Depression

Our Crazy Climate

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May is mental health awareness month, so let’s take a moment to consider how the climate crisis is driving us crazy.

Direct immediate impact

Carbon pollution causes more frequent and severe disasters, diseases and heat related deaths. The mental stress of evacuation and losing a home to a wildfire or flood is severe and far worse when lives are lost. Even small changes in our climate can cause diseases to spread into new zones, which causes fear and again lives. Especially among children, elderly, poor and outdoor workers, heat waves kill. Each life lost cascades into communities, causing depression, grief, guilt, isolation, regret and trauma.

Long term impact

The gradual and cumulative loss of our environment diminishes our quality of life. Our global temperature rise is manmade, ongoing, uncontrolled, and unprecedented since we evolved from apes. The coral reefs I dove in my youth are mostly dead now, and with them much of the abundance, beauty and diversity of marine life is disappearing or gone forever. Billions of humans rely on fish in our diet, now threatened by the climate crisis America chooses to ignore. Snowpack loss takes away both our winter recreation and breaks downstream ecosystems. More drought kills more crops and cattle. Excess heat endangers our forests and restricts our time outdoors.

Most Americans are anxious about our future, especially as our past inaction means that our climate will continue to worsen for the rest of our lives. So far this year, I’ve described how our climate crisis is driving mass migration, worsening public health, flooding cities, and increasingly costing our economy. And I’ve got seven more months to discuss other effects.

Band-aid Solutions

17% of Americans are taking prescription medication for their mental health. That’s roughly equivalent to the population of New England, New Jersey, New York, and Pennsylvania. While treating anxiety and depression with drugs helps individuals, medication doesn’t solve the climate crisis.

The political party currently in charge actively suppresses climate education and science and has withdrawn from international climate commitments and cooperation. Neither confusing the public intentionally, denying the threat, enriching those who contribute to it, nor lying about the self-evident truth does anything to solve the climate crisis.

Real Solutions

Do something. Instead of being confused by misinformation, inaction, or just taking drugs, consciously choose to change your carbon footprint. You can’t save life on earth by yourself, but you can eat more locally grown vegetables, take fewer carbon-burning trips and buy locally produced goods and services. You may not own a media monster, but you can talk about the crazy weather with people you meet. You may not be a billionaire ballroom donor, but you can vote. All you must do is make an effort.

Ultimately, all we have is each other. If we communicate more, have more empathy, and try to understand each other better, then together we are all stronger. Individually, we may not have much, so we must make do with what we have. While one deranged man may believe that he alone can solve our problems, that’s wrong. When most of us understand and want to do something, then we can cooperate and get something really done. We the People have the real power. You should use yours to do good.

Instinctual Balance

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Progress on our big idea! We recognize our shared humanity, admit our troubled thinking, are aware of our instinctual motives, acknowledge a major instinctual mistake, and are taking steps to improve our instinctual thinking. Before moving on, here are a few practical ideas to improve our lives instinctually.

All of us experience good times and bad, but we handle them differently. Our Myers-Briggs personalities vary, focusing inwards or outwards, gathering facts or relying on intuition, using logic or trying to please others, planning or being spontaneous. So some follow the feelings of others in the moment, while others may insulate themselves in structured reality. Knowing our type helps us make the most of our instinctual thinking.

If your support network is helping you flourish and keeping you happy, that’s nice. But if they’re feeding you bad information or guiding you on the wrong path, then you need to recognize and change that. If you are checking off all of your personal objectives, that’s nice. But if you’re ignoring good advice or are unhappy, then you need to recognize and change that.

Balancing is an act that often requires effort. The ancient philosophers and poets preserved their wise advice for us to use today. When times are good, we need to restrain our optimism before our expectations become too unrealistic. When times are bad, we need to combat pessimism to face adversity with the strength we can muster.

Sadness is normal in many circumstances, and rather than medicate it away, we need to recognize the cause and handle it appropriately. Humans evolved the feeling of sadness to aid us in improving our lives, so we there’s a risk to removing it artificially. Sadness is often a signal that we need to process a feeling, learn from a mistake, make a change, forgive or move forward. Feeling sad is often an opportunity for us to apply our instinctual thinking for our own benefit, if we put in the effort.

But when the circumstances do not justify our negativity, we need to recognize and adjust our attitude. When I drive long distances, I sometimes check the elevations to predict mileage per charge. When I’m in a good or bad mood, sometimes I mistakenly feel like I’m driving uphill or downhill, when I’m not. If your emotions cause you to misjudge reality consistently, then you need to figure out why and how best to handle that.

Remember, your instinctual feelings evolved to try to help you. So think about them and harness them to live your best life.

Jacobs House

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Not all of Frank Lloyd Wright’s clients were extremely wealthy. He designed many homes for normal people, including this one in a residential neighborhood in Madison. Faced with a client, Mr Jacobs, who demanded a home for only $5,000, Wright also demonstrated that he could keep to a budget, building this for that price in 1936 during the Great Depression. He called this new style Usonian, which meant American Utopia open to the Democratic masses. The World Heritage committee must have been impressed with the full tour inside, but since it is still being lived in, the home is not open to tours.

Here are my visits to all of Wright’s heritage sites and to all parks in Wisconsin.

Herbert Hoover National Historic Site

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Hoover may have been a Stanford graduate who made his fortune working on foreign mine extraction projects, but he grew up poor in this tiny house in a rural Iowa Quaker village. Note the outhouse in back and his father’s blacksmith shop on the right. His hardworking father died of heart failure and his even harder working mother later died of typhoid and pneumonia. Herbert’s relatives took him and his two siblings in, and he grew up in a school principal uncle’s house in Oregon.

I also visited his Presidential Library & Museum next door, run by the National Archives. They go to great lengths to rehabilitate Hoover’s reputation, since he was widely blamed for the Great Depression. They point to his conservation efforts for example, but neglect to mention that his 5 million acres are not as much as Teddy Roosevelt’s 150 million acres. The museum helped convince me that Hoover was a generous humanitarian who saved many lives in Belgium, Russia and elsewhere by running food aid programs, who was elected with extremely high expectations, and who implemented a variety of positive programs (not just the dam). I genuinely think he was a smart and nice guy.

But, Hoover was an ardent believer in solving social problems with volunteerism and without government intervention. Even though he had warned Coolidge about the dangers of stock speculation, Hoover was all about efficiency, not reform. Hoover had seen massive, desperate social failure all around the world, including being trapped in the foreign enclave during the Boxer Rebellion with his wife (see movie, ’55 Days at Peking’). But he still believed that if government supported business leaders and capitalists, then everything could be solved with goodwill and determination.

He was wrong. FDR crushed him and immediately implemented massive social programs including unemployment payments, government work programs, and Social Security. In retrospect, Hoover should have been able to look at his own family’s struggle with poverty and the tragedies of his parents’ deaths and consider that maybe government intervention would have helped them in their hour of need. Instead, he shared the common views among the ruling elites, that government programs like military protection for foreign business interests in China are good but that government programs like unemployment relief are bad.

Here’s the link to my visits to all parks in Iowa.