This summer in the United States, millions of people have experienced the intense effects of the climate crisis. The “heat dome” that has gripped the south-west for the past three weeks is expanding into the south-eastern states. Catastrophic flooding in the north-east has claimed lives and wiped out farmers’ crops. And the worst wildfire season in Canadian history has not only caused tens of thousands of Indigenous people to be displaced, but the accompanying smoke has also billowed over into the north-eastern and midwest US, setting records for poor air quality. In many cases, these events have caused irreparable damage and trauma to those directly affected, and can certainly feel like they’re encroaching on those people on the periphery. And yet despite the fact that we’re living through a climate disaster, most Americans aren’t cowering in fear every day about the future of our planet. There’s a psychological reason for that.
For one, the climate crisis is a much lower priority for Americans than other national issues, such as the economy and healthcare costs. That isn’t to say that we aren’t concerned: two-thirds of Americans say they are at least “somewhat worried” about global warming, while 30% are “very worried”, per a Yale University survey. But because of the nature of the way that many humans experience fear, connecting this emotion to something as vast and complex as the climate crisis is difficult. According to Brian Lickel, a social psychologist who researches human responses to threats, we aren’t designed to remain in a high state of fear for long. “A very fundamental feature of the normal kind of expected emotional processing is hedonic adaptation,” he said. “Our emotion system is designed to be labile, to go up or have certain responses, but then to not stick there.”
The emotional response to the climate crisis – even if we feel fearful during an episode of wildfire smoke or flooding – is similar to what many people who live in war zones may experience, Lickel said. While at first, the threat of bombs and attacks are imminent and extremely frightening, eventually those who remain in these areas adapt somewhat to a life in which the threat becomes just another thing to deal with daily. “If they’re not escalating or the nature of the threat’s not changing,” Lickel said, “it is to be expected that the felt emotion is going to go down.”
Though the climate crisis is altering our planet rapidly on a geologic time scale, on a human one, changes are happening relatively slowly. That means that even if we see record-setting temperatures or experience our first indoors-due-to-smoke-days, those occurrences will become a new normal within the timespan of our lives. “I’m skeptical that there is going to be an event that’s going to catalyze us more than any of the things that have already happened,” Lickel said.
Instead, humans tend to adapt to our stressors, which happens in one of two ways, according to Susan Clayton, a psychologist who studies the relationship between humans and nature. When faced with a fear, for instance, Clayton told me that there are two things we can address: the situation or our reaction to the situation. Since the climate crisis is not something we can deal with in the moment, and most people don’t even understand it fully, we often choose to ignore it as a way to protect our emotional selves. “We’re really, really good at avoiding things that bother us in many cases,” she said. “It’s denial.”
However, as more of the weather events we are seeing this summer affect a larger number of people, that denial might be harder to maintain. “You do find that the more people have direct experience of climate change the more they are able to perceive it as a risk,” Clayton said. “It’s kind of hard to engage in denial after your own house is burned down or gets flooded.” In her 2019 research surveying a sample of some 200 Americans, Clayton found that up to 20% said that their anxiety about the climate crisis is so bad that it impairs their ability to function normally, meaning they lose sleep or the ability to work or socialize normally. One part of the discussion that tends to come up, though, especially among young people, is the concern that others aren’t worrying enough. Two-thirds of Americans say they rarely or never discuss the climate crisis with family and friends, according to the Yale survey. Clayton says this is likely also due to how humans process and internalize fear privately: “You think the scarier it is, the more we should talk about it. In fact, it’s often the reverse. It’s too scary to talk about.” However, there may be an ironic upside to more people experiencing the effects of the climate crisis directly, she said, in that others who were already fearful won’t feel so isolated.
The question of whether humans are scared enough of the climate crisis might be the wrong one to ask altogether, though, according to Lickel. That’s because fear isn’t always the best motivating factor for action. The changes we need to make as a species to address the climate crisis are huge and logistical, so they probably have nothing to do with any one person’s individual fear response. “Fear appeals can be effective for things like cigarette smoking, if people know what they can do to address the threat,” Lickel said. But the huge, slow-moving, complex issue of the climate crisis doesn’t have a lot of answers on the individual level. Most of us feel – and really are – pretty helpless.
Instead of spiraling, Lickel said it’s important to take care of our own mental health as we go through these scary times. One way to do that if you’re worried about the climate crisis might be to figure out life changes you can make that are good for you and for the planet, such as installing a heat pump if you live in a smoky area or a place with extremely hot summers, or switching your car commute to a bike commute where possible.
Clayton and Lickel both agree that we, of course, shouldn’t ignore the realities of the climate crisis. But not absorbing every bad piece of news about it, and taking steps to ease our own fears, including sharing those fears with others, are also important. After all, Clayton noted, nothing will be addressed if everyone just becomes “stressed out and anxious all the time”. Our ability to eventually effect change, big or small, is directly tied to how we manage the stressors that come along with this issue.