As if I needed more evidence of the pathological levels of cognitive and moral dissonance under which I regularly operate, my month began with the news of New York engulfed by the ash clouds that marked the demise of Canada’s forestscapes – an item my brain put, urgency-wise, somewhat below my kid’s afterschool club getting cancelled that day. And therein lies the problem with the climate emergency. Today, people are dying and entire ecosystems are burning, but today I also forgot to buy milk. That milk will no longer be available to us when our cow-addicted lifestyles lead ineluctably to the end of cows’ habitats doesn’t even register.
Why do those of us with climate-change information fail to act on it?
Filmmaking pain
The irony for me is redoubled because I just spent three years making a movie, My Extinction, charting things around this motif: why those of us who have all the climate-change information regularly fail to act on it, beyond a little handwringing and the consideration of slightly more advanced recycling practices. What is wrong with my head? Why can’t someone with time, resources and education at his disposal actually do something? It’s kind of a big one, because if a bunch of us could even slightly get over our massive getting-through-my-day bias, it might rescue the planet. Although a shrink may tell us that, deep down, whatever we attest, we don’t really want the world saved because we secretly resent and envy the young people coming up to replace us. Actually a shrink did tell me that – the wonderful Anouchka Grose – and I put that in the film. She also made clear how changing oneself is really hard: we need to keep being reminded, but also we can’t really do it on our own. It isn’t so much a problem of mind, but of the much bigger bit of us that is un-minded: our feelings, which are in our bodies, and only change when we put our bodies in different sets of relations to other people. If cognition were all it took, we’d all be climate warriors by now. That’s what I learned making this film, and I’m still learning it this month because it’s the month of taking it out there, which, ugh, means: convincing people to write about the film, show up to screenings, bring along their dads / spouses / pals, and so on. (None of this sounds fun, so what I did was put a lot of jokes in the movie to try to counterbalance it. Please come.)
Back pain
Doing all this, I was coming out of a long jag of spinal agony that left me stuck in bed for five months. It’s a chronic issue and it flared up particularly cripplingly – partly because current medical approaches to chronic conditions are bullshit, but mostly because, well, at some level, the culture is killing us. To me, my pain and the climate emergency are related: if you’re falling apart (and who isn’t?) because of the pressures of your life, job, relationships and unachievable aspirations in an unforgiving and brutally scary world offering such terrors as, y’know, the actual apocalypse – are you surprised?
The cure I discovered, and which I want to share with everyone, came in the form of a new system for neural pathway reprocessing, which actually just means feeling your painful feelings instead of suppressing or denying them. A certain level of functional denial is, of course, necessary and what your brain does for you. But pushing aside painful things, not least the painful knowledge of how badly the world, including its climate, is going, is proving a little counterproductive. Alan Gordon’s audiobook The Way Out saved my actual backside; but without meaning to be, it’s also a puzzle-piece toward how to create society-saving change. Feeling your feelings won’t change our politics directly, but it’s a necessary step – or it was for me. So, if you can’t do it alone, where can you do it? In the film, there’s a lot of me gingerly dipping a toe in and meeting groups of people already doing climate action, who turned out to be normal, nice and just a bit better at sharing their feelings than I was. And in that community of feeling, something shifts. Sharing opens a space for change, including action. And then you have a gang to actually implement it.
Ukraine pain
For the film, I did a podcast for Byline Times with the heroic Peter Pomerantsev, who has been travelling frequently to his ancestral Ukraine, where he’s engendered a number of incredible projects, from documenting war atrocities to creating counter-propaganda movements. Peter told me how Putin’s war is at some level a move to extend his petro-dictatorship by re-addicting Europe to the oil he depends on for revenue, turning us away from renewables in the name of “energy security” – a move which, based on current UK government policy to renege on commitments and greenlight new fossil fuel projects that won’t produce energy for a decade, seems to be working a bit too well. It turns out resisting Putin is also resisting global climate destruction – in case you needed another reason.
See how this works? Talking to people in physical spaces actually matters. Yes, you’ll remain cognitively dissonant. Yet because it’s the showing up that counts, cognition isn’t even the important bit. I still forgot to buy the milk. But that’s something my kids will survive.
Josh Appignanesi is a British film director, producer and screenwriter. His latest film “My Extinction” is currently screening across UK cinemas. dartmouthfilms.com/myextinction
