I want to strongly recommend the extensive resources, books and practices on this topic that the climate movement has developed, faced with a challenge that no individual can solve, in which we have already critically lost in many ways, and in which success seems highly unlikely, achieving it is a long-term process, and very draining. We realised early on that we were losing so many people to bad mental health and burnout that it was threatening to destroy the whole movement.
For me, two of the biggest takeaways were:
Mental health is your biggest resource. If you are all crippled by depression, nothing else will matter. You won’t be able to use any of the external means you have acquired; you’ll sit on the money you raised, and no longer know what to do with it, because everything will feel pointless. Once you have realised this, structure your activism with this in mind. If there are several types of work you can do towards your goal which are needed and which would seriously help, but one of them makes you feel like shit, while the other makes you curious, excited, fascinated, energised—that is a legitimate reason to go for that last one. If you have activities you need to do as a group that are known to be extremely frustrating and stressful for everyone involved, set aside serious thought on how to make them suck less, how to recuperate from them, how to make them joyful and fun. This is not frivolous. Toughing this out as each of us will destroy us collectively. Activism on a topic so existential is already serious enough as is, there is no need to make it extra somber. Meanwhile, maintaining mental health of the community is seen as an actual job, a legitimate target of funding, of committees. The people who make the science posters for our protests, the people who are on top of data security, the people who handle legal, are seen as equally important to the people who ensure buddies, check-ins, ample supplies of water and chocolate, pain killer access, psychological counselling, post-action-decompression, mid-time parties, books for the boring time in jail. Ensuring that the people around you do not feel alone, noticing if they are breaking down, making sure they are taken care of and not forgotten, is literally one of your responsibilities, the same as the public communication, the handling of police forces. It is these measures that means the police can hold hundreds of people without giving them food or water or lawyer access for a full day in order to break them, and all this results in is a potluck, skill exchange and book exchange held in the middle of the police station with people laughing and snuggling into blankets.
You need hope to fight for the long haul, but hope can take many forms, and those that activism most needs do not require a belief that it is likely that you will succeed. There are numerous concepts of what this type of hope, an active hope, may look like, but I particularly treasure the writing of Rebecca Solnit (“Hope in the Dark”) on this topic. Some quotes of hers: ““Cause-and-effect assumes history marches forward, but history is not an army. It is a crab scuttling sideways, a drip of soft water wearing away stone, an earthquake breaking centuries of tension. Sometimes one person inspires a movement, or her words do decades later, sometimes a few passionate people change the world; sometimes they start a mass movement and millions do; sometimes those millions are stirred by the same outrage or the same ideal, and change comes upon us like a change of weather. All that these transformations have in common is that they begin in the imagination, in hope. (...) Despair demands less of us, it’s more predictable, and in a sad way safer. Authentic hope requires clarity—seeing the troubles in this world—and imagination, seeing what might lie beyond these situations that are perhaps not inevitable and immutable. (...) To hope is to give yourself to the future—and that commitment to the future is what makes the present inhabitable.”
I want to strongly recommend the extensive resources, books and practices on this topic that the climate movement has developed, faced with a challenge that no individual can solve, in which we have already critically lost in many ways, and in which success seems highly unlikely, achieving it is a long-term process, and very draining. We realised early on that we were losing so many people to bad mental health and burnout that it was threatening to destroy the whole movement.
For me, two of the biggest takeaways were:
Mental health is your biggest resource. If you are all crippled by depression, nothing else will matter. You won’t be able to use any of the external means you have acquired; you’ll sit on the money you raised, and no longer know what to do with it, because everything will feel pointless. Once you have realised this, structure your activism with this in mind. If there are several types of work you can do towards your goal which are needed and which would seriously help, but one of them makes you feel like shit, while the other makes you curious, excited, fascinated, energised—that is a legitimate reason to go for that last one. If you have activities you need to do as a group that are known to be extremely frustrating and stressful for everyone involved, set aside serious thought on how to make them suck less, how to recuperate from them, how to make them joyful and fun. This is not frivolous. Toughing this out as each of us will destroy us collectively. Activism on a topic so existential is already serious enough as is, there is no need to make it extra somber. Meanwhile, maintaining mental health of the community is seen as an actual job, a legitimate target of funding, of committees. The people who make the science posters for our protests, the people who are on top of data security, the people who handle legal, are seen as equally important to the people who ensure buddies, check-ins, ample supplies of water and chocolate, pain killer access, psychological counselling, post-action-decompression, mid-time parties, books for the boring time in jail. Ensuring that the people around you do not feel alone, noticing if they are breaking down, making sure they are taken care of and not forgotten, is literally one of your responsibilities, the same as the public communication, the handling of police forces. It is these measures that means the police can hold hundreds of people without giving them food or water or lawyer access for a full day in order to break them, and all this results in is a potluck, skill exchange and book exchange held in the middle of the police station with people laughing and snuggling into blankets.
You need hope to fight for the long haul, but hope can take many forms, and those that activism most needs do not require a belief that it is likely that you will succeed. There are numerous concepts of what this type of hope, an active hope, may look like, but I particularly treasure the writing of Rebecca Solnit (“Hope in the Dark”) on this topic. Some quotes of hers: ““Cause-and-effect assumes history marches forward, but history is not an army. It is a crab scuttling sideways, a drip of soft water wearing away stone, an earthquake breaking centuries of tension. Sometimes one person inspires a movement, or her words do decades later, sometimes a few passionate people change the world; sometimes they start a mass movement and millions do; sometimes those millions are stirred by the same outrage or the same ideal, and change comes upon us like a change of weather. All that these transformations have in common is that they begin in the imagination, in hope. (...) Despair demands less of us, it’s more predictable, and in a sad way safer. Authentic hope requires clarity—seeing the troubles in this world—and imagination, seeing what might lie beyond these situations that are perhaps not inevitable and immutable. (...) To hope is to give yourself to the future—and that commitment to the future is what makes the present inhabitable.”