An aerial image of the Amazon rainforest burning, taken on August 25, 2019 in the Candeias do Jamari region near Porto Velho, Brazil.
An aerial image of the Amazon rainforest burning, taken on August 25, 2019, in the Candeias do Jamari region near Porto Velho, Brazil. Victor Moriyama/Getty Images

Much of the country, and the world, got a taste of existential eco-anxiety last week as stories about ongoing wildfires in the Amazon went wildly viral. In true 2019 fashion, the most viral photos were either old or not of the Amazon, as Mother Jones reported, but the fires are certainly real, and with headlines like “The Lungs of the Earth are in Flames” screaming at us across social media, it would be hard not to feel anxious and depressed. The Amazon is on fire, and there’s basically nothing any of us can do about it.

Eco-anxiety, or a feeling of distress connected to environmental degradation, is on the rise, and Eve Andrews sees this more and more from her readers. Andrews, a writer and advice columnist for Grist, a Seattle-based website covering climate change, answers reader questions ranging from the banal (just how bad are plastic straws, really?) to the existential (is it ethical to have children in the age of climate change?).

Her particular job means she spends a lot of time immersed in bad news. (I know the particular hazards of this as well—I used to work at Grist, and Eve and I are former colleagues.) Of course, everyone can, and should, do our best to reduce our own impact on the environment, but addressing climate change will take a global, not solo, effort, and the sheer scale of the problem can quickly overwhelm, especially when it’s your job to constantly think about it.

What is it like to deal with that sense of doom all the time, especially now, with Trump in office and the window to address this crisis rapidly closing? I wanted to hear from an expert, so I gave Eve a call. What follows is our conversation, which has been edited for clarity and length.

How much eco-anxiety do you have today?
Today? Not much, really.

The fires in the Amazon aren't stressing you out?
Last week it stressed me out a lot, but I think because I'm so ensconced in climate news all the time, these things wash over very quickly. I'm not really sure how to feel about that but being actively distressed about it for too long is just not sustainable from a brain functioning standpoint.

Yeah. There's the existential angst about the Amazon burning but then there's the local eco-anxiety. Do you get that? I spend a lot of time driving around the Olympics and there is so much logging. I know it’s been that way forever but it’s so hard to see.
Oh, yeah. I haven't been on the Olympic Peninsula in a while but I went to Vancouver Island in July and we were driving to the far, far north end of it where there really wasn't anybody—there is no town or anything like that—and it's all logged. It's astonishing. Someone in the car was mentioning that they read that pretty much all of the logging that happens in British Columbia specifically goes to toilet paper.

Oh my god. That's so depressing.
It's deeply, deeply depressing.

Should we start using bidets instead of toilet paper?
Well after that I found this crazy interview that Sheryl Crow did around when An Inconvenient Truth came out. It's from like 2009 or something like that, and she's like, "A real tip for being environmentally friendly is to only use one square of toilet paper,” which, frankly, no. Not gonna happen. She got a lot of criticism for that, as you can imagine.

But she was right.
She probably was right. Bidets probably are more sustainable.

What do we do about this? Even if we all quit eating beef today, that's not going to change this immediate problem of deforestation in the Amazon.
No. There is pretty much nothing you can do to stop the Amazon from burning tomorrow. That's the other frustrating thing. So many people all across social media, like Kim Kardashian, are like, "What do we do about the Amazon?," and it's like, oh my god, you, of all people, are the figurehead of consumption and consumerism for its own sake. I don't think that's the only source of climate change but it's a huge major one and it's the major cultural factor that makes it so hard to do anything about it. People haven't been paying attention to it for years and years and now they are only paying attention to one thing that they don't even understand. That part is frustrating.

So how do you deal with this kind of environmental anxiety?
Um. [Long pause.] [Sigh.] [Long pause.] I think, honestly, I'm just good at compartmentalizing.

I think a reason I don't get distraught to the point where I can't function or can't think about anything else—which I do think is a reasonable response to this situation—is that I tend to have a kind of practical, problem-solving approach to things, like "This happened, can't change the past, how do we go forward now?" I'm not recommending that as an approach, but that's how my brain deals with bad news.

And it would be disingenuous to not say that I'm also on anti-depression and anti-anxiety medication. I used to get really dragged down by certain obsessive, dark thoughts and that just doesn't happen anymore. That contributes to my ability to be able to write about this stuff and think about this stuff all the time and not just flatline.

Ok, so you're on this medication that helps assuage this existential threat that we're facing right now, but that doesn't take away the threat itself.
No, the threat itself still totally exists but you're asking how one deals with it.

Right but should we not feel like there is a crisis if there is a crisis?
You mean should everybody be freaking out all the time?

Yeah. Not just the Amazon, but everything. Climate change. Sea level rise. Ocean acidification. All the other shit that's happening.
That's a good question. There is so much that people have the power to that they are just not changing. The thing that makes me so much more frustrated than seeing lots of logged sections of Vancouver Island or the Olympic Peninsula is that even in Seattle, where people say that they are so progressive and care about nature and climate change and what have you, not all people vote, which is insane to me because it's so easy to vote here. This is a city where people are fighting tooth and nail against bike lanes so that they can preserve parking spaces in front of their house, and that makes me a lot more riled up than seeing knocked-down trees.

Where do you find optimism? Do you?
Yes. I find optimism in the fact that—I mean, you used to work at Grist. You remember that it used to be like fighting tooth and fucking nail to get people to read about climate change. You had to trick them into it. Just in the time since you've left, even in the past year, that is not true. People are actively searching for stuff about climate change. People are coming to Grist to read about climate change. You can see that. You can see that in our analytics, what people are searching for and what they read after the get to the site. There is so much more enthusiasm about it. There is so much more interest in it. If you want to take a cynical approach, you could be like, “Well, why weren't you paying attention before, when it really mattered?” but it doesn't matter any less now. It matters a lot more now, and people are, at least from looking at the backend of this climate website, people are a lot more eager to learn about it.

What do you think has changed?
Honestly, I think bigger publications started writing about it more. A big turning point that I noticed was the last big IPCC [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] report on climate change that came out in October. That was front page news. Big publications have that power to make things mainstream news and then people care about it and more niche publications like Grist or any other climate-oriented publication gets the trickle down benefit.

Do you think any of this is the Trump effect?
I'm really not sure. I mean, if you went back and looked at the New York Times or the Washington Post coverage of that IPCC report, I sort of remember there being contrasts of what was recommended with Trump's policy, i.e. no policy. So I think it's definitely another issue in which people can see how he's a really deficient president for the current moment. Even three years ago, I don't think there was as much a sense of how urgent and how certain all these changes were.

How bad has Trump been for the planet? Is this worse than you expected the day after the election or better?
It's worse. I'm an inherently optimistic person and so even after the election, I was like, you know, he doesn't have any policies, who even knows what he's going to do? Because he didn't. He had no platform. So I was like, maybe he will actually be progressive on wind or solar or what have you, but no, he's been so much worse. It's like he's actively trying to return to the 1800s or something. In every respect.

Yeah, like steampunk.
He's the steampunk president.

What can people do, substantively, to help make a difference?
Eat less red meat. If you can cut it out altogether, that's great. If you can cut your car, that's huge. And if you can cut out flying, that's huge. That's the three big things.

What about not having children?
I just wrote a piece about that. There's a study that came out that said the biggest thing you can do to reduce your carbon footprint is not have one more child, which is kind of a confusing recommendation, but that whole calculation is based on another study, which is based on a kind of philosophical premise that one person is responsible for a fraction of the carbon emissions of all of their deciendents. So, like, I'm responsible for half the emissions of my child, a quarter of my grandchild, and eighth of my great grandchild, but you're comparing things on a completely different time scale so it's kind of a disenguous comparison.

There's this other advantage of not having children. Like, I take a lot of solace in the fact that I'm not having children, in part because I know I'm not bringing people in this world to suffer. That allows me to take a really long term view that nothing really matters. It sounds bleak but it's really not. I'm not on antidepressants, so I get through the day by reminding myself that the planet is really old. I just think, you know what, 300 million years ago, Arizona was under the ocean. Shit changes. You know what I mean?
It's funny that you say that because I interviewed a paleoclimatologist who focuses on oceans and she was saying that that is the one very abstract, bright side of researching this stuff from a paleo climate perspective: You realize that the Earth as a planet will be fine. It's human civilization that will be in poor shape.

Right. Eventually the Earth will recover from man and another species will take our place and fuck it up and the whole thing will happen all over again. If you don't have kids, there's sort of a beauty in it, but if you have children, you have to really worry about running out of fresh water.
That’s where I feel climate angst. I do want a kid. Just one. Singular. No more than that. I don't worry that much about what that means for my carbon footprint to have a kid. I do worry about, since I don't know what's going to happen, is it fair to have a kid? But then I think, has anyone ever known what is going to happen?

No. And the reality is that life for most of us in the US is actually pretty good by comparison and will probably continue to be so.
Yeah, but it could get bad.

Indeed.