The Flood

Belgium

Yesterday, I broke down. It seemed to come from nowhere - I was just sitting with friends, half-concentrating on my computer, half-concentrating on whatever was on TV, just generally relaxing after a nice day out.

And then, oh.

Open on my laptop was the homepage of The Guardian. I like that paper for its climate coverage, and that day was a particularly busy day for climate reporting. At least six headlines confronted me with dire news of flooding: China, India, Belgium, Germany, The Philippines and London had all been submerged under unexpected levels of water. Hundreds had died, more were missing.

Alongside these headlines were analysis columns; titles like “Extreme weather ‘will be the norm and UK is not prepared’”. That one got to me.

Before I really knew what was happening, I had stood up and left the room. My eyes were blurring, my knees were wobbling. My feet took me to my bedroom, where I curled up on the floor.

The dam burst. The floodwaters rushed out. The ground shook under me, and I rocked as wave after wave of emotion swelled and cascaded through my eyes. I stayed like this for a while, trying just to keep myself from going under.

But the storm kept going.

***

London

Climate change terminology rarely does justice to the intensity of the problem it describes. Take, for example, the term ‘tipping point’.

What it describes is the point at which there is no going back from a certain climate change process. One of the big nine ‘tipping points’ could happen if the Greenland ice sheet continues to disappear into the ocean. Various different factors will contribute to the acceleration of this; less snow means less reflective white surfaces, which means faster warming; the loss of structural integrity of the ice sheet means more pieces fall off, in larger quantities. But the crucial thing is that if the planet warms to a certain temperature for long enough, the world’s fastest-shrinking ice sheet will be a lost cause. It will continue to shrink, regardless of what happens to the climate after that point. The only way to recover it would be to have a new ice age, and to wait millennia for the ice to maybe re-freeze.

For such a terrifying concept (which might not seem quite so terrifying when you find out that said tipping point is more than 2,000 years away, but will seem scary once again when you consider the immense sea level rise that will happen before it’s anywhere near), there should be a more terrifying name than ‘tipping point’. It makes me think of the gameshow.

That being said, I think I hit a tipping point yesterday. For months, I’ve felt my mental health regarding the environment deteriorating, but I’ve continued to take in articles and books on the climate crisis anyway, without following much positive climate news, since it still felt like a breakdown was a long time away. I processed my declining mental health in the same way as most of us are processing the declining health of nature; sure, there’ll be a problem later, but it’s not that bad right now. Might as well keep going for a bit.

And, like nature, my mental health hit back with greater force, and much sooner, than anyone could have predicted.

***

India

After a while in my bedroom, I decided to move out into the kitchen. I thought if I distracted myself by making some food, I’d be able to snap myself out of the breakdown.

Then breathing became a problem; the air stopped feeling like it had any oxygen in it; every breath felt like it’d gone into the wrong part of my body, and just wasn’t being processed. I needed more. I breathed deeper, I steadied myself on the kitchen counter. Breath after breath felt wasted, felt empty, despite the gasping pull it took to get into my lungs. I tried breathing faster instead, taking rapid, shallow breaths, in-out-in-out-in-out, but still my fingers were buzzing with their lack of oxygen, my head was lightening. I was becoming unsteady on my feet.

I stumbled through the hallway to the main living room where my housemates sat oblivious. I mumbled something about wanting something sugary, then backed away and fell over on the stairs.

What happened after that will stay between me, my fantastically calm and helpful housemates, and the mental health services we called.

Suffice to say, I had a crisis.

***

China

No individual flood is ever ‘caused’ by the climate crisis. No scientist can look at a flood and say, with certainty, “that wouldn’t have happened if we weren’t burning so many fossil fuels”. Climate change is an intensifier. It simply makes frequent flooding more likely, and increases the rainfall in every storm when it does occur.

By necessity, there are many flooding events that never would have happened without the intensifying impacts of climate change. Many burst banks that otherwise would have been able to contain the rainfall, many storm drains that otherwise would never have overflowed, many cities that otherwise would have been adequately prepared for the damage.

We just can’t say which floods.

I’m not sure my breakdown was entirely caused by my fear of the climate crisis. There were plenty of other contributing factors - I was dehydrated, I was tired from going out the night before, I’d had other stressful things going on the week before.

But without question, I would not have ended up at the point where I needed to leave my student house in Newcastle and travel home, if it hadn’t been for the intensifying impact of climate change on my mental health.

Knowing that the world is becoming increasingly unstable, that there is nowhere on Earth I can go to escape the unpredictable chaos of extreme weather, of drought, of food insecurity, that will affect every one of us (except maybe the rich) at some point in our lives this century, knowing that it is my own species, my own government, my own consumption habits, making this instability worse, knowing all that, is difficult to handle. Because what we need when we’re stressed is respite. We need somewhere we can go, to hide away from it all.

But when what you’re stressed about is the entire planet, where can you go?

Even Jeff Bezos barely made it beyond the atmosphere.

And so, the intensifier simply does its thing in the background; bearing down on me like a sword of Damocles as I navigate the supermarket for sustainable groceries, tainting the way I think about reading (‘shouldn’t you really be reading that book about ocean acidification rather than this irrelevant time-travel novel?’), turning my interactions with friends into desperate attempts to make them understand how important the death of the world is.

Climate change intensifies the crises of the physical world, and the mental world.

Maybe because those two worlds aren’t really as separate as we usually think.

***

The Philippines

Stress is a physical problem. It changes what nervous system our body uses, and thus affects our digestion, our heart, our immune system, and takes years off our life. It cannot be understood as simply mental.

So the stress caused by ‘climate grief’ is merely another physical effect of the Anthropocene. Mental breakdowns sit alongside tsunamis, burning forests and bleached coral reefs as sad symptoms of the new normal.

The way beyond this stress is not to ignore the climate, because the climate is impossible to ignore. It is the Earth we live on, the air we breathe. If we try and ignore it, keep saying it’s not that bad right now, rather than dealing with the crisis as it already is, then there’s a breakdown on the way.

Our way beyond this stress is not ‘self-help’. It is the fight for a better climate. In his book The Uninhabitable Earth, David Wallace-Wells talks about the total inadequacy of modern, depoliticised self-help attitudes to deal with the political causes of mental health: “A perception of worldly sickness uncomplemented by political commitment gives us only ‘wellness’”. Wellness, not happiness. Not stability.

Hope comes through action, which is why I’m writing this article rather than trying to forget all about the crisis I had yesterday. Action is the only way we can stop ourselves from going under.

I’ve passed a tipping point. My mental health will continue to be impacted by the climate, and it will continue getting worse, regardless of what I do to help it. But it’s within my power to prevent another total breakdown.

Our planet, even if we stopped all CO2 emissions right now, will continue to warm. A certain amount of climate chaos is ‘locked in’, according to scientists, and there’s nothing we can do to stop it getting worse.

But if we commit to hope, if we commit to act, we can at least avoid a breakdown.