So climate anxiety is a thing.
Last year, a Yale University report noted that 21 percent of American adults are “very worried” about climate change. The American Psychological Association has put out a 70-page guide, “Mental Health and our Changing Climate,” to help mental health professionals in working with clients.
These professionals say they’re treating more and more people for eco-anxiety or “solastalgia” — a word coined by philosopher Glenn Albrecht to mean “the distress caused by ecological change.”
The United States is the greatest per capita emitter of greenhouse gases in the world. Yet the U.S. joins just 10 other countries that have not ratified the Paris Agreement, a global accord signed by 195 countries that aims to combat climate change. Other non-ratifiers include Turkey, Iran, Libya, Yemen — not normally nations the U.S. considers peer economies or political systems.
If our country refuses to act, slowing climate change will be much, much harder. It’s no wonder this national failure brings up feelings of guilt, fear, anxiety, vulnerability and helplessness.
Not to mention the barrage of actual climate change effects we’ve been seeing on TV or feeling on our own skin, homes, and livelihoods: wildfires, floods, hurricanes, agricultural struggles, wild bird declines, fish population crashes.
Online, a slew of articles offer advice for working through eco-anxiety. Taking positive action, joining a climate grief support group or just seeing a good old-fashioned therapist — all these can help.
But I want to talk about a different approach, one you can do completely alone, but also share to create a sense of connection and community: eco-poetry and art.
Since I’m a poet, I naturally see most things through a lens of poetry. Yet using poetry to wrestle with something as big as environmental destruction may seem a little — well, futile. Frivolous.
“I, too, dislike it,” wrote Marianne Moore in her iconic poem “Poetry” — “there are things that are important beyond all this fiddle.”
But I’m by no means the only person advocating for poetry and art as a reasonable and even important reaction to climate anxiety and environmental depression.
This November, poet Camille Dungy came to Smith College to talk about how art can create new kinds of consciousness and take a vital place in our arsenal of tools. Dungy, author of four books of poetry, also edited the 2009 anthology “Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry.”
“What we decide matters in literature,” Dungy has written, “is what we decide will matter for our history, for our pedagogy, for our culture. What we do and do not value in our art reveals what we do and do not value in our times. What we leave off the page often speaks as loudly as what we include.”
In other words, through art, communities establish what’s important to them. Through our writing, our poetry, our pictures, we create a sense of identity, meaning, and shared experience.
And if we fail to explore what’s happening to us through our shared art, we’re showing our blind spots. What we can’t talk about, we can’t change.
Dungy also pointed out the importance of language in naming our relationships. She gave the example of the indigenous language of the Ashinaabe, which contains a pronoun for nonhuman living beings.
Unlike the English language’s depersonalizing pronoun “it,” the existence of such a term can remind us to “reimagine our connections to other living beings,” Dungy said.
These relationships aren’t just important in encouraging us to treat other beings with respect. Remembering our links to other beings can make us feel less alone in the world.
Just the act of walking or sitting outdoors, surrounded by other living beings that we see as companions rather than inanimate or soulless objects, can ease the sense of isolation that can prompt anxiety. Putting those feelings into writing, a sketch, a painting, a collage, can solidify and concretize that sense of belonging.
Through a series of one-minute exercises, Dungy shared the importance of paying what poet Jan Zwicky calls “animal-bright attention” to the Earth. She showed a photo of a sunset, and had people write for one minute about what they saw.
Then she expanded the photo’s view to show a large city lying beneath, asking everyone to write for another minute. (I’ve included my two-minute exercise below, and would love to see readers’ one-minute eco-poems.)
“What’s on the outside of my field of vision that I may not have access to yet?” Dungy asked writers to explore. The city’s presence challenges our sense of the sky’s beauty, reminding us that smog can make sunsets more dramatic by scattering light.
It reminds us that not even the seemingly pure evening light can escape human influence.
“The problem with relying on our idea of beauty is that it puts us at the mercy of our ideas of beauty,” Dungy said.
Art, powerfully, can look beyond convention to find pleasure and sustenance in the non-traditionally beautiful — while calling into question things that seem beautiful but that in fact cause destruction or suffering.
For Dungy, every detail of our lives affords connections to nature, not just our visits to the romanticized “pure” wilderness of national parks. In a visit to a flower stand in “Daisy Cutter,” she contemplates the damage in her relationship with an intimate partner, and subtly compares that destruction to what we wreak on the earth:
I want the flamethrowers: the peonies,
the sunflowers. I will cut down the beautiful ones
and let their nectared sweetness bleed
into the careless air. This is not the world
I’d hoped it could be. It is horrible
the way we carry on.
Dungy asked participants to write one minute about “what scares you.” Another one-minute exercise had us to consider something in our lives that, looked at differently, could reveal our own environmental ethic.
“Writing should be a field trip,” Dungy said — an expedition outward from what we know into what we haven’t seen or thought before.
Too often, our response to anxiety can be to turn away, to ignore, to hide, and to feel hopeless. Yet to the contrary, “most of our despair comes when we’re not paying attention anymore,” pointed out poet Nickole Brown during a question and answer session about her own eco-poetry last year.
I loved Brown’s formulation of the importance and vitality of being closely aware of the world, of our surroundings, nature, other people, the nearness and heat of other beings. Discovering and articulating truths about the world through careful, deep attention returns us to a sense of consonance, no matter how hard and difficult those truths may be.
Even Marianne Moore, in “Poetry,” ultimately tempered her description — “Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it, one discovers in it after all, a place for the genuine.”
Streaks rose, tangerine, a dyed shirt,
drying blood, logs of a fire
burning before collapse
to ember. Lines of consumption,
of de-composition — lines on a page.
Beneath, a city startles awake
in dusk’s last minutes, streetlamps welling
from fissures in what’s built
against a darkness that gathers
despite all we choose to burn.
Naila Moreira is a writer and poet who often focuses on science, nature and the environment. She teaches science writing at Smith College. She’s on Twitter @nailamoreira.