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'Time is the fire in which we burn'
Delmore Schwartz,
“Calmly We Walk Through This April’s Day”
from Selected Poems (1938-1958): Summer Knowledge
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" Last April, Memorial University’s Cunsolo and a colleague coined the term “ecological grief”: the profound sadness that people feel as a response to loss of animal species, ecosystems, and landscapes"
Climate Change Isn’t Just Frying the Planet—
It’s Fraying Our Nerves
www.motherjones.com/…
Forty percent of Americans reported hearing about climate change in the media at least once a month in 2015, and about half said they were worried about the topic that year, making it “a powerful environmental stressor,” according to a 2016 federal report. And that’s not the only way global warming causes psychological problems: A recent report from the American Psychological Association and Washington-based nonprofit ecoAmerica details some of the effects of natural disasters on mental health, including social disruption, depression, post-traumatic stress disorder, and suicide. Researchsuggests that heat waves affect our neural regulation, weakening our ability to regulate our emotions, and that people are more aggressive and less empathetic during warm periods. As Stanford University researcher Sanjay Basu put it to me, “We kind of lose our cool.”
Indeed, evidence suggests a connection between rising temperatures and suicide. A study published in July by researchers from California, Canada, and Chile found that as temperatures climbed over the course of decades in the United States and Mexico, so did suicide rates—by 0.7 percent and 2.1 percent, respectively. In Finland, more than 250 years of data show that temperature variability accounted for more than 60 percent of suicide variance. Poring over historical records, researchers found that positive correlations existed between temperatures and suicide rates from 1751 (when statistical authorities began documenting suicides in the country) until 1990, when a national suicide prevention program was put into place. Meanwhile, in Greece, male suicide rates correlate more significantly with temperature than with unemployment, even as the country’s unemployment rate has ballooned over the last 10 years. Indeed, climatic variables are consistently a better predictor of suicide than socioeconomic factors, according to a 2016 study of 29 European countries over a 13-year period. “Since meteorological variables seem to have an impact on mental health, there are concerns that climate change could lead to an increase in the rates of mental disorders and especially addictions and suicide rates,” the authors wrote.
Clive Thompson on How the Next Victim of Climate Change Will Be Our Minds
"solastalgia"
"Everyone's worrying about resource management and the spooky, unpredictable changes in the ecosystem. We fret over which areas will get flooded as sea levels rise. We estimate the odds of wars over clean water, and we tally up the species — polar bears, whales, wading birds — that'll go extinct.
But we should also be concerned about the huge toll climate change will inflict on our mental health. In the modern, industrialized West, many of us have forgotten how deeply we rely on the stability of nature for our psychic well-being. In a world of cheap airfares, laptops, and the Internet, we proudly regard mobility as a sign of how advanced we are. Hey, we're nomadic hipster capitalists! We love change. Only losers get attached to their hometowns.
This is a neat mythos, but in truth it's a pretty natural human urge to identify with a place and build one's sense of self around its comforts and permanence. I live in Manhattan, where the globe-hopping denizens tend to go berserk if their favorite coffee shop closes down. How will they react in 20 or 30 years if the native trees can't handle the 5-degree spike in average temperature? Or if weird new bugs infest the city in summer, fall shrinks to a single month, and snow becomes a distant memory? "We like to think that we're cool, 21st-century people, but the basic sense of a connection to the land is still big," Albrecht says. "We haven't evolved that much.
"What's more, Albrecht has noticed that the more quickly environmental change occurs, the more intense the solastalgia. The mental-health effects can be powerful. In the Australian outback, industrial activity — notably open-pit coal mining — has turned verdant areas into moonscapes seemingly overnight, and the suicide rate in the region has skyrocketed. Or witness New Orleans, where a Harvard survey found that survivors of Hurricane Katrina reported suffering a "serious mental illness" at roughly double the rate of the city's residents three years earlier. Fully 6 percent have thought about suicide. Trauma and personal loss obviously play a role in this, but the decimation of the city's physical environment surely does as well."
archive.is/...
Record high US temperatures outpace record lows two to one, study finds
Scientists say AP study consistent with peer-reviewed literature and shows clear sign of human-caused climate change
www.theguardian.com/...
"Climate change takes an especially high toll on the mental health of native communities. As snow and ice levels change, Inuit populations in circumpolar Canada, whose land is part of their cultural identity, experience increased family stress, drug and alcohol use, and suicidal ideation, according to a 2013 study led by Memorial University’s Ashlee Cunsolo. In 2017, University of Illinois social work professor Shanondora Billiot found that members of the United Houma Nation in southern Louisiana feel disconnected from ancestral land shaped by environmental changes and pollution—they lose, for example, cultural traditions that rely on the land, and they feel unable to protect that land, compounding the damage.
Treating the psychological effects of climate change won’t come cheap. The Integrated Benefits Institute, a nonprofit insurance research group, notes that mood disorders lead to lost productivity and expensive short-term disability leaves. For every 1,000 US employees, mood disorders in the workforce cost about $232,000 in excess health care treatments and lost work time, and disability claims for mood disorders cost about $9,800 per employee. “These are not trivial,” says Brian Gifford, IBI’s director of research and analytics."www.motherjones.com/...
"30 years since have been lived out in a kind of denial: not in terms of international conferences and demonstrations, or the growth in renewable energy and the search for the perfect electric car, but in our apparent belief that nothing fundamental will change. McKibben wrote in Granta magazine in 2003 that people still thought about global warming “in the way they think about ‘violence on television’ or ‘growing trade deficits’, as a marginal concern to them, if a concern at all … hardly anyone has fear in their guts”
"How can we live with this prospect and not go mad? The website of Extinction Rebellion, which aims to change government attitudes to climate breakdown through nonviolent resistance, carries a film, Heading for Extinction and What to Do About It, which is one of the plainest bits of film-making you will ever see. A female scientist stands in what looks to be her modest kitchen and talks for an hour to a small audience (never in shot) about human civilisation’s probable fate. “Traditionally, you try to be a bit hopeful,” she says at the beginning, “but this is a different kind of talk.” What we need, she says, isn’t hope but courage. We’re heading towards three degrees of warming, and that will be catastrophic, “like boarding a plane that has a one in 20 chance of a crash”.
Halfway through her talk, she allows her audience two minutes to grieve for our future losses. Then she invites us to act – to modify the future terror through present acts of peaceful protest. Is it really worth trying? That, she says, is the wrong question. We must act out of “a desire to be a worthy ancestor”.www.theguardian.com/...
"At a federal level, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has created a public-health action framework called BRACE—Building Resilience Against Climate Effects—and in June awarded grants to several cities, states, territories, and Native American tribes to fund climate and health work. A spokesperson for the CDC said in an email that while BRACE does not specifically address psychological distress, “health departments implementing the BRACE framework may choose to focus on mental health based on their vulnerability assessments.”
www.motherjones.com/...
World's food supply under 'severe threat' from loss of biodiversity
Plants, insects and organisms crucial to food production in steep decline, says UNwww.theguardian.com/…
Heatwaves sweeping oceans ‘like wildfires’, scientists reveal
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What you can do:
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List of environmental organizations
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[Join a Climate Action Group]:
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EXTINCTION REBELLION:
INTERNATIONAL SIGNUP
WE DECLARE:
INTERNATIONAL NON-VIOLENT REBELLION AGAINST THE WORLD’S GOVERNMENTS FOR CRIMINAL INACTION ON THE ECOLOGICAL CRISIS
https://xrebellion.org
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EXTINCTION REBELLION
facebook.com/…
Sign the petition to the DNC: Hold a climate debate