Pick-Me-Ups If Eco-Despair Has You Down
What to do when eco-anxiety haunts your sleep? Join Team Musk Ox. | ISSUE 18, May 24, 2019
QUICK/READ: Who knew musk oxen and Dr. Seuss could help treat climate change despair? And, hey, you adults! Follow the kids out into the climate protest streets on Sept. 20, 2019, across the planet. Plus, save the bees and let them borrow the car, too.
ONE | Join ‘Team Musk Ox’
There is so much bad climate news a pep talk might be good. From a Musk Ox. That is to say, from ‘Team Musk Ox.’
Ice Age ecologist Jacquelyn Gill was recently laid up from surgery. So, the University of Maine scientist went on Twitter for an ‘AMA’, or ‘Ask Me Anything’ session on the climate crisis. Having done these for years, she was struck, she tweeted this week, that for the first time “a majority of the questions have been about whether humans and the planet are doomed,” Gill wrote. “I’m not just seeing anxiety; it’s hopelessness. I think we’re failing people if this is the message they’re getting.”
Gill proposed that people suffering from ‘eco-anxiety,’ as some call it, or its more severe cousin, ‘eco-despair,’ be like the Musk Ox. Gather together, form a circle around the weakest. Stand strong as we tough out challenges ahead. Be a climate musk ox:
In a delightful Twitter thread I recommend to you (click the tweet above), Gill invited people to join her on ‘Team Musk Ox.’ That quickly produced the #teammuskox hashtag. As well as instant memes for an instantly classic phrase:
And:
PS: Check out the climate podcast “Warm Regards,” hosted by Gill and others.
TWO | Strike This Way
Eco-anxiety is an occupational hazard for any humans who dip their big toes into the churning waters of climate coverage. After cannonballing into those waters for this week’s newsletter, I decided what the doctor ordered was…
A doctor. Dr. Seuss, I mean, as in these verses from his final book, “Oh, the Places You’ll Go”:
You'll look up and down streets. Look 'em over with care.
About some you will say, "I don't choose to go there."
With your head full of brains and your shoes full of feet,
You're too smart to go down any not-so-good street.
It’s an open question whether humanity is too smart to keep heading down the “not-so-good street” we’re on. It is a choice, after all, for the race to “don’t choose to go there.” But kids, at least, are now marching in the streets with their heads full of brains and their shoes full of feet.
The day I am typing this—Friday, May 24—student climate strike icon Greta Thunberg tweeted that her forces counted at least 1,594 climate strikes in 118 countries today. (I didn’t even know there were 118 countries.)
They want adults to get off their duffs and into the fray. Mark your calendars. Adults are invited to a planetary climate strike, taking place, like, everywhere on Earth, on September 20, 2019.
THREE | A Tough, Not Impossible Place
The call for a global strike was signed onto by folks like climatologist Michael E. Mann and author and activist Naomi Klein. And Bill McKibben, who helped birth the modern environmental movement decades ago with his book “The End of Nature.” McKibben later took his climate activism off the page and into the streets, founding the global group 350.org. In ISSUE 15, I wrote about his new call-to-action, the sobering, but inspiring “FALTER: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out?”
McKibben was featured with journalist and author Elizabeth Kolbert in a May 9, 2019, Newyorker podcast. It’s about the best summation of where the planet stands, politically and realistically. In a really tough place. But not an impossible one. Yet.
Roll tape (listen to the podcast or read a transcript of it here):
McKIBBEN: I think the reason that young people are so involved is because, well, because, you know, you and I are going to be dead before climate change hits its absolute worst pitch. But if you’re in high school right now, that absolute worst pitch comes right in the prime of your life. And if we’re not able to take hold of this, then those lives will be completely disrupted, and they’ve figured that out. That said, it’s not O.K. for the rest of us to leave it to fourth graders to solve the problem.
PS: All that said: Rock on fourth graders! PSS: If you teach or have a kid in elementary school, here’s an inspiring climate change, classroom-oriented video.
The world considered as a sphere with its atmosphere heating up. From a photographic series of swirled photographs by DAVID IMBROGNO | cowgarage.com
FOUR | No More Business As Usual
The headline on the Guardian’s story on the global strike underlines McKibben’s difficult, but direct message: ‘Disrupting our normal lives is the only way to secure our future.’ As he told the Newyorker:
It’s at some level business as usual that’s doing us in. The fact that we get up each day and do more or less the same thing that we did the day before…. The U.N. just published a truly remarkable report saying that we’re going to lose a million species on the planet sometime over the next few decades. It completely backs up the work that Betsy did so brilliantly in “The Sixth Extinction.”
And yet, you know, it’s in the newspapers, but it’s well below the new royal baby and the trade talks with China, and it’s that business as usual that’s literally doing us in. And we have to figure out how to disrupt it a little bit.
FIVE | Sweet Climate Tweet of the Week
Winnie the Poohs are not the only species that adore honey. Humans love honey. Plus, we have a soft spot for the honeybee. That has not stopped us from decimating bee populations worldwide through pesticides and habitat destruction. Nearly a third of the North American bee population has disappeared in recent years. Which, I know, is not exactly a pick-me-up-from-eco-anxiety message. But this Sweet Climate Tweet of the Week is just… well, so, sweet. Like a good wildflower honey. It makes the point, without being in your face: Save the Fecking Bees. (Excuse my Irish…):
SIX | Climate Crisis Meme of the Week
Our Climate MemeWorks has been producing memes and releasing them into the wilds of the socialmediaverse. Here’s a bunch from our last issue. We’re doing a series on other species for whom the human-caused climate crisis is a threat to their world, too. This week’s meme features a Barred Owl photographed by my naturalist brother, David Imbrogno.
We invite you to steal, copy and pass these memes forward. We welcome submissions of photos and ideas for memes. Send to: douglasohnmartin AT icloud.com.
SEVEN | You Promised Cartoons
I did. Thanks to climate/water scientist Peter Gleick, who tweeted out this cartoon, with the comment: “How every climate scientist on Twitter feels.”
PS | Spread the Times
Help grow The Changing Climate Times audience. Subscribe for free and read past issues at changingclimatetimes.substack.com. And post the link to social media sites. Feedback/content ideas welcome. Be well | Changing Climate Times Concierge and Curator Douglas John Imbrogno | douglasjohnmartin AT icloud.com