Overwhelmed by Climate Change? Try Re-Framing Your Impact
One of the questions I most commonly hear from people who are concerned about the climate but don’t quite know what to do about it is whether their individual actions matter when such huge forces are doing damage at horrifying scales. In sociology, this debate even has a name – "structure versus agency" – while in social psychology, some talk about the "drop in the bucket imaginary." Whether you know the jargon or not, I bet you know the feeling: powerlessness in the face of monumental destruction. Like Sisyphus cursed to roll a boulder up a hill for eternity, we may make personal sacrifices, agonize over our impact, empathize with the suffering of others, and feel we have no control over damage happening far away from us. The task of improving things feels out of reach. We wonder, where should we start? Or worse, why even bother?
In my book, A Field Guide to Climate Anxiety, I call this impasse the "apathy trap." We are what the Holocaust scholar Michael Rothberg calls "implicated subjects": we know we are participating in the harm (even while being harmed by climate change), but we don’t know how to stop. Researching the role of emotions in climate advocacy, I learned that this trap is one reason we check out. Most Americans are worried about climate change, but continue to carry on with their lives as if their actions make no difference. We’re caught in what some psychologists call "cognitive dissonance," where our feelings about the issue are in conflict with our actions, but we can’t find a way out. I count myself in this group, too. Denial isn’t always nefarious, nor is apathy always lazy; these are cognitive solutions to a problem we feel we have no control over.
I want to suggest that the notion that we have no control over a problem that seems too big to tackle is a figment of our imagination. To dispel this myth, we need to make the problem smaller and make ourselves bigger. Much of that work is in reframing the way we see things. It is not the earth, but big oil that benefits the most from the public’s perception that the problem is outside their control.
Yes, climate change is a big problem, and, arguably, my lifestyle choices hardly make a difference. But when we perceive ourselves as small and the problem as huge, the psychological effect is that we give up before we even try to do anything. So, this perception only threatens the planet further, no matter how deeply we may care.
Psychologists call this the "pseudoinefficacy effect" — we are less likely to try to tackle a problem if we think we can’t solve it. Put another way, if we believe a story about climate change that tells us it’s too big to stop, we are not going to make an effort. Our actions are a result of our perception. Thus, perception matters.
Yet the story we hear, day in and day out, is that the climate crisis is catastrophic, it is causing untold suffering everywhere, the numbers are unimaginable, and we are both complicit and powerless to do anything different. No matter the good intentions of those who espouse it, this doomsday story is rigged against the planet and justice because of the pseudoinefficacy effect; it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. The bigger the problem, the less likely we are to try to address it, and the more likely the forecasts will unfold as foretold.
Making the Problem Smaller
So, what’s the solution? There are many possible answers, but one shorthand answer is "make the problem smaller and make ourselves bigger." First, we need to try to make the problem of climate change smaller in our perception, so we can make it smaller in reality. Let me explain. By its very definition, climate change itself is a phenomenon we cannot humanly perceive. That is, it occurs at such expansive scales of time and space that the human body’s sense organs cannot register it. What we can perceive are climate change’s effects: increased heat, rising sea levels, reduced ecosystem resilience to natural disasters. Of course, we can also perceive the ways climate change compounds other human-made inequities – how it widens the gap in access to medical resources, or stirs up geopolitical conflict. If it is true that climate change exacerbates existing human-made problems, and that climate change is in turn exacerbated by those same problems, then the places where we experience climate change– the places where we can touch, smell, hear, taste, and feel it– are almost everywhere. Climate change is literally outside your window. It follows that the field of action on climate change is as small and as proximal as our bodies, our homes, our communities. That is the spatial and temporal scale of the human, as opposed to the scale of climate, so that is the field we already inhabit. What good does it do to imagine that climate change is any bigger than that?
Whether you are a stay-at-home parent, a barista, a farmer, or a teacher, climate change touches something in front of you. Start there. Whenever we work on any number of issues– reducing inequality, improving relationships in our family or community, or healing the trauma in our own bodies so that we can do less harm to ourselves and the world– we are doing the work needed to mitigate and adapt to climate change. Just as every tiny amount of carbon not put into the atmosphere reduces the suffering of some creature or ecosystem somewhere, everything we do matters. The inevitability narrative is only inevitable if we fail to even try.
Re-Sizing Our Actions
Let’s also imagine that small steps are bigger than we imagine. When we think about "nudge" theory in behavioral psychology, we see that small behavior changes can add up to larger changes in our lives. When we put the vegetables at eye-level in the fridge, we kick off a feedback loop of behaviors that can lead to cardiovascular health. Like the movement of a sailor, who changes the ship’s course by one degree, tiny changes can land us in a radically different place over the course of our lives. The psychology behind this is that big change is hard to tackle, so we don’t even take the first step. But when any goal is broken down into tiny pieces, taking the first step is a lot easier, and it leads to more steps.
On climate actions, this means we should let the nudging feedback loop of eudaimonia kick in. Psychologists and social movement leaders tell us that we must fiercely protect pleasure, joy, hope, laughter, love, imagination and a desire for a livable future. Whatever we can do to cultivate those things that are right in front of us and inside us, we are doing for climate justice. We need not defer responsibility to corporations or political leaders – they will most certainly disappoint us. Instead, attend to that which you love by even one degree. The chemical reactions of desire and pleasure in your body will make you want to keep doing it. Let the carrot of what feels good about working at the closest scale motivate you more than the stick of apocalypse. It will keep you coming back for more.
I’m not saying that we should let corporate polluters off the hook; indeed, we will need every ounce of energy and interior fortitude to fight them. This is a project that will last our entire lives and the lives of many generations hence. But let’s imagine for a moment that the apocalypse is not coming. Life will still go up and down, and we will continue living through various kinds of discomfort, inequality, and even trauma, some slow-moving, some faster, some acute, some vicarious. Some days will be terrible and some will even be great. We’ll experience love and community, laughter, and good food. Maybe whole new ways of doing things are on the horizon. Maybe, as the Indian novelist Arundhati Roy writes, "another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing." What does this alternative story of the future mean for your relationship to climate change, right now? And what kind of space does it open up for you, when apocalypse isn’t breathing down your neck?
Making Ourselves Bigger
As for making ourselves bigger, it helps to remember that our actions, our power, and our intentions matter more than we think. Seeing them as small is part of our problem. We diminish our impact by diminishing ourselves. The first way we can undo this is by seeing ourselves as part of a collective, not alone in this effort. The collective is where the magic is– not just for magnifying our impact, but for assuaging anxiety, cultivating social capital, and building climate resilience. The collective gives us permission to take a nap when we need to recover our energy reserves, and it regulates our nervous systems when we work on a shared project with other human beings. The solution to both the climate crisis and the mental health disaster in this country are the same– healed relations with each other and the earth, starting with ourselves.
Attending to one small corner of climate change, starting with the intention in our hearts to feed that which we want to grow and actively work against the forces that would have us do otherwise, may all feel like very small actions. Some people might even say they’re not actions at all, and are therefore a waste of time given the urgency of our myriad crises. Part of the apathy trap, though, is that culture has conditioned us to believe that only tectonic shifts at global scale and in instant timeframes will stave off the apocalypse. The fetishizing of spectacular impact, exemplified by Hollywood’s savior figures in films like Don’t Look Up and The Day After Tomorrow, overshadows how even fast change, like the global zeitgeist on climate kicked off by Greta Thunberg’s school strikes, is made up of the unglamorous labor of a groundswell of nameless individuals. Their efforts range from attending meetings, writing emails, publishing op-eds, and bringing people together, to feeding, caring, and healing themselves and each other. Even great change is made up of this small stuff. As writer Ursula Le Guin wrote, "We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings." We don’t have to wait for someone in power to do the right thing, or wait until we are in a position of enough power to effect change.
And then there’s a broader definition of power to consider. When we define power as the ability to influence, imagine a viable future, bring joy, take care, witness, comfort, heal, and connect– necessary qualities of any social movement– we have immense power at our fingertips. We exert power every time we reshare a story on social media, not to mention when we affect algorithms with our attention (with our "eyeballs," "likes," and time spent on a page or site). When we choose not to fuel flames of outrage, when we choose nonviolent communication over the intoxication of righteousness, when we dream about a post-fossil-fuel future instead of the apocalypse, when we observe ourselves long enough to know how to regulate our nervous systems and act from a balanced state– we effect change.
When we ignore these existing tools and fail to step into the power we already have, we use it mindlessly, without awareness and skill, even irresponsibly. From a neuroscientific perspective, we never get the chemical feedback hit of making a positive difference. Let’s broaden our definitions of action and power to include the rhizomatic, fractal ways that just being alive in the world effects change.
Focusing on What We Love
Another way to reframe the structure-agency debate entirely is to focus on that which we love, instead of that which we fear, and do the right things for intrinsic, not extrinsic, reasons. Following Indigenous botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer’s idea of "practical reverence" and Zen monk Thich Nhat Hanh’s notion of “interbeing," we can try to walk around in the world doing the least harm possible, not because we think it’ll save the planet, but because it is the ultimate expression of our love for it. Rather than think about the work ahead as a "sacrifice" or as an insurmountable challenge, we can see how such an approach would profoundly enrich our lives, drawing us closer to the physical world and relationships that sustain us.
The mere act of putting our attention on that which we love – oxygen, pets, biodiversity, levity, innocence, soil, our beloveds – magnifies those things. Not just in our minds, but in real life. This approach has nothing to do with whether our actions will bring about global results. It is entirely about enriching our lives by attending to that which we want to grow, that which we may fear is threatened by climate change. Why allow the 24/7 news cycle, which is designed to horrify us, eclipse what is thriving in our lives? This doesn’t mean turning away from reality; on the contrary, it’s about counterbalancing the version of reality we accept as "truth", which both our brains and the media have distorted toward the apocalyptic.
To counter the pseudoinefficacy effect, and for the sake of the planet, we simply must choose to believe that we have control over the conditions of our lives and the lives of those we love, both human and more-than-human. We can only do so if we right-size the problem and right-size our own sense of agency. The planet needs us to train our attention toward more carrot, less stick, counterintuitive as it may seem. Making the problem smaller and making ourselves bigger starts with seeing our efficacy in the collective. We can heal both our anxiety about the climate and the planet itself with the same medicine.
