CLIMATE OF FEAR: 'ECO-ANXIETY' LATEST WORRY FOR AMERICANS

Rutland Herald, 25 March 2007 

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By JUSTIN NOBEL Columbia News Service 

Global warming, pesticides in food, nuclear waste — it's enough to keep a

person up at night.

Indeed, a growing number of people have literally worried themselves sick over

various environmental doomsday scenarios.

Their worry even has a name: eco-anxiety.

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. 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, she said.

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.

The British film, "Children of Men," portrays the state of terror that ensues

when society crumbles after women stop giving birth, possibly because of

environmental factors. "It Could Happen Tomorrow," one of the Weather Channel's

most popular shows, addresses such questions as, "What if an F5 tornado rips

through downtown Chicago?" or "What if wildfires race out of control toward

Austin, Texas?"

Is the end actually nigh? If anyone can answer that question it should be the

scientists whose findings feed such articles, films and television shows. But

they don't always make the best spokesmen.

"Scientists are very bad at communicating with the public about risk," said Dr.

Benny Peiser, a social anthropologist at John Moores University in Liverpool,

England, who studies the effects of catastrophes on society. "Unfortunately, a

lot of low probability risks are blown out of proportion."

Peiser used to worry that an asteroid half the length of a football field would

explode over New York or London, as one did in Siberia in 1908, burning miles of

forest to a crisp. Imagine the devastation if such an event happened over a

modern city. And then there are the 10-kilometer asteroids, like the one known

as Minor Planet (7107) Peiser, named after Peiser himself because of his

"particular research interest in neocatastrophism and its implications for

human, societal and cultural evolution," according to a NASA Web site.

Were Minor Planet (7107) Peiser to hit earth, it would cause an

"extinction-level event," wiping out most of the life on the planet.

Fortunately for us, Peiser says scientists are now much better at detecting

these mega-asteroids thanks to improved telescopes. His fears about smaller

asteroids have also been allayed somewhat. Recent research suggests that

explosions like the one over Siberia in 1908 probably happen only once every

1,000 years, not once every 100 years, as previously thought. This eased

doomsday agitation in the research community, according to Peiser, and also

"helped people realize that other potential hazards may not be as serious."

And some potential hazards may be manufactured out of whole cloth. Dr. Robert

Hale, a marine scientist at William & Mary's Virginia Institute of Marine

Science who studies the effects of PCBs and pesticides on sea life, blames

journalists for the public's misinformation and subsequent eco-anxiety. He

referred to a 1997 episode known as "Pfiesteria hysteria." Many journalists

attributed a spate of human illnesses in the Middle Atlantic states to a

flesh-eating microbe found in the Chesapeake Bay based largely on the views of a

single researcher.

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."

Schmidt provided examples from his own life of things he had done that might

help stem global warming, including driving less, buying electricity harnessed

from renewable sources, using fluorescent light bulbs and voting for "people

with a head on their shoulders." He also co-founded the blog realclimate.org to

correct misinformation about climate change.

"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."