The grief and stress associated with climate change are now becoming societal concerns.
Prof. Michele Koppes recently spoke to Inverse about how this personally impacts her as a climate change researcher, and what we might do about it in the future.
“I feel like I’ve gone through the four stages of grief. There’s anger, there’s resignation, and now, I’m in this new phase of saying, “Okay, but how do we move forward?” Accepting change can be difficult based on your personality, and the media does science a disservice if it only focuses on the fear factor of climate change.
There are other ways to evaluate what’s going on and make a decision to embrace large systematic changes that will alter the way we work and how we live our lives. We need to erase some of the ways we’ve lived our lives.”
We need, she says, to appreciate more than the physical impacts of climate change.
“The next big change that has to happen in the climate change debate is thinking about how it affects our psychological health. How do we process steady trauma like climate change versus dramatic trauma?”
Read her thoughts in full at Inverse.
