‘Eco-anxiety’ about the doomed state of humanity in the face of catastrophic global warming is leading climate researchers to quit and decide not to have children. BBC News has more.
Until two years ago Jennifer Newall was working at the forefront of climate change research.
Her PhD on melting ice sheets and changing sea levels had taken her to Antarctica, Scandinavia and the USA but it was while leading a workshop for primary school children in Glasgow that she began to question what she was doing.
“It dawned on me,” she says. “The physics behind this haven’t changed in my lifetime. They’re not going to change going forward.”
Jennifer says she realised action was needed urgently and she no longer had the passion or motivation to continue studying the effects.
She put her career on hold in order to take more direct action but she found the scale of the challenge overwhelming.
Jennifer is one of a growing number of people who have experienced ‘eco-anxiety’ – a chronic sense of hopelessness and fear of environmental doom.
“It presented itself as depression and anxiety,” she says. She felt completely paralysed and often unable to get out of bed.
It was during what she describes as her “eco-grief” that 33-year-old Jennifer decided she could not have children.
She says: “I don’t feel like I can have children, because a) the world can’t cope and b) I would feel guilty bringing any child into this world.”
Jennifer didn’t complete her PhD on the disappearing ice sheets – although she hopes to one day return to it.
She is now living in Perthshire with her mother and has found that mountain biking has helped her achieve some peace of mind.
Jennifer says she plans to set up a social enterprise project in Aberfeldy, called Soulful Adventures In Nature (Sain), to help people improve their mental health through outdoor activities.
She accepts that the climate situation will worsen – but has learned not to feel personal guilt for the circumstances.
“I had the sense of hopelessness and powerlessness. But, thankfully I chose to keep fighting to change that, and have a world that I do want to be a part of,” she says.
There is a growing recognition that environmental change affects not just physical but also mental health – although there is still relatively little research into the cognitive impact of it.
In 2021, Bath University lecturer, psychotherapist and researcher Caroline Hickman and her colleagues examined data from 10,000 young people, aged 16 to 25, living in 10 different countries.
About half of those who took part in the survey reported feeling sad, anxious, angry, powerless, helpless or guilty.
The study, published in Lancet Planetary Health, found that while threats faced in different countries varied – from food insecurity to pollution or flooding – there were similar levels of anxiety.
“Over half think humanity is doomed, 56% worldwide, 51% in the U.K., 73% in the Philippines,” Ms. Hickman says.
“So there’s more closeness in relationship. Being at a distance from it physically doesn’t protect you from the emotional and cognitive impact.”
The article also spotlights student Kyle Downie, 22, who “was an avid climate activist but had to take a break from campaigning due to his mental health. He is now on anti-depressants.” It continues:
His mental health started to worsen in March last year and while eco-anxiety was not the only cause, he believes it was a factor.
“It wasn’t because of eco-anxiety – but I think the eco-anxiety played a big part in being diagnosed with depression,” he says.
“I think that’s probably the case for a lot of people. Just because that feeling of hopelessness is always there, so it leads to depression.”
Worth reading in full.
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Ho, just get it over with you whingeing little softy and let the rest of us get on with living! No one ever said life would be easy, you either have to man up and get through of give up, the choice is yours!
Think of it this way, the only real way out is through!
You’ve got that annoying little tick again.
I know, it follows me around, it don’t half itch!
Its the
77th78th.. he’s always late on duty..When I was in my teens, we knew we had nuclear bombs, and the Russians had nuclear bombs, and one day it could all end in a big flash of light. No-one was blaming me for this situation, nor were they making me personally responsible for the cause and the solution to it either. ‘We’ve got to save the planet’. Is there ever a phrase that is so utterly arrogant, unachievable, and devoid of meaning. The planet doesn’t need saving. When the day comes it will shake us off, as George Carlin said,’like a bad case of fleas’.
That is so unfair, Neil. Don’t you realise that all those smelly, hairy women camped outside Greenham Common saved the world from nuclear annihilation.
It is so much easier than getting a real job, as Jenny apparently has found out.
Steady on Roubles.. I was one of those but have since ‘transitioned‘..
“We’ve got to save the planet”????.—— But as someone once pointed out. “The urge to save humanity is almost always a false face for the urge to rule it”. The same pretend to save the planet people wanted the same solutions to “global cooling” in the seventies. Which is bigger and bigger government controlling every aspect of people’s lives. It is the “Never let a good crisis go to waste” mentality no matter what the crisis is or even whether there is any evidence for it, because that is easily manufactured, and ofcourse that is what climate change is —-A manufactured Crisis for political purposes.—-CO2 is the globalist bureaucrats dream gas. It gives them the ability to put socialist policies in place that they never thought was possible before. Because all human activity involves the release of some CO2, what better way to control all human activity than by controlling that CO2.
Co2 – the gas that keeps on giving.
Life,.. to the planet, that’s some gift!
To hear the idiots these days you’d think it was poison
The only way to completely stop output of CO2 is for all mammals to stop breathing. The total content of CO2 in our atmosphere is 0.042 %. With less than 0.015% CO2, we would all be dead. CO2 is not a pollutant and is essential for life, although there are other effects of human activity that discharge pollutants, science has reduced them considerably, and continues to progress that reduction.
You got it.. superb post.
Is it really that bad if the mental health of these losers spirals down to a point where they are no longer functional? I don’t see any downsides, personally.
Yep! absorbed in promoting the prophecy of doom and death by a thousand floods, have now succumbed to the belief in their own prophecies. Strange that, but are they depressed by the climate catastrophe they promote, or the fact so few believe them. Nice down tick by the way.
I see a major downside – it’s us poor sods the taxpayer who will have to ‘support’ them through their crises. i.e. bailing them out with unemployments benefit, housing allowance and all the rest of the benefits that they will claim they are ‘entitled’ to.
It fair hacks me off.
“So it’s not all bad” you say.
Put this together with the lowered birth rate curtesy of the mRNA vaccines and fact we in the West are sitting on a demographic time bomb and the fact the authorities aren’t coming clean about the reason they are failing to clamp down on immigration is precisely because of this problem and you have a recipe for societal breakdown, lack of social cohesion and mass unrest and it’s pretty ******* disastrous.
The recipe for societal breakdown was sewn by the multicultural agenda, classic divide and rule, by another name. The purported intent of cohesion resulted in the shattering of society as a whole. Nice down ticks by the way.
Such “proximate mis-attribution” is fairly typical behaviour of people with a real anxiety-with-depression disorder: they mis-attribute their dysphoria to the nearest interacting entity, be it their spouse, parents, children, family, therapists. If there is no obvious personal identification, they attribute their feelings to imaginary enemies like (currently) climate change, chemtrails or long covid or whatever their “controllers” tell them to be anxious or depressed about this week. In the sixties it was Nuclear Warfare. They then spiral into a vicious circle of worsening anxiety in which they lose touch with reality and form fanciful relationships with each other, black-and-white thinking about “friends” and “enemies”, developing Borderline behaviour and leading to cults and extremism. They lose the ability to deduce that their controllers are simply people with similar mal-adapted thought processes. The old countermeasure of “energetic confrontation with reality” is dismissed as “coercive control”. Unfortunately, some fall into a black hole of suicidal thoughts and totally dropping out of society. I notice that at the bottom of the BBC article the “helpline” doesn’t help: normally it advises people to contact The Samaritans, rather than the BBC Action Line, which I guess will make them feel even worse by colluding and reinforcing their delusions.
Blimey. Who woulda thought?
When you allow irrational fear to overcome you then you will suffer the consequences. You may end up gluing yourself to buildings or lying in bed all day but you can only conquer the fear if you quit with the faith and emotion and replace it with fact and reason.
When you believe in things that you don’t understand,
Then you suffer,
Superstition ain’t the way.
I don’t suppose anyone has ever accused Stevie Wonder of being a climate heretic, but he hits the nail on the head here. If ever there was something that could be described as “not understood” it would be a loosely coupled stochastic system with an unknown number of parameters, each of which has an unknown effect on the overall system.
Big Brother (Talking Book Stevie Wonder)
I’m old enough to still remember the sirens being tested and the public information broadcasts about getting under the table in case of a nuclear event. What we didn’t have then were mobile phones constantly reminding us of it. I suspect that, if you take a lot of these snowflakes’ phones away and actually got them to look up occasionally, they might gain a bit of perspective.
Maybe Jennifer’s ‘Soulful Adventures in Nature’ (Yuk) is actually the right thing to do them. Get out of a rut, go and look at some real nature. Although I note that Aberfeldy has no railway station, so getting there might pose a problem for people with eco-anxiety
Same here. I’m just about old enough to remember the BBC sci-fi drama “Survivors” made in the 1970s. Don’t think they want to transmit that old archive at present – but it could fill in a bit of time on BBC4, I suppose.
Survivors was child’s play! Try Threads! By Michael Jackson, no not that one,mick Jackson.
https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0090163/?ref_=ext_shr_lnk
Knuckle up! This one pulls no punches
“You and your family must take cover!”
Patrick Allen (Barrett homes commercial)
Sudden thermo nuclear war! As against slow, maybe happening climate change?
https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https://m.youtube.com/watch%3Fv%3DzkOcJPQFhyE&ved=2ahUKEwiS7sTJhrz_AhWHJcAKHYqACyUQo7QBegQICBAG&usg=AOvVaw0allJtgEFudKfui0LVkAet
Two tribes:- “when you get the air attack warning, you and you family must take cover!”
You sound about the same age as me and I was terrified in my childhood! But, you get up, dust your self off and live!
WTAF?
There is a trove of clips in the “Karen goes nuts” meme, some of which shows “Karen” behaving irrationally against cars. Some of them are so bizarre I cannot work out whether they are actually a carefully-scripted comedy sketch rather than genuine candid videos of people who have been driven into an insanity of eco-anxiety to the point that they ignore blatant contrary evidence. A recent one shows “Karen” ranting against two men for “being in a carpark sitting in a car with the engine running, polluting the air in the houses nearby”. In reality, they are in a switched-off electric car.
The “refusing to have children” is an interesting point. I work with children, and I enjoy doing so, but I am childfree by choice: not for environmental reasons, but because I believe the world is a hostile place to bring children into (mostly because of the way other humans behave, especially governments, their habit of starting wars on a whim being one reason). I have thought this for a long time, and my view has been reinforced by the pure cruelty of lockdowns, where children were thrown under the bus by the government, and by many of the adults around them, who valued the fig leaf of “safetyism” above their children’s well-being and development. I haven’t forgotten children being labelled as “vectors of transmission”. Does believing the world is too nasty for me to want to have children make me have “anxiety”? (This word being an over-used label, in my view.) I hesitate at the idea of having to steer my own children through the world of propaganda from all sides, social media, and having to protect them from the government.
I remember a lot of the environmental stuff spouted by the BBC children’s programme Blue Peter in the early 90s: acid rain, the hole in the ozone layer, down with CFCs, use your car less, recycle more, spare the trees by not using paper, etc. There was enough to fill a whole book: “The Blue Peter Green Book”. Some would argue this is “brainwashing” from an early age. Incidentally, this book stopped short of saying “save the environment by not having children”.
Also, this is another case of where the language is almost identical on both sides. This article talks of those experiencing “eco-anxiety”. Those of us who have tried to persuade others of the lockdowns folly, the evils of government micromanagement and all the rest will probably have heard the reply in a concerned tone “all this fretting isn’t good for your mental health”, accompanied by a head tilt. See also:
“Look at all those vx refuseniks, they’re going to catch Covid and die, it’s very sad.”
“Look at all those lemmings queueing up for the clotshot, they’re going to die, it’s very sad.”
And yes, I have seen both of those on social media.
I’m also childless, but it’s not because I think there’s anything particularly wrong with the world, rather that they’re ghastly, noisy, needy little creatures and I’ve never really seen the point.
Having children seems to be a vote for the future, or at least a belief that the future won’t be worse than the present, especially when people have a choice. It’s hard to believe the world will be an OK place as we’ve seen governmental overreach over the past three years, plus express governmental intent to crush dissent, decrease our living standards, groom into deviancy, and actively discriminate against boys.
Socialism means that the future will always be worse than the present, trickle-up poverty isn’t a great concept.
Or as an American friend of mine used to say as opposed to trickle down.. the ‘pi$$ on you effect’..
“Eco-anxiety’ about the doomed state of humanity in the face of catastrophic global warming is leading climate researchers to quit and decide not to have children.”
Why has nobody made the obvious point – what a top piece of news. Surely we can take some satisfaction from the fact that the eco nutters have decided not to breed. The last thing we need is a sub-strain of humanity infecting the planet.
Chin, chin.
Hux, When this piece was first posted it actually ended the headline with “So its not all bad then” that line has since been removed!
“Slainte,’ he said, raising his glass”
Cheers Dinger.
Shame their parents didn’t refuse to have children. The world would be a far saner place.
Oh spot on
“I would feel guilty bringing any child into this world.”, well, so you should you airhead idiot! Why should any human, let alone a child, be subjected to you?
“Her PhD on melting ice sheets and changing sea levels had taken her to Antarctica, Scandinavia and the USA”
It must have been the tens of thousands of miles of swimming and walking (the only truly Green methods of movement from A to B) that led to Ms Newall’s physical and mental burnout…
Love it.. nail on head..
Maybe Jenny ought to start looking up in the sky at the extraordinary cloud types available these days..
We had ten cloud types for millennia, but those clever folks at NASA have added twelve new ones. Fancy that! I wonder why.. maybe its because the billions of tons of chemicals/particulate being sprayed are forming their own unique clouds. Nah.. it couldn’t be could it.. that’s just conspiracy theory..
Posing as Will L at the moment instead of the usual George L..
Funny, eco-loons’ beliefs and impact on society are the ones making me despair about the future of the human race!
At heart, I’m probably one of those crazies who wants to create a colony safely hidden from the rest of the human race, take all our great literature, films, learning, art and technological innovation and preserve it from the new dark age we’re entering.
“The physics behind this haven’t changed in my lifetime. They’re not going to change going forward.” – If she knew even O-Level Physics she’d know there’s absolutely no cause for concern. The nature of the specific heat capacity of materials hasn’t changed and never will. Increasing the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere (counterintuitively to those with no grounding in the only real science) will have an effect on atmospheric temperature somewhere between nil and negligible. The only people able to pesent this fact – physicists – are being ignored because they don’t claim to be “climate Scientists”.
If only these activists realised the blessing of not living the the Middle Ages where they would have been elderly at 35. Or in the Victorian era when there would have been no cure for cholera or peritonitis. Or in pre-Conquest England where they might have been sold abroad as slaves. Did the Victorians not have children because they might have died of whooping cough?
No superstitions of the past was so fearful as those held by these poor activists. They need to be pitied. The dream of Utopia brings on an even stronger reminder of mortality. A necessary reminder?
We can at least be grateful that these brainwashed Eco Nutters won’t be breeding another generation of easily controlled, weak-minded sheep.
“Eco-anxiety’ about the doomed state of humanity in the face of catastrophic global warming is leading climate researchers to quit and decide not to have children.”.
Darwin works in mysterious ways!
Good. At least lunacy is a self limiting characteristic.
Poor Jennifer, maybe through bad luck, has too much time on her hands. The ability to live with Mummy at 33 and potter about on her mountain bike leaves one thinking, “where’s the money coming from to eat etc”. The general population of the UK and certainly most of the world are fortunate enough to have to go out every day and earn enough to feed, clothe and provide some form of shelter. This leaves very little time to ponder the fate of humanity and curl up in bed under the weight of responsibility for saving the planet. Put simply the risk of dying through malnutrition etc would be far higher than waiting for the impending doom predicted by climate models.
My father was lucky. Born 1905 he was sent to Southwark Workhouse in 1911 with his mother and two siblings when his father inconveniently died of TB. His mother then went and died of TB in 1915, how lucky can you get? Then to an orphanage in South London with his brother and finally at 14 got his first job in the printing industry in London. Lived through two World Wars and survived TB but died at 56 with Bronchitis and related conditions. I don’t think he thought about his responsibilities to the planet at all during his lifetime such was his selfish existence.
i think Jennifer should just go to bed whilst her mother looks after her for the rest of her life. She could then perhaps tell us, when she has a moment, what we need to do to make her demons go away.
I can understand how people can be psychologically influenced by the mad stories and false data about climate change. The best antidote is to see the output from people like the Canadian Patrick Moore, William Happer and more in the group of real scientists who would make it clear to anybody that the climate emergency is a hoax and provide the data and evidence that proves it. The despicable idiots and political chancers who spread the stupid claims about the false climate emergency are causing unjustified distress to many young people.