The Problem

On May 8, 2024, The Guardian’s environment editor, Damian Carrington, wrote about the responses of 380 top climate scientists to the question of how they feel about the future. Overwhelmingly, these scientists, Carrington wrote, “are terrorized but determined to continue fighting.” The main emotions those experts were expressing were anger, fear, and frustration. Some expressed anxiety and depression. In this article, I hope to explain why staying in these emotions actually makes our climate problems worse, and how to reverse that.

I understand fully. I have been there. Believe me, as a Highly Sensitive Person, I am still often found with those horrible emotions not wanting to leave my body. Like all emotions, they are natural and helpful. The scientists’ emotions in the quoted article are all related to the problem (not to the solution). In other words, in the moments we are holding on to these uncomfortable feelings, and for as long as we are holding on to them, we are thinking about the problems; we are telling ourselves a story of danger, pain, and suffering. Let me insist. We are having those feelings because we are telling ourselves these stories about life (whether such stories are correct or not). Our emotions stem from what we tell ourselves about a situation, not directly from that situation. “Fighting” may be a good response option, but only in certain circumstances, when we have no other option against a real enemy. But as regards our climate story, what exactly do we need to fight, and for how long? We humans often mistake who the enemy is, or think there’s an enemy when there is none.

The Solution

We must accept the energy of the problem (our uncomfortable emotions), as such. We must feel them. And we must express the story we are telling ourselves in that moment. Probably, for those top scientists, it tells the worst case scenario for the future of humanity, or perhaps something like: “I will never be understood!” But then, as soon as possible after having felt and expressed, we must find a way, using our willpower, to think about and imagine the world we want, that is, the world as it will be once solutions have been applied successfully (even though we may not know the means to get there yet). We must hold such a bright image of the future world (at least one happy scene of it) in our mind in the present. Those new, positive thoughts will immediately change how we feel, thus now offering the right kind of emotional fuel to act towards our ideal. Being “in the energy of the solution” means that we have operated the mindset shift I just described, so that we can work on finetuning the details of a solution. The means to get somewhere emerge from dreaming of that “somewhere.”

On May 9, 2024, Christiana Figueres, former head of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (2010-2016), shared her opinion in The Guardian about the same article quoted above. She advocated for “stubborn optimism” as possibly being “our only hope.” I agree. She exhorted:

“While we grapple with the current lack of political will, and the abhorrent inequities of the climate crisis, we can take some comfort that so many of those who are key to designing our future have heard climate scientists’ urgent warnings and are channeling their spirit by taking positive action in response: think of the engineers reforming our grids, the architects, the social entrepreneurs, the regenerative farmers restoring our soil, the legal advocates, and the millions of people everywhere who are advancing new systems of care, repair and regeneration.”

What it Will Take

Christiana Figueres is correct: despite all what is not going well, we must spend more time thinking of what is going well. Shifting to positive emotions collectively to fuel our transformation has started but will probably take more time. Because most sustainability experts are still dominantly concerned by external natural sciences—the “environment”—and forget to look inside their own bodies, consider their own biology, and observe how their inner nature (including their emotions) interacts with and impacts their external one.

But this relationship exists, and it is 100% physical. There is a physical chain reaction between what we think and feel and what happens in our experience of the world as a result. And if enough of us collectively think and feel dominantly in a positive way, and act intelligently based on these thoughts and feelings (i.e., our emotions), we can collectively change the world for the better. The United Nations has a crucial role to play in that regard, since it gathers representatives of most countries.

The Metaphor of the Domino Effect

Let me put it this way: Imagine you watch a five-minute video of one of these big domino fall-down projects, with tens of thousands of dominos forming the most complex ensembles. It starts with one domino being given a gentle push, just enough for the domino to fall. Then we see amazing chain reactions, with big constructions crumbling down, balls jumping to knock doors open, art pieces changing colors or revealing a different pattern, etc.

Would your experience be the same if you saw only the last one second of the video, or only the last two or three dominos?

Probably not. In a similar way, let’s say you witness repeated adverse climate events. We say adverse because they have negative consequences for you. You can see how this pattern of adverse events is a cause of something bad (for you). But can you also see how it is also a consequence of something?

You think, “I need to do something about that pattern.” So, you ask yourself what produced that effect. Well, just keep asking backwards. If you do, and if you trace back far enough, you’ll find that something was communicated to enough people, who believed it, and who started behaving in a way to (unknowingly) release all these tons of CO2 into the atmosphere. Tracing further back, you will find that enough people were thinking and feeling in a certain way that led to these messages, beliefs, and behaviors, and on to those adverse climate events, and to natural disasters (the impact).

Why I Know it Works

As a pioneering thinker, feeler, and doer in sustainability for close to 45 years, I have made many mistakes, like all pioneers do, in the unavoidable initial trial and error phase. Eventually, as a leader of global sustainability programs, such as the Biodiversity and Agricultural Commodities Program, my teams, partners, and I measurably changed entire industry systems worldwide for the better. And I came to understand what works and what does not, as regards change programs. Particularly, I saw that what I had started saying differently, how, to whom, and when, and how others answered, and how I continued in conversations—in one word, communication—was an early domino in the chain to those programs’ success. I also saw that I was saying those things to others because my own inner thoughts and feelings—my emotions—had changed. Emotion is an even earlier domino in the chain to impact.

More on the Science of Emotions

Emotions, such as fear and anger, create tension in our bodies, and the temptation to resist what we believe is causing such discomfort. But resistance may not be the best option, and too much resistance can simply kill us. At a minimum, it can cause us to make decisions that are opposite to what we truly need. There is no benefit, for anyone, to stay for too long in those emotional states, therefore in those thoughts and stories.

In our wonderful bodies, senses and emotions move the body in the present, moment after moment, to help us survive. We are naturally unhappy when one of our needs is not fulfilled, or its fulfillment is threatened, and we are wired to seek its fulfillment. With experience, we are able to devise more and more efficient strategies to do so. And the animals that we humans are have the ability to develop emotional intelligence, that is, the ability to understand and use our emotions intelligently. It comes with the development of our consciousness.

With experience, we uncover and integrate more and more components and aspects of reality into our memory and consciousness. It is like working on a big puzzle, one piece at a time. We discover that many things can be invisible but do exist concretely and physically, like air. Gradually, we come to sense more subtle things, like thoughts and feelings: so, we learn that these are also concrete and physical. They are objects like other objects in universe. They are effect-producing, measurable electromagnetic signals and fields.

When trying to make sense of the world, we cannot but model (think) what we see (sense) with words and numbers, naming the parts, labelling the dominos in a big system. Each and every puzzle piece, each and every domino, has a location in universal real estate (as it is thought). All are part of the system. All interact. All are concrete and physical. All communicate with each other. All matter. One day you realize that words and numbers are physical objects inhabiting one or more parts of your brain, which, like dominos falling, influence the entirety—repeat entirety—of your experience of the world, including your own actions and the actions of others, for better or for worse, physically.

So yes, our thoughts and feelings change the world, whether we like it or not. We must only make sure that our thoughts for the better dominate our thoughts for the worse.

Dear reader, how are your thoughts and emotions influencing your experience of the world? Can you trace certain things in your environment back to the words in your head? What stories in our collective minds do you think are influencing the current world events?

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