Who Gets to Have Ecoanxiety?

In November 2018, as wildfires raged across the state, California governor Jerry Brown held a press conference in which he emphasized that the pattern of catastrophic droughts and fires was not and should not be understood as “the new normal.” It was, instead, “the new abnormal, and this new abnormal will continue, certainly in the next five, ten, twenty years.” Worse, the causes of the fires, “dryness, warmth, drought . . . they’re going to intensify.”

The trajectory that Governor Brown lays out feels familiar to many of us—the sense that climate change is unfolding in ever more dramatic and unpredictable ways, the fear that this may, in fact, be irreversible. Indeed, it may rise to the level of its own particular, perhaps even clinically distinct, strain of anxiety. Per a 2017 report from the American Psychiatric Association: “Gradual, long-term changes in climate can also surface a number of different emotions, including fear, anger, feelings of powerlessness, or exhaustion.” This “fear of extreme weather” can approach “the level of phobia and the ‘unrelenting day-by-day despair’ that can be experienced during a drought,” as can “watching the slow and seemingly irrevocable impacts of climate change unfold, and worrying about the future for oneself, children, and later generations.” The APA terms this condition “ecoanxiety.”

The anxiety produced by climate change, in other words, is not limited to the momentary eruptions of ecological crisis. It is the waiting as we anticipate the storms and fires still to come, the shifts to weather patterns that might fundamentally transform our ways of life. It is the agony of not knowing whether the next cataclysm will be on our doorstep, or whether there might indeed even be a future at all for any of us.

Governor Brown’s adage, one suspects, was intended to emphasize the need for critical attention to climate change, an issue extending well beyond the boundaries of California. The weather patterns that have led to systematic droughts and forest fires year after year are neither normal nor going away; instead, we must attend to them for fear that they will continue. Less intentional, however, was Brown’s emphasis on the newness of these phenomena.

For Brown, as for those at whom he aimed his remarks, the fear, even perhaps the “unrelenting day-to-day despair” of possible systematic and “seemingly irrevocable” changes to the physical conditions of their own existence is being experienced as a new phenomenon. It is something that has never happened before. But not for everyone. Quite the opposite. As Nishnaabeg scholar and artist Leanne Betasamosake Simpson has concisely put it, “Indigenous peoples have witnessed continual ecosystem and species collapse since the early days of colonial occupation.” Simpson’s remark, and the complex and ongoing histories to which she points, should make us think differently about the “newness” of the fears signaled by Governor Brown and the American Psychological Association. So, too, they trouble our ongoing conversations about the “Anthropocene,” this terrifying and ostensibly new era that we have built for ourselves.

Locating the Anthropocene

Opinions differ—quite substantially—on when we might locate the beginning of this “Anthropocene,” a “new geological era . . . in which humans must for the first time be counted as global agents, or drivers of change.” Chemist Paul Jozef Crutzen, one of the term’s most well-known popularizers, suggested that the era began roughly 225 years ago with the advent of the industrial revolution in Western Europe and its concomitant rise of greenhouse gas emissions, mass deforestation, and an ever-expanding range of pollution-generating human activities.

Others move the goal posts for the Anthropocene back much farther—for some, as far as 3000 BCE—or jump forward, marking the era’s beginning as recently as 1945. Likewise, there isn’t consensus on whether the “Anthropocene” is a particularly good name for this current, at least reasonably new era, as scholars and scientists have debated whether the term privileges humanity at the expense of other species, decenters the particular impact of industrial capitalism on climate change, or erases the differential impact of pollution and ecological degradation on marginalized peoples and communities. Anthropological archaeologist Kathleen Morrison has even suggested that the concept of the “Anthropocene” itself is unnecessary, as humans have been altering the earth throughout the Holocene period.

What is interesting to me here, however, is not so much the relative merit of all these different positions in the Anthropocene debate as the very fact of the debate itself. Whenever in fact humans began modifying the earth at a globally significant scale, academic conversations about the concept of the Anthropocene are of a much more contemporary vintage, emerging in the early 2000s and becoming ubiquitous within the last ten years. This coincides rather neatly with the sharp rise in public experience of the sometimes devastating consequences of climate change in places like the continental United States, where the real-life impacts of global environmental shifts are becoming increasingly difficult to dismiss. The new abnormal.

However long it’s been going on, in other words, the Anthropocene has only become a problem for many of us in the last two decades, thus perhaps explaining its explosion as a concept in academic circles and the parallel emergence of ecoanxiety—which, by the way, scholars Paul Robbins and Sarah Moore have argued is particularly noticeable among climate scientists and other specialists whose work involves coming to terms with the earth’s shifting ecoscapes.

The End of the World, circa 1870

It is taken for granted by Governor Brown, by the climate scientists studied by Robbins and Moore, and by the many people now reporting symptoms of ecoanxiety, that this new abnormal we call the Anthropocene is a new problem. But, guided by the insights of Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, let’s jump back in time for a moment. In the second half of the nineteenth century, an apocalypse happened on a series of islands just off the west coast of what we now call Canada.

The established population of these islands, which carry the name Haida Gwaii, was faced with rapid, unforeseen shifts in its ecological lived worlds including the sudden introduction of new species, the destruction of established ones, systematic transformations of the lands and waters, and, without question, conditions of “unrelenting day-by-day despair,” as the APA might put it. In particular, shifts in microbial populations and the introduction of new diseases led to a more than 90 percent reduction in the islands’ population, a decimation in the most literal sense. But most unlike the wildfires in California, just a few hundred miles south of Haida Gwaii, at the time very few North American or European media sources were particularly concerned with the tremendous, near-apocalyptic destruction that was unfolding for the people of Haida Gwaii and for many different communities all along the northwest coast of North America (and elsewhere). Indeed, if any nineteenth-century news sources had noticed these devastating transformations at all, they would simply have considered them the necessary precursor for Euro-Canadian settlement.

Let’s tell the story of ecoanxiety another way, then, with a focus on the history of the Haida Nation, for whom Haida Gwaii is both their ancestral homeland and sovereign territory. Between the nineteenth century and the turn of the twentieth, an estimated Haida population of 20,000 was reduced to 600, as documented in Haida Laas, the journal of the Council of the Haida Nation. Most of this loss came in the 1860s and 1870s, after smallpox was brought from Victoria due largely to the settler expulsion of much of the colonial center’s Indigenous population. The late Florence Edenshaw Davidson, a Haida elder, remembers:

Smallpox came from Victoria. On the way home the people camped overnight, some would get sick and they’d leave the sick ones there. It spread all over the islands. Both of my mother’s parents died in the smallpox epidemic and my grandmother’s parents, too. They were going home to Kiusta from Masset. My mother’s parents were in one canoe, my grandmother’s on the other. There were some other people from Kiusta with them. They stayed overnight at Jalun River and put up cedar-bark tents. They were supposed to leave right away in the morning but they took sick. They all got sick at once.

They were all wiped out, no one was saved from there. My grandmother used to tell me the story of it when I was little.¹

Alongside the decimation of disease came missionaries, colonial administrators, and a settler population ready to establish its own communities and take advantage of Haida Gwaii’s abundant marine life, lumber, and other resources. Each of these arrivals reshaped the physical and social geography of Haida lives. The arriving settler population introduced deer into the islands’ flora and fauna, effected major changes to berry patches and plant resources, took possession of the vast majority of fishing grounds for their own commercial and recreational purposes, and began harvesting ever greater amounts of timber from the islands’ old-growth forests. In tandem, a set of missionary pressures and colonial laws targeting Indigenous cultural practices attempted to further reform the ways in which Haida life was lived, i.e., the notorious ban on “the potlatch,” which combined a host of different Indigenous ceremonial practices, from weddings and coming-of-age celebrations to mortuary feasts, into a single object that could then be acted upon by colonial authorities.

Compare these radical transformations with the definition of ecoanxiety we heard earlier:

a fear [that] approaches . . . the unrelenting day-by-day despair that can be experienced during a drought. Watching the slow and seemingly irrevocable impacts of climate change unfold, and worrying about the future for oneself, children, and later generations, may be an additional source of stress.

Unlike drought or loss of wildlife, the transformative violence brought to Haida Gwaii through settler colonialism renews itself over and over again. There is no question that the ongoing devastation of settler society introduced diseases and ecological transformations, that colonial domination brought stress, fear, and despair, and that these violences unfolded irrevocably and caused Haida to question the possibility of a future for themselves and their children.

The “day-by-day despair” of such dramatic loss and violence, as Florence Edenshaw Davidson so harrowingly reminds us, remains palpable even many years after the initial decimation of disease. This is not only because such historical traumas do not disappear quickly; more significant, even, is the fact that the natural and political transformations that colonial “settlement” instantiated in the Haida world remain present and ongoing. Deer still roam the forests of Haida Gwaii, these forests themselves scarred by a century of large-scale logging projects. Settler commercial and recreational fishing still dominates the waters of Haida Gwaii, the fish likewise contaminated by decades of ecological disasters and problematic settler fish farming practices. Finally, the Canadian government still claims dominion over the lands and waters of Haida Gwaii in the name of the Crown, refusing to recognize Haida sovereign rights to territory or resources except in so far as those can be subsumed within already hard-earned regimes of “co-management.”

All this means that few, if any, Haida have the luxury of being “anxious” about the possibility of ecological transformation. Instead, on Haida Gwaii, the apocalypse came to stay. As I’ve written about in my recent monograph, Shaping the Future on Haida Gwaii: Life Beyond Settler Colonialism, Haida have been working throughout the last century and still today to continue to build different futures for themselves that push back against the idea that they, their culture, or the lands and seas upon which they live will disappear. And they do this work, each and every day.

The Future

Literary scholar James Berger has argued that the most terrifying part of the apocalypse is that we can’t know for sure whether or not it’s really happening until it has already happened. We’re left scanning the present for signs of a future that we fear we can’t avoid, symptoms of a future we fear might already be terminal. In other words, the most terrifying quality of the apocalypse, its deepest anxiety for mainstream settler society, is that it might already have happened and we’re just waiting to catch up. The fearful futures imagined by the ecoanxious, however, are the historical realities of the Haida community and so many other Indigenous peoples.

And this is the point. Pushing against dominant colonial representations of Indigenous peoples as being trapped in the past and requiring colonial intervention to arrive in a civilized, cosmopolitan present, communities like the Haida Nation have been living in the nightmare future of settler society since the devastating advent of colonial incursion. The uncertain future of ecoanxiety hides this terrible, temporal secret. The “new abnormal” isn’t very new at all for most of the communities living on this earth. They’ve been dealing with it for a very long time indeed and, most importantly, they’ve been continuing to build futures in spite of—and in relationship with—rapid, devastating, and unforeseen transformations in their lived social and ecological worlds. Without marginalizing the very real fears that come with climate change, I’d like to suggest that we don’t allow our own anxieties to blind us to the historical and ongoing realities of Indigenous and other marginalized communities. So, too, might we start paying attention to the ways these communities have led the way in coping with the anxious ecological futures that we all share.

Featured image: An aerial view of Haida Gwaii, an archipelago off the northern Pacific coast of Canada. The islands are the center of the Haida Nation. Photo courtesy of the Province of British Columbia, 2013.

Acknowledgments: My first thanks go, as always, to my friends and teachers in Old Massett, with particular gratitude to the Old Massett Village Council, the Council of the Haida Nation, the staff and students of the Chief Matthews School, the Davis family, and to Lisa White, from whom I’ve learned so much about putting the environment first in my thinking. The ethnographic material in this post is derived from my recent monograph, Shaping the Future on Haida Gwaii, and gratitude is owed accordingly to the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research and the Department of Anthropology and the Social Science Division at the University of Chicago for funding that research. Finally, special and loving thanks are reserved for my wife and constant intellectual companion, Hilary Morgan Leathem, for pushing me to think together about time and the environment and for encouraging me to try my hand at more public oriented writing.

Joseph Weiss is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Wesleyan University. His first book, Shaping the Future on Haida Gwaii: Life Beyond Settler Colonialism (UBC Press, 2018), explores how the Indigenous Haida Nation in Western Canada addresses political and social change through a series of different future-oriented cultural strategies. Dr. Weiss’s current research focuses on what it means to live simultaneously with military presence and ecological catastrophe in Indigenous North America. Website. Contact.

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1. Margaret B. Blackman, During My Time: Florence Edenshaw Davidson, A Haida Woman (University of Washington Press, 1992), 63. ↩