"It's not rising sea levels, but raised anxiety that we need to worry about"

Blazing Reader,

In Tom Ed's whimsical article, "The rise and rise of Climate Anxiety," he proposes that "It's not rising sea levels, but raised anxiety that we need to worry about."

Ed describes a growing market for workshops on "how to manage eco-anxiety" noting that, "Nothing is more effective in raising eco-worries than a course suggesting we need to manage our worry about it."

The anxiety runs so deep, he claims that, "Therapy rooms across the country are full of patients worried about the future of the earth relentlessly advertised as hopeless, with therapists afraid to challenge the belief, or believing it themselves."

There are even such things "as climate crisis cafes, which... are a place to share your hysteria over a mass-produced plastic-based coffee cup."

The parallels between the 2020 COVID "crisis" (when death rates were less than in 2019) and the ongoing climate "crisis" (in which temperatures remain cooler than the Medieval Warm Period) were also not lost on Tom Ed:

"It’s the usual fear porn that we witnessed during Covid; perhaps impotent abject terror at perceived global catastrophe is preferable to meaningful self-reflection."

You can read the complete essay on Tom Ed's Substack.

John C.A. Manley

John C. A. Manley is the author of Much Ado About Corona, All The Humans Are Sleeping and other works of philosophical fiction that are "so completely engaging that you find yourself alternately laughing, gasping, hanging on for dear life." Get free samples of his stories by becoming a Blazing Pine Cone email subscriber.