In the 2020 Hulu documentary “I Am Greta,” teenage climate activist Greta Thunberg explains how knowledge of global warming nearly killed her. After seeing a movie at school that featured “starving polar bears, floods, hurricanes and droughts,” she says, she became depressed and anxious, stopped talking and “nearly starved to death.”
We become accustomed to the idea that global warming feels bad, and this gives us a sense of comfort, as if our psychological distress proves that we take the problem seriously. “Citizens like to panic,” says an epidemiologist in Hanya Yanagihara’s novel “To Paradise,” which is set in part in an unbearably hot, totalitarian, future Manhattan ruled by scientists with blinders. “Survival breeds hope – it is indeed based on hope – but it does not allow pleasure, and as a subject it is boring.” In our response to global warming, we resemble the frog that only jumps out of the heating water when it is too late. Except we are aware that the water is boiling; we just can’t imagine leaving our tumultuous little pot.
Perhaps one of the many conveniences we have to give up to deal with global warming is the numbing flow of global warming itself. As David Wallace-Wells writes in his 2019 book “The Uninhabitable Earth,” climate-themed disaster movies don’t necessarily represent progress because “we dispel our concerns about global warming by re-enacting them in theaters that we own. designed and verified.” Even YouTube videos from climate conferences can slip into this role. While we portray an activist like Thunberg as some sort of celebrity oracle, we hand over our own responsibilities to a teenager with a supernatural mastery of bleak statistics. We once said we would stop climate change for the benefit of our children, but now we can tell ourselves that our children will take care of us.
The internet is often criticized for giving us useless information and spreading misinformation, but it can also allow for a destructive relationship with serious information. If you’re someone who accepts science, how much more do you really need to hear? The casual doom and gloom of social media is so seductive: it helps us show that we care about big problems, even when we’re looking for distractions, and it gives us a silly tone to express our despair.
Above all, it moves us in time. Mentally we always jump between a nostalgic landscape, where we have a lot of energy to waste on the internet, and an apocalyptic landscape, where it’s too late to do anything. It is the center, where we live, that we cannot imagine. After all, denial is the first stage of grief.
