‘What Happens Next?’: How Can We Conquer Climate Anxiety?

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Susan Carland: Welcome back to What Happens Next?, the podcast that examines some of the biggest challenges facing our world, and asks the experts, what will happen if we don't change? And what can we do to create a better future?

I'm Dr Susan Carland. Keep listening to find out what happens next.

Amanda Stephens: When I talk to other people working in the climate space, in general, people find that action is the antidote to anxiety.

Alan Reid: And, again, you can reduce climate anxiety by being part of the community which is working together.

Kelly O'Shanassy: I always remember that the future is not set. It might look a bit dark right now, but it's not set. It is set by the people who take action today and, therefore, we need to take action today.

Susan Carland: Everywhere we turn, there's bad news about Earth's future. We read it every day online, we hear about it in podcasts like this one, and we see it with our own eyes with every new climate-related natural disaster. It's enough to keep anyone up at night.

And as we learned in last week's episode, it does. Climate anxiety is one of the many psychological impacts of climate change, and it's only getting worse as we are frustrated daily by inaction from industry and government.

But today, we're shifting focus to empowerment and action. I'm joined by experts and activists tackling climate anxiety head-on, offering hope, resilience, and a roadmap for a more sustainable future. Keep listening to find out what happens next.

Rebecca Huntley: My name's Dr Rebecca Huntley. I'm a social researcher and writer. I'm particularly passionate, interested in climate change and nature and the environment in the research that I do.

Susan Carland: Rebecca Huntley, welcome to the podcast.

Rebecca Huntley: Happy to be here.

Susan Carland: One of the things that you've researched recently are public attitudes toward climate change. What have you noticed are some of the more common emotions that people have about the issue?

Rebecca Huntley: The main emotion that the majority of us have is a level of doubt and uncertainty. And that's really the consequence of nearly three decades of deliberately sowing the seeds of doubt about the causes of climate change, and also about the capacity for us to address climate change by the fossil fuel industries, by various political and media interests who want that doubt to continue.

A fantastic book that actually was based on the tactics of the big tobacco called Merchants of Doubt, which was just the tactic was just keep saying, “Well, we don't know, and it could be, and…” You know what I mean? Just basically injecting uncertainty and doubt into the public discussion to fend off what was the evidence base.

So the fossil fuel industries have done the same and so it's not a surprise that when you say to people, what's the real emotional response you have to climate change, it's uncertainty.

And it's not always just uncertainty about, is climate change happening? How much is being caused by human beings? There's a level of uncertainty we all feel about, how worried should we be? How much do I really know about this? There is a kind of anxiety, so anxiety, uncertainty, doubt, insecurity, all of those kinds of things. And while we remain in that space, it's very difficult for people to act definitively out of a position of doubt, uncertainty.

One of the other real consequences from that primary emotional response to climate change is that we don't want to talk about it. If you feel a sense of doubt and uncertainty about something, it's very hard to then pipe up and say something about it because most people just don't want to be wrong, right? They don't want to say, “Well, I think climate change is happening and maybe the fires are caused by climate change.” Nobody wants to be shut down because a lot of people feel like, “I'm not an expert in this.” So while we remain in that uncertain state, it is very difficult to act.

Susan Carland: And I imagine it also then means that the people that feel that they can be confident, even if they're wrong, are the dominant voices –

Rebecca Huntley: Oh, yeah, exactly.

Susan Carland: – creates, reiterates this problem. At a societal level, managing our collective climate anxiety would be much easier if more people felt confident enough to have informed conversations about it.

Rebecca Huntley: I've been involved in a project for a number of years now called Climate Compass, which divides the community according to various different segments on climate.

About nine per cent of the community are, what we would say, dismissive on climate, and people who are active climate deniers are only about three or four per cent of that group. Of all the people across the spectrum, all of these groups of people on climate, the only ones that say they don’t have any kind of doubt about their ability to talk about climate are the climate deniers.

And, in fact, the more anxious you are about climate, the more concerned, the more alarmed, the more engaged, your biggest barrier to doing anything about climate, particularly talking about it, is “I don't think I'm a good enough speaker or writer,” so the more you care about an issue, the more you want to do it justice and the higher threshold you give yourself in terms of being a good advocate, having all the facts.

And when I do the work that I do, a lot of people who are really engaged and worry about climate, say to me, “What books can I read?” Like, “Should I go and do a degree?” Like, “What do I need to know?” And I'm like, “You do not need to be an expert on climate change to talk about it.”

Susan Carland: It's almost like it's the reverse Dunning-Kruger effect, you know?

Rebecca Huntley: Exactly.

Susan Carland: This idea where people, the less they know, the more they think they do. Is that the reverse?

Rebecca Huntley: No, I think that's exactly, it's exactly right. Exactly right.

And it kind of makes sense, too, because people who are alarmed about climate change, one of the characteristics about all of them, is that they believe the science, right? So they have a very, kind of a greater trust in experts, a greater ability for systems thinking. They tend to be more educated, not because they're kind of smarter, but because they understand what it is to actually go and do a university degree and how difficult it is to kind of fabricate evidence out of the back of that.

So you have a group of people who are alarmed about climate change, and one of the reasons why they are alarmed is because they believe the tens of thousands of people with PhDs that they're not making this up. And, of course, so that means that they have a respect for evidence, respect for expertise so their threshold for that is much higher, their kind of standards are higher, and they feel like, “If I can't meet those standards, I'm not going to do the issue justice because I don't have all the facts.”

Not something that climate deniers care about at all. Does not keep them up awake, does not keep them up at night at all.

Susan Carland: Here's Dr Rhonda Garad from Monash University Centre for Health Research and Implementation.

Rhonda Garad: There's a low level of science literacy in our community, and I'd actually even put myself in that, even though I have a PhD in science.

But climate science, it's challenging to understand and so there's a tremendous need for science brokers, for communicators like yourself to bridge that gap between the scientists and being able to deliver a message to people that is both accurate and hopeful.

Susan Carland: Environmental sustainability and climate change education expert Professor Alan Reid also believes there's a literacy issue to tackle, and it goes beyond science.

Alan Reid: Climate change isn't just a science issue or a technology issue. It's about how do we want to live together well? And once we start asking those questions then climate will naturally come up. We don't have to focus on the crisis. We can focus on what kind of society do we want to live in?

If we think about the voice, if we think about the kind of future of Australia, where should it be by say, 2200, that kind of thing, mapping out a seventh-generation type perspective is another way of beginning to say, “Well, let's recognise there are different ways of thinking about how the future might unfold. Who do we honour? Who do we want to engage with? How do we want to take this further?”

That, again, is part of the educational process. We have dialogue, disagreement, we come to resolutions on things. We sometimes know we've got to learn a bit more. It's not one side or another.

The challenge for a lot of the work around climate anxieties, how do you stop it becoming despair? And education is one of many roots that you can hopefully encourage people not to despair about things.

But there's also an equipping, which comes from schooling and from education to be scientifically-literate, to be climate-literate, to be emotionally-literate. We could even talk about emotional intelligence, as well as scientific intelligence, different forms of intelligence which are important to raise as part of the package of education and what schools, different sectors should be focusing on.

I think there, that's where in terms of avoiding a calamitous future, the kind of dystopian futures, which we often see in TV series, movies, climate fiction, which is kind of suggesting it's the end of the world, avoiding those apocalyptic scenarios is really important for also saying, “Actually, we can respond. We've had crises before. There are things which bring about change in society.”

Susan Carland: So we know what we need to do at a high level, but what about you and I? How do we stop tossing and turning at 3am trying to handle the world's biggest existential threat on our own before breakfast?

One tricky thing about managing climate anxiety, I think of a friend I have who has terrible climate anxiety. She can't read any newspaper articles about what's happening with the climate because she gets genuine anxiety and so she avoids all or she says, “I have to switch it off because I actually can't cope with it.”

Alan Reid: Every so often, it's nice to have a doughnut. But if you have doughnuts all of the time, it will make you very ill. I'm not saying the climate information, knowing what's going on is like eating doughnuts, but it's one of those things where sometimes we need to know when to say, “Okay, I can put my screen down. I don't need to hear this any longer. I can go and do something else.”

Susan Carland: Climate Council CEO Amanda McKenzie says the next step is to stay in the moment.

Amanda McKenzie: You know, for our little human brain, it's actually really a lot, compared to where we came evolutionarily, to take on this global challenge. So we need to be as present as possible. We do a lot of thinking about the future, what if this happens, what if that happens, these varying disasters.

And it's not to ignore them, but just to say, “Let's focus on the present when I have time to enjoy myself.” Like, I find this with my kids. Sometimes I'll be at the park and it'll be a beautiful environment, the kids are on the swing, and I'll start thinking, will they get to have this with their kids, and kind of ruining the moment for myself. I try to be disciplined now in saying to myself, “No, I'm enjoying this moment because this is the moment that's here right now.”

Susan Carland: We can also make conscious choices about our attitudes towards the problem. Here's Rebecca again.

Rebecca Huntley: Look, when I was writing the book, How to Talk about Climate Change, I was looking at all the social science and the sentiment work, but I was also talking to people who'd been involved in climate action for a lot longer than I had at the time. So it was… I wrote the book almost at the beginning of my engagement as an environmental activist and they all said a version of optimism is a choice that you make. And some would say in a sense it's almost a kind of illogical choice when you got to be, if you really kind of stack up all the evidence.

But that really resonated for me for two reasons. I don't feel as somebody who has been extraordinarily privileged and lucky in the kind of life's lottery and to kind of say, “Well, I'm just going to give up on this thing that is probably going to affect me, but much more likely going to affect people in other countries and other parts of Australia that are far less well-resourced than me.” I don't feel like that's a moral decision that I could make. Like, I haven't really tried hard, but I'm going to give up.

Susan Carland: Yeah.

Rebecca Huntley: And secondly, I have children and I don't really feel – and that's a kind of version of that – I don't really feel like I can give up on something that is going to be such a dominant shaper of the world in which they grow up in.

But the other thing I would say is this, and this is not my metaphor. There's lots of kind of recurring metaphors in the world of climate, and I don't know whether it's because we're all nerds, but The Hobbit, and Tolkien’s one of those.

Susan Carland: Are you about to tell me that the real struggle of climate change was the friendship we made along...

Rebecca Huntley: No. No, no, no, that's not true. I mean, it's like you do make lots of friends in the climate movement, and that's one way that you stay optimistic is because you don't want to let other people down, right? Because pessimism is contagious.

Susan Carland: Yeah.

Rebecca Huntley: There is this kind of sense of that by embarking on something that feels hopeless, the very nature of embarking on it can help you kind of measure, help you kind of meddle with the odds, right? If you didn't actually try, then you haven't actually set in train a whole range of processes that somehow can kind of magically come together that might actually chip the odds in our favour.

Susan Carland: Amanda also says it's important to remember that we're trying to turn a planet-sized ship around. That's going to take some time so it's more helpful to think about what we can control.

Amanda McKenzie: What I advise people to think about when they're getting into working on climate is to manage their own expectations. Although we know the scale of the problem and we need to be agitating for the similar scales of solutions, we also need to understand that social change does inevitably take some time. And managing that expectation is important to ensuring that you don't get burnt out in approaching an issue like this.

But also thinking about, “Well, what are the steps that I'm going to take?” As you said, if you're just doing some actions around your house, that can be very disempowering because you look down the street and no one else has done it, and you're thinking, “Well, actually the politician and businesses have much bigger levers.”

So I advise people to think about their voice, their treasure, and their time. Your voice is how you are sharing your thoughts with those around you, how you vote, calling your politician, activating those in your community. Your treasure is where your money's going. So can you donate to organisations that are doing good work on this, join with others? Can you think about where your banking, where your superannuation is going, which is either ethical or it's not ethical? And then using your time, depending on the stage you are in your life, do you have a capacity to volunteer? So that's for a general audience.

But if you have power and influence, you should be using every lever that you have to make a difference. And I advise people to think about what is their circle of influence, because we often don't think about ourselves as being someone that has agency. I remember even presenting to a superannuation fund board and, “Well, we're just a little superannuation fund. What can we do?” was part of the response.

[Laughter]

Amanda McKenzie: And I thought often everyone has a bit of that sense of “I'm just a small actor. What can I do well? Well, what is my sphere of influence? Is it my street? Is it the school community? Is it my workplace? Is it donating to an organisation to empower a bigger group of people to work together?”

Susan Carland: Finally, when we're ready, we can take a breath and take action. Here's Kelly O'Shanassy, CEO of the Australian Conservation Foundation.

It's such a tricky thing, isn't it? Because we talk about climate anxiety and how can we manage climate anxiety when, if we believe that what the science is telling us is true, which I think most people do, vast majority of scientists do agree on this, this isn't a potential or a possible outcome. It seems pretty certain. Climate anxiety is actually an entirely reasonable feeling. Like, if you genuinely believe this is going to happen, which is not a crackpot theory, there's a lot of good evidence to think this is true, actually, it's the most rational feeling to have.

So how do you talk yourself or act yourself out of... It's like there's a lion at the cave door and someone's saying, “Let's just do some deep breathing”... The lion's there, I think I'm going to die. Like, this is a reasonable response. So how do we manage that?

Kelly O'Shanassy: It is a reasonable response, and I think that the people that sometimes feel the most amount of stress are the people who cannot deny the climate science. They completely accept it. And the only antidote I know of, yes, you need to breathe, right? You probably need to take a deep breath before you take the lion on. You want to see what the lion's doing. You want to find the best way to maybe not kill the lion, I'm not advocating for that, but to tackle it. And so just taking a breath is really important.

But for me and for many people at work in the fields that I work in, the best antidote is to take action, so is to fight, not fly. And that's what we need to do to, I mean, we can't sit back and let climate change just happen. Every tonne matters. Every 10th of degree matters. What we do right now matters.

So I always remember that the future is not set. It might look a bit dark right now, but it's not set. It is set by the people who take action today and, therefore, we need to take action today to create the best world that we can. That in itself always motivates me every day to stand up and take action, despite what I know about the health of the climate and so the best antidote is to take action.

I think that one thing that people could do is after you take a deep breath, is to realise that you're actually not alone, and that your response to this is absolutely reasonable and should be the human response. We should be worried about this and it's, to be honest, worrying that not enough people are worried about climate change.

But if you can find a way to join with other people who share your concerns, share your idea about what the future should be and could be if we take action, then you'll find out you won't be alone. So join with like-minded people. That could be as simple as talking to your neighbour or a family or a friend, but also could be joining a group that you share your values with.

So it could be an Australian Conservation Foundation, it could be another environment group or climate group that you share your values with. These days there are Parents for Climate Action, Vets for Climate Action, Engineers for Climate Action. You'll find one where you share your values. And you'll find out that not only are you not alone, but then when one person joins with another person, joins with 10 people, joins with a hundred people, you can actually change the future.

Susan Carland: And the good news? Change is already underway and it can happen in an instant. Here's Rebecca again.

Rebecca Huntley: As you would know, systems change. Being 51 and looked at all the issues that matter to me, I now realise that time isn't linear and the pathway of progress is not dictated by the pathway of progress in the past. You can have a situation where you're plugging away and plugging away and nothing happens and, suddenly, a few things happen and you can leap forward, quite short period of time to a position you could never have imagined that you'd be.

The flip side to that, as you've seen in places like America with Roe versus Wade, is suddenly you can be thrown back. You can be thrown back to a past that you never thought. You know what I mean? You just didn't ever think that that kind of world could exist.

So what this shows it shows you two things. It shows you vigilance, never, ever take for granted the progress that you have. It also shows you optimism because, suddenly, things can move.

I mean, think, Susan, about the dramatic political difference between the elections of 2019 and the elections of 2022. I mean, you just couldn't imagine two different political outcomes in an extraordinarily short period of time. It's not like Australians changed dramatically. We did have the fires, we did have other things.

So that's what keeps me optimistic. Not necessarily because I look at all the evidence and think, “This is going to be easy,” but I know and can see now really in a lot of examples of how, suddenly, things can leap forward because a group of six or seven people said, “No, we're just going to really try, try to shift the dial and it can work.”

Susan Carland: Here's Kelly O'Shanassy. What's giving you hope in this area?

Kelly O'Shanassy: But I had this little trick to look backwards to dream forward. When I started probably 15 years ago working in the nonprofit area, I've always worked in the environment my whole career, but in the nonprofit area, three per cent, the target for Australia's renewable energy was three per cent, was the target. We weren't even there and now we're at 33, 35 per cent of actual renewable energy in Australia. The projections to 2030 are for about 82 per cent. We're going to blow that out of the water. We'll get there faster than that.

When we were struggling about the three per cent target and advocating to government to set that target, everyone was saying it was impossible to do and we wouldn't achieve it and put all the barriers up in front of us. But not only did we beat the targets that were set for 2030, and I think we will beat them for 20, sorry, 2020, I think we'll beat them for 2030, we did what people said was impossible.

So what they tell me today is impossible, I don't listen to. Nelson Mandela said things only seem impossible until they're done and I agree with him. And you've got to, look, every big advancement that humanity has made has happened because humans have asked for it and got together and got organised about it, and this is the next one. So let's look backwards to where we've come from to dream forwards about where we can get to.

Susan Carland: Kelly, thank you so much for your time today.

Kelly O'Shanassy: You're welcome.

Susan Carland: When it comes to climate change, we have choices. We can choose to bury our heads in the sand. We can live in fear of an uncertain future, or we can acknowledge that climate anxiety is a reasonable reaction to the greatest challenge our world has ever known, and use it as a catalyst for change. I know which choice will help me sleep better.

Thank you to all our guests on this episode, Amanda McKenzie, Kelly O'Shanassy, Dr Rhonda Garad, Professor Alan Reid and Dr Rebecca Huntley. You can learn more about their work by visiting our show notes.

Music featured in today's episode comes from “Climate Notes”, an installation and performance project by Dr Anna McMichael and Dr Louise Devenish, both from Monash University's Sir Zelman Cowen School of Music. Learn more about this incredible interactive work in our show notes, and join us next week on What Happens Next? for a closer look at how art can help heal our climate anxiety.

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