Time to unleash climate anger
This next student strike for climate action should be proudly, effectively, undeniably, angry
In the months after enormous crowds turned out for student led climate strikes on September 20, 2019, I had a recurring fantasy — what if the estimated quarter of a million marchers threading through Manhattan all sat down, and refused to move? The next round of student marches called for this September 24th should bring that kind of heat.
I recently left a career as a public health psychiatrist to do what I could to highlight the social and emotional consequences of climate change barreling down on us. That increasingly means working with youth: in focus groups, surveys, policy initiatives. There is growing evidence and clinician experience of widespread adolescent and young adult distress fueling impairing, anxious, preoccupation and a pervasive roller coaster of depression, vulnerability, betrayal, threat, and specter of a stolen future. Anger, though, has an ambivalent place in that mix. For their own wellbeing in this emotional morass, and for the earth’s future, the 24th would be a good time to change that.
Scholars highlight the importance of the emotional drivers of social movements. In her study of the appearance of the AIDS Coalition To Unleash Power, or ACT-UP, sociologist Deborah Gould described its origins in the 1980’s in a shift among US AIDS activists from voicing an almost stoical emotional tone along the lines of we take comfort from our solidarity in care and grief, to one of angry resistance — wait, we are fed up… they are killing us! Naming the brutality of a homophobic, head-in-the-sand, status quo as the root cause of the spiraling epidemic, not them, ACT-UP delegitimated that status quo. The medical and political powers that be were not to be supplicated, but superseded and remade.
The time to shift to that kind of angry about climate change and the brutality behind it is way overdue. This summer’s droughts, wildfires, floods, storms, heat will reliably cascade to more chronic, widespread, and harrowing, consequences such as unreliable water and agriculture, massive-forced displacement, buckling infrastructure of all kinds, multiplied health threats, and the ongoing loss of work, places to live, and species that support human life. These are inevitable and already “baked in.” And the environment is so inundated with waste, poison, carbon, plastics, heat, acid, that the biosphere is rapidly collapsing. These-by action or inaction- are killing us.
The ACT-UP spotlight on “them” focused energy on detailing what an alternative world, an alternative response to the AIDS crisis, could look like and to seize that and make it so. These activists elevated their role to hands-on change, and made themselves impossible to ignore. That dynamic is even more essential for tackling climate change. All of us need to get our hands dirty. Undoing a carbon economy and adapting and buffering its already massive and accelerating physical and emotional damage, eventually needs DIY, local, work. There, the rubber meets the longer road of implementing — of brokering, testing, learning and innovating, consensus-building, culture-changing, doing, broad change. We can all be climate-doers.
So, with or without passage of Biden’s climate agenda for incentivizing shifts in industries and energy systems (and which still aims too low), there has to also be a plan to resource, empower and spread the skills and tools that super-size grassroots-led implementation of needed change on the ground. As the COVID-19 pandemic shows, without flexing and falling back on a robust social fabric of empowered, nurtured, mutually committed equals to do more of the work of prevention and care, we will be overwhelmed by planetary-sized forces that otherwise swamp us.
Those tools include practices of wellbeing-driven participatory democracy and budgeting, nurturant-community and circular and donut economic practices, neighborhood-led energy and sustainability hubs and collaboratives, and so on. These elevate civic roles for dismantling and rebuilding for the future. Stubborn faith instead in trickle-down progress, endless growth-based economics, corporate stewardship of our energy and environmental future, is the real fairy tale. And it is killing us.
The youth climate movement is not poignant. It is prophetic. This generation sees the future better. They have more of it to lose and they increasingly know this. This September 24th shouldn’t yield more commentators sharing how “moved” they are by mobilized youth in action. They should instead be incensed at the collective paralysis that steals their future and increasingly poisons their present. All of us who love them must join in that rage. Rage only works and lifts up rather than consumes if it is borne by all of us. Right now this generation is too alone hearing the earth making clear that without seizing drastic shifts in how we all live, only more brutality will be left to show for our time here.
