If You Think It's Bad Now...A Historical Perspective on Eco-Anxiety

Inevitable future catastrophe - or lesson of hope from the past?

Environmentalism today is very pessimistic. There’s a constant sense of crisis, that if we don’t do (fill in the blank, usually involving something global out of the control of the average person) immediately, it will be too late and we will destroy the planet and everybody will die. According to a recent article in The Commons, the Nelson Institute alumni newsletter, this pessimism even has a name: “eco-anxiety,” defined as “a state of chronic fear of environmental doom.” According to an article in Nature published last spring, about half of young people worldwide suffer from eco-anxiety and climate despair, believing that catastrophe is inevitable.

This is tragic. It shows that the fear appeals about climate change and other environmental problems have gone too far. When a fear appeal leads to despair and hopelessness, it’s not helping anything—including the environment. Of course I’m not denying that there are serious environmental issues, but convincing young people that they have no future is not helpful. It just leads to fatalism, depression, and inaction. We need to be more optimistic.

Consider this scenario: The rich, ecologically diverse forest of northern Michigan—an area encompassing millions of acres—is totally destroyed. Unregulated capitalist logging companies swoop in, cut down every single marketable pine tree, leave the slash behind, jam up rivers with logs, and then abandon the stump-filled wasteland. A period of extremely hot and dry weather strikes and a severe windstorm sweeps through the state. A horrendous, unstoppable wildfire burns down practically every building from Lake Michigan to Lake Huron, kills hundreds of people, destroys the entire city of Chicago, and sterilizes the soil.

The great Chicago fire might have been started by Mrs. O'Leary's cow, but it was made much worse by extreme weather events.

If that’s not an eco-catastrophe, I don’t know what is. It’s on par with any of the worst-case climate change scenarios. But this isn’t a prediction of something that might happen in the future. It’s something that already happened—back in 1871. The hopeful part of this story is that northern Michigan is not a charred wasteland today—it’s now both a vacation destination and an active lumber-producing area. And it didn’t get that way from people sitting down in despair thinking it was too late to save the land.

In the 1870s the Au Sable River was choked with logs and flanked with denuded hills. Now it's a boating, fishing, and hiking destination in the Huron National Forest.

Michigan’s forests were restored through a combination of natural healing and human intervention. In the 1930s, the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) planted millions of red and jack pines in the devastated area. Many of them still stand today, and while the endless rows of monoculture pines sometimes lend a gloomy look to the forest, at least it is a forest again. These 90-year-old pines are mature enough to harvest, and this time the logging prioritizes reforestation and sustained yield management. Other areas are managed more naturally, like the Hoist Lakes Foot Travel Area. Sitting under mature second-growth hardwoods and pines on the shores of these beautiful lakes, it’s hard to believe that the area was a raging inferno 150 years ago. Life is stronger than death. Nature can heal, and we can help it.

The Hoist Lakes Foot Travel Area in the Huron National Forest is managed as "old growth," but every tree there has grown since the 1871 fires.

Northern Michigan will never look exactly the same as it did in the early nineteenth century. The stands of 300-year-old white pines singing in the wind are gone. But there are still forests. They are still green, and they are still full of birds and animals and understory plants. There has been change, for sure—some of it bad, some of it good. But change is not the end of nature. The earth can adapt, and so can we. And that’s why visiting places like the Huron National Forest—and understanding its history—gives me hope.

I've never seen as many great blue herons in one day as I did while kayaking the Au Sable River.