At first I was afraid, I was petrified. Then I became determined to put up a fight to survive.
The truth can be terrifying, so terrifying that often we prefer avoidance or lies.
So it is with the reality of climate change. Like a diagnosis of terminal cancer, how I wish it wasn't so. If only we could go on and on, with the dream of endless abundance and growing prosperity. The problems of disease, poverty, and even war, seem dwarfed and solvable, compared to global warming.
The psyche has many defence mechanisms, to protect itself from unbearable truths. These can help us to go on against the odds. We step out the door each day, presuming we will survive to return home. We make simple plans assuming we will be around to carry them through. Every time we hit the road, we deny the dangers. We subdue our incipient fears, by telling ourselves 'It won't happen to me and mine.'
This is an effective emotional survival tactic, provided we take reasonable care, and remain vigilant. But it becomes total folly when a life-threatening danger is clearly demonstrated to follow from our actions — or failure to act — and we ignore this reality.
I am a psychologist, trained to help others with anxiety, depression, and despair, but I too wrestle with these demons. I have worried about the past and the ills that may befall my loved ones. Worries and doubts have kept me awake at night, and reduced my enjoyment of life.
I used to worry about financial ruin, an ageing body, my weight and insomnia. Yet paradoxically as I age, with little super, no retirement plan, fatter, and with still less youth and beauty, I find reality more bearable, even tranquil. I feel freer to experience a less encumbered joy.
But confronting the doom of the planet is quite another proposition.
Our relationship with fear is complex. Fear is a necessary instinct. It sets in train a reaction to imminent danger. We share our fight, flight, and freeze response with many species. It is a fantastic mind-and-body mechanism that can turn us into a champion sprinter or give us the strength to drag others to safety. In other situations we may lay low, in an induced stillness, to hide from a predator, or shelter from the terror of a fire or storm.
These mechanisms can save our lives when faced with immediate, obvious danger. We perceive a threat, our brain sends signals and the body instantly gears up.
More and more evidence emerges about the onslaught of human induced climate change. Yet like a person with emphysema, the world goes on smoking. Scientists measure the rising emissions, the melting polar ice, the rising temperatures and lost species and eco-systems. We experience droughts, floods, fires and heat waves, with increasing intensity and frequency.
I first realised how we were careening towards our doom nine years ago. I read The Weather Makers by Tim Flannery and viewed Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth. I felt traumatised. Still more horrendous was the sea of denial surrounding these revelations. An academic friend from Canada laughingly declared, 'I'm not worried, we need the warmth in Canada.'
These days I feel less alienated. The sceptics are looking more and more absurd as they cling to their denial. Unfortunately, big coal remains powerful and intractable, clinging to its ill gotten fossil fuel gains.
We also have a government of climate deniers, who seem hell bent on speeding up our dying in the anthropocene. This is the period since the beginning of the industrial revolution, when our benighted species changed the world. Or rather ruined our own habitat through pitiful moral ignorance.
Doug Hendrie writes that only upon the recent birth of his son did the emotional reality sink in. He found himself seeing the future as an oncoming war and hoping, in that self-focused way that we all share, that his son won't be doing the dying. My own deep awakening coincided with the birth of my grandchildren.
I grew up in the shadow of the holocaust and have spent years in therapy coming to terms with the murder of my relatives and the destruction my parents' world. I now find myself confronting a future potential holocaust of gigantic proportions. Gore has warned us of the danger of moving from denial to despair, while omitting hopeful or determined action. Our only hope is to face the reality.
This may unleash sadness and precipitate a grieving process. Having traversed this, I have come as one does to a new place of hope, and a desire to fight for life.
Lyn Bender is a Melbourne psychologist. Follow her on Twitter @Lynestel