Climate grief in a world that moved on

It's 2019: Greta Thunberg is Time magazine's "Person of the Year" after starting a worldwide revolution in climate action. She brought a notion of clarity and necessity to the larger debates and smaller activist groups alike, inspiring a change in the collective culture that would actually bring lasting change for the future of our planet. People generally seemed to follow suit - we were societally more aware of the climate crisis, pointing fingers at the right people while still making changes to our daily routines on a smaller scale. Less than a year after her Time feature, New York City unveiled its "Climate Clock," revealing the daunting timeline of 7 years and 102 days left to prevent irreversible damage to the planet.

Now it's 2026: Most of that time has passed, and it's deathly quiet.

This is not the kind of silence that signals a closure. It's that awkward pause in the room, the one the teacher loathes, where no one has any ideas or contributions to share. We haven't solved the climate crisis. There is no victory. Rather, it feels like everyone has given up.

We humans like to think of ourselves as a species that rises to the occasion, but the truth is, for the most part, we are a species that adapts to the temperature of the room. We want comfort and convenience and will do just about anything to get it, even if we know it's not good for us. And in 2020, the room changed. The existential threat of a melting planet was abruptly replaced by the lower-level and immediate threat of a global pandemic. Our focus shifted from the survival of the future to the survival of the week. I didn't mention the massive backlash to the Climate Clock above, but when placed in the context of COVID, it makes perfect sense.

Psychologically, this is known as compassion fatigue. We reached the peak of the activist wave - the millions in the streets, the viral infographics, back in 2019 - and then it seems we eventually ran out of breath. Even my friends studying the environmental sciences developed a chip on their shoulders and a growing resentment for the career paths they'd chosen. Of course there's still love there, but the human nervous system wasn't built to sustain that fervor for service for seven years straight. While the clock ticked down, our feeds pivoted away from Earthly concerns and toward politics, dance trends, death tolls and online shopping. We traded collective action for individual curation, not because we stopped caring, but because learning a new TikTok dance whilst trying to survive isolation was a lot easier on our cognitive overload than still contemplating the dying planet.

And again in the present, this begs the question: how are we supposed to hold the weight of a fragile ecosystem on the precipice of no return when we're worried about grocery and gas prices? We know the math. We know it’s not really our plastic straws that are the problem, but rather a handful of giant corporations with zero incentive to change their ways. This realization creates a Prisoner’s Dilemma of the soul: If the big players aren't doing the work, why am I making my life harder?

In the classic game theory setup, two prisoners are interrogated separately. If they both cooperate and stay quiet, they both get a light sentence. If one betrays the other while the other stays silent, the betrayer goes free and the "sucker" gets the maximum sentence. If they both betray each other, they both get a maximum sentence. We see the same pattern with people in their decisions to either act for the environment and change their daily habits, or ignore the problems altogether because they're "just one person." If you're the sucker, you use less plastic, rarely eat meat or dairy, refuse to use generative AI, and you spend your emotional labor advocating for change. The betrayer does none of this. They do not change. And the friction occurs here: If you choose to sacrifice, but the person in the cubicle next to you, the corporation across town, and the government across the ocean all choose to "defect," we still all end up paying the price. You’ve made your life harder, more expensive, and more stressful, but the permafrost is still melting because no one else joined you.

We are wired to detect unfairness. If we perceive that the "big players" - the private-jet-celebrities and the fossil fuel CEOs - aren't doing the heavy lifting, our brain registers our own small efforts as futile. We stop wanting to do the "right thing" because we don't want to be the only ones left tending to a burning room. We start abiding by the thought process of "no ethical consumption under capitalism" and call it a day. We aren't necessarily becoming "bad" people, we're just tired of being the only ones trying.

Now it's April and it's 95 degrees, and someone makes a joke about "early summer" or "the end of the world," laughing because the alternative - actually acknowledging the shift - is too much to hold while we're out at brunch. Just like they did with Pride Month's rainbows, companies have stripped the green from their logos for the month. They no longer seem to even pretend to care about showing off their promises of carbon-neutrality or use of recycled materials (and candidly, maybe this is for the best...greenwashing has no place in a sustainable journey to climate healing). Talking about the climate crisis online quite literally feels like screaming into an abyss. So...now what?

The "Skolstrejk for klimatet" era was bright and hopeful, and I think it's only fair to grieve the fact that it's all but disappeared from public view. But just as the laws of compassion fatigue suggest, a collective movement of the masses with a straight decade of growth and passion is nearly impossible, especially with so much working against it. Forget about being able to sustain it as an individual. The task of facing a problem that is quite literally existential to humanity within only a few years is incomprehensible our nervous systems. Beyond that, it is difficult for most to understand that we're working toward a future none of us will see - it's difficult for most to care about that which will never benefit them.

But if you're one of the few who does still care, even with all that works against us in this moment, I need you to know that panic and despair don't help us move. Grief can be a fantastic tool, but it must have somewhere to go, and we must be able to guide it there. If we can't, it will get in the way. When we're able to put it down, we can get back to the work of stewardship, which is the most sustainable form of working for the environment as an individual. Probably my favorite author of all time, Robin Wall Kimmerer, put it so beautifully in her new book The Serviceberry: "Stewardship is not a matter of control, but a matter of relationship. It is the practice of being a good neighbor to the rest of the creation."

When focusing on building a relationship with Earth, whether that be through watching birds, taking a walk without headphones, or wading in the river when it's a little too cold, we learn to love her instead of fear her future (or our future). Really, all it takes to lift ourselves out of despair is a shift in focus. Kimmerer says of this, "When we treat the world as a gift, we become grateful. When we become grateful, we become responsible. It is the gratitude that fuels the work." When we're able to see that there is still so much left to save - and I promise, there is! - we can get back into conversation with our neighbors about the bigger issues. We can attend the board meetings and call our representatives. Like all things, gently finding our way back to the pain, listening to it, and tending to it is the only way to move forward - especially with something so massive as our Home.

The Earth keeps turning regardless of our attention, but our connection to her requires us to stay in contact and still care, still interact in whatever way. She will be here long after we are. And yes, on this Earth Day, it feels almost too hopeful to say that it's all going to be okay, that we're going to get out of this timeline unscathed. But there's only one conclusion if we collectively give up on her.