A mass unraveling of relationships, all of us, out of sync.
THE BELIEF THAT fear is a better motivator than hope is amazingly pervasive when it comes to the environment. The funny thing is that it runs counter to our own experiences in other parts of our lives. Think back to how you’ve felt when you had the misfortune of working for a tyrannical boss or a professor hell-bent on using cutthroat exams to reduce the class size. What you no doubt experienced is that fear can be a great mechanism to alert you to situations where failure is unacceptable. But fear of failure doesn’t propel you to greatness. In fact, fear leads most of us to panic. We can’t think straight. We stop looking for creative solutions or imaginative ways forward. Students and employees make more errors when they are operating in cultures of fear; because everyone is afraid of screwing up and being found out, we hide our mistakes, which means no one can learn from the mistakes of others.
Trying to avoid failure is a familiar but ineffective strategy. Failure, it turns out, is an essential prerequisite for success, according to a massive study of three-quarters of a million grant applications to the National Institutes of Health published in Nature in 2019. Yian Yin and his colleagues at Northwestern University set out to create a mathematical model that could reliably predict the success or failure of an undertaking. In addition to the grant applications, they also tested their model on forty-six years’ worth of venture capital startup investments. The result?
Every winner begins as a loser. But the old proverb if at first you don’t succeed, try, try, again only works if you learn from your previous failures. You need to keep doing what works and focus on changing what didn’t. Plus, you should get right back up and try again. The more time you leave between attempts, the more likely you are to fail again. Rather than trying to avoid failure, what matters is what we learn when we fail, the changes we make based on that learning, and how quickly we try again.1
Fear can manifest as anxiety and hopelessness, which keeps us from being productive. Hopeful action, on the other hand, breeds confidence, happiness, and freedom to experiment—emotions that are tied to better performance and a better sense of well-being.2
Fear alone is not an effective strategy
Despite the well-documented ill effects of creating cultures of fear, I often meet people who believe fearmongering is necessary to spur environmental action. In fact, they tell me that the real problem is people aren’t scared enough. Hope, they say, creates complacency at the very time we most need people to be scared into action. Clearly, that’s the sentiment David Wallace-Wells channeled in his 2017 essay “The Uninhabitable Earth.” The article delineates the effects of the worst-case scenarios of climate change, crafting a horrifying, dystopian vision of a near future destroyed by runaway climate change.3 Within a week, it had become the most widely read article ever published in New York magazine.
There’s no doubt fear makes a deep impression.4 And it’s true that fear-based messages can be effective, especially for simple, short-term, or specific behavior-changing interventions. Yet a 2014 meta-analysis that looked at the effectiveness of fear campaigns across sixty years of studies concluded that increasing people’s confidence is a more successful approach than just trying to scare folks straight.5
Fear alone doesn’t help us to address broad, complex, emotion-laden, societal-level issues, like the ones we face with climate change. Indeed, Anthony Leiserowitz, director of the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication, describes what he calls a “hope gap” between people’s fear about climate change, and their feelings of powerlessness to do anything about it. Even those people identified as “most concerned about climate change” in research studies don’t really know what they can do individually or collectively, he says. It’s a serious problem. As Leiserowitz puts it, “Perceived threat without efficacy of response is usually a recipe for disengagement or fatalism.”6
The hope paradox
We find ourselves, therefore, in a paradox. As I described in chapter one, climate change communication to date has overwhelmingly relied on negative emotions. One could argue it’s been a highly successful tactic. American concern about climate change is higher than ever before, jumping 9 percent between 2018 and 2019.7 Evidence from polls in many parts of the world indicates that concern about climate change is at a record high. Increasing numbers of people believe climate change poses a severe risk to themselves and the countries where they live, according to a survey of twenty-six nations conducted by the Pew Research Center in the spring of 2018.8 Though the levels of concern vary by country, people rank climate change as the top global threat.
What all these polls confirm is that a critical mass of people all over the planet now know about and are also worried about climate change. This is an astonishing accomplishment. The effort required to focus global attention on a single issue is beyond challenging, especially for a problem as complex and difficult to communicate as climate change.
This mass demonstration of collective worry is driving political will toward change. Half of the world’s population is younger than thirty years old. According to a 2019 World Economic Forum survey of thirty thousand individuals under the age of thirty across 186 countries, climate change and the destruction of nature is the biggest global concern for young people around the world.9 The same year, a survey of over ten thousand eighteen-to-twenty-five-year-olds across twenty-two countries by Amnesty International found Generation Z fears climate change more than any other issue.10
We’re beginning to see the results. For the first time ever, in 2019, climate change was a top issue in Canada’s federal election. As I write this, the world’s youngest prime minister, Sanna Marin, has set an ambitious target to make Finland the first carbon-neutral welfare state in the world. Bhutan and Suriname have already won the net-zero-greenhouse-gas-emissions race, with Norway and Sweden coming up close behind. Meanwhile, in Australia, climate politics is burning as hot as the devastating bushfires.
Fear, guilt, and shame are powerful levers in political movements. However, fear tactics are a double-edged sword. On an individual level, fear is a good indicator that something is broken or has gone wrong. But, when it becomes entrenched, as it has in the doom-and-gloom narrative, it is demotivating. When we are afraid, we become less creative, less collaborative, and less capable of perseverance. And that’s where the paradox comes in. As a global community, with climate concern at a record high, we are better positioned than ever before to take urgently needed action, yet the collateral damage on individual people of being constantly bombarded with environmental catastrophe is inhibiting our capacity to tackle the climate crisis.
New words to express profound feelings
The emotions people feel around the planetary crisis can be intense, life-changing, and overwhelming. Many describe being terrified, floored, or swept away by grief. “Global dread,” “eco-anxiety,” “environmental grief,” “climate rage,” “eco-paralysis,” “environmental cynicism,” “climate change distress”—despair about the future of the planet has garnered many labels in the research literature as academics try to understand and study the emotional and psychological complexity of our feelings about the state of the planet. Glenn Albrecht, a sustainability professor in Australia, says we simply don’t have enough words to express how profoundly environmental changes affect us. He has created a new lexicon of terms, including solastalgia—the feeling of homesickness we experience when we are still in the same place, but it has been irrevocably changed. Solastalgia is distress caused by the transformation and degradation of one’s home environment.11
Worries about climate change impact our most intimate decisions. A third of Americans reportedly consider climate change in their decision not to have children or to have fewer children, according to recent polls