I don't want to have to talk about any of this.

But here we are.

It’s horribly mild, isn’t it?

When I was young, I used to bundle up for the fireworks every 5th November, beneath layers and gloves and scarves. My breath would billow in frozen plumes and I’d stamp my feet to keep warm. This year I could stand outside comfortably in just a sweatshirt.

We had a blissful few days of cold temperatures a while back, where the ground sparkled with frost and mist coiled around the hulls of sleeping canal boats. Snow made a fleeting appearance, and for a moment it almost felt like everything was normal.

But all I heard was people whinging about it being cold. The Met Office issued an amber weather warning for cold wind. It was as if everyone had forgotten what November was supposed to feel like. And after a long run of way-above-average temperatures? Not a peep. Where’s the Met Office weather warning for something is terribly wrong with our weather patterns and we need to take immediate global action?

It’s now mid-December, and the cold weather doesn’t look like it’s returning any time soon. Nature hasn’t got a clue what season it is any more. The only reason I know we’re in the run up to Christmas is the endless loops of Frosty the Snowman everywhere I go.

So you’ll forgive me if I’m not feeling Christmassy right now. Instead, my spirit is in a kind of constant panic I can never quite shake. It’s always there, like a simmering pot. Sometimes it’s barely noticeable and I can crack on with my day. Sometimes it boils over and all I can do is curl up into a ball or cry for a bit.

It’s called climate anxiety, or eco anxiety.

It’s a rational response to an existential threat. When presented with the facts of what’s happening to the world - what’s going to happen - as a result of our addiction to fossil fuels, why wouldn’t I be worried? The wildfires, the floods, the hurricanes, the unbearable heatwaves, the droughts, the death of the coral reefs. Endless reports titled Things Aren’t As Bad As We Thought - They’re Actually Far Worse certainly don’t help. Neither do the scientists predicting the end of human civilisation within a lifetime.

Climate anxiety is not something modern humans have really had to tackle before. A few years ago I signed up for some meetings with Better Help, an online therapy sort of thing, to see if they had any ideas of how I can control this constant rumbling fear. The woman I spoke to was clueless. Her suggestions included going for a long drive to relax, and that 'the world needs oil.’

I try to get outside and offline as much as I can, but even that has been a test this year. My brain goes into overdrive when I see flowers blooming at the wrong times of the year, and it frightens me to see trees shedding their leaves in August because it’s so damn hot.

No wonder my primitive monkey brain is triggering fight or flight mode all the time.

When I was at school, I envisioned a career in the police. I studied with that in mind, but although my career took me elsewhere I distinctly remember my parents saying that a job in the police would be understandable, because I tend to see things in black and white. Right and wrong.

When I began working for a climate NGO a few years ago, it was because I had been presented with the black and white facts of climate change. It’s very simple arithmetic:

Burn fossil fuels + destroy habitats = the death of everything.

The solution to this equation? Also very simple.

Stop burning fossil fuels + restore habitats = the survival of everything.

In my mind, this is a no-brainer. I saw this equation and came to the conclusion that because I quite enjoy life on Earth I should take all the appropriate steps to prolong it. I decided to fly less. Eat less meat. Buy less. Donate what money I could to environmental causes. Replace my gas stove with a more efficient induction hob. Not vote for oil-funded climate deniers. I decided to switch banks to one that was investing in the energy transition. Why wouldn’t I do those things? What possible argument could there be to NOT do anything?

I sort of presumed that my fellow human beings were just as rational and clear-minded. Yet here we are.

Since 1995, there have been thirty meetings of COP - the UN’s Climate Change Conference designed to navigate our way through this mess. The latest talks finished just the other week, once again with zero progress on even agreeing to transition away from fossil fuels.

Earlier this year, despite the fact that we can make plastic from seaweed, the global talks to tackle plastic pollution collapsed.

Here in the UK, the government - elected partly with promises of ending fossil fuel expansion and protecting nature - is rapidly rolling those promises back and dismantling nature protection laws.

And I can’t even begin to explain what’s happening in the USA.

But those who enjoy going for pleasant walks and listening to birdsong on a crisp morning are branded as RADICAL ACTIVISTS for daring to suggest that maybe, just maybe, we should shift our way of doing things to protect the beauty that makes our fleeting time in the universe not just worthwhile but possible in the first place.

I posted a video on my YouTube channel recently about how the woods and meadows where I grew up have been earmarked for development. I accompanied it with the (in my opinion) uncontroversial opinion that perhaps we should leave some space for biodiversity instead of smothering everything with concrete, because it enables us to do remarkable things like grow food and breathe air. It attracted comments from people absolutely outraged that I should suggest such a thing. Apoplectic that I should dare attempt to halt development. It was as if they couldn’t even begin to comprehend that a meadow should be anything other than a strip of land to build two thousand identical houses on. And that suggesting we protect it from development is tantamount to treason.

The directors of the residents’ association where I live routinely call for trees to be removed from the estate because they are ‘overgrown’ and ‘block light’. Then they cheer the erection of nearby skyscrapers because they are ‘good for the neighbourhood’.

I want to scream.

People will always spout some nonsense about the economy in defence of environmental demolition, and I am not sympathetic. What’s going to cost us more? Installing heat pumps and giving swathes of land back to nature? Or rebuilding major cities that have been wiped off the map? Call me crazy, but if our society uses an economic system that will cause the extinction of most life on Earth including us, then we need to change that system.

But that arithmetic - that ever so simple maths that I see in such black and white - eludes people still. The madness persists, all in the name of ‘progress’, although I’ve never had a clear understanding of what exactly we’re progressing towards.

And honestly, I don’t know what to do about it. I don’t know what I can do about it.

Because above all, I’m jealous. I’m jealous of people who can walk around as if everything is fine. People who can look at the weather forecast and not get palpatations. I’m jealous of people who can sit through weeks of record-breaking heatwaves and say It’s just summer! By the way, when’s Bake Off on tonight?

I don’t want to have to talk about any of this. I don’t want to have to say ‘let’s stop polluting all our rivers,’ or ‘let’s stop the world from heating to unsurvivable temperatures,’ or ‘I would rather have some trees here than an empty expanse of concrete,’ because it’s ludicrous that those things even need to be said. I don’t understand why preserving life on Earth is a topic of contention and disdain, and I don’t understand why people just roll their eyes when I mention it and make me feel like I’m the crazy one.

So I can see the appeal in just doing nothing. After all, it’s the global decision-makers holding all the cards. Governments should rightfully take all of the blame. And if the climate change-denying US government decides to threaten Venezuela with military action to nab its oil, there’s nothing you or I can do about it. Maybe I should be able to find some semblance of peace in that. Sometimes I think I’d love to be plugged back into the Matrix and ignore all of it, because ignorance really does seem to be bliss.

But I’m not, and I still can’t sleep comfortably at night.

So it was cathartic to hear about the National Emergency Briefing, in which a panel of experts from economics, culture, faith, science and defence spelled out the reality of our situation to an audience of MPs. They explained that tackling the climate and nature crises requires a co-ordinated response not seen since wartime, and the chaos that would stem from further inaction is blood on their hands.

It was reassuring to see some sense in the UN’s Global Environment Outlook, compiled by nearly 300 scientists across disciplines which stated the blindingly obvious: that “investing in a stable climate, healthy nature and land, and a pollution-free planet can deliver trillions of dollars each year in additional global GDP, avoid millions of deaths, and lift hundreds of millions of people out of hunger and poverty in the coming decades.” Conversely, burning coal, oil and gas currently causes £33.5 trillion in damage per year. Just scrapping fossil fuel subsidies could slash emissions by up to a third.

Maybe I’m not crazy after all.

I started this newsletter a couple of years ago because writing about this stuff was within my control. It was something I could do to try and make sense of the tempest that whirls inside my brain every day.

And I think - after all of this rambling for which I hope you’ll forgive me - that’s what it’s about. It’s about doing things that are within my control.

I was at Kendal Mountain Festival recently, where my film The Birdwatchers was screened twice. One of the questions in the Q&A was a request to leave everyone with some hope. I stole something that I’d read somewhere - I have to apologise to the original author who I’ve forgotten - but it was along the lines that whenever a person asks for something to be hopeful about, it feels like what they are really asking for is an abdication of responsibility. For someone to tell them don’t worry, we’ve got this, you go back to watching Celebrity Traitors and let others handle it.

Of course, that’s what we’re all searching for. Some external force to calm our fears and provide us with some inner peace.

But hope is something that needs to be earned. It doesn’t come from refreshing news sites or obsessively tracking every fraction of a degree of global warming. Hope comes from making the decision to do things a better way in our own lives. It comes from building community, it comes from peacefully resisting the forces trying to steal our attention. It comes from rejecting the status quo and questioning and challenging and standing up for ourselves and for those who don’t have a voice.

There is still action happening everywhere. The UK is gearing up to create Europe’s largest oyster reef. London Wildlife Trust has launched Rewilding East London to reintroduce white storks and beavers. Wind and solar generated more energy than coal this year. Denmark is on track to meet its ambitious emissions reductions targets. Conservation efforts have succeeded in bringing the green turtle back from the brink of extinction.

None of this is done in a vacuum. None of this has just magically dropped out of the sky. It is the result of sensible, focused people collaborating to build a better world and it all started with a decision to question why things are the way they are.

We’re all searching for inner peace and balance. I certainly am. But I can guarantee you that we’re not going to find it in Black Friday sales or Facebook or AI. We’ll find it by focusing on what we can control and acting with integrity and kindness and purpose. By spending our money carefully. By choosing who we vote for, what we eat, who we spend our time with and what we read. By opening our souls and our hearts to compassion, by filling our lives with art and connection and an undying love for this physical, biological, chemical marvel that we have the utter privilege of calling home for even the briefest of times.

That is resistance.

It’s fight or flight, and there’s nowhere to run. So fight it is.

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“Don’t allow yourself to be tricked into thinking that the way things are is the way the world must work.” - Charlie Kaufman

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