I have tried to keep my eco-anxiety at bay, to box it into my working life. But every month this becomes more difficult. The rising sense of panic I feel is entirely rational; we should all be feeling it. But we can't live with it through every hour of every day.
Interpretation
Eco-anxiety is a natural response to environmental crises, but it's important to manage it.
In this quote, George Monbiot expresses his struggle with eco-anxiety, highlighting the tension between acknowledging the urgency of environmental issues and the need to maintain a semblance of normalcy in daily life. He articulates a common emotional response to the reality of climate change and ecological destruction, emphasizing that while feeling anxious about the state of the planet is rational, it is unsustainable to let that anxiety dominate our lives continuously.
In practice
This quote can be shared at environmental rallies to acknowledge the emotional burden of climate change.
The notions that nature exists to serve us; that its value consists of the instrumental benefits we can extract; that this value can be measured in cash terms; and that what can't be measured does not matter, have proved lethal to the rest of life on Earth.
I believe that anyone who wants to stand in a national election should receive a course of psychotherapy. Completing the course should be a qualification for office. This wouldn't change the behaviour of psychopaths, but it might prevent some people who exercise power from imposing their own deep wounds on others.
I became an environmentalist because I love the living world, but I spend much of my life thinking about electricity, industrial processes and civil engineering.
Places that have become agricultural deserts, trashed by giant corporations, could be reforested, drawing carbon dioxide from the air on a vast scale. The ecosystems of land and sea could recover, not just in pockets but across great tracts of the planet.
Never underestimate the power of intrinsic values. They inspire every struggle for a better world.
Why is it so easy to save the banks - but so hard to save the biosphere?
The lime trees were in bloom. But in the early morning only a faint fragrance drifted through the garden, an airy message, an aromatic echo of the dreams during the short summer night.
Not wholly in the busy world, nor quite_x000D_ _x000D_ Beyond it, blooms the garden that I love._x000D_ _x000D_ News from the humming city comes to it_x000D_ _x000D_ It sound of funeral or of marriage bells.
We are star stuff harvesting sunlight.
Four hundred year old trees, who draw aliveness from the earth like smoke from the heart of God, we come, not knowing you will hush our little want to be big; we come, not knowing that all the work is so much busyness of mind; all the worry, so much busyness of heart. As the sun warms anything near, being warms everything still and the great still things that outlast us make us crack like leaves of laurel releasing a fragrance that has always been.
The first law of ecology is that everything is related to everything else.
The soil of their native land is dear to all the hearts of mankind.
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