> Thinking about and watching climate change can't be good for, say, a teenager imagining their future.
That doesn't make sense. Kids in previous generations had to grow up with things like the omnipresent threat of nuclear annihilation, which had greatly faded into the background until very recently. Also (at least in the 80s) destruction of the environment was a an issue kids were made very aware of. At least when it comes to this teen mental health crisis, the 70s and 80s are often understood to have been far better.
I think pointing to climate change as a cause of the teen mental health crisis is a good illustration of how issue activists can twist and distort perceptions.
I don’t disagree completely but I think one could argue that while we had that threat, the government and people were in agreement that it was a problem to be addressed.
The equivalent today would probably be the United States having a few token nuclear weapons, the Soviet Union stockpiling nuclear weapons, and 30% of the country largely in charge denying that the Soviet Union even exists.
The latter scenario is probably more hopeless and frustrating.
I don't think increasingly poor mental health has much to do with climate change, but the threat of nuclear war is a bad comparison. Bombs either fall or don't. Climate change is a creeping, progressive issue that's visibly worse every few years, and the government has effectively said that that there will be no intervention.
Creeping changes are something you can adapt to and get used to. Nuclear war was (and still is to an extent) a looming boogeyman whose simultaneous distance and nearness, slowness and quickness makes it a literal nightmare horror-show. I mean, it's a literal sword of Damocles.
> and the government has effectively said that that there will be no intervention.
The government said that about nuclear war, too. No one has ever seriously considered getting rid of the bombs.
The average person isn't so blind they don't see the changes. The frog-boiling experiment is a myth. When there are state-spanning fires that darken the sky across the whole country every year, and hurricanes strong enough to shut down city infrastructure are a regular occurrence, and crops fail and lakes run dry and insects that were so thick twenty years ago you couldn't see through them can no longer be found, people notice. I think these things add up to much more psychological damage than the abstract fear of missiles, even if most don't connect it to climate change directly.
That doesn't make sense. Kids in previous generations had to grow up with things like the omnipresent threat of nuclear annihilation, which had greatly faded into the background until very recently. Also (at least in the 80s) destruction of the environment was a an issue kids were made very aware of. At least when it comes to this teen mental health crisis, the 70s and 80s are often understood to have been far better.
I think pointing to climate change as a cause of the teen mental health crisis is a good illustration of how issue activists can twist and distort perceptions.