How can Emotional Intelligence help us deal with Climate Collapse?
We can choose to ignore our feelings, let them overwhelm us, or use them as fuel to face complex challenges head-on
I’ve been worrying about climate collapse for a long time, while it seemed to me that my friends and family went around, undisturbed. To them, the climate was something far away — it seemed they thought environmental activism was all about protecting some obscure species of Amazonian frog they’d never heard of, rather than preserving the chances of our grandchildren having breathable air and food.
But recently, the tide has started to change.
Perhaps we can thank Greta and Fridays for Future. Perhaps being locked down forced people to finally take a long, hard look at our world and what we’re doing to it. Whatever the course, it seems to me that over the last few months, the public has collectively become more and more aware of just how bad things are on the climate front.
I spoke to my father the other day, after I’d persuaded him to watch David Attenborough’s A Life on Our Planet: a fun romp through just how inhabitable the world will be if we don’t act now. Instead of being moved into action, however, he had swung the other way — into apathetic helplessness.
