Spinning Out, page 1
SPINNING
OUT
First published in 2023 by
Footnote Press
www.footnotepress.com
Footnote Press Limited
4th Floor, Victoria House, Bloomsbury Square, London WC1B 4DA
Distributed by Bonnier Books UK, a division of Bonnier Books
Sveavägen 56, Stockholm, Sweden
Copyright text and illustrations © Charlie Hertzog Young
The right of Charlie Hertzog Young to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1998
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means without the written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library and the Library of Congress
ISBN (trade paperback): 978 1 804 44031 5
ISBN (ebook): 978 1 804 44060 5
For the mad, the weird and the wild – all those who dream awake
Table of Contents
Introduction: Is it hot in here or is it just me?
PART ONE
1 What we talk about when we talk about eco-anxiety
2 The ecology of mind: our managed madness
3 Climate despair, climate trauma
PART TWO
4 Nigeria: activism and renewal
5 Pakistan: planting resilience
6 Mexico: the small universe which is the body
PART THREE
7 Regenerative rebellion: climate action as recovery
8 RESIST: how to stop the bad stuff
9 RECONNECT: getting our act together
10 REMEDY: how to change the things we cannot accept
11 Movement culture: how to keep us safe and happy
Acknowledgements
Endnotes
Index
Good jumping off points
About the author
‘I am no longer accepting the things I cannot change. I am changing the things I cannot accept.’
Angela Yvonne Davis
‘The civilised can pretend to be emotionally healthy as they do not commit genocide and destroy landbases, but instead take what they need to develop their “advanced state of human society”. This is how we can all pretend to be sane as no one kills the planet.’
Derrick Jensen, Endgame Volume 1, Seven Stories Press, New York, 2006
INTRODUCTION
Is it hot in here or is it just me?
I AM PRETTY MAD, by conventional standards, but I’m nowhere near as mad about it as I used to be. I first noticed the divergence nearly twenty years ago, when I was twelve. That was the year that the immensity of climate change properly entered into my awareness. It hit me like a planetary death drive, a bodily horror that made me want to disappear. I wanted no part in the pallid, hollow ways we lived, the suffering it entailed. Paradoxically, this new meaninglessness of the dominant culture somehow gave my life a charge, a frenetic, revolutionary meaning I had never felt before. It was an odd sense of belonging, especially in the lonely moments when I saw humankind as an ecological mistake. I was divorced from consensus reality and wedded to visions of utopian futures. To me, these projections became just as real as the material world everyone else thought I lived in. They were just as real, too, as the flickering visions of climate apocalypse.
That same year, as I was reeling from the realisation that the world was probably about to end, my family lived out its own private doom. My grandmother went missing. We put posters up around the Isle of Wight, where she had lived. Even on the pinned-up printouts she looked forlorn. My dad went from pillar to pillar, an abandoned boy. He told us she would be fine, trying to suppress the fear that his words were just consoling lies. It took six months for her to be found. She had jumped off a cliff. Her body had been in the sun, the wind and the rain, and was found in a remote cove by a child exploring the coastline on a fishing trip. She was identified by her teeth and a metal pin in her elbow. I remember telling some friends at school that she had died by suicide. They told me she was in hell for killing herself.
As often happens for kids, these two dramatic episodes fused themselves in my psyche. Climate change has loomed over me ever since as an unpredictable harbinger of death. It’s an embodied fear and fury that has led to a lot of mental unravelling. Climate change was a mythological counterpoint to a world I felt was pointless. At times it was a terrifying but exciting herald of apocalypse. Sometimes that gave me a powerful need to be an activist, to rebel. Other times it was an inescapable reason to destroy myself, just as we are destroying the planet – a rebellion of a different, darker kind. What was happening, in my formative youth, was the cresting of a disorder of the mind, fuelled by having to live on a fundamentally disordered planet; one that was threatening to shake us off its back for what we had done and for what we continued to do.
For years climate change was my everything. I started out giving talks in schools, pamphleteering, getting people to attend screenings of climate-change movies. I got involved in community organising and set up a green council at my secondary school. I somehow won a national award. At the ceremony I helped orchestrate a stunt from the toilets of 10 Downing Street, where a friend of mine superglued himself to Gordon Brown. Latching on to the Prime Minister, he shouted: ‘You might be able to unstick my hand, but you won’t be able to unstick yourself from the problem of climate change.’ It was an unwieldy phrase, but it got the message across. The picture I took made the front page of the Metro. It was around this time that I started hallucinating properly.
One evening I was sitting on a mound on Hampstead Heath. The sun had just dipped below the horizon and the darkness encroached on the twisting Scots pines. I closed my eyes and imagined myself floating into the sky, skirting treetops and skimming along meadows of tall grass. There was something in the corner of my vision. A lumbering but agile form. It was quick and heavy in the blackness. It slowed and landed waist high in the grass. There was something flattening the foliage as it progressed from a few metres away, something cutting its way through. It stopped. I listened. The silence was dense. Then, like an explosion, the wolf pounced. I saw a flash of matted black fur and yellow teeth. I opened my eyes and I was back on the mound but a putrid stench hung in the air.
From that day on, often when I found myself alone and usually in the dark, the wolf would visit me. What started out as fleeting appearances, shimmers in the corner of my sight, became full-blown altercations. I would be walking home from school in the cold and turn a corner to find it lying in wait on the pavement, or curled up on the bathroom floor in the middle of the night. Its teeth would rip into my flesh as I kicked and flailed on my back. I would jab at its eyes, its gut, wrench its jaws open, anything to stop the attack, until it decided to lope away, like it was suddenly bored.
The wolf also liked to come on direct actions with me. When I snuck alone to the perimeter fence of a major UK airport, it trotted along beside me like a scout, then kept me company in a tree whilst I radioed dozens of protestors who broke in and locked themselves on, shutting the runway down. The wolf was with me, too, in the cavernous airplane hangars of UN climate meetings, in the hallowed wankery of the World Economic Forum in Davos, and lay on the concrete paving of Zuccotti Park during the dawning of the Occupy movement.
I had my first serious breakdown in 2009 after the collapse of the UN climate talks in Copenhagen. We had been told that it was the ‘last chance to save the world’. The talks ended in disaster. I truly believed we had passed the point of no return; I collapsed and didn’t leave my room for a long time. The wolf stalked the perimeter of my bed with rank breath. The pyromaniac in me, that sliver in all of us that revels in destruction, stirred. It felt wrong, but in that private moment, alone after the declaration of apocalypse, I wanted to see it all burn.
We didn’t deserve the planet – we had been given a chance to save ourselves and squandered it, rich nations unwilling to compromise on economics to save civilisation. Those in power in the Global North were clearly too distant from the natural world, prioritising imaginary games over survival. At that time I managed to pass for sane, studying and working proficiently, but I lost some of my anchors. I was more scared, more delicate and more obsessed with working furiously to stitch my visions into reality. At the age of nineteen, after five sleepless nights riddled with hallucinatory imagery, an incandescent breakdown led me to a psychiatric unit. I was diagnosed with bipolar disorder.
In the intervening decade I have been in and out of study, in and out of work and in and out of hospital. It’s been tempestuous. The wolf disappeared as soon as I started taking lithium. I swapped manic incandescence for deep depression. I still see things. Long ago it was a gangly spectre that lived in the corner of the room I barely left for two years. I also thought I was being followed for a long time, especially when I lived in a warehouse on an industrial estate. That led me to ditch my phone and draw maps for myself in code so I couldn’t be traced. I then, obviously, kept getting lost. I had to sleep in places I shouldn’t have. Sometimes I saw vivid sparks and trails of light when cycling through the city in the middle of the night. Sometimes I heard people talking about me in the walls. I became an addict. I lost my memory, my drive, myself. I had electroconvulsive t
I eventually ended up jumping off a six-storey building. In stereotypically melodramatic fashion, although I have no memory of it, I fell from the flat roof extending from my then-therapist’s office. I landed on the concrete base of a neighbouring garden. I somehow remained conscious and even had a long chat with the woman who found me. She thought I was a burglar, propping myself up on the planters and talking rather pleasantly – I’m told – as I bled out. I would have died, had an ambulance team not happened to be on the next block. My pelvis was split open and shattered, my legs demolished and my wrists badly snapped, and my legs so damaged that they both had to be amputated. I spent a month in a coma and six months in hospital. I was spat out into the pandemic, with lockdown hitting a month after I moved back into my mum’s house to recover. I had lost a job, a flat and my then-partner. It took time to start actually recovering myself, and even longer for me to open up enough to realise how deeply traumatised my family and loved ones were by what had happened. I am still learning to balance my own needs with how I can be of most service to them, a process I imagine will take longer than a lifetime.
Since my diagnosis I have had to become a different person, especially since I jumped. The experiences of madness and the multifaceted recovery I have worked through, and continue to work through, have taught me a great deal about what it is I care about and how it is I want to be. They have also shed a piercing light on the disordered state of the world. Mine is just one case that demonstrates some of the interactions between climate catastrophe, society and the mind.
How we fit ourselves into this story is key to fighting climate chaos and the mental-health epidemic, let alone winning. This book is about figuring out how we are embedded in the dominant culture that is responsible for these crises, how we fit, and how to free ourselves from it. Social transformation is obviously and undeniably challenging, but if we understand its tiered nature – its benefits for us personally as well as systemically – then we can form a different relationship to this kind of work. Engaging in the right way also makes it less draining, and therefore more sustainable.
Recently, the mum of a close friend, a counsellor, asked me why it was I had wanted to kill myself. We talked a lot. Eventually she turned to me and said: ‘It sounds like you wanted to turn all your anger about the world in upon yourself, and ultimately towards the people who love you.’ I nodded. It was hard to hear but I couldn’t deny it was true, conscious or not. ‘But,’ she continued, ‘what would happen if you turned it towards what you’re really angry at instead? Towards the system that has caused all of this. Wouldn’t that be powerful?’
We need to fight back, urgently. But we also need to get ourselves into a headspace where we can be well, stay well and use what is being done to us as a mobilising force. Some clinicians use the term post-traumatic growth, which I like. This is the idea that some people, after trauma, can enter a state of systematically rebuilding their lives anew. What I particularly love about it is that it focuses on recovery through the realignment of one’s relationship to the world. In so doing, we recover not by detaching from society and just looking after ourselves, but by reweaving our relationships and using them to create the world we want to see. We need post-traumatic growth on a civilisational scale.
The Uruguayan poet-historian Eduardo Galeano once wrote: ‘Utopia is on the horizon. I move two steps closer; it moves two steps further away. I walk another ten steps and the horizon runs ten steps further away. As much as I walk, I’ll never reach it. So what’s the point of utopia? The point is this: to keep walking.’ For someone who thought he would never walk again, every step I’ve taken since is an embodiment of active hope. On my good days, setting my prosthetic on the pavement can feel like the beginning of a revolutionary act. I don’t want to walk that path alone.
PART ONE
1
What we talk about when we talk about eco-anxiety
‘We have an obligation to be anxious, it’s a mark of respect for the gravity of the situation.’
Mark Corrigan stuck in the ‘Nether Zone’: S7 E4 of Peep Show.
IT IS EASIER, AS the saying goes, to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.1 We are now being forced to stare down the barrel of the end of the world, whilst being told that everything needs to stay essentially the same. Our dominant culture is one of extractive, individualistic capitalism, built on age-old traditions of disconnection and domination. It’s a system that is horribly adaptable and resilient, managing to maintain the outdated social structures responsible for the polycrises we are enmeshed in, whilst at the same time paying lip service to global catastrophe. This is a form of psychological sadism. It only succeeds by warping collective reality, depriving us of communities of care and cleaving away any possibility of systemic alternatives.
To live within such a society requires us to maintain what psychologists call cognitive dissonance. To function, whilst identifying as relatively powerless, we must simultaneously hold two incompatible realities in our minds or else deny one of them. Denial requires us either to ignore the physical realities of the climate, or else to detach ourselves from the dominant culture and try to manage private visions of existential doom.
In any discussion of climate change and mental health it doesn’t take long for eco-anxiety to come up. It is what everyone mentions first. Eco-anxiety is a trendy, limited, tangled mess of ideas, full of false dichotomies and internal contradictions, but it is a useful term nonetheless. It’s also, somehow, cool. Grist magazine recently dubbed eco-anxiety the year’s top ‘pop-culture trend’.2 It was ushered into Anglosphere officialdom in the run-up to the 2021 UN climate talks in Glasgow, when the Oxford English Dictionary added the term to its lexicon. Over the course of that year, online searches for ‘climate anxiety’, virtually interchangeable with eco-anxiety, ballooned by 565 per cent.3
Eco-anxiety is the tip of a rapidly melting iceberg. It is also a crucial entry point helping a lot of people to understand the messy web of relationships between ecology and the mind. Eco-anxiety can be worry, but it can also trigger or be defined as a serious psychological disorder. Global authorities describe eco-anxiety variously as an ‘unease or apprehension’, a ‘concern’ about environmental destruction and a ‘chronic fear of environmental doom’. Some think it should be categorised as a psychiatric disorder. Others say no, that it is a healthy psychological response to systemic collapse.
Generally, at least in the medical research community, eco-anxiety is seen as degrees of distress, rather than an explicit ‘condition’. It shouldn’t be pathologised, they say, and shouldn’t usually necessitate psychiatric intervention. If we pathologise an appropriate emotional response to ecological devastation, then there’s a risk of individualising a problem that is really systemic in nature. So, are these categories even useful? Do they change our experience of the world? Do they provide solace and support?
Often, the answer is yes. Many of the people I interviewed for this book have found the idea of eco-anxiety incredibly useful. It gave a name to something they knew, but had no words for. It gave them something to hold on to in a sea of uncertainty. Jennifer Uchendu, founder of The Eco-anxiety in Africa Project, says that her work on climate change was relentlessly unsettling and confusing until she found out about eco-anxiety and had a framework to help explain her feelings and those of her community. Eco-anxiety is a stressor, even if it isn’t a ‘disorder’. But it’s a pervasive stressor which can easily push people into serious mental-health issues.
Eco-anxiety is usually associated with young people in the Global North. That is largely because the research funding is there, as is the global media focus, and mental health is often perceived as a Western luxury. But people in the Global South are already more acutely affected by climate-related mental-health issues. In the Philippines, almost 50 per cent of young people are ‘extremely worried’ about climate change and 74 per cent say that thinking about it makes day-to-day functioning difficult. In Brazil, half are struggling to function because of eco-anxiety. In Nigeria, it’s two-thirds. In India, three-quarters. For the UK, the US and Australia, by comparison, between a quarter and a third of young people report similar difficulties.4 That is still a lot, and many are not sleeping, eating, or working. People are struggling to find joy, connection and meaning in their lives because of their disintegrating future.
