Doomy (def. the feeling that destruction, or some other terrible situation, are unavoidable). There are many reasons to feel doomy these days – the virus spreading death around our planet being just one. For instance, if you like a yearly jaunt to Europe for a ski holiday, you may be more than a little piste-off at this week’s news that climate-change induced lack of snow on the slopes has caused a French resort to close. It’s also possible to get properly doomy over the humanitarian disaster that is Idlib, or the fact that glow worms, magical things that they are, have declined by 75 percent in England. Headlines that shout that NASA is tracking an asteroid that is heading towards earth next month, can set our personal doomsday clocks ticking, until we read that actually it's just coming close. No hit.
Worst of all is the news this week – a small headline bobbing up among the steady flow of virus bulletins – that the tropical rainforest is losing its ability to absorb carbon, faster than expected, as a result of logging, farming interests and the impacts of the climate crisis. “This is decades ahead of even the most pessimistic climate models,” author Simon Lewis, a professor at Leeds University, said.
Doominess is one of those emotions I consider best faced head on. One way of doing this is to plunge right into the dark cloud of environmental anxiety and look at the worst-case scenarios and theories – read, for instance, the infamous Deep Adaptation paper by Jem Bendell – and then look for something slightly more uplifting, like Christiana Figueres' The Future We Choose. That way you feel at least you’ve taken a proper look. The things we know we’re not confronting are often the scariest.
Or, if your doominess is more diffuse, there’s always the doom-fest of a podcast, The End Of The World by Josh Clark. I particularly like the episode where he looks at the possibility that the evaporation of a microscopic black hole inside the Large Hadron Collider might cause a low energy vacuum bubble which would lead onto a transformation in the Higgs field that would lead to the almost instantaneous collapse of the universe. Make it to the end of the show, and you will, if you’re anything like me, simply marvel at the fact that you are still alive and that the universe hasn't evaporated while you were sitting there listening.
Laughter is also a good antidote to doom. Podcasts like comedian Matt Winning’s Operation Earth can useful, but there’s also something about the occasional eruption of disaster scenarios in more regular comic radio shows like last week’s Mark Watson Talks A Bit About Life, that is effective in popping a doom-balloon. I particularly enjoyed his guest Lou Saunders's gag: “We can all do our bit to help. Wear more hats. Sharing baths with friends. I texted about ten friends to see if they wanted to have a bath with me… Yup, all up for it.”
Better still, though, is to actually do something - like gluing yourself to a road, inventing a green solution, growing some tatties, joining a protest against racism, or walking to work, whilst marvelling at the sky and trees. For, the real darkness that drives doominess is the sense that what you fear is inevitable, and unstoppable. Whatever you do, it will keep coming.
With almost everything, including climate change, however, there are things we can do – even if we accept it’s possible David Attenborough's was right when he said climate change is irreversible and the best we can hope is to "slow it down considerably”. Doing something just to put off doom’s arrival is better than nothing.
The opposite of doominess isn’t optimism. It’s acknowledging that even our small actions count and then actually doing something.
Sistered up (def. showing solidarity with the global sisterhood, whatever your gender) Today, International Women’s Day, is about many things – equality mainly – but the best feeling around it is the one of getting all sistered up. We all have our own ways of doing it. Mine’s going to be to run into the sea with about a hundred other wild swimmers as a fundraiser for women’s charities. There may be some people who are wondering whether, a century after women got the vote in the UK, this whole sistering up, is still necessary. They’ve obviously not been checking the news. A recent report found that around 90% of people, globally, are biased against women. Keep sistering up.
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