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Zen and the art of not freaking out
Christiana Figueres credits it with landing the Paris Agreement. NASA’s Peter Kalmus says it keeps him going, organizing scientists in disruptive rebellion. I find mindfulness to be the keystone practice for dealing with climate anxiety — stabilizing the rickety structures and wild swerves of our minds.
We’ve covered several strategies for handling the onslaught of news about our overheated planet in recent weeks. I’m heading into a few weeks away from writing Zero Carbon, and I want to make sure we explore the most obvious approach to dealing with our minds — checking in on them.
It’s actually very weird that mindfulness should be a topic at all. Our minds are fundamentally all we have, mediating every experience, generating every thought and every reaction. Getting to know them should be core curriculum in the basic training for living a human life. Instead, we spend most of our lives caught up in thoughts, identified with emotions, under a kind of spell punctured only by the briefest moments of awareness. We pay much more attention to what we wear than what we think.
Mindfulness is itself a kind of miracle, as sages like Thich Nhat Hanh have been saying for millennia. And it can be used as a multi-tool in the climate era.
At the most basic level, when climate chaos gets overwhelming, we can turn to mindfulness to regulate the nervous system. If we’ve practised outside of emergency mode, we have a kind of break-glass tactic when anxiety spikes. Perhaps some simple breathing exercises to calm the racing mind and panicked body. A practice like “box breathing,” which Jay Michaelson recommends in What to do About Eco-Anxiety. An ordained rabbi, activist and muckraker, Michaelson recorded a guided meditation for the Ten Percent Happier podcast, which I’ve plugged before and will link again here.
As you probably know, mindfulness has become incredibly popular in recent years. There’s a bewildering buffet of teachers and approaches out there. The path you pick will depend a lot on your own temperament and tolerance for the kookier corners of humanity. If you’re turned off by westerners in eastern robes, mystical mumblings or dubious dogma, there are many secular programs based on solid science. If you’re just getting started, I hope the smattering of resources we cover today will get you going.
It needs to be underscored that meditation is not a substitute for professional help. If you or someone you know is in real psychological crisis, good therapists and psychiatrists can be essential. You will run across studies showing that mindfulness programs work just as well as medication for anxiety. Over 200 studies have found mindfulness helps treat depression, pain, addiction and stress (even surprising physical conditions like irritable bowel syndrome, immune response and fibromyalgia). But psychologists like Margaret Klein Salamon and researchers like Britt Wray, who focus on climate anxiety, all stress the importance of mental health professionals.
Nor is mindfulness a cure-all. It might be a multi-tool but it’s not the only tool we need. You may remember Mingyur Rinpoche, the Tibetan monk who recommended gratitude as the surprising antidote to despair. He recommends daily formal meditation and also punctuating daily life: “Short times, many times — anytime, anywhere.” He also urges exercise. I remember one moment after a public talk quite vividly because it was so unexpected. A distraught questioner asked for advice. The entire auditorium fell silent, anticipating a jewel of contemplative wisdom.
“Try jogging,” suggested the meditation master. “Or some aerobic exercise.”
So much stress and anxiety is held in our bodies. Rinpoche’s point was that exercise can help release some of the excess. And physical sensations can also become a therapeutic part of mindfulness practice. Once we’re calm enough to see and feel clearly, we can train the spotlight of attention on body sensations.
Finding the specific location of a feeling and then its distinct qualities — precisely where and precisely what it feels like — can be a powerful entry point for processing emotions. A deceptively simple technique to address avoidance, denial and the tendency to bypass painful experience.
Kelly Boys is one teacher I discovered recently and find very helpful on somatic stuff. A useful bridge between breaking glass and more deliberate mindfulness. You’ll actually be lying down and calming down as you uncover the natural, underlying clarity she promises is always available (she’s also really good with guidance to improve sleep, if that’s your thing).
You’ll find Boys’ meditations on her own site, but she also has a series on the Waking Up app. Both Waking Up (“a new operating system for your mind”) and Ten Percent Happier (“meditation for fidgety skeptics”) are excellent resources to explore the broad range of practices and varied approaches to mindfulness.
One way of thinking about mindfulness practice is a kind of training for your mind. Just like you’d go to the gym for muscles. As we train in concentration and non-distraction, the mindfulness “muscle” strengthens, and if you’re like most, you’ll find a shocking amount of distraction. A firehose of thoughts sweeping you off on tangents and into cycles of rumination.
“Don’t believe everything you think,” has got to be one of the world’s greatest bumper stickers. And it’s very applicable to minds grappling with climate chaos. Anxiety is so bound up in thoughts about the future (or rehashing the past). Discovering that you are not your thoughts can be one of those simple but liberating shifts in perspective.
Turn awareness onto thoughts themselves and they’re revealed as gossamer wisps, arising from some mysterious nothingness and dissolving back into it, unless we perpetuate them.
Is this summer’s barrage of climate records a signal we’re in some kind of phase-change to a more dangerous acceleration of climate breakdown? An important question. Also, a thought that we can choose to pursue but need not define our being.
Are carbon emissions rising relentlessly or is climate pollution peaking with replacements now proven and set to eat away the dominance of fossil fuels? Is 1.5 degrees still within reach? Is exceeding 2 degrees inevitable? Will we need radical change in our economic system to have any hope of climate safety?
Incredibly important questions. Ones where top climate experts differ in their answers. And ultimately thoughts about a future we cannot know. As the great master Oogway tells Po, “Yesterday is history, tomorrow is a mystery, and today is a gift … that's why they call it the present.”
If you’re looking to get systematic about training your mind, you might try RAIN. An acronym developed by Michele McDonald, it’s a progression of steps to deal with whatever is actually happening in the present. Beginning with R for recognizing and moving on through acknowledging, investigating and non-identification, RAIN is easy to remember and useful in all sorts of situations, from painful feelings to persistent thoughts.
Mindfulness teachers promise benefits beyond your own life and sanity. The practice will make you more effective as well because you’re operating with more insight and less from a place of panic. I’m constantly surprised by the people who are dedicated meditators. From Lebron James to Yuval Noah Harari, Oprah to Nelson Mandela, who emerged from Robben Island counselling “regular meditation, say of about 15 minutes a day.”
You might remember that when we last checked in with Peter Kalmus, the NASA scientist had locked himself to a JP Morgan bank branch as part of the great scientist rebellion. One of the most outspoken of over 1,000 scientists engaging in disruptive civil disobedience, Kalmus credits meditation with easing anxiety and increasing effectiveness.
“When I meditate regularly, I do not have anxiety, and I am far more effective at science, activism, writing,” Kalmus wrote while en route to a 10-day retreat this spring. “I find it to be a gem of a practice. When I stop practicing the anxiety floods back. Meditation is one of the most important things I do — it lets me keep going & with joy.”
And the astrophysicist-turned-Earth-scientist certainly keeps going. Just this week, he penned a cri de coeur in The Guardian. “We’ve passed into a ferocious new phase of global heating with much worse to come,” he writes. “I’m terrified by what’s being done to our planet. I’m also fighting to stop it. You, too, should be afraid while also taking the strongest action you can take.”
Christiana Figueres, former executive secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and a key architect of the Paris Agreement, told me this spring that she credits the negotiations to studying with Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh. “I attribute the Paris Agreement to Thay’s teachings,” she said.
Thich Nhat Hanh died last year. His last book is impishly titled Zen and the Art of Saving the Planet, and the monastic community of Plum Village has doubled down on his climate mission. Along with Figueres, the team has been developing a seven-week online program to “nurture mindful action in service of the Earth.”
“We have entered a period unseen before in human history that requires all hands and all hearts on deck,” says Figueres. “Whether you’re a climate activist, a scientist, a parent, an outdoor enthusiast or someone who simply doesn’t know where to begin, this course will help you respond to the current crisis from a more grounded, thoughtful, connected and effective position.”
I was lucky enough to be invited (along with the founder of Canada’s National Observer, Linda Solomon Wood) to a week-long climate retreat led by the monastics this May. A condensed version of the online program, which several participants described as “life changing.”
As you might expect if you’re familiar with Thich Nhat Hanh’s “engaged Buddhism,” the program is comprehensive and also gentle. Kind towards our neurotic tendencies and compassionate in addressing common fears like inadequacy. The program includes a healthy dose of connection with the Earth — “interbeing” — and is aimed at increasing the effectiveness of advocacy in the face of suffering, injustice and destruction.
You’d have to decide for yourself whether you’re down with the Zen monastics’ more ambitious aspiration for global awakening. I think I land more in line with Jay Michaelson’s view that great swaths of humanity meditating towards sustainability is simply not in the cards. Tackling climate change will have to come through the messy process of culture battles and the nasty sausage-making of pluralistic politics.
“Where meditation and mindfulness do have a role,” he says, “is enabling us to be part of the actions that do make a difference.”
If you needed any more incentive to get systematic about calming eco-anxiety, the UN secretary general provided a truckload this week. The era of global warming has ended, and “the era of global boiling has arrived,” António Guterres declared in response to scientists forecasting July will be the hottest month on record (2023 will almost certainly be the hottest year). “It is terrifying. And it is just the beginning,” said Guterres.
Record-breaking heat waves have gripped countries across Asia and Africa through Europe and North America while the Northern Hemisphere oceans and seas are hitting temperatures never seen in recorded history. It is meant to be winter in the Southern Hemisphere, but Uruguay is suffering dire water shortages and Atlantic sea ice is so far below average, quants categorize the situation as a “six-sigma event.” (Disaster experts talk about freakish “once-in-100-year floods” — a six-sigma event measures those years by the millions.)
Is this summer worse than scientists’ predictions? Zeke Hausfather has a couple of explainers over at The Climate Brink and CarbonBrief contrasting the extremes we’re witnessing to the projections. TLDR — temperatures are tracking within the range scientists expected, but some of the effects of that heating have been “extremely anomalous.”
Are we “losing control of the carbon cycle?” Also at The Climate Brink, Andrew Dessler takes a sober look at that truly worst-case climate scenario. TLDR — no evidence we have triggered catastrophic feedback loops yet, but “we are rolling the dice … While each of these worst-case scenarios has to be individually characterized as unlikely, there are so many of them that we should expect at least one of them to materialize if we continue rapidly warming the climate.”
Guilbeault survives
Trudeau shuffled his cabinet this week. There are new faces, but Steven Guilbeault will stay on as minister of environment and climate change. Guilbeault is despised in oil country and several of Canada’s closeted-climate denial premiers really, really want him turfed. So it's a strong signal the Trudeau government intends to forge ahead with climate policy even in the face of major blowback from many provinces.
Guilbeault says the feds will finalize regulations to clean the electricity grid this year and table draft regulations to cap oil and gas emissions in October. The oil and gas cap should be finalized by mid-2024.
This week, Minister Guilbeault made a long-awaited announcement restricting fossil fuel subsidies. Canada is the first G20 country to deliver on the promise, first made under the Harper government at the 2009 G20 meeting. Canada’s move sets a “really important international precedent,” says Julia Levin from Environmental Defence. The new framework does allow support for carbon capture projects and does not address Crown corporations like Export Development Canada, which provides billions in financing and loan guarantees to projects like the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion and Coastal GasLink. Guilbeault promised a framework for Crown corporations and other public finance in 2024.
Elsewhere in Canada’s National Observer, we learned that British Columbia is set to grow its electric bus fleet by 115 vehicles thanks to a combined investment of nearly $400 million from the provincial and federal governments, reports Natasha Bulowski. The investment will also allow BC Transit to install 134 charging stations across the province.
Climate groups and tenants are protesting a Toronto landlord who is hiking rents, purportedly for “decarbonization” renovations.
The series about Haida Gwaii continues with this week’s installment, “Death by a thousand ships,” investigating the impact of marine shipping and fears over the coming surge of LNG tankers. “It’s a constant part of our reality and our responsibility to do our best to look after this place,” says Council of the Haida Nation President Gaagwiis. “There are other nations who are looking to (LNG) to develop their economic base. We have a different perspective on it, and we disagree on that as the path forward.”
Canada’s financial heavyweights have pumped at least $1.3 billion into companies drilling for oil in the Amazon rainforest, according to a report by Stand.earth and the Coordinator of Indigenous Organizations of the Amazon Basin.
“Most of the oil exported out of the Amazon is destined for California,” reports John Woodside. “And the bulk of the financing comes from just eight major U.S., European and Brazilian banks … But three Canadian banks and a private equity firm were also named as significant contributors between 2011 and 2019. They are RBC, Scotiabank, CIBC and former Toronto-based GMP Securities (which was acquired by Missouri-headquartered Stifel in 2019).”
Canada’s big banks are showing “little progress” and “no urgency” against climate change. That’s the headline finding from Investors for Paris Compliance, which found little progress since its last assessment in 2022.
Advocacy group says banks show little progress on climate action https://t.co/etUIkiXpT4
— Investors for Paris Compliance (@investors4paris) July 28, 2023
Elections matter
If any of the leading Republican candidates take the U.S. presidency in 2024, we now have a pretty good idea what will happen.
Right-wing think tanks have written a 920 page plan, which begins day one of a Republican presidency, to dismantle most of the federal government’s work on climate.
— Dr. Genevieve Guenther (@DoctorVive) July 26, 2023
Make no mistake: this is a battle plan. The war being waged is against our children's future.
Elections matter! pic.twitter.com/qFoGm0IMaR
Thankfully, MAGA Republicans don’t hold the presidency and have only won about half the elections for state governors. Just this week, the state of Maine launched a wind program to source half its power from offshore turbines. And other governors are readying the public for dramatic action.
.@GovInslee calls it like it is: “The fuse has been burning for decades, and now the climate change bomb has gone off. This is a solvable problem. But we need to stop using fossil fuels. That is the only solution to this massive assault on humanity."https://t.co/mvmMS0SkAH
— Lena Moffitt 🌲 (@LenaMDC) July 25, 2023
Renewable U.K.
The U.K. has been leading the world in cutting carbon but the current crop of ruling conservatives seem poised to backtrack on climate policy. Still, the surge in renewables continues. The U.K. announced that renewables generated a record amount of electricity last year and made up 41.5 per cent of U.K. power. Renewables are now bigger than fossil fuels in the U.K. power sector. “Wind remains the U.K.’s biggest source of clean power, generating a record 24.7% of the UK’s electricity,” reports Scotland’s The National.
Seems a good time to repeat: There are at least 739 papers reviewing 100% renewables systems. Main conclusion: 100% renewables CAN power all energy in the world at low cost - fast
— Assaad Razzouk (@AssaadRazzouk) July 27, 2023
We have decisive solutions to the #ClimateEmergency. Implement them fasterhttps://t.co/EHXpSDBoGG pic.twitter.com/r5mjFb7yI0
Heat pumps are hot
“After years on the back burner, heat pumps go mainstream with sizzling hot sales,” reports CBC News.
"I'm surprised at how quickly the general public's mindset has changed on heat pumps,” says Peter Messenger, the owner of an HVAC company. They were 10 per cent of his sales last year and have suddenly jumped to half.
In a few years, he predicts, “we won't sell air conditioners. Everything will be a heat pump …. People may still keep their gas furnaces, but as time goes on, I think we're going to see less and less gas meters on people's homes."
Can’t afford to be doomers
I’ll leave you with Rebecca Solnit’s latest, “We can’t afford to be climate doomers.”
“A significant percentage of the general public speaks of climate change with a strange combination of confidence and defeatism,” she writes.
That “strange combination” arises from “muddle about the relationship between facts and feelings … I respect despair as an emotion, but not as an analysis. You can feel absolutely devastated about the situation and not assume this predicts outcome.”
After all, “change is often not linear but exponential, or it’s unpredictable, like an earthquake releasing centuries of tension. Big changes start small, and history is studded with surprises.”
I’ll be taking a few weeks off Zero Carbon but I’d really love to hear from you, especially your ideas and experiences coping with climate anxiety. Please email chris[at]nationalobserver.com