The actual emissions course we’re on, which is rising year on year, is accelerating us into what writer David Wallace Wells describes as an uninhabitable Earth. It’s just a matter of time before it hits us, says the writer. (Photo: Thom Masat / Unsplash) 
They call it the existential slap. It’s the shockwave that thunders through your psyche after your doctor tells you the electricity that’s been pulsing down your arm isn’t a pinched nerve. A shadowy ghost in the brain scan confirms there’s a tumour ballooning inside your head, and there’s nothing to be done to stop it.
In a stunned fog, you have to decide: poison your body with two or three rounds of brutal chemotherapy to buy a few more months; or forgo treatment and try to yield with equanimity to the inevitable. Either way, you have to begin wrapping up your affairs, and quickly.
An end-of-life counsellor recently told me that when most cancer patients break this kind of news to their loved ones, the response is usually a fiery defiance: you can’t give up, they’ll say, you have to keep fighting. There’s still hope. Try this diet or that operation.
Well-intended as this is, it only leaves the person feeling isolated and alienated. What someone needs in that moment, the counsellor said, is to be allowed to grieve. They need the space to simply unravel and experience the full spectrum of crushing emotions. It’s messy and ugly, it’s threatening to a helpless observer. But it’s a necessary part of accepting the shock of hearing that someone has a suddenly foreshortened life.
My existential slap arrived at about midnight in the middle of June this year. I’d spent the evening as part of a panel discussion that was trying to convince a small crowd of Capetonians that the record-breaking cyclones, heatwaves, floods and wildfires we’ve seen crowding out global news headlines in the past few years are a sign of just how unstable our climate has become. But, I kept urging the audience, there’s still a small window in which we can act before we fill up the atmospheric “landfill” with so much carbon pollution that we’ll tip the system into a new and unstable state that will wipe out our civilisation and most of life on Earth.
In the afterglow of the energising discussion, I found myself sitting cross-legged on my porch in the slumbering night with the meniscus of a quarter moon shimmering overhead. In that somnambulant stillness, something hit me with the force of a tectonic collision.
It’s actually too late.
Scientists had been sending reports from the Arctic earlier this year, documenting the rate of ice and permafrost thawing that they said was happening 70 years ahead of schedule. This wasn’t just an unnerving extreme weather event. This was a sign that we’re slipping across a tipping point into a new climate regime. It’s the point of no return. It’s game over.
The 1.5°C ceiling in global heating that the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (UN IPCC) has been cajoling governments to aim for in their emissions reduction targets is a fantasy. We’ve already dumped so much carbon pollution into the atmosphere that we have a “baked in” temperature increase of 3°C, regardless of whether we shut off all emissions right now or not.
The actual emissions course we’re on, which is rising year on year, is accelerating us into what writer David Wallace Wells describes as an uninhabitable Earth. It’s just a matter of time before it hits us. Like the lag when you turn on the hot tap in a shower, even though the initial jet feels tepid, the scalding water is already in the pipe and it’s about to blast its way out.
This was the moment that vaporised any hope (that we can still fix the problem) and years of ongoing denial (that it’s not as bad as all that).
A few weeks earlier, I’d written a piece about how those at the frontline of climate science and activism are canaries in the coal mine as we run ourselves to exhaustion fighting society-wide inertia that ignores the evidence of the extent of carbon pollution and its impact on the climate system. After nearly two decades of writing about this topic, it seemed all that work had done little to disrupt the system and what had seemed like a remote threat to other people, yet to be born, might actually start to unfold within my lifetime. What, I pondered in that piece, was the point of keeping on with this work if no one was listening?
I still didn’t believe, though, that the battle was lost. But, at midnight in June, all that changed.
Like the delay between seeing a branch of lightning slamming into the ground, and the sound of the thunder eventually rolling through, it was only the next day, during a bog-standard telephone call, that the existential slap became a medical emergency.
Ten minutes into a conversation with a colleague, as we compared notes on a job, I unexpectedly dissolved into uncontrollable sobs.
Somehow, in the mess of it all, I managed to ring out a few soggy words.
“It doesn’t matter if I die now, or in 10 years; either way, it’s over. Our work isn’t going to stop this train smash. I don’t have any dependents. When you take a pebble out of a stream, the water quickly fills its space. In the bigger scheme of things, life will go on. It doesn’t matter if I’m here or not.”
“Leonie,” my friend said, “you know how dangerous this thought track is.”
I did. But it was like having brain concussion: part of me knew I should get medical treatment, but I was too dazed to figure out how to do that. Where are my car keys? Which emergency room do I drive to? What do I tell the admitting nurse when I get there; that I’m having a climate-angst induced breakdown?
Thanks to my friend, who has survived a mental collapse herself, within an hour I was in medical care, cowering in the corner of a therapist’s couch where I shivered like a storm-soaked mutt as we tried to figure out the best treatment route. How do you bring down the fever of someone who can’t escape the environment that’s causing the fever? You can’t step out of the sauna conditions of a collapsing climate.
“I feel like a cancer patient who has to decide between chemo or no chemo. Either way, the next few years are going to be painful, and brutal, and lonely. Whatever I choose, it’s a path I’m going to have to walk alone,” I said.
“So, this is about how you die alone,” my therapist reflected back.
I guess that’s it. How do you continue to live meaningfully when you realise that you have a suddenly foreshortened life, which may be filled with hardship?
Humanity is in an end-of-life crisis
I don’t use the cancer metaphor glibly. Many thinkers in the climate collapse community have used the hospice scenario as an analogy for the state of humanity at this unprecedented time of environmental breakdown.
Some in the psychotherapy community are getting wind of this. The International Journal of Applied Psychoanalytic Studies recently published a special edition on the mental health community’s need to respond to climate collapse.
“Living in a progressively more hostile and uncertain environment where governmental leaders do not give credence to the reality of the changes afoot may be experienced as a cumulative trauma, in which large groups may feel ‘gaslighted’ and terribly unprotected by their elected leaders,” the journal authors explain.
“The necessity for members of our field to apply psychoanalytic thinking to address this most pressing issue facing our species is not up for debate.”
The UN IPCC’s next big assessment of the state-of-climate science, due out in 2022, will give unprecedented attention to the mental health fallout from the acute stress of surviving extreme weather events, or the chronic distress of facing the existential threat of our own extinction.
The American Psychological Association has written extensively on this. The UK Council for Psychotherapy recently held a workshop on the role of their profession as society heads into climate collapse and mass extinction. The workshop asked how we move “from dread to resilience, from catastrophe to transformation, from helplessness to action, from fear to hope”.
Eco-psychology is a budding new movement.
There’s also an explosion of groups pulling together various spiritual approaches to deal with climate anxiety, which often draw on the work of environmental activist, author, Buddhist scholar and deep ecologist Joana Macy. Over the past four decades, Macy has designed processes aimed at building resilience for those working in environmentalism and her “work that reconnects” is regarded as the gold standard for processing ecological grief. There are many such groups emerging here in South Africa.
The books that rocked the boat
Three seismic publications may be part of the reason for the spreading social fever of climate anxiety.
First came the work of Professor Jem Bendell, from the University of Cumbria’s Institute for Leadership and Sustainability, who broke scientific protocol in 2018 by self-publishing a 34-page research paper after it was turned away by the Sustainability Accounting, Management and Policy Journal because the editors were worried about its potential emotional impact. In his hard-hitting and extensively referenced paper Deep Adaptation: A Map for Navigating Climate Tragedy, Bendell outlines why he believes the scientific data shows that near-term “climate-induced collapse is inevitable”. This is a reality which is often edited out of climate communications as a subtle form of the Overton Window – the range of ideas that are tolerated within public discourse – pressures scientists to tone down their messaging, in spite of the evidence.
Bendell’s paper went viral, and in the process birthed the “Deep Adaptation” movement, a conceptual map for how we can absorb the economic, political, social or environmental shocks coming our way.
Next came David Wallace Well’s Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming in early 2019, which paints an equally bleak picture.
In lockstep with that came Dahr Jamail’s The End of Ice: Bearing Witness and Finding Meaning in the Path of Climate Disruption, in which the former war correspondent “stitches together personal introspection and gut-wrenching interviews with leading climate experts”.
But there is also the possibility of recovery on the other side of this shattering awakening. Since publishing his paper, Bendell has been instrumental in setting up the Extinction Rebellion movement, cutting back his own work hours to pour more time into climate activism. He is also reaching out to the psychotherapy community in the UK to see how it can bring its expertise into the maelstrom.
“Good psychotherapy is not available to many people,” he said during an
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