopelessness and despair seemed to lurk in the background of my mind. Deeply, though I wouldn’t have admitted this to myself, I knew these small efforts couldn’t reverse the avalanche of destruction; it’s kind of my version of planting a wildflower meadow on the deck of the Titanic.

At some point in 2018, I became increasingly troubled by recurring bouts of anxiety which seemed to have no cause. I felt depressed, full of angst and fear and I started having episodes of palpitations out of the blue. I didn’t know what was the matter with me and searched for some hidden personal psychic trauma. Then it suddenly dawned on me that this wasn’t about some personal issue of mine but rather my gathering horror at our global predicament and destruction of the natural world. I was in grief about what we humans are doing to our precious planet. And I was bottling all this up and feeling increasing despair without acknowledging it. Recognising this powerful undercurrent, if still only rather intellectually, started to help. I talked with friends about it and tried to write about it and became more conscious of my own anguish, despair and hopelessness. Beneath the anxiety was more and more grief, which I hadn’t known about or expressed and I became more and more impacted. I read up extensively on all the latest climate data as I wanted to get the whole truth. 

I heard of Extinction Rebellion, which had just been formed, and I went to the initial launch in Parliament Square where I heard Greta Thunberg and others speak passionately and urgently about our existential ecological predicament. This all totally resonated with me and I was starting to own my deep grief and simultaneously I started to become an eco activist powered by a new urgency to act.  My palpitation attacks ceased and I wasn’t haunted in the same way from that point onwards, though by opening myself to grief and love, it was and still is, often painful, because now I’m not so much in denial. Now I was impelled towards taking some kind of action to help, with an urgency which felt choiceless. 

This was how I came to be viscerally connected with the climate and ecological emergency and now I can’t ‘unsee’ it or not feel it. Of course, I go in and out of how much I feel it, and often it feels absent or way in the background. Humanly, I couldn’t live feeling constantly in turmoil, it would be unbearable. I try to maintain my sanity by walking in nature, Qigong meditation, getting my hands in the soil on my vegetable plot, and crucially, engaging in eco activism and nonviolent civil disobedience with other people. And like everyone I want to distract myself and sometimes my ‘awakening’ feels like a curse, though I wouldn’t wish to return to my avoidance.

 I couldn’t – and still can’t – fully comprehend that we are destroying the whole fabric of Life and the planetary ecosystem. It’s an existential moment. I don’t even really know exactly what I do feel as it’s too vast for my mind to let in fully. The climate and web of life emergency has been called a ‘hyperobject’ by philosopher Timothy Morton, meaning it’s just too gargantuan and far reaching in time and space to comprehend. Later I heard about the recent psychological condition, ‘eco- anxiety,’ which was first coined in 2017 by the American Psychiatric Association and I found out about how this condition was rapidly spreading among many people, especially the young.

Of course, my particular crack and portal was clearly connected to my lifelong love for and bond with nature, and this wouldn’t necessarily be a portal for a lot of other people. For some people I know, it is concern for the future of their children or grandchildren, or the way we in the Global North are trashing the lives of those in the developing world with our emissions and rapacious extractivism. Many people in developing countries and low lying islands are already living through the midst of the climate catastrophe, and the droughts, crop failures, crippling heatwaves and floods are not academic nor off in the future for them.

As I said earlier, there are millions in developed countries like me, who are affluent enough to live a reasonably comfortable life. These are the people I’m writing about here.  Of course so much of the world’s population is understandably fully occupied in just trying to survive, in trying to make ends meet and feed their children. And there are also many in rich countries like the UK who are struggling with poverty, just trying to get by with the odds seemingly stacked against them. 

I think it may be  helpful to note some of the many and often familiar responses that I’ve encountered which serve to distract, distance and remove ourselves from coming face to face with the realities I’m discussing here. It’s not that people don’t care or that they are not good people. What I’m discussing just has so far, for whatever reason, failed to deeply impact them emotionally, or if it has, then they feel somehow paralysed. 

I’ve taken to asking friends and acquaintances the question, ‘So why do you think we aren’t devastated? Does anything come to the forefront of your mind?’ (of course I give a little context before popping the question). The answers from nature sensitive people who do deeply care about our environment tend to be variations around that it’s just too overwhelming and painful; it’s too immense and awful to really comprehend and take in, and the seeming futility of trying to turn things around can feel paralysing. And then a common followup is to express how they seek refuge in the grounding of nature, the outdoors, plants and gardening. Other friends are fully engaged in work and projects which are in one way or another contributing to the greater good, and I can understand that these endeavours are their way of responding to the metacrisis. 

It’s been postulated that perhaps we are evolutionarily hardwired to prevent experiencing such disruption to our psyche, and that this dates back to ancient times, so that we only have the ability to be emotionally concerned with events in the relatively near term. Yet I immediately think about how many people, especially in the past, have for example, been greatly concerned about the afterlife, an event often far away in time.

Most of us don’t want our comfortable lives disrupted and tend to doubt whether an individual can make any real difference anyway. So if there’s essentially no point trying to change anything, why not just live one’s life rather than causing oneself needless anxiety. 

Many people still have faith that the government will sort it all out since it’s their job; and this is reinforced by how we endlessly hear calm confident government ministers declaring how Britain is a leader in cutting emissions (- which superficially may be relatively true, but it’s a more a measure of how scarily little most countries are really doing in the face of the scale of the issues).

Then many people, while readily agreeing about our dire predicament, adopt a cynical position of the kind, “Yeah, we’re all f…ed! It’s way too late, humanity has had it; we’re like a cancer on the earth, nature would be better off without us.” This kind of attitude serves to keep the whole subject at arm’s length.

The range of avoidances are legion. Environmental whistleblowers are dismissed as ‘doomers’ and ‘eco-zealots’ and compared to millenarian cults with apocalyptic fantasies. “We’ve heard it all before 30 years ago, and the world didn’t come to an end as prophesied.”

Then there is a popular groove of dismissing all calls for facing our plight and radically cutting down emissions as being the work of far left political extremists wanting to destroy capitalism and take us back to the Stone Age, when we need to get back to robust growth. (this at a point when it’s obvious that you can’t have infinite growth on a finite planet, and that this ‘growthism’ is insane. Even ‘green growth’ is part of the same fantasy, it being now well proven that green growth can’t be decoupled from increased material usage and consumption).

On the other end of the spectrum are the indefatigable techno-optimists: “We’ll innovate our way out of the crisis. We’ll suck the CO2 out of the air with carbon capture, undertake cloud seeding and solar geoengineering to manage the climate.” Carbon capture still remains unproven at any useful scale and climate manipulation is fraught with enormous danger. I hope we do come up with much needed technological remedies, but for the purposes of this essay, the point here is that the starkness of our predicament doesn’t have to be faced if you’re a techno-optimist and believe that we’ll come up with techno fixes down the line. 

We’ve been encouraged to ‘green’ our lifestyles and many of us have diligently recycled and have reusable coffee cups and water bottles and organic cotton etc. While this is all good, in this existential context it can almost be an avoidance. As George Monbiot terms it, it can merely amount to “micro consumerist bollocks.”

I believe that one very important reason for our lack of feeling greatly impacted is our modern world’s general dissociation from Nature. Many of us are hardly in touch with the seasons, the weather, the phases of the moon, the cycles of nature, the non-human inhabitants of our world, or where our food comes from. We live indoors and to an ever greater extent, virtually. We simply don’t feel like we’re a part of nature and hardly notice the armageddon playing out outside in the environment. Even when outdoors, more and more people are staring at their smartphone screens with headphones on. The crisis then doesn’t feel real; it’s as if we’re watching Netflix or merely scrolling through social media content. 

Unfortunately scientists unwittingly contribute to the sense that we’re fundamentally okay and not hurtling towards the cliff edge. As climate scientists calmly report increasingly dire statistics, they lean over backwards to be unemotional and rational in their presentations. This has the effect of making the average person feel that since the experts don’t ever appear distressed, everything must somehow be all under control.

Spirituality as a way to be in deeper touch with oneself can also inadvertently contribute to our distancing from the emotional effects of our climate predicament. Modern spirituality often privileges pure subjectivity over material reality and may imply that material reality is at root, a rather illusory effect, caused by immaterial mind or spirit, or at least way downstream from the ground of being of consciousness. I was struck by a conversation with an old friend, a respected Buddhist meditation teacher of many years standing. He smiled at my concern over our environmental catastrophe and elaborated his conviction that since everything is impermanent and change is the only constant, that on a longer time scale life will continue, even if it has to be only on other planets. His cultivated sense of equanimity certainly afforded him more peace than I felt, but to me, it was yet another means of not having to feel the unbearable reality of these times.

Again, what we are confronted with is objectively overwhelming. It feels too gargantuan and complex. Even NATO’s military is devising strategies for what it calls the global climate ‘hyperthreat’. People have told me of the fear of letting it in: that life would have no point, it’s too depressing and there would be no motivation for living. 

We are understandably habitually averse to big change and yet huge change is called for, and is on its way, whether we like it or not. Overconsumption is a big part of the problem; our lives have to change and we have to consume less in the West; that’s the uncomfortable truth. The vested interests of some people can make this impossible for them to grasp.

I agree with eco philosopher Rupert Read, who says, “This civilisation is finished.” He doesn’t mean that this is the end of civilisation, but that it’s the end of this way of life.

And although system change is paramount, who even wants to make the bigger personal choices that would make a difference, such as switching to a plant based diet and not flying except when really necessary?

No wonder there is  huge unconscious resistance to letting in the magnitude of the crisis. And no wonder that eco-anxiety is greatly on the rise, especially among the young. The American Psychological Association coined the definition of eco-anxiety  as “chronic fear of environmental doom.” The British Medical Journal (BMJ) recommends how to alleviate rising levels of climate anxiety in the eco-anxious young and old by any means that nurture optimism and hope. Particularly important, according to the BMJ, is connecting more strongly with nature.

There is now a lot of advice about eco-anxiety and how to manage and assuage it and I’m sure it’s all well meaning and helpful. People are advised to  limit their media consumption, learn self care, connect with others, limit your eco-focus to a few topics to avoid overwhelm, try therapy, etc. Yet I can’t help feeling that it is sane and normal to feel eco-anxiety as a valid response to our collective careering towards the cliff edge. So while I’m sure the above advice can help, what about embracing the emotional rawness and reality of our dilemma? 

My experience has been that while emotionally letting in the scale of our crisis – at least for moments – is undoubtedly disturbing, painful, and full of anguish, it’s different now. I still often feel anxiety and my grief can be painful, but I know it well and I am not a passive recipient or victim. I don’t flinch from the horror and I am doing whatever I can to help, irrespective of whether it looks hopeful or hopeless. For me it’s imperative to now live and align with what I know to be true, whatever the prospect; and in engaging like this, I find there are many kindred spirits who have given themselves to the same imperative. I don’t mean to suggest that I’m advocating some kind of masochism. Like everyone, I like to feel at peace and I derive great solace from simple things like growing vegetables and flowers or hiking. 

Also I discovered that the flip side of grief is love. The extent of my grief for the world is the extent of my love for the world. In not trying to get over grief, I’m finding that grief seems to be humanising me in unexpected ways; it’s humbling and has its roots in love of all creation. Far from having a paralysing and depressive effect, my experience is that eco grief softens the heart and seems to free me up. A bonus seems to be that I feel more alive in these last several years than I can remember for many years. This is such a unique existential moment to awaken to, that it unmoors me from old certainties. How should I live in light of what I now know? No humans have ever been in this situation before. Not that this predicament is anything we would ever wish for, yet in a certain way it is freeing as it throws into question my and our entire narratives. It can open the heart, with the emotional recognition of our complete interdependence with all life forms, releasing our empathy.

So I wonder if  this inquiry has shed any light on “Why aren’t we devastated?” I can say that it’s helped clarify my thoughts and feelings around it, and I hope it may be of some benefit to others, though I can’t claim to have come up with any clear answer to the initial question.