Climate anxiety and freedom
As for so many, the recent heatwave has intensified the ‘normal’ feelings of climate anxiety.
Trying to sit with it I’ve been asking myself: what is it that I am anxious about? This isn’t to try and dismiss or minimise the concern but to be able to understand it better so that as well as being loud the noise is not baffling and bewildering.
The first level I encounter is the least unexpected: fear and uncertainty mixed with guilt. The guilt, I notice, is diffuse in that it is not so much about any specific action I have or have not taken but about my existence as a human being. This is a thought I can quite quickly understand as a product of decades of transference for the responsibility for climate change from the shoulders of the companies that extract, use, and burn up the earth’s resources to the individual. It comes from the ‘carbon footprint-isation’ of climate change mitigation. But I also experience how disabling that feeling is and how immediately it makes me feel like an imposter on this planet, not a part of it. This, I believe, might be the unintended consequence of narratives which centre humans as the problem, not solution, and nature as a thing apart from - and ‘better’ than - ourselves.
Going deeper I discover a second layer of anxiety which is best described as a sense of constriction. In The Dawn of Everything David Graeber and David Wengrow argue that many societies of the past sought to maintain - albeit to varying degrees and not always all at once - three fundamental freedoms: the freedom to move, to say no, and to create. Freedom to move, for Graeber and Wengrow, meant the freedom to either leave a social group that you no longer wished to be a part of (and, crucially, to be welcomed into another group elsewhere) or the freedom of an entire community to move away from a place that was no longer safe, fertile, or sustainable. Freedom to say no meant the ability of an individual to object to the ruler or rules that governed them or their society. Lastly, freedom to create meant the space for individuals to come up with new social arrangements, economies, industries, values, and ways of being.
I believe that climate change is revealing to us the relative loss of these three freedoms. Most obviously, no one (yet) has the freedom to move away totally from climate disaster. You can insulate or isolate yourself from its worst effects but not completely and not forever. More frightening, though, I believe is the lack of freedom that we experience to alter the systems we live under. It is not obvious how we meaningfully say ‘no’ to capitalism or ‘create’ something different - and this must be, at the unconscious if not conscious level, suffocating.
Staying with this final thought I also uncovered a third layer of anxiety: that not only does climate change require that I act differently but also be different. We don’t just need to create new systems but embody them. That, I believe, might be the most stupefying, terrifying, awesome and inspiring part of this entire story. And it is why Eddie and I both came to this work believing so strongly in the need for spaces of uncertainty, ambiguity, and experimentation. The thought of leaping wholesale into a new mode of living is impossible. It’s a binary maintained by the present system - a purity test locking us in inaction. But while the thought of being in places of not knowing, humility, and questioning seems altogether more reasonable, it is not practical for most under our current culture and system which demands constant movement and activity under the pretense of certainty. Perhaps, then, we need to add a fourth freedom to Graeber and Wengrow’s list - the freedom to pause, to not know, or just be.
By Matt Hawkins, commonplace