Tag Archives: climate anxiety

Is it OK for me to fly to Tahiti?: More climate questions

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I love going to faraway places. I have airplane trips lined up for April and May already. But I got to wondering about all that travel when we seriously considered finally flying to Tahiti. Is it OK to fly to Tahiti? I know the law of supply-and-demand says, “It’s not only OK, please do!” But what about people who care about their carbon footprint on a warming planet? Even more, what about Christians who care about creation and the beloved creatures struggling for life on it? Will I protect them and my soul better if I stay out of planes?

I thought you might like to think about our moral dilemma with me, so I got together with God and some people on the internet and pondered the arguments people are having. I suppose you are not surprised that quite a few people are not in complete denial about what humans are doing to the atmosphere.

No. Don’t fly….But

In an ethical discussion there are usually people on one side who know all the facts and the rules derived from them. Many of them will be appalled someone is wantonly ignoring them. For instance, I feel for those poor souls who are still wearing masks (and wish everyone else would) because Covid is still being passed around! “Why are you infecting people?” they think. Maybe they would also be people who think it is obvious no one should be flying to Tahiti if the planet is warming. Airplanes are notorious for burning tons of fossil fuels that increase CO2.

Philosophers and wannabe philosophers are having more nuanced conclusions (like here).

Some people think their choice to fly or not fly differs from their choice to drive or not drive, because that particular plane would be flying anyway and the additional fuel required by your weight is marginal. This is a mistaken view. How many flights are scheduled depends on how many people choose to fly. By not flying, you would be contributing to a reduction in flights that occur.

However. Almost everything we do causes some harm to the environment. Eating meat, taking hot showers, keeping rooms at room temperature, living in a house with a yard, regularly driving to friends’ houses – all of these things cause harm. Even living a very minimal ascetic lifestyle causes some harm. For everything you do, you have to ask whether the benefit to you, plus to others who are also helped, is worth the harm to the environment.

That’s a “No” with a “But.” People who want to say “NO!” to everything that harms the planet usually soften that no with the admission that there is no way one cannot cause harm to others or the planet. As far as making all your choices count, soem say individual choice is too miniscule to really think you are changing the world with it — big change requires a movement of individual choosers. Others say not even a movement can help the climate now because the planet is already warmed, you can only try to help people cope with the impact. Yet others say the law of supply and demand runs the world; old, utopian ideas of forcing the hand with millions of personal choices is irrational and does not work. Of course, these conclusions can be debated and that’s what philosophers are going to do.

Right now, after listening to the qualified “no” side. I think I need to fly modestly. I think modest means I do not have a lifestyle or work that depends on flying (like the Philadelphia Phillies do). What is modest for an American is, of course, immodest compared to many people in the world who have never even thought of flying in an airplane. I will never forget Andres, the Salvadoran refugee I met just over the border in Honduras who had never ridden in a car and could not imagine going to San Salvador, from which I had just come, about 75 miles away.

Yes. You can fly.…But

On the other hand, some people say my individual efforts and my guilt, even my modesty, though noble and necessary, are not what I should be measuring too strictly.  In an ethical discussion there are ofen people who will be frustrated with all the strictures and nitpicking of the other side. I feel for these “Yes” people, too, who are dealing with all us self-centered people who can’t see outside our boxes! Maybe they are like the State Department workers crisscrossing the Middle East to tamp down Israeli and Iranian hotheads and to encourage Saudis and Turks to keep their eyes on the bigger picture.

I tend to be a “yes” person by nature. But I want to pay attention to my carbon footprint — I took the test and I did not fare that well! But I don’t want to put the weight of the world my footprint. The idea behind measuring our individual carbon footprints is to make us aware of our personal contribution to greenhouse gas emissions (and “No” people would say “And to hold us accountable!”). The idea aims to encourage individuals to adopt a  sustainable lifestyle and make environmentally conscious choices. That’s a good thing. But it remains true that the vast majority of global greenhouse gas emissions are not generated by individuals, but by industries and large-scale commercial activities. According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), around 70% of carbon dioxide emissions stem from just 100 companies (!) worldwide. Either they get on board or our individual efforts are silly. Nevertheless, when individuals collectively adopt sustainable practices, it can create a ripple effect, influencing larger entities and prompting policy changes.

The IPCC, itself, has been a very successful big-picture process. It presented at the U.N. Climate Change Conference (COP28) which closed in December with an agreement that signals the “beginning of the end” of the fossil fuel era. In Dubai, no less, negotiators from nearly 200 Parties came together with a decision which agrees to transition away from fossil fuels and reduce global emissions by 43% by 2030

The COP28 action is the kind that makes a real difference. So when one of the editors of Sierra wrote about deciding whether to have children in an age of climate chaos and potential mass extinction last year, some of the readers got in her face for thinking individuals are responsible for addressing the climate crisis.

Responding to the article on Twitter, a professor at Carnegie Mellon University complained,

“The ‘don’t have kids because of climate’ argument is bunk, & absolves the choices of companies & policymakers.” Sandra Steingraber, a prominent anti-fracking activist wrote, “Stop policing women’s fertility. The fossil fuel industry along with the banks and political leaders who keep the fossil fuel party going is the cause of the problem.” Another commenter posted, “This argument only serves the big CO2 producing corps. It’s like they threw a white [tablecloth] party, served nothing but sloppy bbq, and then watched [as] the guests blamed EACH OTHER for dry cleaning bills.”

Even  environmental advocates are dismissing the importance of individual responsibility. In The Daily Beast, Jay Michaelson recently argued,

“Individual behavior change isn’t action—it’s distraction. . . . It shifts the blame from the actual causes of climate change to fake ones, and shifts attention away from meaningful actions to meaningless, psychological ones. . . . The focus on individual behavior makes fighting global warming more controversial while letting the actual entities causing climate change off the hook.”

In June Michael Mann, the climatologist, made a similar argument in USA Today,

“A fixation on voluntary action alone takes the pressure off of the push for governmental policies to hold corporate polluters accountable. …One recent study suggests that the emphasis on smaller personal actions can actually undermine support for the substantive climate policies needed.”

So I would say all that is a qualified “Yes” for little old me to fly to Tahiti. I agree that the powers-that-be love to keep us individually responsible and keep the huge corporations shrouded in mystery — invisible and inaccessible. Even worse, if we protest or try to organize a union in their VW plant, they call us socialists, as if Jesus were not a common-good and common-goods kind of man.

But I also think scorning the importance of my individual lifestyle changes would be an overcorrection. It’s true that taking personal responsibility for climate change is insufficient to address the crisis, but it is also true that individual action is essential to the climate justice equation. Westerners really like their binary arguments, don’t they?

Right now, I think the best response to the arguments is the usual both/and. Ultimately, a  binary argument pitting personal action versus political action is unhelpful. We need to agitate and organize for systemic change and also encourage individual behavior changes. Or, put another way: If you say fixating on personal behavior distracts from the political changes we need, you should also say dismissing the value of personal behaviors detracts from the political movement for climate justice.

So can I go to Tahiti?

If I go, I will be aware that I am probably cashing in most of my personal carbon footprint chips. Perhaps I will buy some carbon credits (but PBS reported last week that is not working so well, either).  Credits or not, I cannot absolve myself with any certitude. Maybe the guilt monitors would feel better about me if I went to Tahiti and at least felt miserable about it — just like I should feel when I eat beef and drive cars (honestly I already cut out most beef and my new car is a hybrid).

I think the best way to feel OK about my extravagant use of fuel (along with the other 200 people in the plane) is to keep the pressure where it belongs. Governments, corporations, and institutions must implement policies that promote renewable energy, invest in sustainable infrastructure, and regulate emissions from major industries. They implemented the policies that let fossil fuels rule society, they need to reverse them.

If I just focus just on my individual carbon footprint the guilt will likely lead to overwhelm. We end up feeling our efforts are futile when that happens. When we feel guilty, we demobilize. If I overestimate my individual impact on the climate crisis I’ll probably get anxious. Such a view of self can lead to climate anxiety, especially among kids. It might be easier to stay anxious and be immobilized. But I think we need to do the harder thing and bravely stand up to the people willing to sacrifice the future for their immediate profits.

What do you think I should do?

FFF #15 — Resilience: The faith factor in climate action

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Posting every Friday at noon is how I act in solidarity with young climate strikers all over the world who want their elders to save their future. 

There is general agreement about what needs to be done to combat climate disruption:

  • Mitigation: reducing emissions.
  • Adaptation: preparing infrastructure to endure the changes.
  • Resilience: deepening the capacity of people to cope with trauma and build a new way of life.

The third response in the list is even weaker than the previous two.

In his book Transformational Resilience, social systems theorist Bob Doppelt says, “No response to the climate crisis will…succeed unless individuals and groups of all types around the globe understand how trauma and toxic stress affects their minds and bodies, and use skills to calm their emotions and thoughts, learn from, and find meaning, direction, and hope in adversity.” The hard scientists and social scientists are doing great work. But people are the problem. If you think their view matches the often-maligned “anthropocentric” worldview of the Bible, I agree with you. The fate of the earth has been given over to humans to steward in collaboration with one another and God. But love rarely rules. So things often die.

Personal resilience

I’m enjoying reading Sarah Jaquette Ray in A Field Guide to Climate Anxiety as she tries to work on the missing link in climate action: the “personal resilience” of people. What she means by “personal” and “resilience” would be interesting to debate. But you probably get the gist of it. It is the same strength, vision and hope you need to call on when you realize you actually matter and you need to do something important with the skills you have in your present context. When you look into 2022 you may not automatically sense a lot of strength, vision and hope. You may be tempted to go with feelings of despair that lead you to withdraw and merely survive.

Some of you Bible readers, however, probably automatically dialed up Romans 5 when you heard “personal resilience;” you could feel the Holy Spirit drawing you to fearlessness when it comes to 2022:

We have gained access by faith into this grace in which we now stand.
And we boast in the hope of the glory of God.
Not only so, but we also glory in our sufferings,
because we know that suffering produces perseverance;
perseverance, character;
and character, hope.
And hope does not put us to shame,
because God’s love has been poured out into our hearts
through the Holy Spirit, who has been given to us.

Sarah Jaquette Ray is a Buddhist evangelist, but I think she can align with Paul’s point of view. (Besides, divvying up the spoils between rival religious/political parties should probably be consigned to “pre-climate change.”) She gives some useful suggestions for building resilience (or faith, if you like) in the face of the blooming catastrophe we face. Here are three of them, in brief.

Don’t measure so much

As good consumer capitalists, we hardly do anything unless we think it is a good deal, from buying a washing machine to making love. So when we look at what we should do in response to the huge work of fighting climate change, we shy away from the effort because we can’t guarantee the outcome. You might not do your part because you can’t see your effort resulting in enough impact to justify the cost. But it has often been said in response to such thinking, “If you expect to see the final results of your work, you simply have not asked a big enough question.”

I admire people who can stick with their big questions and stop “counting beans” to measure whether their good is producing the best and most good. I am more with Paul, who knows his vision is limited but knows he serves in an eternal arena.

We do not lose heart. Though outwardly we are wasting away, yet inwardly we are being renewed day by day. For our light and momentary troubles are achieving for us an eternal glory that far outweighs them all. So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen, since what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal. — 2 Cor 4:16-18

Fixing our eyes on what is unseen is a big enough question, in itself! Thanks to God, the eternal has been planted in history in Jesus and planted in us by the Spirit so we have strength beyond our own to call on when we face our troubles.

Redefine action

Sarah Jaquette Ray is dismayed to see the movement of climate action in bondage to the left-brain. She says, “Many people want to be problem-solvers and to fix things right NOW. They want less feeling less thinking, less talking and more action. But urgency and its sidekick, non-thinking, result in unintended consequences that can undermine our goals.” Resilience needs the right brain, too.

Our sense of inefficacy may have more to do with whether we think we make a difference than with assessing the difference we make. We may have an “instrumentalist’ view that says the only actions that matter are the ones which make immediate, impressive, large-scale change. If we view ourselves more realistically, accepting our limits, we often gain more energy to do what we can. Our problem is rarely that we have no power or influence; it is that we don’t use the power or influence we have because we think it is not enough.

Christianity has unwittingly taught an “instrumentalist” theology for ages. I think the Bible always starts with “You matter” and THEN gets to “So act like that.” But that truth is often turned around so people think, “I’d better do the right, the best, the most things so I can matter as much as I ought to.”

This Bible passage was often misinterpreted in that way when I was coming up

So whether you eat or drink or whatever you do, do it all for the glory of God. Do not cause anyone to stumble, whether Jews, Greeks or the church of God — even as I try to please everyone in every way. For I am not seeking my own good but the good of many, so that they may be saved. – 1 Corinthians 10:31-33

I think Paul is in the middle of a big discourse grounded in “You matter” when he writes those lines. So it follows that he says, “If you do anything, do it to the glory of God and you will be fine. You have nothing to lose. Love everyone, build the common good and anything else will follow — you are brothers and sisters with Jesus no less.” Even though I think that is the core of what he is teaching, I don’t know how many times I have been hit with, “You are making someone stumble” as the takeaway I should get. Don’t do anything that could be wrong! A lot of us never do anything because it might be wrong or not right enough! Doing the good we can with the Spirit we have is enough — and who knows, it might lead to more!

There are starting points in climate action everyone can do. Express dissatisfaction with the status quo. Bear witness to a crisis — don’t turn away;  know about it and speak about it. Help people on the front lines. Give money. Build community. Talk about the good action that is happening  — e.g.: a friend posted a picture of a smokestack near his house belching black smoke the other day on FB. You get the idea. Listening to the voice that tells you “You don’t matter” and doing nothing is the sin, not failing to do something spectacular.

Go slow enough

Urgency and action without mindful deliberation and contemplative depth does not serve the mission of climate action.  Resilience takes time. Sarah Ray quotes the writers of the workbook Dismantling Racism as they teach that a relentless sense of urgency makes “it difficult to take time to be inclusive, encourage democratic and/or thoughtful decision-making, to think long-term, to consider consequences” (p. 29). Likewise with climate action, the urgency of problem solving can run over the human and community development which is crucial to solving the problem.

Dee Dee Risher (a Philly hero) writes in The Soul Making Room about how pausing to turn into gratitude slowed down her action-oriented, anxiety-driven life enough to help rejuvenate her strength.

Gratitude is the great demon-vanquisher. We cannot be grateful and carry emotions of fear anxiety or anger. Our wiring is not capable of it. Moreover, gratitude changes our place in the chain of being. Gratitude by its very nature makes us a recipient. We are not the giver. That weight is off our shoulders. Gifts are bestowed upon us and we recognize them. We do not have to produce or be worthy. Instead, moments come into our unsuspecting and outstretched hands. Our job is simply to unwrap them.

In the cause of slowing down for gratitude, some Bible verses should not be made into songs. Like this one:

But seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be added to you. “Therefore do not be anxious about tomorrow, for tomorrow will be anxious for itself. Sufficient for the day is its own trouble. — Matthew 6:33-4

The old song I linked helped me remember a bit of the truth. But it was so sweet so short! Our seeking is long and slow. Righteousness is incremental. What’s worse, verse one of the song (the one most of us will remember) ends with “all these things will be added to you” when it would do better to lead us to check our anxiety about not getting what we imagine we need or deserve. We need to do the best we can to trust God with the trouble at hand instead of thinking about three years from now.

The good things the people of Earth are doing in 2022 to combat climate change may or may not be enough. We know what needs to be done but people will always be the problem with doing it. Will we build one another’s capacity to cope with the trauma and learn how to build a new way of life? Will we find resilience and trust? I think Jesus followers have profound answers to that question and the means to answer it with faith, hope and love.

FFF #14 – Climate change anxiety

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Posting every Friday at noon is how I act in solidarity with young climate strikers all over the world who want their elders to save their future. The strikers are probably all out of school today, since it is New Year’s Eve, but the problem of climate change is not taking a break.

We all are carrying the weight of anxiety associated with climate change. More and more, our troubled feelings are topics in therapy, in the church and around our tables. In their 2017 document: Mental Health and Our Changing Climate: Impacts, implications and Guidance, three partners summarized the groundbreaking work people have been doing to assess the impact of the warming atmosphere on mental health: the American Psychological Association (APA), Climate for Health, and EcoAmerica. There is trouble, literally, in the air. We can feel how other people and whole communities are changing and adapting. The experts are helping us sort it all out. If you are practicing psychotherapy, church leadership or any institutional oversight, the health and effectiveness of what you do is being impacted by climate change and the associated mental health challenges we all face.

According to the APA doc, mental health is “the ability to process information and make decisions without being disabled by extreme emotional responses.” As you read through the new names experts are suggesting for what ails us, you can decide how disabled you are. You know that all emotions are part of a fulfilling life. But I think you also know that extreme negative feelings can interfere with our ability to think rationally, plan our behavior, and consider alternative actions. It is easy to see that extreme weather events are sources of trauma; the experiences can cause disabling emotions. You may have already endured such an event. Less-noticed are the indirect effects of climate change which add stress to our lives in varying degrees and are cumulative over time. The stressors to our climate translate into impaired mental health which is resulting in alarming amounts of depression and anxiety.

Everyone has ways to cope with stress. But the accumulated effects of relentless stress can tip a person into mental illness. Just the uncertainty of expecting further trauma can create psychological distress on its own. What’s more, we are negatively affected by hearing about the negative experiences of others, and by fears—founded or unfounded—about our own potential vulnerability.

The stress on the climate also produces stress on the bodies living in it. Compromised physical health creates stress that threatens psychological well-being. Conversely, mental health problems can also threaten physical health, for example, by changing patterns of sleep, eating, or exercise and by reducing immune system function.

The stress is not just about individual well-being. Individual mental and physical health affects communities. The changing climate stresses our community fabric and strains interpersonal relationships. It alters our opportunities for social interaction, the ways we relate to each other, and our connections to the natural world.

I hope talking about climate change anxiety makes it a subject we can discuss and examine and not just a menacing “force” we can’t quite identify. The experts have been hard at work helping us put names to what we are experiencing. Here are a few identifiers which have been coined in the past few years that you might find useful. You don’t need to try each of them on to see if it fits. Let the understanding increase your security.  If you recognize a threat, call on God to help you endure it or let it go.

Eco-anxiety

Over the past several years, climate change has moved from an abstract idea to a reality in many of our lives – a reality that has a lot of us increasingly worried. An APA survey in February 2020 found that two-thirds of American adults said that they felt at least a little eco-anxiety [APA podcast], which is defined as worry or concern about climate change and its effects. Some say eco-anxiety is the chronic fear of environmental doom, which will feel appropriately dramatic (and traumatic) to a few readers, no doubt. In the survey, nearly half of those under age 34 said that stress about climate change affects their daily lives.

Ecological grief

Ashlee Cunsolo, one of the contributors of the 2017 APA study noted above, coined the idea of “ecological grief” to describe what Inuit people experienced as they tried to adapt to the most rapidly-warming place on Earth: the Arctic.

We have so much grief associated with the last few years of Covid: loved ones dying, and all the community and traditional experiences we lost! Then we had fires, floods, drought, wild tornados, habitat loss, and the list goes on. Climate change anxiety may be a feeling closer to the surface than ecological grief. People are grieving both the current changes they are experiencing and the future loss that might be coming. The loss and fear can create a constant sense of anxiety. Young people feel a loss of power when they want to “future proof” a choice or relationship; their hope and imagination can be blunted.

Click pic for article by Ray in Sun Chronicle

Climate hostage

Many of these terms are collected in Sarah Jaquette Ray’s book A Field Guide to Climate Anxiety: How to Keep Your Cool on a Warming Planet. She’s an activist and undergrad professor who realized the fact-driven and blame-casting techniques many activists have used in the last 20-30 years have not worked. So she teaches and writes with a more narrative approach full of vision and creativity, not division and damnation.

One of the reasons for her change of direction is most of us feel like we’re hostages to a larger process that is going on in spite of us. The average citizen doesn’t have a lot of power to direct the government or corporations to address climate change. It is important bear witness to this reality, name it, and validate it. It is soothing to validate whatever the problem happens to be in one’s life. It is empowering to elevate it; we lift it up, and say, “This is important.” It is transforming to look at it from different angles and get creative about it, “What are we going to do about this?”

Life is beginning to feel like a prison for many people, an experience we never imagined. It is exhausting. The climate, coupled with the economy, COVID, political polarization is very real anxiety for people. We tend to toggle between grieving, mourning and disorganization and then experiences of growth, new beginnings, and creativity. It is a normal sort of oscillation. So we should not be surprised if climate change anxiety takes us up and down, like we are locked into the roller coaster car. We should look at people charitably to see where they are on the oscillation curve when we are relating. One of my favorite proverbs says:

Like a man who undresses in winter
or a woman who pours vinegar on a wound,
So is anyone who tries to sing happy songs
to a sorrowful heart. (Proverbs 20:20 The Voice)

We can feel or make others feel it is shameful to feel troubled, as if life should be dancing with the stars! It is helpful to check out our own state with some understanding and compassion as well as that of others with the same charity.

Solastalgia

The philosopher Glenn Albrecht in Earth Emotions: New Words for a New World (2019) invented a new word: solastalgia, to describe the experience of being in place in one’s home community, but it no longer looks or feels like home. Solstalgia comes from the Latin word for comfort (solacium) and Greek word for pain (-algia). It names a sense of homesickness without actually leaving home. People experience this when their neighborhoods and churches change around them, of course. But the changing of the whole planet amplifies the sensation. Think of all the native people in the United States and Brazil who have been overrun by the ravages of industrial capitalism. They undoubtedly have felt the profound discomfort of their environment being degraded and changing around them, nevertheless, it is their home.

Anthropocene

The anthropocene is a proposed new geologic age marked by the irreversible ways in which human beings have affected the climate and environment. It has not been approved by the International Geological Conference, yet, but the discussion continues. Some proponents would like to mark the beginning of the age with the Agricultural Revolution 12-15,000 years ago. But more would prefer it to begin with the detonation of the first atomic bomb in 1945.

If you were born between the early 1990’s and 2000’s (the GenZ/iGen marketing label), you are the first to have spent your entire lives within the cultural consciousness and obvious effects of climate change. You are the “climate generation” or the climate change anxiety generation. Stereotypes of this generation include: 1) linking climate change and social justice, 2) feeling  financially insecure and being in debt, 3) being troubled by wealth disparity/the 1%, 4) growing up with  smart phones, social media and internet access to everything, 5) being more stressed, lonely, depressed and suicidal than previous generations, 6) being more aware of and more likely to report trauma, 7) being more ethnically diverse and identity fluid, 8) being less likely to vote or trust any institutions. You are the humans who best represent the anthropocene.

Age of Overwhelm

Laura van Dermoot Lipsky wrote The Age of Overwhlem: Strategies for the Long Haul in 2018 and the description stuck. The following viral YouTube video of an overwhelmed child epitomizes what the age of overwhelm might feel like to children and to your inner child.

Pre-traumatic stress disorder

Lise van Susteren, co-founder of the Climate Psychology Alliance defined the term pre-traumatic stress disorder. The disorder is dread about the future combined with feelings of powerlessness to do anything to shape that future. I contend it is what we are all feeling as the evil fruits of capitalism continue to ripen, unabated. A similar idea is “anticipatory grief” – what you might feel when standing next to a forest about to be logged and you connect that event to all the other desperately-needed forests about to be destroyed. Such feelings of stress, helplessness, fear and fatalism are linked to physical ailments, even a weakened immune system.

Apocalypse fatigue

This aspect of climate change anxiety is the exhaustion of having to make endless moral choices when they don’t seem to make a difference. It is the psychological rebellion against always having to worry about every choice when other people’s lack of concern negates your efforts. Per Espen Stoknes gave a popular Ted Talk on apocalypse fatigue, hoping to help us overcome it.

#BirthStrike

Fearing ecological Armageddon, singer-songwriter Blythe Pepino set up BirthStrike in 2018, an organization based in the UK for men and women refusing to have children because of the climate crisis and bureaucratic inertia over dealing with it. When she spoke to Tucker Carlson she assured him that BirthStrike is different from nihilistic anti-natalism. Rather than trying to convert the masses to childlessness, they are presenting people with a choice. They hope women (and their partners) will channel their mothering skills into activism. Women can soothe the grief of forgoing motherhood with something more active, regenerative, and hopeful for humanity. Pepino teamed up with Meghan Kallman and Josephine Ferorelli of Conceivable Future, a women-led network of Americans who come together to discuss the intersection of climate change and reproductive justice, to put their responses to climate change anxiety into a video.

[Sep 2022 update. Even before I wrote this, BirthStrike had morphed into a support group named “Grieving Parenthood in the Climate Crisis: Channelling Loss into Climate Justice” (see report). Their previous posture was criticized as white privilege.]

Piling up names for our maladies may increase, not decrease climate change anxiety! How did you do? As a Jesus follower I am joined with billions of people in history who knew where to turn in their own “ages of overwhelm.” Hold on to the Lord’s hand as you venture into the unknown threats of our troubling times. You are the beloved of God and God is with you.