Science Friday - Degrees of Change: Climate Anxiety and Depression. April 17, 2020, Part 1

Episode Date: April 17, 2020

You Aren’t Alone In Grieving The Climate Crisis As the consequences of unchecked climate change come into sharper focus—wildfires in the Amazon and Australia, rising seas in low-lying Pacific Islands, mass coral bleaching around the world—what is to be done about the emotional devastation that people feel as a result? In 2007, Australian eco-philosopher Glenn Albrecht described this feeling as homesickness “for a home that no longer exists,” which he called “solastalgia.” Others have settled on terms like “climate grief,” or, since environmental devastation can come without a changing climate, simply “ecological grief.”  For this chapter of Degrees of Change, Ira talks about adapting emotionally to climate change. First, he speaks with psychologist Renee Lertzman and public health geographer Ashlee Cunsolo about their research on the phenomenon of grief tied to environmental loss, and what they’ve learned about how people can adapt their grief into actions that can make a difference. Then, climate researcher Kate Marvel and essayist Mary Annaïse Heglar share their experiences simultaneously working on climate change, and grieving it.  Inequality In The Air Air quality is a known public health threat, attributed to seven million deaths around the world every year. Minorities, especially African-Americans, often live in areas of high air pollution. Now, scientists say pollution is linked to high rates of COVID-19 deaths, which may help explain why people of color are dying from COVID-19 at disproportionate rates.  Vox reporter Umair Irfan speaks with Ira about the pandemic’s inequitable impacts for some communities, as well as other coronavirus and climate change news from the past week.  Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. The daily references and reminders about COVID-19 can be so mind-consuming that other threats to our well-being may have fallen off our daily radar screen. One in particular I'm talking about is our climate crisis. It's still here. It's still growing and it needs our attention. So we open up the next chapter of our series, Degrees of Change. And this hour, we'll be talking about the psychological toll of the climate crisis. We will be talking about the psychological toll of the climate crisis. We will won't be taking your calls in this recorded hour, but more info on how you can get involved in our coverage and sign up for our climate newsletter is at science friday.com slash degrees of change. First up, joining us to talk about the latest coronavirus and climate change news is Umarrafan, reporter at Vox in Washington, D.C. Welcome back to Science Friday, Mayor. Thanks for having me, Ira. Let's get into some of the top stories and start with a dramatic political move that happened this week, President Trump announcing that the U.S. will pull funding from the World Health Organization. Tell us about that. Yeah, President Trump has long been critical of the World Health

Organization and its response to the coronavirus crisis. And in particular, he's blaming them for inadequately reporting the true extent and the risk from this, and as well as, you know, taking the Chinese government's party line on the extent and the scope of the outbreak and not being skeptical enough of that information. And so this week, he announced that essentially the U.S. would no longer be funding the World Health Organization going forward. And that's a huge deal because the U.S. is the single largest funder of the World Health Organization. And the WHA sort of acts as an intermediary between all countries, does it not? Yeah, it pools a lot of information, a lot of public health research and data. And that's really critical in a virus like this that's brand new and

people are still finding things out about it. But it also helps Marshall resources to countries. that might need it, particularly developing countries that may not have testing infrastructure or some of the critical equipment. And so it helps pool resources and get them to places where they're needed. There are critics who point out that maybe Trump's action is a political way to deflect blame for U.S. reaction to the pandemic away from him. Right. And I mean, one of the big concerns that he's been laying out is that essentially that a lot of people didn't really know the true extent of this.

But reports going back to January showed that, you know, the World Health Organization was warning that there was but potential risk for a pandemic, that there were human-to-human transmission that was likely from this virus. So there have been mixed messages, and there is some room for criticism here of the World Health Organization and the public health response. But kind of going forward, it is something that is going to be necessary for controlling the pandemic as it continues to rage throughout the world. Let's move to a topic that seems to be on everybody's mind, and everybody is talking about it. And that is the neat for large-scale testing for coronavirus.

Where do we stand on that now? In the United States, we're testing between 100 to 150,000 people per day. And that is well short of what we need for clinical purposes, basically just testing the people who are coming to hospitals with symptoms. But to truly control the pandemic, a lot of public health researchers say we need to go beyond that and start actively looking for cases. In particular, people who are spreading the virus without showing any symptoms. And that's one of the issues that with ending social distancing is that some people who have a coronavirus don't show their symptoms yet, right? Yeah, that's right. And we don't really even know how many of those people are out there.

And because of that, because there's so many unknowns, we can't answer basic questions about the virus, like how deadly it is, how dangerous it is. And so a group of researchers from different institutions from like the Center of American Progress, from the American Enterprise Institute, and Nobel Prize winning economist Paul Romer, they've all put out various proposals in recent weeks about how we can restart the economy. And almost all of them talk about the need for vastly scaling up testing. One of the lower end estimates is about 750,000 tests per week minimum,

and Romer's estimate is at least 22 million tests per day and going up from there. We're not even close to that, are we? Not remotely. But his point was that, you know, by scaling up testing, we can actually seek out and find these cases, and we can find the asymptomatic spreaders and tell them to isolate.

And that way we can actually get people out of their homes and back to work, and we can move towards more targeted responses rather than these blanket stay-at-home orders that are being so devastating to the economy. And this could be sort of a way to start returning to something approaching normal, but again, it would require a huge lift and a massive ramp up and scale from where we are now. When coronavirus first hit the U.S., many people thought California, the biggest state, would be the hardest hit state, but that hasn't been the case. Can you tell us what the numbers look like there versus New York, which seems to be the hardest hit state?

Right. As you note that California was poised to be one of the hot spots for the outbreak here in the United States. There were 600 direct flights between China and California in January and more than 150,000 people deplaneed from those flights. That's more than double the number of passengers in New York. And so the read was that California was much more likely to be facing much more important cases that would eventually pick up. But so far, what we've seen is that New York has now ended up with roughly eight times the number of confirmed cases. as California and roughly 14 times the number of deaths as California. And the difference is related to because California had a lockdown earlier? That's one of the factors. I mean, it's a little bit early to say what definitively played a role, but that was critical to what California did in terms of controlling the pandemic. They had one of the first reported cases of community transmission, that is, the virus being spread locally rather than being imported.

And on March 16, San Francisco issued the first stay-at-home order in the country. and then the first statewide order went into effect about three days later. And acting quickly is a big deal for a virus like this because in the early stages, it grows at an exponential rate. So controlling it when you still have a small number of cases, even if the number of cases changes by a small amount day to day, over the long term has a huge impact on the total number of cases a few weeks and a couple months down the line. And that's kind of what we're seeing here. Yeah, yeah, because I remember there were people who were pushing back against California saying that they were overreacting, but it appears now they were not.

Right. And some public health officials will put it this way that, you know, anything you do ahead of a pandemic seems like an overreaction. And then everything you do in hindsight seems like it was inadequate. So that's kind of the crux here in terms of mounting both the political and the public health response to a crisis like this. Speaking of hotspots, there was an interesting case that's that is finally getting attention this week. And that is about South Dakota, one state that has resisted stay-at-home orders. and now it has become one of the nation's coronavirus hotspots and the pork factory there. Yeah, that's right. The governor of South Dakota said that she would actually not want to implement any kind of stay-at-home order

or any kind of lockdown order across the state. And what we've seen now is that this pork processing plant has more than 300 employees diagnosed with this COVID-19, which is kind of surprising because, you know, you kind of think of South Dakota as of being a place that's sparsely populated. with people spread out. But this kind of shows that whenever you have people gathering together in a place, whether that's a workplace or a concert or a religious service, that increases the risk of transmission, and it only needs one or two people to start transmitting before a large number have it. Because there are thousands of people that work on that plant, and they work in very, very close conditions processing them eat. That's right. There's about 3,700 workers at that

one plant. And so the fact that a couple hundred, several hundred have been infected so quickly, I mean, just shows how quickly the risks can increase. And even though the outbreak series, are still popping up all over the country. Trump still wants to reopen the economy next month, right? He's not getting a lot of agreement on this, is he? Right. I mean, he initially said that he had the absolute authority to issue these kinds of reopening orders and then later walked it back. This decision is actually going to be in the hands of cities and states. And a lot of cities and states are saying that they're going to be led by the science. They're going to follow their own public health data and their own internal recommendations rather than any guidance from the

federal government. So as much as Trump wants to reopen the economy. I mean, I think we're likely not going to see that happen anytime soon. And if it does, it's going to be happening sort of piecemeal in different spots throughout the country. I want to move on to another interesting topic, and that is how coronavirus is impacting people differently. It seems there's a tie between the death from COVID-19 and bad air quality. Is that right? Right. It seems to show that there is a link between air pollution and the worsening outcomes of this virus. And intuitively, that makes a lot of sense because, you know, this is a respiratory virus and air pollution damages the lungs in the airways. And so it stands to reason

that this virus can be more infectious that way. And it can also be an explanation for some of the disparities we've seen along, you know, racial lines. We've seen a huge increase among black and Latino deaths in cities like Chicago and New Orleans. And differences in exposure to air pollution in those communities is one of the explanations along with other kinds of structural problems like access to health care. Didn't the EPA, though, recently say it was suspending some of its rules around air pollution? Right. The EPA said that it would temporarily suspend some of its enforcement activities around certain environmental monitoring and enforcement, but they insisted that it was a temporary effect because of the COVID-19 outbreak that they wanted to protect their workers

and they didn't have the resources to go out and enforce this. But a lot of environmental activists say this is exactly the time where we need to be enforcing environmental rules because we see such a strong environmental component to this disease. And that brings me to a question about China because it's notorious for the smog in some of the cities, but the U.S. has passed China for coronavirus deaths. There's a connection again. Right. I mean, China has been notorious for poor air quality, but we also got a natural experiment with some of the lockdowns that they imposed with air quality improving drastically in some cities. And so one researcher did estimate that the lockdowns saved about 20 times as many lives as were lost to the COVID-19 virus

because of the improvements in air quality, that keeping people home and breathing cleaner air did a huge benefit to public health in the country. Your last story is about natural disasters. I mean, we're heading into the summer. We can expect hurricanes and wildfires and things like that. How are officials preparing for the wildfires and the hurricanes in this age of social distancing? Well, they're kind of at a loss as to how to prepare because this is sort of an unprecedented scenario. but it is something that they are starting to recognize is a risk. You know, officials in South Carolina recently noticed that, you know,

this is a really important question of how you maintain social distancing when you have people sheltering or you have to evacuate people from the coast. Similarly, in California, they've had to deal with wildfires last year and they're likely to see more this year. And in addition to that, like the measures they used to control fires, things like shutting down power to areas where ignition is likely, that can hamper, you know, the public health response. If you shut down power to people, to hospitals, for instance, like, you know, that can be very detrimental when you're trying to treat this disease.

So right now they're working on coming up with plans that can deal with broad problems at the same time, but it's a tall order. And it's kind of an uncharted territory right now. And they're learning right now exactly what they can and cannot do. And we'll get a real world test once these disasters start picking up this year. If you have to evacuate people from flooding or a hurricane and those places they would go to is already filled with people who are sheltering. you have a big problem. Yeah, and like many of the people that you're evacuating are probably going to have underlying health conditions

or they're going to have access to inadequate care. They're not necessarily going to be able to get treatment right away. And, of course, if you pull people together in big groups, I mean, that increases risk of transmission of this virus. Some great stuff, Omer. Thank you for taking time to be with us today. Thank you for having me. Omer Afon is a reporter at Vox in Washington, D.C.

We're going to take a break, and when we come back, it's one thing to build a wall against rising seas. but how do you cope with climate grief, how the climate crisis impacts mental health for both scientists and citizens alike. We'll be right back after this short break. This is Science Friday. I am Irafledo.

In our latest chapter of degrees of change, climate change is rewriting the landscape of our planet, but also of our minds. When rising seas and wildfires displace people from their homes, when new species of animals and plants disappear from Earth, these abrupt changes pose a challenge to our emotional stability. When Australia eco-philosopher Glenn Obrecht described a unique sense of loss

in people whose rural home had been completely transformed by strip mining, he coined the term solostalgia, comparing it to homesickness. The critical difference was that these people were still at home, And it was quite clear to me that they were experiencing melancholia, distress. The key thing that they were missing from their home environment was the solace. So they felt as if their home environment was moving away from them. So solstalgia was created by me to describe the lived experience of negative environmental change. And the bumper sticker version of it was the homesickness you have when you're still at home.

The American Psychological Association acknowledges the mental health burden that can be imposed by climate change. It issues guidance to professionals who support individuals and communities grappling with climate grief and anxiety. Our listeners shared their feelings about climate change on the Science Friday Voxpop app. So I'm awake at 4 a.m. Since having a baby, my level of anxiety has really intensified. I have so much fear for the future that we're providing the next generation. Climate change makes me sad. I think climate change mostly makes me feel angry.

Climate change makes me feel overwhelmed. There are so many changes to make that are not within my power. I don't understand why our politicians aren't making this the highest priority. Will I even be able to retire? I think about it every single day. My son, who's in sixth grade, has been learning about climate change and pollution. He's been displaying a lot of anxiety about the topics and been asking a lot of questions like, why can't people just stop polluting?

But the normity of the problem weighs heavily on it. I do not want my students to feel discouraged. Now I think we are past the point of no return, and now it just makes me so, so sad. How am I handling it? I'm not. Thanks to Ariel, Paula, Matt, Brooke, Morgan, Alex, Jane, Craig, Desiree, Sue, and Juergen, who contributed their thoughts on the Science Friday Voxpop app. For this episode of Degrees of Change, we wanted to explore what it means to adapt, not by building seawalls or planting trees, but by working through your feelings.

So joining me today, please welcome psychologist Renee Lertzman, a founding member of the Climate Psychology Alliance, author of Environmental Melancholia, Psychoanalytic Dimensions of Engagement. She joins us from Marin County, California. Welcome to Science Friday. Hi, happy to be here. You're welcome. And also, Dr. Ashley Consolo, a public health geographer and director of the Labrador Institute at Memorial University. Her book is Morning Nature, Hope at the Heart of Ecological Grief and Loss. She joins us from Happy Valley Goose Bay in the Canadian province of Labrador. Welcome to Science Friday. Thanks for having me, Ira. Let me begin with you, Dr. Lurthman. Why is climate change causing people to feel grief and anxiety? Well, when we think about climate change, it's really often about loss, loss of specific creatures and species, loss of ways of life, of being, and I think more and more people are starting to experience what feels like grief, what feels like a sense of mourning.

So is grief, though, the right word for something that isn't dead, like a loved person? I think that's a really important question. And the way that the psychological field for so many years has conceptualized and understood grief has often been in the context of death of loved ones. And so there's understandably some questions around, well, is this the same thing? And my response would be yes and. It's not quite the same, but it's in that same continuum. Ashley, your work is not focused solely on climate change, but on something called ecological grief.

What's different about ecological grief? Well, ecological grief is really similar to climate grief and to what Renee's been describing. The term ecological expands out to other forms of disruption. that are human-induced, things like mining, and how that impacts an environment or an ecosystem. So it's looking at the work by Glenn Albrecht and Solissela. It's looking at climate grief and anxiety. And it's also understanding the other forms of environmental change

that people can experience. So climate grief is well within ecological grief. And part of the reason why I use that term is it really emerged from people that I was working with in northern Labrador, where they were describing sort of feeling a part of this larger ecosystem and being people of the sea ice and being so deeply connected to this more holistic understanding that climate was a part of, but it was shifting everything.

Yeah, tell us a little bit more about that. The Inuit people in Labrador, what were they grieving specifically about? What did they lose? Well, for over 10 years, we've been working with five inuate communities on the north coast of Labrador. And so these are people who have been there for thousands of years connected to the land,

the snow, the sea ice, the plants, the animals. Everything, everything comes from the land and people feel deeply connected. Labrador is also one of the fastest warming places anywhere in the world. And so that's led to huge shifts in average warming temperatures. It's led to huge declines in sea ice and really impacting people on all different levels. So the inability to travel to hunt and provide for family, increased family stress, a lot of fear and anxiety about what the future is going to bring. And in particular, a lot of people described a whole range of mental health challenges from climate change.

So grieving that melting sea ice and that declining stable ice conditions that last for eight months of the year. Grieving what it means for families as cultural patterns are shifting. So it's things that have been lost. It's things that are currently in process of being lost. And it's also an anticipatory grief where people think about what's it going to be like in five years or 10 years and 20 years. And what does it mean for themselves, their families, their children, their grandchildren? And what does it mean to be inuit in a time where environments are changing so much? Renee, let's again look psychologically at grief.

How do you define grief? Is it a process people? can complete and then move on from? Well, actually, there's different models of grief. So the most popular and well-known model is Elizabeth Kubler-Ross's five stages of grief. There's other models of grief that I find much more helpful for our work on climate change and environmental issues that are more dynamic. So I would align with the view that it never ends.

it's ongoing and it has various kind of ebbs and flows to it. I was very inspired by the work of British psychologist Rosemary Randall, and she talks about the work of William Warden, another British psychologist, where he talks about grief as tasks. And those tasks tend to involve, you know, the acceptance of reality and working through the painful emotions of grief. And on the other side of these tasks are what happens when we sort of refuse them. It looks like denial, right?

We shut our feelings down. We bargain and become maybe kind of techno-optimus, or we might become sort of bitter, angry, depressed, and kind of just refuse to engage with the issue at all. And so with all of these tasks, we have choices. What's incredibly important to emphasize is that grieving and mourning our social, practices. We sort of need each other to be able to talk about these

things and normalize that and that's the most powerful way that we can move through the grief in ways that are really creative and constructive and support our capacities. Ashley, how have the people you've worked with adapted and moved through their grief?

Well, I think all the processes and tasks that Renee just described align so well with what people have been doing and what we've been talking about for years here. And I think one of the biggest pieces is that social piece and being able to talk about it. You know, when we first started working on the research and there was inmate people who were doing the interviews and working with their fellow community members. And the conversations were the first time that people had actually vocalized their grief to

each other. And so that started off this whole other process of people, being able to name it and talk about it and start to find community and support and solidarity in knowing they weren't alone. And so many people said, you know, I thought I was the only one that felt this way. But communities have also been trying to find ways to support cultural connection and cultural resurgence within community so that if people are unable to travel on the land because the ice hasn't formed yet, what are the things that can be done intergenerationality in town? So more language classes, you're seeing a lot of sewing,

and crafting happening, you know, people setting up woodsheds to work together. A lot of working through things by doing things. At least in the U.S., mental health is hard enough to get help with, and it's not exactly something we're encouraged to talk about. So how do we move toward offering people meaningful mental health support about something as politically fraught as climate change? Right. Well, we're seeing right now some transformation.

happening in the psychological field and the mental health field itself, which has, in my view, been quite slow to really orient around what we're talking about in these realities. But it is happening. There's a number of psychologists who are really working on sort of from the inside out within the mental health field because unfortunately what can happen is people will seek out mental health support from a psychologist or a mental health professional who may not be, sort of aligned or there yet. So that is happening. I think it's very important when we seek mental health support to do that kind of vetting. Are they going to, you know, be on this wavelength and understand what it is we're bringing and talking about is one piece? And the other relates to

social, cultural forms of support, right? So we're seeing the good grief network. We're seeing initiatives. We're looking at community responses as Ashley's describing that actually provide a tremendous amount of what we would call mental health support by creating spaces where people can come together and talk about what they're feeling and be able to process that in a safe environment. I'm Ira Plato and this is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. We're talking about climate grief with psychologist Renee Lertzman. and public health geographer, Ashley Consolo. Ashley, one example of collective grief that I saw recently this year were,

it was the wildfires in Australia. And before that, the Amazon, they captured the public imagination and sadness. In the way that I haven't seen in a long time, what happens when a large number of people all grieve the same occurrences this way? I think in many ways, that's been a huge shift for understanding large-scale, collective grieving. So we talked about anticipatory grief, but there's also sort of vicarious grief where just your capacity to be empathetic and compassionate and care for others, that even if you're

not in Australia experiencing the fires, you can see the devastation. And people were openly sharing their pain, their grief, their fear, their sadness, their disbelief, the testimonies that were coming out of Australia, everything kind of compiled together to tell this very strong collective human story where people were really starting to very explicitly talk about grief related to climate and environment and very explicitly link it to climate change. Even in government policy discussions that I was in, it was starting to come up a lot more. And I think that type of collective solidarity of actually discussing and beginning to normalize grief related to the environment was a huge step forward. And I know particularly in

Labrador, where these conversations have been happening in other parts of the North where people have been experiencing these long-term changes already, that sense of like knowing what people were feeling and knowing what that loss meant and that sort of, you know, experiential collective solidarity was really powerful as well. So something really important when we're talking about grief is the tendency we have to assume that it's a negative and that it's a downer. And listeners might be already kind of a little scared of this episode that it's going to bring me down. And it's so important to recognize that the more we can really talk about this and share how we're feeling, it has the paradoxical effect, that it gives us wind in our sales, that it really

allows us to access more creativity and energy that we're needing precisely in times like this. It's actually the way to come out of the hole is by naming it and talking about it. I completely agree with that. I mean, this grief related to environmental change is we should understand it as something so normal and natural and not pathological and not something to be afraid of, something that can actually be an opportunity, a doorway to walk through where we understand we have capacity to make change because we only grieve what we love. Yeah, actually, very interesting and nice to hear. All right. In the moment I have left some quick advice for people, you know, who are grieving, overwhelmed emotionally. What do you tell them to do? Where should we send them? How can they get help?

Well, the first thing I would suggest is to accept and have compassion and kindness for what we are experiencing, you know, starting just there. And second is seeking out and connecting with others with whom you feel you can be safe and yourself with and can really share what's coming up for you and to listen to others. So really that social interaction, that relationship piece is so, so vital right now. And the third is, you know, I would encourage people who are interested in seeking professional support, counseling therapy. groups to explore that, you know, to recognize that there are resources available for us and that we're not in this alone. That's interesting. And useful advice, I think, to people who need some help because we all, you know, need some help these days from grief in two different directions. That's good to know. I want to thank both of you for taking time to be with us today.

Psychologist Renee Lertzman, author of Environmental Melancholia, Psychoanalytic Dimensions of engagement. She was joining us from Marin County, California. And Dr. Ashley Consolo, a public health geographer, director of the Labrador Institute at Memorial University in Happy Valley, Guse Bay, in Labrador. Thank you both for taking time to be with us today. Thanks so much, Ira. Thank you. You're welcome. We have more resources and stories from scientists and others about their climate creep up there on our website at science friday.com slash grief. After the break, what happens when you're a climate scientist or a climate activist and you're facing down your own climate grief and anxiety? We'll talk about studying and fighting climate change without getting stuck in despair.

This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. In this episode of Degrees of Change, we're talking about a different kind of climate change adaptation, the emotional adaptation, understanding and accepting the kinds of profound changes and losses that the world is experiencing as seas rise, fires, rage, and rain relocates. In our last segment, we talked with people who research this landscape of climate and ecological grief, but what about the people whose work centers on understanding and describing the realities of climate change, the scientists, the scientists, the journalists, the activists. How do they grapple with grief while staring at the depressing data every single day? Producer Christy Taylor spoke to several people who fall under this umbrella,

and here is some of what they had to say. It sucks. It sucks to know this much about what's coming and how much of it is already guaranteed. And I, you know, I cry. And a lot of people are going to get hurt and a lot of people are going to die and a lot of the ecosystems and species that I love. are going to be unrecognizable or gone. A new IPCC report will come out and, you know, it'll kind of all come flooding up and you'll just think, oh, God, I knew it was bad, but it's really bad. And then, lo and the whole Katrina came along. That was enormous.

The grief, the PTSD of the entire city. There are already lakes that are completely void of wild rice. That's an entire culture of a people, identity of a people that is deeply, deeply sad. that I couldn't possibly absorb it all. And if I could possibly observe it all, there was no way that I could possibly act. And I think that once you realize in any situation where you're sad, that it's not your fault or it's not happening to you,

but someone's doing it to you for no reason, it sort of changes the way you feel about it. Thanks to Dr. Ayanna, Elizabeth Johnson, me and Chris, Tina Freeman, Tara Houska, Danielle Mulner, and Emily Atkin. And now to talk about further staring at the face of our climate crisis every day, and moving through the grief, let me introduce my guests. Dr. Kate Marvel, a climate researcher and research associate for Columbia University

and NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, and Mary Anais Hegler, co-host of the Hot Take podcast, writer-in-residence for Columbia University's Earth Institute. Kate, let me begin with you. You're a climate scientist. You know the data. You look at the models. You understand their implications. what is it like emotionally for you?

I sometimes feel like there should be, and there probably is in German, a word that captures the feeling of being simultaneously really excited to find out something new, but then really depressed when you realize its implications. And whatever the word for that is, I feel that almost every day. Do you find that other scientists often talk about the emotional reactions

they've had to understanding and researching climate change? I think more and more. I think for a long time there's been this notion that there's no place for emotion in science. You have to be cold. You have to be objective. And obviously it's not very scientific to pretend that something doesn't exist just because it might be inconvenient. So I think there's now more researchers feeling more comfortable talking about their emotional

reaction because we're all living here. We all live on this planet and it's this planet that's changing really rapidly. Mary, you write in one of your essays that every climate person has a moment when climate change breaks their heart. What was yours? So I kind of came to this, like really realizing how serious it was around 2014 when I joined one of the big green groups, the Natural Resources Defense Council, and my job was to do. And my job was to edit policy reports. And those things are really scary if you edit them well, because that means you need to interrogate every sentence

and really understand what it means. And if you do that, you start to see all the lives that hang in the balance between the lines. And that's terrifying. And so there were so many times where I would call up the authors and be like, wait, is this, am I reading this right? and there were a couple of the reports on like pipelines, for example, really, really scared me

and would send me into like different little waves of shock. So I think the whole year of 2014 was my heartbreak moment. In our last segment, we really drilled into how people feel grief about changing climate. Is this the word you would use? Let me ask both of you, do you feel grief? I definitely feel grief. And I think the thing that is unique to climate grief is that, you know, you're supposed to go through these different stages of anger and despair and shock and so on. And then you're supposed to wind up at acceptance. You know, that's what happens when you mourn a relationship or the death of a family member. You wind up at acceptance. And with climate, you can't accept it because accepting it is not. accepting, you know, this loss of something external to yourself is the loss of everything that you love and everything that you need and even yourself. And so there's no way to really truly

accept that. So you kind of just keep cycling through despair and anger and confusion and all of these different phases over and over again. But anger is a great place to be. Like if you got to pick one to stay at, I would pick that one. Okay, would you go to anger or go to grief? Well, I want to clarify that I think anger is part of grief. Yeah, I agree with Mary. I agree that it's not possible to sort of cleanly separate out grief from all of the other emotions. For me, the most comfortable and maybe productive place to be is a sense of gratitude and wonder, knowing that this planet is so special. We don't know of a single other planet in the entire universe that's anywhere near as suitable for us and all the things we like to do.

So for me, there's that sense of real gratitude. But it's always intermingled with sadness and fear and just fury, but hope and determination as well. We talked to a past guest, ocean scientist, Dr. Ayanna Johnson, about how she deals with her grief. And she said it's about focusing on solutions and what she can do. My job on this planet is to make things better. I can't fix it. No one can stop climate change. That ship has sailed.

But we have a lot of control over how bad it gets collectively. And, you know, what is the role that I can play in. being a part of these solutions. Kate, do you think working towards solutions is a good answer to your grief? I do, because I think what if, you know, imagine we didn't know what was causing the climate to change. Imagine if this was something completely beyond our control, the helplessness and the anxiety and the fear that I think I would feel knowing that there's nothing we can do, that would, I think, overwhelm me. And so knowing from a scientific perspective,

and I don't at all want to minimize the social challenge ahead of us. But from a scientific perspective, we know exactly what's causing the planet to get warmer. And we know exactly what we have to do in order to stop that. And Mary, from the point of view for people who aren't scientists, can you use work also? Absolutely. Everyone can. You do not need to be a scientist to be part of this or be part of the solution at all. As a matter of fact, if all we need it was scientists, like it would have been solved. You know, they've been in agreement for a really long time.

And also, I'm not a journalist. I'm a writer. So I don't do investigative journalists. I didn't go to journalism school or anything like that. So my writing is more from the perspective of a literary writer or a creative writer. And that means that I bring an air of art to writing. And I think the climate movement absolutely needs art. I think that we have to start seeing this less as some sort of scientific experiment and more as a social movement for justice.

And there's never been a social movement for justice that only had one type of person involved. My best analogy is the civil rights movement. And there were artists, there were writers, there were organizers, there were some of everybody was involved because it had to become, that was a fight for survival. and that meant it had to become part of who everyone was and part of their identity. And I think we need the exact same thing for climate. Mary, you wrote an essay for the New Republic where you directly compare climate grief to the emotional turmoil many are feeling right now as we isolate and witness the unfolding coronavirus pandemic, describing both as tectonic shifts in the way the world works.

and the end of something big and precious and irreplaceable, please tell us more about that. Yeah, I think, you know, the climate crisis and the corona crisis in their own way are both existential crises. They're different in really fundamental ways. The corona crisis accelerated really fast. There was no reason it needed to get this bad. We definitely had enough warning to stop it from getting as bad as it did. But compared to climate, we really didn't have that much. of a warning. Like there were decades of warnings about climate before it became, you know,

part of our reality. On the other hand, climate is more like slow moving, but it's also permanent, whereas corona is likely temporary. And the big difference being that we have the solutions for climate or we have a lot of them. And that means we just, that actually is very hopeful to me. So, but there's just no way of ignoring how. different they've made the world that we operate in. There's no other way of looking at this massive loss of life as anything other than a collective trauma that we're all suffering through together. And you really don't know what's on the other side of them. But I think what makes them very similar is that what we absolutely need to be on the other side of them is compassion and

empathy for one another. Kate, we're in the middle of a a pandemic, of course. There are people who might ask, should we still be talking about climate change right now? I think absolutely. I think it's a completely false dichotomy to separate out a pandemic from climate change because they are both problems that we're going to have to deal with. And I think one kind of illuminates the other and goes both ways. People, I understand, are desperate to return to something that feels like normal. But with, I think, both COVID and the climate crisis, I don't think there is such a thing as business as usual. With climate change, if our emissions continue along their current trajectory, we are going to live in a climate that's unprecedented, that

nobody's experienced. And so in order to cut those emissions, everything is going to have to change. And so I think there's this real sense in both cases of really facing down that, that scary, but also ultimately really energizing possibility that everything will have to change or it will be changed for us. I'm Ira Flato. This is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. You know, I see a whole range of attitudes about climate change, even just on social media from politicians. Some say they have a lot of hope and we'll engineer a way out of this. Others say, well, what's the point? We're doomed. Mary, where would you place yourself on that spectrum of hope and despair? And are these even the right

words to consider? I think that there is a lot of room between those two very, very big extremes. And I'm probably squarely in the middle. A great friend of mine named Kate Marvel wrote a masterful essay on, you know, what we need to face climate change is not hope is courage. And I think that's, that is a major motivator for me. Hope is not the thing that gets me out of the bed every morning and makes me want to fight climate change. It's courage. And it's also a certain amount of spite at the fossil field industry and the people that got us

into this mess that I will not be pushed lightly into that good night. I don't think that we're doomed. I also don't think that there is any case for, you know, blind hope. Because to my mind, the thought of hope, hope is what you do when you can't do anything else. Hope is like you hope someone else will deal with it. I'm too busy at work to worry about hope. Kate Marvel, your name came up about courage. Tell us about that.

I mean, I want to be clear that I'm not anti-hope. You know, I've had people say, oh, climate scientists lost hope. And for me, it's that it's not really relevant. Or, I mean, I guess to put it in a shorter way, make your own damn hope, you know? You need to go out and you need to do the things that we know need to be done. I think there's a danger in saying some miraculous technology will come along and save us. because we have miraculous technologies already, and it's not, we just need to use them.

We need to adopt them. And I think this is really important, and I want to go back to something that Mary said before, where climate change, we treat it like it's a scientific issue, but it's not just a scientific issue. And scientists, we can't be the only parts of the solution here. I see headlines all the time that say, Scientists are worried about warming world.

Scientists worried about climate change. And I'm just thinking, what are the rest of you doing? How come everybody else isn't worried, you know? So, you know, I think this is something that we're really going to have to tackle together. And it's going to require a lot of humility on the part of scientists to recognize that we are part of the solution, but we're not the only part of the solution. I want to thank both of you. We've run out of time. Dr. Kate Marvel, Climate Researcher and Research Associate for Columbia University and NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies. Mary Ana Eze, Hegler, co-host of the Hot Take podcast, writer and residence for Columbia University's Earth Institute. Thank you both for taking time to be with us today. Thanks so much for having us. Thank you. I want to thank everyone again whose voices we heard talking about the relationship with climate.

climate grief, we have many of them collected on our website, plus resources for thinking about the environment and your emotions. They're up there on our website at ScienceFriday.com slash grief. Charles Berkowitz is our director. Our producers are Alexolem, Chrissy Taylor, Katie Feather, and Kathleen Davis. B.J. Leatherman composed our theme music. And for a replay, you can check out our podcast or ask your smart speaker to play Science Friday. You know, as the world continues to adapt due to COVID-19, getting accurate information is crucial to protecting ourselves, our loved ones, and our communities. This is where Science Friday comes in. We are here to deliver the facts to combat misinformation, to have the right conversations with trusted experts who offer a unique voice in this confusing noise of news.

Our goal is to get you the information you need, but you know, we can't do this alone. Science Friday depends on donations from listeners just like you. So please, if you can, I'm asking you to help to chip in a few dollars right now to support our programming. Go to ScienceFriiday.com slash donate to make a donation. Every little bid helps. Again, that's sciencefriiday.com slash donate. Stay safe, stay healthy, and thanks. Be safe this weekend.

I'm Ira Flato.