Writes Stephanie Foo in "I Tackled My Climate Anxiety by Becoming a Parks Department Super Steward/One weed at a time" (NY Magazine).
Your worrying doesn't help. Do something you can do.
August 20, 2021
"A couple of years ago, I had a nervous breakdown over, among other things, our planet’s dark future."
"I started crying every day on the subway, feeling utterly helpless and baffled at how to mourn a loss of this magnitude.
But in the past couple of years, one very important new relationship has acted as an invaluable balm on my climate anxiety — my relationship with the Earth itself.... My mental health was so fragile that I quit my job and started spending full days wandering the streets, lying on the grass in Bryant Park and ambling in circles around Bed–Stuy. And now that I had the time to notice, it occurred to me that the nature in NYC wasn’t as sparse as I thought.... In California, I had picked lemons every night from the tree in my yard, but it wasn’t so different in New York once I began paying attention.... [NYC has a] Super Stewards program.... Shorekeepers remove invasives from the city’s shorelines and marshes. Trail Maintainers keep trails clear by hiking them regularly to report or fix any issues, like erosion.... I chose to be a NAVigator, whose task it is to remove invasive species and sometimes plant native ones in the city’s forests and parks.... ... I find the work silences any anxious, meandering thoughts coursing through my mind.
When I’m done, I face the tree I freed from the vines and smooth my hand over the scars they left in its bark. I marvel at her branches stretching upwards where they belong, pat her trunk, and say, 'You’re welcome.'"
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I can’t stay in NYC longer than two days without feeling disconnected with the earth. I think one big driver of the fanaticism of climate alarmists is living in a man-made concrete jungle. Sort of compensating for one’s personal choice of environment.
This super stewards program sounds like the thing Mayor Giuliani got going where he empowered complaining citizens to clean up their own city. Bette Midler embraced the program as I recall. It worked surprisingly well for a time.
Nobody should tell this lady about the Giuliani bit or it will send her back to being that crazy crying lady that rides the subway...
One of the sickest and most disgusting things about the Green movement is how it preys on people like the author. These people are emotional, poorly educated and have weak minds. They are easily frightened to the point of mental illness. And for what? A prediction about what *might* happen in the year 2100. This prediction is based upon flawed models by the same crowd that has been wrong for 40 years and got the covid models wrong.
Here's another example. Last night I appeared before the Omaha Public Power District; the electric utility in eastern Nebraska. It is a governmental subdivision. The Board has 7 Global Warming zealots on it. And, frankly, they are poorly educated and weak-minded liberal nuts. Total group-think.
OPPD is on the path to net carbon zero by 2050. I told them that it failed in Germany and is failing right now in CA and TX. OPPD is headed to blackouts and much higher prices in the near term. But the group-think Board is convinced that this tiny 2,700 MW utility is going to make a difference and save the planet notwithstanding that the Chinese have over 3,000 gigawatts of coal-fired power plants online and coming online.
Two movies on one screen.
After working on the Manhattan Project in WWII, physicist Richard Feynman had his depressive moments about the world, too. He thought, for a while, nuclear war was inevitable and imminent.
“I would see people building a bridge and I would say “they don’t understand.” I really believed that it was senseless to make anything because it would all be destroyed very soon anyway, but they didn’t understand that and I had this very strange view of any construction that I would see, I would always think how foolish they are to try to make something. So I was really in a kind of depressive condition.”
Hanging out in bars, drinking heavily, even getting into drunken fights, eventually helped him out of his depression. While I would not suggest that as a standard treatment, perhaps generalizing his behavior (and that of the tree hugger above) into "change your environment" would be a good start to self-help for overanxious depressives.
Why are the people who walk around in despair, crying at the state of the world, on the brink of a breakdown, always on the Left, and typically (though not always) located in or around New York or California? Why is that?
Perhaps she should have stopped somewhere between Cali and NY and opened her eyes and mind. She may have found her answers more easily.
But anyway, she has NYMagazine as a continuing therapy session.
The planets dark future that I see is that of one being run by mentally ill or mentally fragile people projecting their dysfunction outward onto other people and society in order to enforce conformity with their mental illness, rather than actually addressing their own problems first.
So she removes plants that are not native to New York. Plants that were not around when humans arrived in earnest. The United States has almost no reactionary conservatives in politics. But a large part of environmentalism is reactionary conservatism.
It has the same religious foundation as political reaction. The way it was before is the way it was meant to be. Darwin had other ideas.
I always wonder how people like this can afford to not work and spend their time self-actualizing. I suppose they are either independently wealthy or they receive disability and other public welfare benefits.
Can someone explain why self-help essays by the obviously mentally ill are so in vogue right now?
let's assume (for the sake of argument)
That America Rallies together, and COMPLETELY ENDS ALL CO2 emissions!
Hurray!
Now, assuming that happens; how long will it take, before China's increasing CO2 emissions COMPLETELY make up that difference?
(hint: about 3years)
So, IF this planet has a dark future, We Are ALL DOOMED
Fortunately, the dark future is all Bullsh*t *
So, Sure; stop and smell the flowers (or, pull the weeds).
What ever it takes to help realize you had a nervous breakdown because you're mentally ill; not the planet
all Bullsh*t * IF it WASN'T all Bullsh*t, you'd see people (TOP PEOPLE)(trying) to come up with Actual Solutions, instead of emotional bandages
Thankfully Stephanie Foo has been healed. Now, what about the hundreds of millions or billions of humans that are suffering various levels of mental stress with respect to the earth and our environment? Wikipedia lists 83 international non-governmental organizations along with several times that number of national NGOs funded by scaring us about the dark and dangerous future of our planet.
Where I'm sitting I can see peaches on the trees (or the peaches the deer haven't got yet), the sun is shining and it's a beautiful day. I think I'll go for a walk.
I'm guessing that her history of mental health issues goes back a lot longer than a few years, and encompasses anxieties unrelated to the planet's climate.
Sure it's better than having a nervous breakdown, and marginally improves everyone's life, but it has absolutely no measurable impact on the future of the planet as a whole. She could do a lot more for the planet by vocally supporting nuclear power.
"ambling in circles around Bed–Stuy"
Sure, that's a way to relate to"the earth."
Good for her
I don't see the point of parading one's anxieties and mental illness in front of other people, hoping for adulation and positive reinforcement.
I'm also thinking that those who choose to live in overcrowded warrens like NYC are prone to such things, and project their feelings onto the rest of the country.
So, who is paying her bills for her?
You could say that she is now a conservative.
Neurotics should do whatever they have to do to ease their symptoms. As long as it is legal and doesn't frighten the horses.
Pretty arrogant saying "You're Welcome" to the tree like you know what it is thinking, I imagine the tree replying, "Get away from me you lunatic!"
She would do better to spend some time studying geology, for instance, did you know that ten thousand years ago, the spot where my home stands was covered by a brackish lake, and that for around 3,000 years? Before that it was covered by a mile thick sheet of ice for a hundred thousand years or more. Yet life on Earth continues apace, even if it does look different from millennium to millennium. There is a 400 million year old fossilized reef around here that seems to indicate that life once consisted of various kinds of mollusks, trilobites, and chambered nautili.
Oh yeah, for hundreds of millions of years the planet was 6C warmer than today, and for many millions of years before this era of ice ages started, there were 28 species of great apes like us thriving in the tropical heat. The atmospheric CO2 was once ten times what it is today and the oceans never boiled.
Study geology and stop reading media sources as if you were reading the actual science.
I agree with the sentiment of do what you can. I see a need and if it’s something I can do something about, I do something. You may not be able to fix the universe, but you can help a person or a park, or whatever you think needs help. Unfortunately, saving the earth is mostly wasted time. It has survived bigger disasters than man, and will do so in the future.
It's called mental illness. It is treatable.
Well, I suppose there's no harm in quitting your job to hug a tree, pat her trunk and say 'You're welcome,' assuming you first inquire about its preferred pronoun. But it is a bit sappy and just a tad loony, and probably only works for job-quitters who didn't really need the job anyway. And, if tree-hugging begins to lose its potency as a cure-all, perhaps a few hours reading Lomborg's False Alarm or some equivalent would help buck her up.
Truth be told, the druids with their oak groves were better at that sort of thing, even if tree worship didn't work out well for them in the end. The destruction of Judah as told in 2 Kings and Jeremiah was, at its root, the result of the waywardness of Judah's kings in worshipping at the sacred groves beloved of Canaanite tribes. Slash and burn was the only route back to righteousness.
Fortunately, NYC is big enough that, even assuming a sizable portion of NY Mag's readership will identify with this lady's cure for 'mental fragility,' it's not so big a slice of the City as to call down on the rest of us Hashem's disfavor.
I run on the path along the East River from mid-town to Harlem every morning. I so appreciate the people like Staphanie Foo who are there every morning tending the flowers, trees and bushes lining the shore. NYC has transformed its coastline. In Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, and the Bronx it is green everywhere you look now. Mike Bloomberg deserves a lot of credit for this transformation. He negotiated deals with developers who were allowed to build new projects if they also built new parks. The parks are maintained by an army of volunteers numbering in the thousands. New York's watereways are being cleaned up too, with groups like the Billion Oyster Project tackling the Nitrogen runofff from sewers and waste treatment plants. Marshes and wildlife are coming back in the Hudson estuary and in Jamaica Bay thanks to them.
I think it is sad that people are driven to anything by despair, but it is wonderful to see the city getting greener. I am fine with glass steel and concrete. I choose to live in NY, after all. Still a little more nature is a wonderful thing.
Worrying about things you have little to no control over is a good first step to losing your mind. I could slip on the stairs tomorrow and break my neck, or the next time I am out someone could cross the double yellow and hit me head on. I don't know the day or time of my passing, I certainly don't know that of the entire earth.
Just live your life already.
It's called mental illness. It is treatable.
In my professional opinion, mental illness is very difficult to treat and extremely difficult to cure. The homeless who crap on the streets are as much a manifestation of the failures of the MH community as this woman.
Woke mental health professionals have no clue whatsoever and they encourage this type of acting out behavior.
The eruption of Krakatoa would've blown every fuse in her nervous system: a sound heard as far away as London and years of blood-red skies worldwide.
Manual labor was the antidote monastics prescribed for acedia
My first impulse was to mock her anxiety. My second impulse was to sympathize, since my anxieties must appear irrational and inexplicable to others. My third impulse was to agree: nature has healing properties, especially trees. When I am scared or angry, just looking at trees calms my heart. I don't know why. Trees are like silent companions, saying that everything will be all right.
When I lived in Manhattan I used to try to imagine what I was looking at looked like before the city was built on and over it.
Of course, I always failed. For the City built over streams, ponds, etc. erasing essentially all natural features, leaving nothing but the built environment. And, yes, even Central Park is fake: it had been mostly a miasmal swamp prior to it's becoming a park.
In a way, living in such an intensely built-over environment is something like living in a spaceship: everything was built by artifice, and if you live there you are inevitably dependent on hidden infrastructure (that you probably don't even know about) functioning as it should to keep the place livable.
So, fine: if pulling invasive weeds helps your mental stability then what's to lose? But if you truly hate the built environment and what it's done to the natural world, perhaps you should consider living somewhere else?
Tim in VT:
You make a good point, but all the geologists of my acquaintance are global warming fanatics, and as an added bonus they’re Branch Covidians, too. The Venn Diagram of those groups is one circle, I imagine.
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