What climate campaigners can learn from civil rights
Both target denial. New tactics are needed to overcome climate despair
Simple climate action at home // I S S U E # 19 // CLIMATE DESPAIR
After grief, it’s time to act
By Michael J Coren
In 1963, Martin Luther King Jr. stood before an audience in the heart of Washington DC and declared, “I have a dream.” He invoked a world in which all races would live together in peace. It was one of hundreds of moments during the Civil Rights movement that awakened America’s conscience to racism.
Today, millions of people endure similar anguish watching climate change ravage our planet and our future, especially for the most vulnerable people of which King spoke.
For many, myself included, this can feel paralyzing, as likely to inspire despair as action. The mass protests and political movements you would expect from such an existential threat have barely begun. None of this surprises clinical psychologists such as Margaret Klein Salamon, who we’ll introduce you to below.
Inaction is a normal and understandable human response to fear.
The mighty exception has been the young, most recently the student-led global climate strikes mobilizing an estimated 4 million people. One of those protesters was Stacey Petrov, 19, of Wagner College who I interviewed on the streets of New York City in 2019. “The younger generation thinks of this as grief, like we’re grieving our home,” she told me. “Somebody at a conference quoted someone saying the older generation sees it as a political thing. But for us, we see it as pure grief.”
This month, Hothouse is exploring climate despair. It won’t be a downer. Instead, we’ll learn what psychology, and the actions of young campaigners such as 16-year-old Scarlett Westbrook, teach us about confronting denial. They will explain how they have found strength and even joy in acting to prevent a climate catastrophe.
This is something the Civil Rights movement and climate movement have in common: they both seek to overcome denial. During the Civil Rights movement, years of protests, sit-ins, marches, and lobbying targeted the denial of racism at the heart of American society.
The climate movement is about overcoming denial, but its challenges are different, argues Salamon. The vast majority of people know climate change presents a real, immediate, and existential threat (even in the US where only 15% of the public now doubts or dismisses climate change).
The most fundamental obstacle to personally accepting and acting on the threat of climate change? Anxiety.
When we’re scared, we don’t think rationally. Fear and isolation hold us captive. We emotionally block out knowledge or resort to symbolic actions rather than do what needs to be done.
Overcoming this climate despair and paralysis requires two things: a plan to act, and a community to support us. It’s the same reason we started Hothouse.
Join us this month. We’ll confront climate despair with a bit of courage, and each other.
Margaret Klein Salamon: ‘What we need to feel is everything’
Margaret Salamon had nearly finished her Ph.D. on her way to becoming a therapist. Then Hurricane Sandy hit in 2012. Amid the wreckage, the clinical psychologist experienced her “climate awakening.” Now she applies her knowledge to help other people process the mental and emotional challenges of the climate crisis.
Salamon is adamant we must end the silence about climate anxiety. As the author of two books and a guide on climate mental health, her aim is to start open and honest discussions that clear the way for action. Her Climate Awakening video platform enables people to share their fears and feelings with friends and family.
By engaging with difficult feelings about the climate crisis, she argues we can change our relationship to them. Channeling anxiety into confronting this challenge is transformative, she says: “When you really face what’s going on, who wouldn’t be motivated to want to change it?”
As told to Elle Hunt. Interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.
We have cultivated helplessness as a psychological defense. For 10 years I was willfully ignorant, consciously avoiding information because I didn’t want to feel emotionally overwhelmed. A catalyzing incident was in 2012 when my therapist said to me, ‘You worry a lot about the climate crisis, but you don’t know much about it’. We were arguing about whether it really was that bad. I went away and read a ton, came back and told her ‘So I was right’. I call it my ‘oh shit’ moment – it was transformative.
Climate has been covered as a science issue, but that’s just not mobilizing people. Humans evaluate risks socially, rather than rationally. If a fire alarm goes off in an office, people react almost entirely based on how others react – and leadership. If one person says ‘holy shit, there’s smoke’, it breaks the trance. Talking about the climate emergency is tactical.
Confronting our fears empowers us to act on them. I have grieved for a long time. I know that the most likely outcome is collapse and chaos, and I don’t expect to die of old age. Yet there is a real freedom in understanding that, and living in reality. So on Climate Awakening, we facilitate conversations where participants share their feelings of terror, grief, anger, guilt and alienation. They explain how helpful and motivating it is to talk to others who feel the same. Creating that space, and with the goal of motivating people to take part. It works.
Society needs to treat the climate crisis as a matter of life or death. What would it look like if we recognized this as a life-threatening emergency and devoted all available resources to it? World War II is an excellent historical analog of what is possible when countries see an existential threat and prioritize their response. Governments should spend without limit to save as much life as possible, and the highest earners should be taxed at a totally different rate.
Discourse alone isn’t enough. Look at ACT UP, the activists working for action on AIDS in the 80s and 90s. Their tactics and communication strategies were militant but non-violent: they occupied government buildings, they scattered ashes on the White House lawn, they interrupted news broadcasts and church services. They knew they were fighting for their lives, and they acted like it.
Declaring climate emergencies works. We secured 10 in the US through on-the-ground campaigning, but it really took off after XR occupied five bridges in central London in November 2018. Now more than 1,800 governments have declared a climate emergency and UN secretary-general António Guterres has called for all countries to do it. It’s not at all a panacea, but I believe it can be effective in changing the paradigm of a political response to the climate crisis.
We need to feel like we are on a mission. Eco-philosopher Joanna Macy calls it “active hope”. Feeling that you are able to contribute to a solution – that’s the conversion experience. It’s an awesome transformation when it happens. We work with a 14-year-old who pushed multiple cities to declare a climate emergency. Adults change careers or go part-time to volunteer 25 hours a week. There could be a huge, collective awakening that we can do this. The number-one thing is showing people the path to victory.
Salamon is also the author of The Transformative Power of Climate Truth and Leading the Public into Emergency Mode. You can find out more about Margaret’s video conversation project at Climate Awakening
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Hothouse is a weekly climate action newsletter written and edited by Jemima Kiss, Mike Coren, and Jim Giles. Everything we publish is free to read — your donations fund our writers and artists.
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