Regarding adaptation - in the world of psychology it’s a given that humans are inately adaptive - from very young we respond and accomodate and modify ourselves to circumstances not in our control. When we have to adapt massively we experience trauma which has great cost to our nervous systems and psychology. Trauma is now understood as a complex, multi-system phenomena affecting physical and mental health. Traumatised people cannot problem solve easily and are not able to think laterally or creatively. They have more heart attacks and other illnesses. We also transmit trauma through our relationships ie spread it around, and also down the generations. You then get a traumatised whole nation or generation. The social, psychological, and physiological fallout of having to do ultra adaptation is as lethal to the human race as the climate change itself. We are capable of being adaptive as a species but beyond a certain point profound suffering, personal and societal is a given. Gloomy I know.
1.I have come to realise my greatest fear… as humanity adapts to the new unsettling norm, we lose compassion and empathy. I already see it… people watching the news of war and floods and fires, or scrolling past the photo of a devastated Forrest and they become numb to what other humans, animals, ecosystems must be going through. I understand this is survival. But I fear for humanity without empathy.
2. As we become more radicalised by algorithms, I am so nervous we are losing the ability to even have the serious conversation about ‘do we just want to survive?’. I also feel like the radicalisation makes us argue about things less important (like face slaps) than our impending extinction.
3. If this article had a soundtrack it would be Life on Earth by Adam Melchor
4. Listen to the latest Dumbo Feather podcast with Daniel Schmachtenberger, tough but great
5. Reading this newsletter and people’s comments here gives me hope for a caring future, so Thankyou xxx
I am deeply saddened that it has come to this - that we are at the stage where big changes must happen for humanity to survive on this planet. But even worse than this, we have destroyed our beautiful Earth to this extent. I love our home, every inch of it, and it pains me to see it abused so. If we had all made changes earlier on than we might have all been able to maintain our lifestyle.
But now that we are here, I am ready and willing to undertake rapid, sweeping change to my lifestyle so that we can reduce the impacts of the environmental crisis. The part that really depresses me is that I don't see this happening in our communities and not at the level of leadership. If a leader stepped up and said 'we're doing this, we're changing the system and making a large scale change today - I would back them, take to the streets for them, follow them.
But I don't see people willing to give an inch on even the most basic and easy of changes. For example, someone close to me goes out multiple times a day in her SUV. Once to get a coffee in the morning in a disposable cup. Once to get lunch. And then another time usually for an appointment or to buy something in a plastic bag. I've tirelessly suggested going out once and getting all the things in one trip to reduce emissions. I've put canvas bags and a reusable mug by the front door and even in her car to encourage their use and she doesn't do it. Another example - in recent times I've seen two instances of people moving house, hiring a skip and then throwing perfectly good stuff into it. Rather than rehoming it or keeping it themselves. Because they want more 'new' / modern things. I see people not reducing their consumption at all.
What I see is people not changing or adapting overall. The time may come when they have no choice to. But if we all make changes now, then perhaps worse circumstances can be avoided down the track.
Thank you. And I agree that it seems there is no discussion of adaptation around. I find it frightening. And I am finding it so hard to talk about future plans with the high school students I work with - what future? I think. I have no clear idea of what I should tell them to expect. And most of them are fixated on what their parents (and I) experienced - money, job, house, money, kids, money, better job, money. Meanwhile our school is literally being built around us as a new school but completely blind to the fact that the future will be different. I am in despair about it.
I was utterly shocked by how completely unremarkable it was for us in Perth to experience empty shelves in the shops. We lost a train line for a month to a storm. People just bought differently but didn't ask themselves bigger questions - what happens when there is a bigger storm? Or another thing?
My response is to go both inward and outward. I've been preparing to be better at looking after myself for my basic needs (not in a prepper way!) and developed links with my community (this is really hard for me!) including pushing for mitigation AND adaptation policies for our local area through a group I'm part of now.
It is something. Not much, but something.
And I can't help but answer people's idle conversations about the future with big questions and provocations that I know they find annoying and/or distressing but......
my heart is breaking... I'v spent so much time over the last 8 years studying and working, thinking that I will still get to experience travelling to countries with family and friends sharing the glory of the natural world around us - that it will still be there waiting for me, its not going anywhere. That fact thats its not going to be, reduces me to tears and grief, like losing a loved one and part of ourselves. However, I dont want to lose hope, mother earth will still want us to fight to save as much as we can and remember hold onto her. So lets hold onto each other and share the grief but also share the fire, hope and anger to save this precious earth we are lucky to call home.
Thank you for this letter. I work in the climate adaptation policy space and I struggle with this. Mitigation feels like the 'fun climate change work' or at least the more hopeful. The thing that motivates me to work on it is that adaptation is also about fairness. People with privilege, money, connections will find ways to live with climate change where people who for example can't afford to move from an area experiencing increasing flooding will bear the costs. I think our focus on mitigation is a sign of human optimism, and our inability to give up, concede defeat and adapt until we are forced to. So I think the optimism is preferable to the giving up but we need the protection of adaptation in place as well.
Thanks Sarah. Your writing is engaging! (Despite the content). I have some rather simplistic reflections (!).
I feel like climate change prevention and adaptation are both actions, in the end. Unfortunately Adaptation is more natural to humans. Isn’t it our strength? We’d rather react to a threat than prevent it; we hate to ‘not do, to hold back’,
to leave coal in the ground or we buy and take comfort in the green-washed environmental product, rather than not need it. Also, Do many modern humans find it hard to accept it’s a problem of our doing? But once it starts appearing like the earth is attacking (rising oceans) we suddenly have an enemy and can fight back with sea walls. But surely a great new challenge (eg renewables infrastructure) will create more action, work and purpose (money!?) than fossil fuels. There is so much that we are forced to act on now. It’s a pity it’s taken the arrival of climate change events to convince some of us; an unfortunate ‘I told you so’ moment. I often think we could all do with a regular (but carefully timed) dose of ‘overview effect’, the realisation upon seeing the actual earth from space, that the Earth and our life is a miracle of time and space. Cass
I feel like I'm your annoying little sister often echoing your thoughts exactly on the impending gloom on the state of our world
I feel grief. Absolutely and sadness rage and frustration
Economically it is dire for some of us
I mean I am Gen x. And paid a 65000 hecs debt. Already paid so feel a bit robbed as boomers escaped this wrath
Paying to be educated then punished for it once you graduate. (!?)
My work was touch and bodywork, massage and craniosacral therapy
The pandemic managed to put most in a state of fear so bodywork and hands on wasn't what many would seek for relief. Yet funnily they can turn to alcohol and substances, notice how addictions and all increased with lockdowns. Another story there...
I have strayed ( a libran thing, and ideas once nicknamed the flit ) I'm sure youdbget is sarah, so much information to get out and share.... But if everyone had a massage every week and received some sustained therapeutic touch the world would be a better place. My taken
As for the climate
All this things you said would happen l are coming true
Your anxiety wasn't a fear of
But a real estate of affairs
Floods fires food shortages inequality only upper and lower class exist now, Middle class seems eliminated
It a not good. For anyone
Now more then ever. We need warriors. Earth shamans. Integrity. Not jobs jobs jobs shit. Im.oher it.
Basic human care is diminishing
Basic human interaction is
We need calm strong and one another
And earth. Air. Water. Those unspoilt parts that ARE still here
Thankfully I try and immerse myself daily.
But overall
Its the end of the world as we know it
Everyone was saying we'd return to normal
I, like you knew we never would
Thanks for all your work
My true nature is a wild child having been raised on 2000 acres and no neighbours and space. All around. Isolation if in nature is NOT a bad thing.
In Burnie or cement shackles it is. For me. Unless you have super duper cool people around.
Space is important To me
Like privacy and integrity
Thanks to the metaverse we don't seem to have it anymore
I didn't sign up for this
Nobody did
and I can't relax into it
Adapt
Trying. Failing trying. Existing. Keep trying no other choice
Hi Sarah - posing great questions again. Less than a week ago I arrived in one of my (and your) other favourite places - Crete - where before Covid locked me in Australia, I sail on a 1984 yacht belonging to a UK friend. Slow connected travel now made almost impossible by Brexit and Schengen restrictions - more flying from UK, less slow travel, too many deadlines. But as yet more plastic bottles appear on every Greek table, as plastic bags & other detritus like masks float in the harbour, as the Cretans complain about the worst winter ever, as cars choke up the walkable streets and as cafes serve coffee only in disposable cups, I wonder how we will ever even start to adapt. Maybe adaptation really means resignation - that those in power like our own treasurer will always put other priorities like the golden calf of ‘the economy’ forever caught in a Hayek neoliberal time warp ahead of us and the planet. If a wealthy country like Australia refuses to take leadership on any real mitigation, how can we expect poor countries like Greece to even take mitigation seriously? Dealing with the plastic bottle plague would be simple but even that seems beyond most countries. Before I left Sydney I saw the detritus put out for council clean ups in the Normanhurst area where I was staying and I was horrified that people throw away so much stuff. At least in Greece they seem to re use, fix, and keep using things. I can only cling to the faint hope that a new govt with many committed independents to force Labor to take more powerful actions, will do so.
Thanks for yet another passionate and thoughtful dispatch.
How do I feel about the slide from mitigation to adaptation and back to a frantic both? Honestly I am not sure, and I'm not ignorant either. In 2016 I acquired a BSc in Climate Change Management from (can you believe) Murdoch Uni, in the adorable assumption that that would allow me to become a climate scientist. Anyways, yeah geo-engineering looks freaky and yet seriously credentialled people are saying it's definitely going to be needed. Yet just yesterday Genevieve Guenther in 'New Republic' opined that carbon removal tech is a "dangerous trap" because of the message it sends (that tech can save us). I agree, yet I wonder -- maybe we *have* to use it.....worried and confused here
Thanks for putting words to this reality, Sarah. Gosh, so many thoughts. Mostly, I feel a huge amount of compassion for (most) people. So many of us are entrenched in this system and it requires us to keep operating as if everything is normal — or at least is on its way back to normal. I get the sense that (most) people feel this loss and grief deep in their bones — on an instinctual level (we are animals in a burning world after all) — but we simply don’t know how to wrap our minds around the reality without combusting. So we keep going, and adjusting, and hoping someone or something will be brave enough to wrangle us all — the entire freakin’ world — out of this mess…
Thank you for your continuous education on current issues, politics and environmental concerns.
I feel deeply worried about the impacts climate change will have on us and future generations. I do try to implement strategies in my household and family life that reduce our carbon footprint. However they seem so futile and insignificant. I buy in bulk where I can, use reusable jars, order organic veg boxes from local farmers and buy second hand clothing where I can. But we have a gas cooktop, gas hot water, a fireplace and two cars. I know that little actions by lots of people can make a difference. But it seems that the majority are either sticking their head in the sand or, although aware of climate change, don’t change their habits because they don’t think it makes a difference. Australia’s climate policies are majorly concerning. Not being a citizen doesn’t allow me to vote. I had no idea that walls are built for rising sea levels! Ironically seaside properties in Australia are getting more and more expensive. We need a complete overhaul in government and government policy.
Decades of scientific knowledge and warnings regarding the effects of a change in climate are just brushed under rugs for big business and politics. Admittedly I’m exhausted and increasingly anxious and often stay away from bleak climate news. However, I do enjoy listening and reading your content due to the hues of positivity. Thank you!
Regarding adaptation - in the world of psychology it’s a given that humans are inately adaptive - from very young we respond and accomodate and modify ourselves to circumstances not in our control. When we have to adapt massively we experience trauma which has great cost to our nervous systems and psychology. Trauma is now understood as a complex, multi-system phenomena affecting physical and mental health. Traumatised people cannot problem solve easily and are not able to think laterally or creatively. They have more heart attacks and other illnesses. We also transmit trauma through our relationships ie spread it around, and also down the generations. You then get a traumatised whole nation or generation. The social, psychological, and physiological fallout of having to do ultra adaptation is as lethal to the human race as the climate change itself. We are capable of being adaptive as a species but beyond a certain point profound suffering, personal and societal is a given. Gloomy I know.
Okay so many thoughts on this…
1.I have come to realise my greatest fear… as humanity adapts to the new unsettling norm, we lose compassion and empathy. I already see it… people watching the news of war and floods and fires, or scrolling past the photo of a devastated Forrest and they become numb to what other humans, animals, ecosystems must be going through. I understand this is survival. But I fear for humanity without empathy.
2. As we become more radicalised by algorithms, I am so nervous we are losing the ability to even have the serious conversation about ‘do we just want to survive?’. I also feel like the radicalisation makes us argue about things less important (like face slaps) than our impending extinction.
3. If this article had a soundtrack it would be Life on Earth by Adam Melchor
4. Listen to the latest Dumbo Feather podcast with Daniel Schmachtenberger, tough but great
5. Reading this newsletter and people’s comments here gives me hope for a caring future, so Thankyou xxx
Hi Sarah. Thanks for another great newsletter.
I am deeply saddened that it has come to this - that we are at the stage where big changes must happen for humanity to survive on this planet. But even worse than this, we have destroyed our beautiful Earth to this extent. I love our home, every inch of it, and it pains me to see it abused so. If we had all made changes earlier on than we might have all been able to maintain our lifestyle.
But now that we are here, I am ready and willing to undertake rapid, sweeping change to my lifestyle so that we can reduce the impacts of the environmental crisis. The part that really depresses me is that I don't see this happening in our communities and not at the level of leadership. If a leader stepped up and said 'we're doing this, we're changing the system and making a large scale change today - I would back them, take to the streets for them, follow them.
But I don't see people willing to give an inch on even the most basic and easy of changes. For example, someone close to me goes out multiple times a day in her SUV. Once to get a coffee in the morning in a disposable cup. Once to get lunch. And then another time usually for an appointment or to buy something in a plastic bag. I've tirelessly suggested going out once and getting all the things in one trip to reduce emissions. I've put canvas bags and a reusable mug by the front door and even in her car to encourage their use and she doesn't do it. Another example - in recent times I've seen two instances of people moving house, hiring a skip and then throwing perfectly good stuff into it. Rather than rehoming it or keeping it themselves. Because they want more 'new' / modern things. I see people not reducing their consumption at all.
What I see is people not changing or adapting overall. The time may come when they have no choice to. But if we all make changes now, then perhaps worse circumstances can be avoided down the track.
As always, thankyou!
Hi Sarah,
Thank you. And I agree that it seems there is no discussion of adaptation around. I find it frightening. And I am finding it so hard to talk about future plans with the high school students I work with - what future? I think. I have no clear idea of what I should tell them to expect. And most of them are fixated on what their parents (and I) experienced - money, job, house, money, kids, money, better job, money. Meanwhile our school is literally being built around us as a new school but completely blind to the fact that the future will be different. I am in despair about it.
I was utterly shocked by how completely unremarkable it was for us in Perth to experience empty shelves in the shops. We lost a train line for a month to a storm. People just bought differently but didn't ask themselves bigger questions - what happens when there is a bigger storm? Or another thing?
My response is to go both inward and outward. I've been preparing to be better at looking after myself for my basic needs (not in a prepper way!) and developed links with my community (this is really hard for me!) including pushing for mitigation AND adaptation policies for our local area through a group I'm part of now.
It is something. Not much, but something.
And I can't help but answer people's idle conversations about the future with big questions and provocations that I know they find annoying and/or distressing but......
Thanks again for talking about this.
my heart is breaking... I'v spent so much time over the last 8 years studying and working, thinking that I will still get to experience travelling to countries with family and friends sharing the glory of the natural world around us - that it will still be there waiting for me, its not going anywhere. That fact thats its not going to be, reduces me to tears and grief, like losing a loved one and part of ourselves. However, I dont want to lose hope, mother earth will still want us to fight to save as much as we can and remember hold onto her. So lets hold onto each other and share the grief but also share the fire, hope and anger to save this precious earth we are lucky to call home.
Thank you for this letter. I work in the climate adaptation policy space and I struggle with this. Mitigation feels like the 'fun climate change work' or at least the more hopeful. The thing that motivates me to work on it is that adaptation is also about fairness. People with privilege, money, connections will find ways to live with climate change where people who for example can't afford to move from an area experiencing increasing flooding will bear the costs. I think our focus on mitigation is a sign of human optimism, and our inability to give up, concede defeat and adapt until we are forced to. So I think the optimism is preferable to the giving up but we need the protection of adaptation in place as well.
its like we have to choose humanity or nature or worse. what matters more right now honestly dont know
Thanks Sarah. Your writing is engaging! (Despite the content). I have some rather simplistic reflections (!).
I feel like climate change prevention and adaptation are both actions, in the end. Unfortunately Adaptation is more natural to humans. Isn’t it our strength? We’d rather react to a threat than prevent it; we hate to ‘not do, to hold back’,
to leave coal in the ground or we buy and take comfort in the green-washed environmental product, rather than not need it. Also, Do many modern humans find it hard to accept it’s a problem of our doing? But once it starts appearing like the earth is attacking (rising oceans) we suddenly have an enemy and can fight back with sea walls. But surely a great new challenge (eg renewables infrastructure) will create more action, work and purpose (money!?) than fossil fuels. There is so much that we are forced to act on now. It’s a pity it’s taken the arrival of climate change events to convince some of us; an unfortunate ‘I told you so’ moment. I often think we could all do with a regular (but carefully timed) dose of ‘overview effect’, the realisation upon seeing the actual earth from space, that the Earth and our life is a miracle of time and space. Cass
I feel like I'm your annoying little sister often echoing your thoughts exactly on the impending gloom on the state of our world
I feel grief. Absolutely and sadness rage and frustration
Economically it is dire for some of us
I mean I am Gen x. And paid a 65000 hecs debt. Already paid so feel a bit robbed as boomers escaped this wrath
Paying to be educated then punished for it once you graduate. (!?)
My work was touch and bodywork, massage and craniosacral therapy
The pandemic managed to put most in a state of fear so bodywork and hands on wasn't what many would seek for relief. Yet funnily they can turn to alcohol and substances, notice how addictions and all increased with lockdowns. Another story there...
I have strayed ( a libran thing, and ideas once nicknamed the flit ) I'm sure youdbget is sarah, so much information to get out and share.... But if everyone had a massage every week and received some sustained therapeutic touch the world would be a better place. My taken
As for the climate
All this things you said would happen l are coming true
Your anxiety wasn't a fear of
But a real estate of affairs
Floods fires food shortages inequality only upper and lower class exist now, Middle class seems eliminated
It a not good. For anyone
Now more then ever. We need warriors. Earth shamans. Integrity. Not jobs jobs jobs shit. Im.oher it.
Basic human care is diminishing
Basic human interaction is
We need calm strong and one another
And earth. Air. Water. Those unspoilt parts that ARE still here
Thankfully I try and immerse myself daily.
But overall
Its the end of the world as we know it
Everyone was saying we'd return to normal
I, like you knew we never would
Thanks for all your work
My true nature is a wild child having been raised on 2000 acres and no neighbours and space. All around. Isolation if in nature is NOT a bad thing.
In Burnie or cement shackles it is. For me. Unless you have super duper cool people around.
Space is important To me
Like privacy and integrity
Thanks to the metaverse we don't seem to have it anymore
I didn't sign up for this
Nobody did
and I can't relax into it
Adapt
Trying. Failing trying. Existing. Keep trying no other choice
We are worth more than this
Excuse typos. Written on the fly
Love ya sarah
Anna x
Hi Sarah - posing great questions again. Less than a week ago I arrived in one of my (and your) other favourite places - Crete - where before Covid locked me in Australia, I sail on a 1984 yacht belonging to a UK friend. Slow connected travel now made almost impossible by Brexit and Schengen restrictions - more flying from UK, less slow travel, too many deadlines. But as yet more plastic bottles appear on every Greek table, as plastic bags & other detritus like masks float in the harbour, as the Cretans complain about the worst winter ever, as cars choke up the walkable streets and as cafes serve coffee only in disposable cups, I wonder how we will ever even start to adapt. Maybe adaptation really means resignation - that those in power like our own treasurer will always put other priorities like the golden calf of ‘the economy’ forever caught in a Hayek neoliberal time warp ahead of us and the planet. If a wealthy country like Australia refuses to take leadership on any real mitigation, how can we expect poor countries like Greece to even take mitigation seriously? Dealing with the plastic bottle plague would be simple but even that seems beyond most countries. Before I left Sydney I saw the detritus put out for council clean ups in the Normanhurst area where I was staying and I was horrified that people throw away so much stuff. At least in Greece they seem to re use, fix, and keep using things. I can only cling to the faint hope that a new govt with many committed independents to force Labor to take more powerful actions, will do so.
Thanks for yet another passionate and thoughtful dispatch.
How do I feel about the slide from mitigation to adaptation and back to a frantic both? Honestly I am not sure, and I'm not ignorant either. In 2016 I acquired a BSc in Climate Change Management from (can you believe) Murdoch Uni, in the adorable assumption that that would allow me to become a climate scientist. Anyways, yeah geo-engineering looks freaky and yet seriously credentialled people are saying it's definitely going to be needed. Yet just yesterday Genevieve Guenther in 'New Republic' opined that carbon removal tech is a "dangerous trap" because of the message it sends (that tech can save us). I agree, yet I wonder -- maybe we *have* to use it.....worried and confused here
Thanks for putting words to this reality, Sarah. Gosh, so many thoughts. Mostly, I feel a huge amount of compassion for (most) people. So many of us are entrenched in this system and it requires us to keep operating as if everything is normal — or at least is on its way back to normal. I get the sense that (most) people feel this loss and grief deep in their bones — on an instinctual level (we are animals in a burning world after all) — but we simply don’t know how to wrap our minds around the reality without combusting. So we keep going, and adjusting, and hoping someone or something will be brave enough to wrangle us all — the entire freakin’ world — out of this mess…
Hi Sarah,
Thank you for your continuous education on current issues, politics and environmental concerns.
I feel deeply worried about the impacts climate change will have on us and future generations. I do try to implement strategies in my household and family life that reduce our carbon footprint. However they seem so futile and insignificant. I buy in bulk where I can, use reusable jars, order organic veg boxes from local farmers and buy second hand clothing where I can. But we have a gas cooktop, gas hot water, a fireplace and two cars. I know that little actions by lots of people can make a difference. But it seems that the majority are either sticking their head in the sand or, although aware of climate change, don’t change their habits because they don’t think it makes a difference. Australia’s climate policies are majorly concerning. Not being a citizen doesn’t allow me to vote. I had no idea that walls are built for rising sea levels! Ironically seaside properties in Australia are getting more and more expensive. We need a complete overhaul in government and government policy.
Decades of scientific knowledge and warnings regarding the effects of a change in climate are just brushed under rugs for big business and politics. Admittedly I’m exhausted and increasingly anxious and often stay away from bleak climate news. However, I do enjoy listening and reading your content due to the hues of positivity. Thank you!