Not Me, Not This, Not Now: the Other Faces of Climate Change Denial.

I want to go back to the results of my informal surveys at the Lab of Ornithology. I had verified that we all agree Climate Change is real, human caused, and life-alteringly serious. But this only mystified me more: Why are we so silent about Climate Change? Why so private? There were other issues at play, issues that had nothing to do with explicitly believing or denying whether Climate Change was a demonstrated scientific fact or not.

It was as if there was a whole second kind of denial. A silent, more reflexive, more protective and almost childlike, denial. Like, the reality of Climate Change is too bad to let in emotionally, even if we can accept it intellectually.

This can’t be happening. Not to me, and my life. Not now.

Not me. Not this. Not now.

Why aren’t we rearranging our lives to account for this new impending reality? And seriously, why aren’t we talking about this?

When I asked my friends why they weren’t talking about Climate Change more, or more deeply engaged with the issue, a familiar set of answers came up: people were overwhelmed, they didn’t feel positioned to have significant influence as individuals. They were skeptical of the ability of government to function effectively to do anything.

I am eager to work through these various ideas next week to round out the Story of Us, but for today, I want to air what I think are two new versions of denial that came up in my “surveys.”

Believer-Denier Type 1: “I’m good.”

One person expressed he was basically already doing his part. He understood Climate Change was real, and was basically going to change/ruin life as we know it. His response? He worked in a conservation organization, drove a Prius, supported local businesses, installed efficiency light-bulbs, voted for the “right” president, etc. He qualified as Alarmed on the Yale Group’s survey, and his personal action levels were solid.

So why am I registering this as a form of denial? He still wasn’t talking about Climate Change, and all those actions he listed, those were lifestyle choices he made long before the reality of Climate Change became clear. Those actions do indeed align with his identity as a pro-nature, pro-conversation kind a guy, but he wasn’t talking about Climate Change with anyone other than maybe his spouse. Where was the passion? The fear? The love?Where was the urgency?

Where was the search for answers?

I’m calling this the ”No thanks, I’m good” response. I’ve got a couple thoughts about this. In some ways, we all want to get to a place, with any major issue in our lives, where we can list the ways in which we’ve built our responses to that issue into our lives so it is not just sitting there eating at us all the time. If my long term goal is to lose weight, I try to exercise everyday. Need to spend more quality time with my children? I have Saturday Morning Fun Time scheduled in. But that doesn’t fully account for the I’m Good response. There is also another element to it. A…dismissiveness? Or, a defensiveness? It can be bit less, Yes! This is a critically important, difficult and persistent issue I am grappling with and I really want to figure out how to deal with it; let’s talk!, and a bit more I’ve changed my lightbulbs, I carry reusable bags; I am doing my part.

I want to be careful not to judge or condemn such a response, but rather to point out it is a bit protective and dead-endish, rather than open and growth-oriented, right? It leads with something derived from frustration or guilt. We know the imperative of responding to Climate Change isn’t only about doing our civic duties. Nor should anyone who wants to respond to Climate Change feel like they need to answer to someone else about how they chose to live. Instead, the primary work of responding to Climate Change is taking in what this reality really means to you and your loved ones, deep in your heart, and asking yourself if you are responding commensurate with its meaning, scope, and urgency to you. This is the only way to find our way to a place where sacrifice doesn’t feel like sacrifice, and where you can feel truly fulfilled by your chosen response, and free. We want to get to a place where we know exactly why we’ve chosen to act the way we do, and we want to help others find their way to better choices. No defensiveness, no judgement, no cutting ourselves off.

I think cutting oneself off from asking if we could or should or want to do more, is a kind of denial.

Believer-Denier Type 2: “It’s all good”

The other unanticipated answer I got might sound a bit more insidious. It was basically a harder-core version of my skeptical-of-my-personal-ability-to-influence-anything issue. It was a ramped up version of chronic skepticism that made any attempted individual action irrelevant. It was a giving up. Human beings are going to do what they are going to do. Life on planet earth will go on. Life will just be different, not necessarily worse, just different.

First: Whoa! The Alarmed-come-Hopeless wasn’t mentioned on the Yale survey, but I guarantee you it is out there. Second: I totally get it, I have heard many people, including some of my dearest friends, express this in various ways. I’ve had these thoughts myself, like all my life. As the Lorax said (in the movie, not the book) trees tend to fall the way they lean. Human beings on the whole can lean pretty recklessly toward self-destructive behaviors. It is kind of hard not to get all fatalistic about the fate of mankind. Plus, let’s face it, we are not the first planet-dominating or planet-changing group of organisms. We don’t have to be the last. Especially from the perspective of an evolutionary biologist, life as a whole is pretty tenacious and tends to go on. So, it’s all good., right?

But Third: No, even if you are not a God-fearing Christian, of course not it is not all good. Don’t even play around saying this sort of thing. You don’t really mean it. If you happen to be one of those people sitting there thinking but it’s true!, let me just cut through it and call your bluff: of course it’s true. The universe, and life, existed before, and can go on, without humanity! But responding to Climate Change is not about saving the universe, it is about us: our lives, and what we want for our loved ones. Resigning oneself to running headlong into Climate Change’s worst case scenarios, as if it were the inevitable course of history, implies overlooking a lot of suffering for the immediate next generations of humanity (and indeed all biodiversity). So while we might sit in our armchairs and try these abstract ideas on to see what they look like, you know this is not what you want in the real world.

In the end, I think this sort of fatalistic shrugging-off of engaging more deeply with Climate Change is just another form of denial. A defensive reaction to something you can’t figure out how to address. Nothing I can do anyway. We could call this response to Climate Change ”fatalistic denial”.

It’s All in Our Heads

In any case, the ideas we have in our heads can act as obstacles to deeper engagement. Even if we’ve been forced, in spite of ourselves, to accept that Climate Change itself is a real phenomenon, our sneaky brain has a bunch of work-arounds that still allow us to be in denial, or force us into living as if we were in denial out of lack of any other perceivable solution. Therefore, even we Alarmed and Concerned may still be in denial, not of the fact of Climate Change, but of how every day that we don’t put just a little bit more of ourselves into it, is a day we contribute to a worse future for ourselves.

This sort of sneaky denial seems pretty natural and understandable to me. But I don’t think it is useful or helpful, or even as comfortable as we might think it is.

Anyway, let’s assume for the moment that some sort of reality-denying paralysis is basically what happens when you put obstacle #1, overwhelm, together with obstacle #2, perceived inability to influence anything, then add frightening amounts of well-founded obstacle #3, perceptions that our public and private institution can’t or won’t save us, and finally, mix in liberal amounts of obstacle #4, too busy to figure out where this fits in my life anyway.

These are the intellectual barriers that live between our knowledge that Climate Change is real, and kinds of actions that would allow us to best fight it. These are society-wide bottlenecks of thought restricting the scope of our response to Climate Change. Again, I think this is actually good news. Because it is possible to change minds and hearts with words and ideas, and thereby precipitate an otherwise impossible sea change in policy.

What if the primary obstacle to real, effective public engagement with the Climate Crisis isn’t about accepting the scientific fact, but instead is about internalizing it. Internalizing that such a drastically altered version of our lives and futures could possibly really come true unless we proactively fight it? I think many of us Concerned and Alarmed could be further activated.

So let’s examine and disarm these various sources of Climate Change sufferance: the overwhelm, the sense of powerlessness, the skepticism, and the struggle to be present with looming planetary crisis in the midst of our busy lives.

Are we frozen into inaction? Let's crack that ice!