Earth Day 2022: How to Avoid ‘Climate Doomism’

It’s Earth Day 2022. Since President Biden took office last year, the United States has had its first-ever climate czar in John Kerry, and an administration working to put back together the shattered pieces of the environmental Humpty Dumpty that Trump shoved off the wall.

We’ve rejoined the Paris Agreement. Biden suspended drilling on federal lands in February. And the administration announced on Tuesday that the government is restoring essential regulations to measure the impact of major infrastructure projects on the environment — a law that was on the books for 50 years until Trump meddled with it in 2020.

But with each step forward in the U.S., we seem to take a step back. On Friday, the Interior Department announced that it will allow 144,000 acres to be leased for onshore oil and gas drilling in an attempt to mitigate the rising price of gas.

Globally, the situation is equally fluid, and bad. At the beginning of April, the United Nations said that, in its assessment — based on the years 2010-2019 — carbon emissions “have never been higher in human history,” and that it is proof that the world is on a “fast track” to disaster, according to U.N. Secetary-General António Guterres.

“The jury has reached a verdict, and it is damning,” Gutteres said in April of new U.N. findings on the world’s progress on climate change. He called the report “a litany of broken climate promises. It is a file of shame, cataloguing the empty pledges that put us firmly on track towards an unlivable world.”

“It’s now or never,” Jim Skea, co-chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change said at the launch of the report.

With all this eco-anxiety on the rise, experts are saying that the goal is to mitigate “doomism” so that we don’t all become paralyzed with inaction.

“Doom-mongering has overtaken denial as a threat and as a tactic,” climatologist Michael E. Mann, who is a professor of Atmospheric Science at Penn State,” told The Guardian in February 2021. “Inactivists know that if people believe there is nothing you can do, they are led down a path of disengagement. They unwittingly do the bidding of fossil fuel interests by giving up.”

It’s true that 56 percent of young people surveyed in a study published by The Lancet at the end of 2021 felt that “humanity is doomed.” But the nonprofit Women’s Earth Alliance argues that there is hope to be had — and that women of color, indigenous women, and those in the Global South have no time for your environmental doomism.

“For women, who are often responsible for caring for families and stewarding natural resources, resilience in the face of eco-anxiety and climate doomism is, and has been, a matter of survival,” the alliance said in a statement today.

So this Earth Day, here are a few small ways to stave off hopelessness. Take action in small or big ways, if not for yourself and your family, then for the women who are being negatively affected the most by our collective inactivity on climate change — and who generally have the least say in what is going on.

• Travel with care: You can protect coral reefs when you vacation by avoiding pollutive chemicals in your toiletries and by leaving home single-use plastics and plastic bags. And be careful about your freshwater consumption in places with limited resources. Here are more ideas from The Washington Post.
• Buy slow, the Women’s Earth Alliance suggests, among other ideas: “Fast fashion production comprises 10 percent of total global carbon emissions, as much as the European Union. Furthermore, 85 percent of all textiles end up landfills each year.”
• Educate yourself — with websites like ours. Click around on our climate map to see how women are impacted by climate change around the world.
• Then speak out: Teen Vogue suggests that the young among us look into “excellent youth climate activist organizations out there like Sunrise Movement, Zero Hour, Extinction Rebellion Youth, and Fridays for Future.”
• And, on this 52^nd annual Earth Day, here are 52 more ways “to invest in our planet,” according to a website from the organizers themselves.