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The system in crisis is not always “society”; the system can also be the body. Historically, in the United States, more than two-thirds of outbreaks of waterborne disease—illnesses smuggled into humans through algae and bacteria that can produce gastrointestinal problems—were preceded by unusually intense rainfall, disrupting local water supplies. The concentration of salmonella in streams, for instance, increases significantly after heavy rainfall, and the country’s most dramatic outbreak of waterborne disease came in 1993, when more than 400,000 in Milwaukee fell ill from cryptosporidium immediately after a storm.
Sudden rainfall shocks—both deluges and their opposite, droughts—can devastate agricultural communities economically, but also produce what scientists call, with understatement, “nutritional deficiencies” in fetuses and infants; in Vietnam, those who passed through that crucible early on, and survived, were shown to start school later in life, do worse when they got there, and grow less tall than their peers. In India, the same cycle-of-poverty pattern holds. The lifelong impacts of chronic malnutrition are more troubling still for being permanent: diminishing cognitive ability, flattened adult wages, increased morbidity. In Ecuador, climate damage has been seen even in middle-class children, who bear the mark of rainfall shocks and extreme temperatures on their wages twenty to sixty years after the fact. The effects begin in the womb, and they are universal, with measurable declines in lifetime earnings for every day over ninety degrees during a baby’s nine months in utero. The impacts accumulate later in life, too. An enormous study in Taiwan found that, for every single unit of additional air pollution, the relative risk of Alzheimer’s doubled. Similar patterns have been observed from Ontario to Mexico City.
As conditions of environmental degradation become more universal, it may, perversely, require more imagination to consider their costs. When the deprived are no longer outlier communities but instead whole regions, whole countries, conditions that once may have seemed inhumane now appear, to a future generation who knows no better, simply “normal.” In the past, we have looked in horror at the stunted growth of national populations who passed through famines both natural (Sudan, Somalia) and man-made (Yemen, North Korea). In the future, climate change may stunt us all, in one way or another, with no control group entirely spared.
You might expect these premonitions to settle like sediments into family planning. And indeed, among the young and well-off in Europe and the United States, for whom reproductive choices are often freighted with political meaning, they have. Among this outwardly conscientious cohort, there is much worry about bringing new children into a degraded world, full of suffering, and about “contributing” to the problem by crowding the climate stage with more players, each a little consumption machine. “Want to fight climate change?” The Guardian asked in 2017. “Have fewer children.” That year and the next, the paper published several variations on the theme, as did many other publications delivered to the lifestyle class, including The New York Times: “Add this to the list of decisions affected by climate change: Should I have children?”
The effect on the personal decisions of the consumer class is perhaps a narrow way of thinking about global warming, though it demonstrates a strain of strange ascetic pride among the well-to-do. (“The egoism of child-bearing is like the egoism of colonizing a country,” the novelist Sheila Heti writes, in a representative passage from Motherhood, her meditation on the meaning of parenthood, which she chose to avoid.) But of course further degradation isn’t inescapable; it is optional. Each new baby arrives in a brand-new world, contemplating a whole horizon of possibilities. The perspective is not naive. We live in that world with them—helping make it for them, and with them, and for ourselves. The next decades are not yet determined. A new timer begins with every birth, measuring how much more damage will be done to the planet and the life this child will live on it. The horizons are just as open to us, however foreclosed and foreordained they may seem. But we close them off when we say anything about the future being inevitable. What may sound like stoic wisdom is often an alibi for indifference.
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In a world of suffering, the self-interested mind craves compartmentalization, and one of the most interesting frontiers of emerging climate science traces the imprint left on our psychological well-being by the force of global warming, which can overwhelm whatever methods we devise to cope—that is, the mental health effects of a world on fire. Perhaps the most predictable vector is trauma: between a quarter and a half of all those exposed to extreme weather events will experience them as an ongoing negative shock to their mental health. In England, flooding was found to quadruple levels of psychological distress, even among those in an inundated community but not personally affected by the flooding. In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, 62 percent of evacuees exceeded the diagnostic threshold for acute stress disorder; in the region as a whole, nearly a third had PTSD. Wildfires, curiously, yielded a lower incidence—just 24 percent of evacuees in the aftermath of one series of California blazes. But a third of those who lived through fire were diagnosed, in its aftermath, with depression.
Even those watching the effects from the sidelines suffer from climate trauma. “I don’t know of a single scientist that’s not having an emotional reaction to what is being lost,” Camille Parmesan, who shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize with Al Gore, has said. Grist has called the phenomenon “climate depression,” Scientific American “environmental grief.” And while it may seem intuitive that those contemplating the end of the world find themselves despairing, especially when their calls of alarm have gone almost entirely unheeded, it is also a harrowing forecast of what is in store for the rest of the world, as the devastation of climate change slowly reveals itself. In the sense of psychological distress, which so many of them endure, climate scientists are the canaries in our coal mine. This may be why so many of them seem concerned with the risks of crying wolf about warming: they’ve learned enough about public apathy to worry themselves into knots about just when, and precisely how, to raise the alarm.
In certain places, that alarm has been raised for them. Those studying the phenomenon are only suffering secondhand—which is a sign of just how intense the firsthand impact has been. Unsurprisingly, climate trauma is especially harsh in the young—in this, our folk wisdom about the impressionable minds of children is reliable. Thirty-two weeks after Hurricane Andrew hit Florida in 1992, killing forty, more than half of children surveyed had moderate PTSD and more than a third had a severe form; in the high-impact areas, 70 percent of children scored in the moderate-to-severe range fully twenty-one months after the Category 5 storm. By dismal contrast, soldiers returning from war are estimated to suffer from PTSD at a rate between 11 and 31 percent.
One especially detailed study examined the mental health fallout from Hurricane Mitch, a Category 5 storm and the second-deadliest Atlantic hurricane on record, which struck Central America in 1998, leaving 11,000 dead. In Posoltega, the most hard-hit region of Nicaragua, children had a 27 percent chance of having been seriously injured, a 31 percent chance of having lost a family member, and a 63 percent chance of their home having been damaged or destroyed. You can imagine the aftereffects. Ninety percent of adolescents in the area were left with PTSD, with the average adolescent boy registering at the high end of the range of “severe” PTSD, and the average teenage girl registering over the threshold of “very severe.” Six months after the storm, four out of every five teenage survivors from Posoltega suffered from depression; more than half, the study found, compulsively nursed what the authors called, a bit euphemistically, “vengeful thoughts.”