On death and dying and climate change

Does humanity have a deathwish??

Global CO2 emissions are rising to record levels when they should be in steep decline. Dire warnings from the IPCC and UN come and go with a momentary ripple in the media. And China and the US, the world’s largest emitters, are actually expanding their fossil fuel production.?

Meanwhile, extreme weather events are increasing in frequency around the world. The evidence of a gathering crisis is growing before our eyes but our collective response is…muted. Mixed. And puzzling. A small minority are taking action – but why aren’t we all mobilising at speed to fight the monster coming over the hill?

The five stages?

Maybe the answer can be found in On Death and Dying, the classic work by Elizabeth Kübler Ross. This is the source of the famous five stages of grief – denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance.?

Except Kübler Ross didn’t formulate these stages in response to grief. She was a psychiatrist who pioneered hospice and palliative care and observed the five stages in the reactions of patients to a terminal diagnosis.?

In other words, the five stages relate to dying, not grieving – which is why they could offer a useful insight into humanity’s collective reaction to the ‘terminal diagnosis’ of climate change.

Because make no mistake, even if they reject it, people understand that climate change means death – not the end of the world, which will continue with or without us, but certainly the end of life as we know it; namely, the destruction of much of the natural world and the passing of the fossil fuel-based civilisation that’s brought us to this point.

Faced with such a prospect, is it possible that humanity is going through the five stages? Not one after another, as an individual might, but simultaneously, with different groups at different stages?

Stage One – Denial?

Take denial. The extreme variety – ‘The climate is always changing, it’s nothing to do with fossil fuels’ – may be in decline but another form is dominant.

This is the denial of ‘It’s real but it won’t happen in my lifetime’, ‘Technology will fix it‘, ‘It won’t be so bad, we’ll cope.’ Basically, business as usual, with fingers crossed that something will turn up.

It’s possible that the covid pandemic has fed this form of denial because, terrible as it was, something did turn up. Science and technology rode to the rescue in the shape of the vaccines. Millions died but human genius triumphed again.?

And will do so again with climate change, assume the finger-crossers. Carbon will be sucked out of the atmosphere somehow, at scale, and put somewhere safe – in rocks, or the sea, or deep, deep underground. Meanwhile, we can get on with our lives as if nothing’s happening.?

‘Denial functions as a buffer after unexpected shocking news,’ says Kübler Ross, so it’s entirely understandable. But it also stops us taking the necessary action.

Stage Two – Anger

What about anger? Well, there’s certainly a lot of that around climate change. The anger of the protesters that governments aren’t doing more to curb greenhouse gas emissions. The anger of people whose lives have been disrupted by the protesters. The anger of those who object to their lives being restricted in any way by measures to curb emissions. Anger begets anger.??

Kübler Ross explains that the anger triggered by a terminal diagnosis is an expression of the patient’s loss of control and sense of helplessness. But the hostility the patient shows towards others, the resentment and complaints of unfairness – ‘Why me? What did I do to deserve this?’ – can make it difficult to see the profound fear that lies beneath their anger, let alone empathise with it.?

Or, more difficult still, to actually address it. For, as Kübler Ross notes of her medical colleagues, ‘We can only do this when we have faced our own fears of death, our own destructive wishes, and have become aware of our own defences which may interfere with our patient care.’

In short, ‘Physician heal thyself’. And if we were to replace anger with understanding – self and mutual – how might the dynamic between those on different sides of the climate argument change?

Stage Three – Bargaining

‘If we have been unable to face the sad facts in the first period and have been angry at people and God in the second phase, maybe we can succeed in entering into some sort of agreement which may postpone the inevitable happening.’

Kübler Ross’s explanation of the bargaining stage might have been written precisely with the climate crisis in mind, except for one word – ‘postpone’. Replace that with ‘stop’ and you have a pretty accurate description of the negotiations around successive IPCC reports, the Kyoto Protocol, COPs, the Paris Agreement and Net Zero – the ‘blah, blah, blah’ derided by Greta Thunberg.

Net Zero is perhaps the most seductive of these bargains; the idea that if we can balance (declining) carbon emissions with (expanding) carbon sinks by 2050 we’ll dodge the bullet of runaway climate change. The tipping-points won’t tip.?

Unfortunately, Net Zero is a bargain (some) people have made with each other, not with the climate – and there are few signs anyway that it’s a bargain that’s being kept.?

Neither is it at all clear that it’ll work. A growing number of climate scientists are saying that it’s all too late. There’s already too much energy, too much heat, trapped in the system for significant damage to be avoided.

Which brings us to…

Stage Four – Depression?

Unsurprisingly, the doomsday scenarios arising from climate change are producing a lot of doom and gloom. Mental health professionals have observed the new conditions of eco-anxiety and eco-depression, especially among the young.

These are distinct from the growing negative mental health effects directly associated with extreme weather events such as heat waves, droughts and flooding. As a 2021 Imperial College study notes, ‘Climate change increases the risk that people will experience prolonged distress that meets criteria for mental illness, including PTSD, depression, anxiety and substance abuse.’

It’s a grim picture – sorry – but consistent, again, with Stage Four of Kübler Ross’s model. ‘When the terminally ill patient can no longer deny his illness… His numbness or stoicism, his anger and rage will soon be replaced with a sense of great loss… The patient is in the process of losing everything and everybody he loves.’

In essence, this is a stage of grief and mourning for the present and future of one’s own life. Magnify the effect of that sense of loss to a global scale and it’s perhaps no wonder that denial, anger and bargaining are so prevalent in the face of climate change – they’re forms of mental and emotional self-defence against the dying of the light. Of our Blue Planet.?

Until we can self-defend no more and it’s time for...?

Stage Five – Acceptance

Fully accepting a terminal diagnosis can be a complex process and is not inevitable. It is ‘a monumental task’ to achieve this stage, says Kübler Ross, which she describes as being ‘almost void of feelings. It is as if the pain has gone, the struggle is over, and there comes a time for the final rest before the long journey.’

And again there are parallels here to emerging attitudes of acceptance to climate change, seen most clearly in growing discussions about ‘deep adaptation’ and ‘collapsology’.

One parallel is that this stage is not about turning one’s face to the wall and giving up, about passively waiting for the inevitable end.?

Rather, it’s about letting go of certain hindrances – regrets, animosities, the no longer achievable story of one’s future – and instead focusing on the reality of what’s ahead and what value can be created despite it. Or perhaps even more relevantly, because of it.

And me?

So where am I? Which stage have I reached, if this analysis holds?

Well, I veer between all of them. I’m green but could be a lot greener and hope that some technological fix might throw us a lifeline (bargaining). But for much of the time I act as if the crisis isn’t happening (denial), until another piece of climate news jars my consciousness and I sink into gloom (depression), especially at the thought of what my son, daughter and grandchildren will have to face. And I'm permanently angry at the obscene profits of the fossil fuel companies and their indulgence by governments around the world.

But increasingly I’m moving towards Stage Five: Acceptance. Looking at all of the evidence I can’t help but think that the end is nigh – but with it the possibility of, eventually, a new and better beginning.?

Which is worth struggling for, starting now.?Starting here – with me.