It's time to talk about Eco-anxiety.

No, really.

Imagine the world if you will, as a hunter-gatherer say 10,000 years ago. It’s been slim pickings and hunting without a kill is simply a walk. You’re sitting down, following a hard day of unsuccessful hunting and gathering and besides a few seeds on the floor and a mammoth bone outside the door, you’ve got nothing to eat. It’s a tough life. There’s no shops or water taps or fridges, there’s no convenience and there’s no best before guarantee. You’ve heard of tribes catching food from the great lakes, but it all sounds a bit fishy.     

How about 60 years ago, when pubs closed at 3pm and Sundays were respected – for church and family (and maybe a pint before being kicked out at 2:30). Cars were polished and glass bottles rinsed for return and kitchen foil carefully folded for reuse. In the countryside more than half the homes had an outdoor toilet and many had no meaningful central heating. Crisps and the Toffee Crisp were recently invented, and a Hoover in window displays would be awed at; shops that closed on Wednesday afternoons and refused to sell anything from 5pm on Saturday until Monday morning. The UK was limping out of a world war with the new threat of nuclear annihilation hanging over its heads. Most families had lost a loved one in the two wars that defined the 20th century. This isn’t aimless sepia nostalgia for empty fridges and houses advertised with coal bunkers by estate agents, but illustrating how uncertain life was only a generation ago.

These days there’s missing Amazon parcels, poor wifi and panic-driven toilet roll shopping and of course the ‘climate crisis’. Admittedly street stabbings, lockdown-caused recession, Net Zero informing an increased cost of living, permanent low-cloud cover and the Union Jack defaced by sports manufacturers adds some spice, but do we have as much to worry about today?

Well, panting from running up the stairs, the Natural History Museum has arrived. Taking a break from addressing institutional racism via overpriced dinosaur pencil sharpeners made in China (or something), it declares that eco-anxiety is a rational response to the current state of our world. What they really mean is that anxiety is a rational response to how the world is being reported. If it bleeds, it leads has long been newspapers’ motto and nothing has changed. There’s even books on the subject, as sociology writers pounce upon social manias like carrion birds. Ben Cooke in reviewing The Weight of Nature by Clayton Page Aldern says how he reads about climate change and climate disasters every day, without any reflection upon the fact that fatalities from natural disasters (notice the importance of switching ‘climate’ with ‘natural’) have been in steady decline over the past 100 years.

In a no way hysteria-led piece of research, Scientists now say that even a pair of jeans could be bad for the environment. Funny how they’re not accusing lab coats, or even pointless face masks, of the same thing. Apparently, wearing a pair of jeans just once creates 2.5kg of CO2, the equivalent of driving a petrol car 6.4 miles; it’s unclear how much co2 they produce if you fall asleep in them and wear them the following day. This is going to come as particularly heart-crushing news to the eco-hysterics in denim dungarees. Presumably we can look forward to a chart of the worst performing Co2 emitting clothes, with swimming snorkels at the immovable no1 position.

It’s little wonder that eco-anxiety involves ‘feeling grief, guilt, fear or hopelessness about the future of the planet due to climate change’ if experts are competing for the bigger horror story. In fact, over the past 50 years no climate scientist has accurately predicted the current climate. Not that this has stopped people like Sacha Wright, a Research and Curriculum coordinator (whatever that is) at Force of Nature, who hope to empower people to turn their climate anxiety into action, presumably by discouraging them from wearing jeans, or indeed ever leaving the house.

Sacha says, it’s important to ‘vaccinate yourself against emotional attachment' to environmentalism. One hopes Pfizer aren’t already working on this. Of all the people who should be kept away from the Guardian newspaper it’s probably her, but she came across the phenomenon of eco-anxiety in a Guardian article, and now advises that it's important to surround yourself with a community you can share your feelings with. It’s hard to see how friends with blue hair glued to roads might benefit anyone but I guess it keeps them out of the workplace.

At the most basic level why do people think that the ‘experts’ have got it right this time? What is it about ‘catatrasophe of the month’ that seemingly treads with the familiar menace of a predator outside the cave? They were predicting on Earth Day 1970 that: “civilization will end within 15 or 30 years [by 1985 or 2000] unless immediate action is taken against problems facing mankind.” (Harvard biologist George Wald). Or Kenneth Watt warning that the world has been chilling sharply for about twenty years, with a pending Ice Age by 1990.

There is nothing more rudimentary in science than modelling, so let’s not forget Al Gore declaring in 2006 that “Within the decade there will be no more snows of Kilimanjaro.” As James Lovelock (scientist, environmentalist and developer of Gaia theory) said, ‘anyone who tries to predict more than five to ten years is a bit of an idiot.’ Those suffering from eco-anxiety are allowing the village hysterics, or Asterix, to claim the sky will fall on their heads.

Even yesterday, Simon Stiell, executive secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (try telling that to someone who enquires what you do for a living in a noisy nightclub) in a speech at Chatham House yesterday, who granted us two extra years to save the planet.

The only inconvenient truth is how wildly wrong the predictions were. Gore was still at it in Davos in 2023, when before nurses could wrestle him to the ground, he started talking about ‘rain bombs’, ‘atmospheric rivers’ and ‘boiling oceans’. Most startlingly no one laughed. How does he continue to rant predictions with the accuracy of a penguin playing golf without any pushback? It would appear that climate experts don’t answer to yearly performance appraisals that us mere mortals need to; if Gore was an architect he’d be still be practising, despite an avenue of collapsed extensions, flooded underground cinemas and unsafe sky-decks stretching behind him like a disaster movie. It would appear that the experts are in competition with one another for headlines - rising sea levels aren’t enough, the water now has to be at temperatures you could make tea with.

However, alarmingly for the Net Zero cult, it would appear that rising sea levels are not flooding even low lying countries like the Maldives. In fact there’s been a net expansion seaward of island coasts. To address this, activists might resort to driving 6.4 miles on a daily basis, while wearing jeans, to drive up co2 levels they believe might help preserve their cause.

What a relief it might be to these people to discover that CO₂ emissions actually peaked in the 1950s, and that it is actually good for the greening and crop yields of the planet, but they’re likely to be too attached to their eco-anxiety to let go. Eco-anxiety is another shortcut to victimhood for those unfamiliar with real hardship, where those stricken with guilt for reaping the benefits of their ancestors’ graft, can find meaning to their lives. As Salomé Sibonex on her Black Sheep substack wrote 'Only in a world of privilege can victimhood acquire a desirable status.' Farmers have spent their entire history worried about weather; if you want real eco-anxiety then take up agriculture. Although if there’s one thing more worrying than the weather it’s the bureaucracy foisted upon farmers by supranational organisations like the UN and the EU.

You want to cure Eco-anxiety? Turn off the news. However, no one is talking about the anxiety of Net Zero leaving UK paying 5x more than China for electricity, or overreaching global governments and supranationals intent upon criminalising thoughts and facts challenging their narrative as ‘disinformation’, hate legislation that intends to police internal states of mind and collectivist interventions such as Net Zero and the dogged pursuit of digital ID and currencies.