The bad news blues

As doubt about climate change has diminished, it has been replaced by panic, anxiety, resignation, fatigue, guilt, outrage and disconnect. This phenomenon has been dubbed “eco-anxiety”, an unease that is particularly prominent among the younger generations and parents of young children. So, how do you and your children cope?

- CHARLIE HALE

If the first thing you do in the morning is check your phone or switch on the television, then you’ve no doubt been waking up to a barrage of cataclysmic news: bushfires tearing through drought-stricken land, half a billion animals incinerated, images of windswept, desolate paddocks and desperate farmers, drinking water shortages, flash floods and dust storms, scorching temperatures and rising oceans. The stories are all too familiar; indeed, it’s been a difficult couple of years to hide from climate change.

To read the news is to be filled with existential dread. Will the town you live in be ravaged by bushfires? Will your children spend another summer inhaling hazardous-quality air? Should you have children at all? This sort of daily uncertainty about the very safety of your future has no doubt taken its toll on your wellbeing.

According to the United Nations (UN), we now have less than 11 years to prevent catastrophic climate change. For some, this devastating fact spurs action, evident in Extinction Rebellion, Generation Greta and climate “strikes” across the globe, but others report feeling powerless, disconnected or “stuck” in the face of unmoving governments, and many experience a crippling level of guilt (Did I bring my keep cup? Have I packed my reusable straw? Can I go abroad for a holiday?), or a debilitating sense of doom.

Disconnect or despair