In almost every regard this year has been wonderful for me. I have very little to feel anxious about – if there wasn’t this unabating sense of despair about the natural world. 2019 has been a disastrous year for our planet: fires, floods, droughts, heatwaves, air pollution – in almost every category we’ve seen records not just broken but smashed. As I’m typing this, catastrophic bushfires here in Australia are gobbling up flora and fauna of an area larger than the entire country of Belgium. (Or more than 3.5 times the area destroyed by the Amazon fires earlier this year.)
2019 was the year the climate crisis finally hit home – with a sucker punch. At times I found it hard to focus on anything else. The omnipresent headlines of new natural (?) disasters gave even joyous moments a hint of existential dread. 2019 was the year I realised that this is not an exception. This is the new normal.
A selfish part of me wants to just drop everything and enjoy what’s left of the natural world before it’s gone. The more altruistic me won’t simply accept this new reality. So my coping mechanism for 2020 is a balancing act of both: doubling down on my very limited impact as an individual while also carving out more time to immerse myself fully in nature, hoping that I can replace some of the more destructive anxiety with a sense of acceptance.