In her Botany 101 class, Robin Wall Kimmerer—a scientist, SUNY distinguished professor, and the author of the NYT bestseller Braiding Sweetgrass—asked her students if they love the Earth. After a resounding ‘yes’ she then asked them: do you think that the Earth loves you back? This time around, the students were uncertain. The question seemed kind of unscientific, emotional, but on the other end of the emotions spectrum, where we do not usually venture to talk about environmentalism or climate action. So much of what we think about when it comes to climate change and climate action is finger-wagging, gloom-and-doom, and shame. 

In discussions about climate change, we often talk about systemic causation, i.e. connections that might, on the first glance, appear to be disconnected, like the link between severe blizzards and global warming, for example. Because climate change is a systemic issue that involves a myriad of aspects and layers of interconnected problems, we tend to easily get lost in this jungle of issues, ending up confused, or worse—indifferent and disheartened. What Kimmerer does in her book is make the problem of systemic causation more palpable by reminding us of what we already know, but somehow tend to forget: that within an ecosystem, everything is connected. The transformative power of climate action therefore lies in recognizing this reciprocal relationship with our environment and understanding our inseparability from it. 

However, when doom-and-gloom take over, we become distressed. As a result, according to the Reuters Institute’s Digital News Report 2023, we start to selectively avoid specific news that are repeated excessively or are felt to be ‘emotionally draining.’ Allianz Research’s newly published second edition of the Climate Literacy Survey  confirms this: the omnipresence of certain topics leads to detachment and ignorance.