Are you worried about your carbon footprint? If so, you have company. Many others are also concerned and some are having serious problems. There is a growing consensus that increased awareness about climate change is leading to negative emotional reactions in some individuals. Doctors are reporting that more and more patients who have anxiety and depression are citing climate change news as something that they are having difficulty coping with and that this leads to distress and/or interferes with daily living. (1)
Other Examples:
A family in Oregon was troubled by their family’s consumption habits and the disappearance of green space. In therapy, their psychologist, Sandy Shulmire, began providing the family with practical instructions for reducing anxiety, and their carbon footprint. Dr. Shulmire, is a practitioner of ecopsychology, a new form of therapy that is starting to find a following in the United States. Like traditional therapy, ecopsychology examines personal interactions and family systems, while also encouraging patients to develop a relationship with nature. Therapists like Dr. Shulmire use several techniques, from encouraging patients besieged by multitasking to spend more time outdoors to exploring how their upbringing and family background influences their approach to the natural world. (3)
Sarah Edwards explained to Fox News that eco-anxiety (manifested in feelings of fear, grief, anger, confusion and depression) caused her shoulder pain, fibromyalgia and fatigue. A British independent news source reported that eco-anxiety has been blamed for symptoms ranging from overeating and bulimia to depression and even alcoholism. (4)
Simon Woods, who is 6, would like to play on a baseball team. His mother, Sharon Astyk, is sympathetic, but is also heavily committed to shrinking her family’s carbon footprint. “We haven’t been able to find a league that doesn’t involve a long drive,” she said. “I say that it isn’t good for the planet, so we play catch in the yard.” (5)
Colin Beavan, a writer in New York City, is working on a book and movie, “No Impact Man,” about the efforts that he and his wife, daughter and dog are making to spend a year without harming the planet. “In other words, no trash, no carbon emissions, no toxins in water, no elevators, no subways, no products in packaging, no plastics, no air conditioning, no TV, no toilets….”he has written in his blog. No mention is made about emissions from daily breathing. Not even Al Gore recommends such privations. (5)
Jay Matsueda waters his lawn with his own urine so that he doesn’t have to flush the toilet. He says that it was his ex-girlfriend’s choice of a gas-guzzling car, rather than his habit of weeing on the grass, that led to the break-down of their relationship. (6)
Dr. Jeff Noethe, a Portland psychologist, says that when seeing patients, he asks them about the amount of time they spend outdoors. “We think nothing of asking about how much alcohol people drink or how many cigarettes they smoke,” Dr. Noethe said. “But when we overlook the natural world, we’re overlooking the most fundamental aspect of who we are as human beings.” (3)
As part of his therapy, Dr. Bill Plotkin, a Colorado psychologist, leads groups into deserts, canyons, and mountains. During such trips, which range in cost from $640 to $2,300, he urges clients to lie on the earth in a bonding exercise. (3)
Trying to minimize one’s carbon footprint is certainly a noble thing to do. However, with some 5 billion people in the world trying to catch up to us, does it really make a difference? In a symbolic gesture, the Forces of Darkness, a dark-sky preservation group, urged people to turn off their lights for an hour between 8:30 and 9:30 local time. Bjorn Lomborg calculated that if 1 billion turned off their lights for 1 hour, it would have been the equivalent of shutting off China’s emissions for a full 6 seconds. (7)
Fareed Zakaria sums this up well, “The combined carbon dioxide emissions from the 850 new coal-fired power plants that China and India are building between now and 2012 are five times the total savings of the Kyoto accords. So you can put in all those curly light bulbs and drive all the Priuses you want; India just ate that for breakfast and China will eat the next round of conservation for lunch.”(8)
References
- K. Searle and K. Gow, “Do concerns about climate change lead to distress?, International Journal of Climate Change Strategies and Management, 2, 362, 2011
- J. Wolf and R. Salo, “Water, water, everywhere, nor any drop to drink,” Australian and New Zealand Journal of Psychiatry, 42, 350, 2008
- Gabrielle Glaser, “Well, Doctor I Have This Recycling Problem,” The New York Times, February 16, 2008
- Larry Bell, “Got Problems, Blame Global Warming,” Forbes, March 29, 2011
- Joanne Kaufman, “Completely Unplugged, Fully Green,” The New York Times, October 17, 2008
- Bryony Gordon, “Obsessed with saving the planet? There are worse fates,” The Telegraph, October 22, 2008
- Jane Orient, “Earth hour celebrates darkness”, Civil Defense Perspectives, 25, 2, March 2009
- Fareed Zakaria, The Post-American World, (New York, W. W. Norton & Co., 2008), 90
