Eco-anxiety

The Rutland Herald is reporting:

Melissa Pickett, an eco-therapist with a practice in Santa Fe, sees anywhere from 40 to 80 eco-anxious patients a month. They complain of panic attacks, loss of appetite, irritability and unexplained bouts of weakness, sleeplessness and "buzzing," which they describe as the eerie feeling that their cells are twitching.

So how does one go about becoming an eco-therapist anyway. I don't remember seeing that degree offered in any of the college catalogs I ever looked at. I'm also pretty sure that it wasn't one of the job's that our high school placement tests recommended.

So how do you treat eco-anxiety anyway?

Pickett's remedies include telling patients to carry natural objects, like certain minerals, for a period of weeks. Making environmentally friendly lifestyle changes can also prove therapeutic

Yep that's what I do when feeling anxious about things I don't understand I wear hemp and carry around rocks. It usually doesn't help my anxiety, but the chaffing and sore muscles give me something else to worry about.

So what causes eco-anxiety?

The fears of the eco-anxious are fueled by abundant media coverage of crises like global warming, collapsed fisheries and food shortages. The Oscar-winning documentary "An Inconvenient Truth" warns that only 10 years might remain to avert a major environmental catastrophe.

There's your answer folks, the eco-anxious have to stop lugging around rocks and start sueing Al Gore. Afterall anyone diabolical enough to invent the internet probably wouldn't think twice before inventing eco-hysteria.

There is one bit of rational tought mentioned in this article:

Dr. Gavin Schmidt, who studies climate variability at NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies in Manhattan, is concerned about carbon dioxide emissions unnaturally warming the planet, but he hasn't succumbed to eco-anxiety yet. He attributes the rise in eco-anxiety to a naive public.

"The fact that people don't have a good grasp of how science thinking works," Schmidt said, "means they don't have a good grasp of what they should be skeptical about."

In other words stop listening to the media and Al Gore and start reading and listening to people who study the envirnoment for a living. And don't listen to just one side, listen to both, then use your brain for something other than keeping your head from imploding. Make a calm rational decision on what you should do or worry about.

"There's a scientific reason to be concerned and there's a scientific reason to push for action," Schmidt said, "but there's no scientific reason to despair."