MORNING SENTINEL • August 23, 2023
The effects of overheated air and oceans are happening right before our eyes. They’ve been especially numerous and destructive this summer, and they’re going to get worse, as David Wallace-Wells in his well-researched book, “The Uninhabitable Earth,” and Bill McKibben in “Falter” both show. We are on the edge of an ecological catastrophe at least as devastating as nuclear winter. The insane thing is, we caused it and are continuing to push it along. Many people who can see what climate change is going to do suffer from a psychological condition recently named “environmental melancholia” — a complex stew of feelings such as grief, anxiety, dread, remorse, helplessness, anger, depression, fear and other mental experiences sprung from the scientific near certainty that Earth cannot escape an ecological catastrophe, and that the catastrophe has been launched by us. It’s excruciating. ~ Dana Wilde