Climate On My Mind
When I was seventeen years old, I ran away to the Amazon jungle. I’d spent my life caring about animals and ecosystems, forests and birds. I knew they were under attack from humans and our Western way of life: clear-cutting, consumeristically-capitalist, climate-changing. I wanted to stop feeling the pervasive sense of dread that came over me whenever I thought about ecological catastrophe. I wanted to do something.
And for a few weeks, it worked. At the macaw conservation project where I was volunteering, I climbed trees and held days-old macaw chicks in a single hand. I got up close and personal with the rainforest, soaking the humidity into my skin and the birdsong into my brain. I knew that the research I was collecting data for would protect vulnerable macaw populations from poaching, habitat loss, and extinction. I savored the sight of every baby macaw whose life I could save.
Then I watched my world fall apart once more.
“Grieving the Future in the Present”
Rainforests are made to be wet. At that time in the rainy season, downpours should have been commonplace but controlled, rain and sun chasing each others’ tails every hour. But I’d heard that storms were getting more infrequent and intense. I didn’t really understand what that meant until one dry day was followed by a deluge, flooding the entire section of forest near the river. When we went out to unload the supply boat, water flowed into our boots. The port was practically part of the river. Days later, one of the shorter volunteers was still walking parts of the paths with his head barely above water. I thanked climate-conscious planning that the lodge where we lived was built on stilts.
The next week, it all dried up. The sun returned; temperatures rocketed into the 90s, poking the 100s; even the constant moisture in the air seemed to evaporate into… well, thin air. Our hard, physical work became nearly unbearable. I filled my journal with phrases like, “extreme heat and despair for six more weeks”—“más calor”—“morning was hot and hellish and I thought I’d forgotten how to enjoy it here forever.” I was told this wasn’t normal weather. But what was?
One afternoon during this drought, I was sitting on the stoop of the lodge, staring at a butterfly and a lizard. Behind them was a combination of the extraordinary and the mundane: our laundry hanging out to dry in the petrifying sun, backed by the endless jungle. These two creatures, scuttling and fluttering around my feet, were the same. I saw them every day here. But every day here didn’t feel like every day.
And then, suddenly, I thought: they’re gonna be gone at some point. I’ll come back here, if I’m lucky, and they won’t be around. None of this will. It will flood, or dry up, or its protections will be lifted and it will all be cut down. If the human race does not get to it through climate change, we will find another way.
I wasn’t watching the lizard or the butterfly anymore. I was just sitting there, holding my head in my hands because I couldn’t hold the weight in my stomach. I didn’t have a name for what I felt, not yet. The memory came flooding back when I stumbled upon one: Pre-Traumatic Stress Disorder.
Where PTSD deals with the past, Pre-TSD is the anticipation of future trauma. One definition calls it “intrusive involuntary images of possible future stressful events.” Another says it manifests “when confronted with imminent and irreversible loss… both a symptom and a cause of helplessness.” One more sums it up as “grieving the future in the present.” Typing this now, I finally have words for what was going on in my brain years ago.
That day, all I had was a co-volunteer who came out on the steps to join me with a cigarette. (Smoking, she said, was the thing she had not yet gotten around to fixing. When back home in Australia, she dedicated her days to climate activism, Indigenous sovereignty, immigrant rights. Her free time went to her mental health. How could she help her lungs when caring for her mind came first?) I hate the smell of tobacco, but I turned to her anyway. “How do you do it?” I asked.
She knew what I meant. In her community of activists, she told me, they had bad days like this all the time. “The more you care, the harder it gets,” she said. The trick was to take care of each other and make sure that during the time in between, they did something about their dread.
Pre-TSD, climate depression, ecoanxiety—it was all new to me, but my friend was used to it. The day I met her, she had told me, “I came here to take a break from trying to save the world.” For me, I had come because I wanted to get started.
The Human Impact
In the years since, I’ve gotten a sense of what it may be like inside of her veteran-activist-mind. The more I learn about climate change and its impacts on humanity, the more I can do, but she’s right: it gets harder, too. I no longer only mourn the preemptive loss of butterflies and lizards, but of coastal cities and wildfire-prone towns. I recognize now that our destructive systems have targeted not only wildlife, but also Black, brown, and poor communities. I do not have to travel a continent away anymore to feel the effects of climate change, past and present and future, seep under my skin.
The joint climate/mental health crisis is not only an issue for activists, but for all people, especially youth. According to a Washington Post survey, 57 percent of teenagers said that climate change made them feel scared. And between 2007 and 2012—not even the peak of the climate movement—anxiety diagnoses in kids aged 6 to 17 went up by 20 percent.
As an older sister, I experience these numbers acutely. Ever since I learned about mental health in middle school, I have watched my siblings’ anxiety fall into step with my own. I wonder—if we had been born just a bit later, would it have been even worse? At five, my sister had a phobia of fire. How would my parents have told her that whole swathes of the world were burning?
I read the past year as a precursor of things to come. School cancelations; safety mask mandates; childhoods cut short. Will my own kids experience the same things, whether from another disease or worse? Or sooner: will my brother’s college experience look a little like mine? It won’t matter then if we care about the climate crisis or not. It will affect everybody, in body and in mind.
Forget caring because of the so-called environment. Forget saving the polar bears, or even future generations. Climate change is here, now, with social injustice and mental health crises to match. To combat them, we have to create a new system—or the old one will bring us all down with it.