Can small acts help us manage climate anxiety?

Jasmine Donahaye wonders if anything we do in the face of climate catastrophe can ever feel meaningful

At the start of the Edinburgh International Book Festival last August, I received an email from the director, giving the festival’s response to a public letter signed by some fifty writers who had objected to the fossil fuel investments of the festival sponsor, Baillie Gifford. The director laid out his intentions – to start a conversation during the two weeks of the festival. ‘Let’s talk,’ he concluded.

Although I had not been approached about signing the letter, I was appearing at the festival, and so was invited to be part of that conversation. But what did I have to say? I agreed with the importance of divesting from fossil fuels – who wouldn’t? – but the signatories called on ‘all writers’ to boycott next year’s festival if the organisers didn’t secure alternative sponsorship, or persuade Baillie Gifford to divest. However, I wasn’t going to be in a position to boycott next year’s festival: it’s unusual for a writer to be invited to a major literature festival two years in a row. For me to agree with the signatories would therefore be meaningless. The only impact the gesture would have would be on me – a genuine case of empty virtue signalling. 

Jasmine Donahaye

But to me none of the gestures we are called on to make in the face of the catastrophic future feel meaningful. We are asked to take personal responsibility for a disaster we can’t prevent, whether we do so publicly by contributing to collective pressure for change, or privately by making those little changes that cumulatively, if we all did them, might lessen the catastrophe. Yet because the scale of the problem is so incalculable and beyond our power to address that to be morally required to act, and to feel at the same time that the act is meaningless, is what turns my climate-change and species-extinction anxiety into a kind of paralysis. Many people are also not in a position to do what we are repeatedly enjoined to do, which adds to the anxiety. Age, class, income, disability, housing, rural location: all these affect how you can act as an individual, and yet the anxiety triggered by being asked to take responsibility for worsening conditions does not discriminate. 

Anxiety tends to operate on anticipation of a worst case, and it is paralysing, because you can’t prepare for a worst case. News about the climate crisis and species extinction – how you ‘consume’ it, or are consumed by it – clamps on hard to these worst-case anxiety projections. Nothing that you do will really change that worst-case outcome; nothing you can do will really make any difference. But doing nothing does not assuage anxiety either – and so each new call to action, each bad news story, can deepen the sense of paralysis into panic. 

That panic and paralysis is, of course, politically useful, and it leads to a far worse outcome than continuing to drive instead of taking the bus to work. At one end of the scale, a worried population can be damagingly manipulated. But at the other, believing you can’t make a difference can also result in political disengagement, in not voting at all – a democratic paralysis. The evidence of a widespread increase in clinical anxiety, particularly among younger people, is therefore not solely a public health care crisis or an economic productivity problem: it is also a problem of democracy. 

I went through a period of acute anxiety following a serious illness in 2021. What enabled me to recover was the ‘supported self-help’ resources from Mind Cymru. These resources laid out a strategy for changing my relationship to anxiety itself – focusing on small elements even though the enormity of the ‘worst case’ fear remained. Over time, with this focus, the larger set of fears faded into a background echo, a kind of habitual thinking rather than a way of being.

The Baillie Gifford sponsorship protest has made me wonder whether the same strategy might usefully apply to managing climate crisis anxiety, and resisting its political misuse. I wonder whether small acts, despite the enormity of what we can’t affect, is precisely what can count, because it keeps us engaged, and therefore not subject either to political decisions made without our input, or damaging political manipulations. 

Or, to put it another way: I wonder whether dealing effectively with environmental crisis anxiety might entail recognising and accepting the uselessness of small acts, and at the same time recognising the necessity of making them. 

The small act of that authors’ letter did, in fact, start an important conversation – public and private, formal and informal, and not just at the festival and in the media, but much more widely, too, because the question of Baillie Gifford sponsorship doesn’t solely pertain to the Edinburgh International Book Festival. Baillie Gifford also sponsors the other two biggest literature festivals in the UK: the Hay Festival in Wales, and the Cheltenham Festival in England, as well as the high-profile non-fiction Baillie Gifford Prize, and a range of other cultural, science and social projects. Nor does this question pertain solely to Baillie Gifford. The issue (if not the text of the protest letter) demands much bigger questions be asked about arts sponsorship, and the problems inherent in corporate support for cultural production. As Vicky Allen pointed out in the Herald, ‘the cultural landscape of recent years lies littered with the crumpled logos of past shamed sponsors.’ It’s something that festival organisers, arts councils and other institutions are now having to grapple with in new ways. 

But I wonder whether in conjunction with that assessment we could also reflect more on the political misuse of climate anxiety, and how to counteract it. I wonder whether we might develop strategies akin to clinical anxiety management strategies to help us move from feeling paralysed in the path of the juggernaut to feeling empowered to take action – to embrace the personal and political necessity of small acts, even if we know they won’t change the course of that juggernaut. 

Jasmine Donahaye’s latest book is Birdsplaining: A Natural History.