Anouchka Grose - A Guide to Eco-Anxiety: How to Protect the Planet and Your Mental Health

This edition first published in the UK and USA in 2020 by

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Excerpt on page 27 from When Death Takes Something From You, Give it Back , by Naja Marie Aidt, Quercus Publishing 2019. Quoted with permission

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Anouchka Grose is a BritishAustralian psychoanalyst and author, who lectures at the Centre for Freudian Analysis and Research. She is the author of two novels, as well as several non-fiction books. She writes for many publications, including the Guardian, and discusses psychoanalysis and current affairs on the radio, appearing on shows such as BBC Radio 4s Womans Hour. Before training as a psychoanalyst, she studied fine art and was a guitarist and vocalist with the band Terry, Blair & Anouchka.

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Jane Austen, Emma

CONTENTS

FOREWORD

Ed Gillespie

In the dark times, will there also be singing? Yes, there will also be singing, about the dark times.

Bertolt Brecht

In his Motto to the Svendborg Poems published in the spring of 1939, Bertolt Brecht wrote: In the dark times, will there also be singing? Yes, there will also be singing, about the dark times. As a climate activist for the last quarter of a century those words speak to me deeply. The grimly predictable white swan of the climate crisis has descended upon us, despite our best efforts, leaving many of us feeling totally hopeless. When the simple, linear, foreseeable trends in Australia reduced rainfall, increased temperatures, drought, austerity cuts to forestry and fire services combined through tipping points into complex, non-linear, chaotic and uncontrollable outcomes, in the form of raging mega-fires, if you werent getting at least a little bit anxious before that, afterwards you were certainly paying attention.

Pyro-cumulonimbus entered our lexicon, huge black firefuelled thunderclouds whose lightning strikes generate further fires, and we watched horrified as an area the size of Austria burned, killing half a billion animals, dozens of people and razing thousands of homes, lives and dreams to the ground. We perhaps began to realize then that nothing would ever quite be the same again. And then along came COVID-19 just to ram the message home a little harder.

As I write this, we are a month into lockdown in London. Two hundred thousand people have died globally, and hundreds of millions are housebound. Multiple strains of virus are on the loose, making a vaccine look elusive, and huge questions are hanging in the air, like the smoke after the Australian fires, around what sort of world we will inhabit on the other side of this crisis, what form of recovery we will need, and how to rebuild for whats next?

But what if this is not an isolated crisis? What if all these crises are actually inextricably linked? What if this is actually a cascade of interconnected and interdependent crises unfolding in both foreseeable and unforeseeable ways? A former colleague used to conduct a somewhat facile thought experiment with audiences, asking them if they could wave a magic carbon wand to make climate change go away, would they? When some people demurred, she would cite this as environmentalists wanting something to hate, as if there was something wrong with environmentalism. But what if the truth is that even if the magic carbon wand existed (spoiler alert: it doesnt), even if all the planet-stewing slew of emissions we have emitted in an explosive blink of geological time could be instantly removed, even if the oceans werent acidifying dangerously enough to insidiously dissolve the calcareous homes of the marine creatures around them (less in your face than a 50-foot wall of forest fire racing towards you at 50 miles an hour, but ultimately no less deadly), even if that could all be dramatically, impossibly fixed in a moment we would still possibly be fucked?

The truth is wed continue to be chewing our way through the last wild places on the planet, and in doing so also chewing our way through bush-meat primates, undercooked bats or pangolins, in turn unleashing further waves of zoonosis, like the HIV/AIDS, Ebola, SARS, MERS and now COVID-19. We would still be facing the sixth mass extinction. We would still be destroying this unique (as far as we know) intergalactic Eden and the wider, wilder family of our shared natural heritage, and for what? To defend our right to consume? To dangle a cruel, false promise to the other six billion on the planet that the current lifestyles of the top billion are somehow achievable and replicable for all through sustainability?!

Hang on! I hear you thinking. This is supposed to be a book about coping with eco-anxiety. Whos this guy? Hes just making me more depressed! And my first response to that is: good. Welcome to the difficult, horrible, painful, potentially fatal existential reality in which we find ourselves. And this is why Anouchka Grose has written such a profoundly important and timely book to help guide us all through this darkest of times. We owe it to ourselves to be honest about the fact this really might not end well collectively, and individually the raw truth is that were all going to die, at some point. No one here gets out alive, as Jim Morrison sang.

We humans are rather adept at the denial of our inevitable personal death. We numb ourselves with drugs and alcohol, pray for an after-life, or prop up our self-esteem through the contrived immortality systems of consumerism and shopping, as if life was a competition in which he who dies with the most toys wins. We construct defences of identity for our own in-groups exceptionalism that drive the dangerous populism of our uniquely entitled we, that allows us to other others to feel better about ourselves, and share pacifying myths excusing us of our own historical horrors of colonialism and slavery. Denial, distraction and disavowal were pretty good on all these.

The cults of egotism, individualism and control, our arrogant hubristic heroism, have got us into this mess, and I believe it is going to take something very different, if not to get us entirely out of it, but to at least get us through it with the best of our humanity intact.

And lets be clear, we are also lovely. The empty streets, sports stadia and transport hubs in cities around the world right now speak to the biggest, most-selfless act of global solidarity we may ever see in our lifetimes. People are staying home to protect others: the weak, the vulnerable, the carers. We are connecting with neighbours we have never met before, rapidly building mutual aid networks. Few have questioned the enormous sacrifices being made economically by so many, because they can see the direct benefit on the lives of their fellow citizens. Were acting together, at speed and scale in shared purpose for the common good. Its impressive.