The comedy is unintentional, but hilarious, nonetheless.
The New Yorker: What to Do with Climate Emotions
The New Yorker: What to Do with Climate Emotions
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If the goal is to insure that the planet remains habitable, what is the right degree of panic, and how do you bear it?
Tim Wehage grew up in South Florida. At home, the TV was often tuned to Fox News, where he heard a lot of rants about liberal hypocrisy, but he didn't consider himself political. After high school, he began working for his family's construction business. He had no intention of going to college until he realized that he didn't want to spend his adulthood doing manual labor in the tropical heat. In college, as a mechanical-engineering major, he learned about renewable energy and about the science behind global warming. In 2017, a couple years after graduating, he moved across the country, to Seattle, to take a job with a company that improves the energy efficiency of chilled-water facilitiesthe systems that produce cold air for data centers, hospitals, and universities. He was carless, and walked everywhere. He became a vegan. He loved being immersed in the beauty of the Pacific Northwest.
He hadn't travelled much as a kid, and he decided to have a peripatetic 2019, under the auspices of a company called Remote Year, which set up monthlong stays for remote workers in twelve different cities. In Kuala Lumpur, the air was opaque. In Hanoi, he developed sinus issues, and thought about how the city's nearly eight and a half million inhabitants breathed this air every day of their lives. He heard from a local that orangutans were going extinct in Indonesia; he felt dazed by grief. He took a tour of the Sumatran jungle, hoping to see an orangutan while he still could, and then saw miles and miles of palm-oil plantations, where the orangutan's native habitat had been clear-cut for the consumer crop. The guide asked who in the group was American, and if any of them checked food labels to see if the product contained palm oil. "Well, when you don't do that, this is what happens," the guide said.
"For years, you read all the articles," Wehage told me recently, over the phone. "You look at pictures of the pollution, you think about the greed that fuels it, and you feel upset. But then, when you're there, you understand that it's so much worse than anything you could read." He returned to Seattle overwhelmed.
He started checking labels for palm oil, but knew that wasn't enough. He couldn't stop thinking about the carbon footprint from all his flights, and how, in some of the cities he visited, the local water was so polluted that the only potable option came in plastic bottles. Then the pandemic set in. Wehage went through a breakup, and began to spend every day alone in his spare, undecorated apartment. (He hadn't wanted to purchase anything unnecessary that would just end up in a landfill.) He went on long walks, sometimes carrying a trash bag to clean up the streets, but a sense of powerlessness weighed on him: seeing car commercials every two minutes on television, getting on Reddit and reading endlessly about climate doom. He stopped enjoying the things he used to like: playing basketball, going hiking.
Therapy wasn't really a thing people did where he grew up, Wehage thought. But, after some prodding from friends and family, he decided to seek it out. He came across the Web page of the Climate Psychiatry Alliance, which has a list of more than three hundred climate-aware therapistspractitioners who recognize climate change as a major cause of distress and have developed methods for discussing and treating it. He e-mailed and called a dozen of those listed, but none had any availability. He tried a dozen more therapists in his city before finding someone who could see him. When Wehage told her what was bothering him, she said that she talked about the climate crisis with most of her clients. "After so much isolation, just to think, I'm not aloneit made me get tears in my eyes," Wehage told me.
The therapist nudged him toward the realization that checking climate-change Reddit for an hour first thing in the morning might not be helpful, and encouraged him to be gentler with himself. Wehage decorated his apartment with finds from local Buy Nothing groups and plants from a nearby nursery. He cut out most social media. He went on a solo overnight backpacking trip, a prospect that had always scared him, and met a group of hikers who invited him to drink tequila on the beach. They talked about climate change, and about everything else.
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A couple of years ago, reading a climate report on my phone in the early hours of the morning, I went into a standard-issue emotional spiral thinking about it all. I woke up my boyfriend, seeking consolation; he took in my frenetic wheel-spinning and went back to sleep. The next morning, he drew up a list of thirty action items for us to consider, ranging from phone banking to ceasing international travel to committing eco-sabotage. There were tasks on the list that we had been doing for yearscomposting food waste, buying secondhandbut many that we had never considered. We had also recently had a baby, whose carbon footprint likely already exceeded that of entire villages in Burundi. I was playing whack-a-mole with my consumer desires. Every day, I felt like a self-serving piece of *****
"We have come to believe we are entitled to be spared the hassle of caring at this detailed level," the English psychoanalyst Sally Weintrobe writes in a recent book, "Psychological Roots of the Climate Crisis." She argues that many of us struggle with a particular kind of neoliberal outlook; that we have been molded into the type of people needed to prop up the economy of consumption that has despoiled the planet, people who cling to the idea that the world can and should stay the same. Weintrobe is a founding member of the Climate Psychology Alliance, which, like the Climate Psychiatry Allianceand a handful of other, similar professional associationsis dedicated to the idea that the disciplines of psychology and psychiatry can help us not only to understand the climate crisis but also to do something about it.
