Subtitles section Play video Print subtitles If I don't think the future is worth anything then I'm not going to have children. If I think it is worth something, I will have children. We've already seen coastal city flooding, we've already seen forest fires, we've already seen flash floods, we've seen tornadoes. When big ecological disasters happen around the world, I feel a sense of anxiety. I feel a sense of sadness and a sense of loss. So imagine you go outside and you look up in the sky, and there's a comet there. And you know you've just been told by scientists that that comet is racing toward the Earth and it's going to kill everybody and everything in a big fiery storm. And nobody else notices the comet. And you say: "Hey look, there's a comet and it's going to kill all of us." And people just don't seem to care. Climate change anxiety as a term is a relatively new term. By no way a new phenomenon. It's an anxiety that is about the future. And a trauma that we haven't experienced yet, but that we know is going to come our way. We're facing a very existential fear. This is not a fear about "how does my body look" or "am I popular enough". This is a fear about our survival. What is it that makes you anxious? What are the thoughts or what are the details that when you go there, that's when you touch your anxiety. In other parts of the world, they'll be more affected by climate change than the cities that we currently live in. That's when I feel like...we're not doing enough. One of the most sort of potent anxieties, is the fear of people mistreating each other out of panic and fear. And, you know...it's more maybe how people respond to that. I just keep thinking about a small child. Probably myself. And I just think about how innocent my... god, I'm emotional already. That memory I have of being a child, that is so valuable. And I just think about all the people that aren't... that don't have that. That preciousness about the world and I think that's really... That's a privilege that is just disappearing. I get emotional when I think about the effects that climate change and its related issues will have. I get very angry about those, I feel very powerless. I feel very frustrated. I think we need more and more people to wake up to this and anxiety is part of the way of digesting the information, there's no way around that. What is the part that you can play in stretching out and mending the part of the world that is within your reach? In the face of constant defeat, just stubbornness and tenacity. Understand what your impact as a human being is on the planet. I feel so helpless but... but so empowered by that helplessness that I then want to try and do everything and so... We see an unprecedented amount of people who present with anxiety that they can't even locate. And I'm wondering whether this is that people are actually picking up that something is not right. I don't think it's all... I have to believe it's not all bad. Maybe things will be fixed by the time they're an adult, and it will be all good. I feel the most hopeful when I remind myself how bad humans have always been at predicting the future. Thanks for watching! Don't forget to subscribe and click the bell to receive notifications for new videos, see you again soon!
B1 anxiety comet climate change fear climate people Climate change: Do you have eco-anxiety? | BBC Ideas 3491 154 Summer posted on 2020/11/25 More Share Save Report Video vocabulary