By Marley Wiemers

We’ve spent years upon years being drowned in and overwhelmed by stories about climate change and it’s catastrophic impacts on our beloved world. Especially as of late, it seems as though every article in every newspaper is detailing the increasingly cataclysmic events that climate change is causing around us: the hottest years on record, melting glaciers, rising sea levels that threaten coastal regions, and so on. We’re being told that the world will reach the point of no recovery within the next decade and that, horrifyingly, this is our own fault. 

When we’re constantly reading these claims, it’s incredibly easy to fall victim to their defeatism, and to begin to believe that we have no hope for the future. According to the American Psychological Association, this sense of defeatist hopelessness is otherwise known as “eco-anxiety,” which can be further defined as the “chronic fear of environmental doom” that develops within people as their awareness of climate change causes their mental health to suffer.

The conversation about climate change is, of course, an incredibly important one to have, and the state of the Earth is a topic on which we should all strive to be well informed. But when these conversations are governed by increasingly inescapable and bleak headlines that work to sensationalize imminent disaster and to place the entirety of the blame for such chaos on the common person, it becomes clear that the conversation is being handled in an entirely incorrect way. There’s an incredible amount of information in the world that details the importance of watching your individual ecological impact by taking public transportation instead of driving, by cutting meat out of your diets, and by taking shorter showers. This information continues to place the blame for the environment on the common person and thus shifts the blame away from the larger corporations that are perhaps most responsible. When we take these actions and still feel as though we aren’t seeing any positive change in the world, only a continuation of the negative, we can feel overwhelmed and as though our actions don’t matter. This individual-focused approach may even be causing people to turn a blind and apathetic eye to climate change as a whole as they try to avoid the discomfort of learning about it. 

A study completed at the University of East Anglia by Saffron O’Neill and Sophie Nicholson-Cole works to examine the fact that these headlines can often petrify individuals into apathy regarding the environment. The study states that “…using fearful representations of climate change may be counterproductive,” as, although negative headlines tend to attract substantial attention, the subsequent fear and eco-anxiety that they generate is generally an “…ineffective tool for motivating genuine personal engagement.” The fact that these fear-mongering titles have little success in producing genuine engagement with the problem at hand could be due to the fact that, according to psychology professor Susan M. Koger, “When we’re scared, we can freeze… We use various kinds of defense mechanisms to distract, to deflect, to numb out.” Thus, stoking fears can often lead to people shutting down and turning more to inaction and apathy than to a passionate desire to help the climate crisis through meaningful engagement. 

With this in mind, it seems clear that negative headlines, although they may seem to be an effective tool for garnering attention towards climate change, must be used with extreme caution. If they are used too frequently, they have a higher risk of causing desensitization towards the environment as opposed to inciting productive action. Thus, newspapers and media outlets need to stop presenting these quick narratives of disaster and these horrifying statistics that detail the end of the world as we know it. In addition, the media must stop placing blame for this chaos on the individual and look at the responsible corporations instead. To fight against this eco-anxiety turned apathy, we need to stay vigilant when it comes to the information that we are reading. We must be aware of the reality of climate change, but make sure that we take time to step back from the horror storms of environmental destruction and remind ourselves that there are steps that are being taken to fight it and that there are things that we ourselves can do to fight climate change (although the fate of the world doesn’t rest on our shoulders as is often portrayed). This is, of course, difficult, as it requires changing our mindset and digging for information that isn’t as readily presented . But as long as fear-mongering headlines and misplaced blame exist, taking personal steps will be an efficient way to combat eco-anxiety and subsequent apathy, to ensure that we don’t petrify ourselves into inaction, and to ensure that we can continue to work together to have conversations about and fight against climate change.