Earth: The final frontier and the failure of fear-based climate messaging

This past weekend I received an email from a young adult from the US struggling with climate anxiety. Their email, and our follow-up conversation over Zoom, are what inspired me to write this piece.

As I wrote last year, one of the biggest surprises I found upon my return to the University of Victoria 1n 2021 after spending 7 1/2 years in the BC Legislature was the overall increase in underlying climate anxiety being experienced by students in my classes. I’ve been teaching at the university level since the mid 1980s. For most of this time, the students considered global warming to be an esoteric and highly uncertain distant future threat to others, somewhere else in the world – but not any more.

While I was not surprised that another young adult reached out to discuss their struggles with climate anxiety, their email was particularly thoughtful. It contained quotes that they had seen in the media or heard in conversations with their friends, and a link to a recent ITV Good Morning Britain interview with Canadian William Shatner, better known as Captain Kirk  from the Star Trek series.

Mr. Shattner is 92. He is passionate about climate change. Yet I struggle to understand what he was hoping to accomplish in the interview. It was over the top, outrageous and, in my opinion, utterly irresponsible. For example, when asked by the ITV reporter “So you don’t think it is an overreaction to say we’re digging our own graves“. Shatner responded incredulously “No, no, no it’s not dramatic enough.  We’re burrowing into our own graves” . “Really?“, the interviewer responded at which point Shatner lays into him: “I’m so unhappy that you don’t understand how imperative the situation is. We’re dying man, the seas are going to rise…  to me I’m stupefied that you as being a reporter aren’t filled with that passion“.

Later in the interview Shatner berates the reporter “you failed to grasp the dire situation. We’re talking about 20, 30 years.  We’re talking about .. are you married?“. “No”  the interviewer replied. “Are you going to get married? asked Shatner, “possibly” was the response. Shatner pushed further: “Do you want children?”, to which the reporter replied “possibly,  yes“.  Getting the answer he was obviously hoping for, Shatner  insisted “You want children. Your children are going to have difficulty LIVING. Do you understand that?”

But here’s the kicker, when the reporter asked Shatner “what sort of changes have you made in your life, because you are so passionate about the climate issue, what are you doing differently now that you perhaps weren’t doing 5,  10 years ago.” All Shatner could come up with in response was this: “I haven’t eaten meat in 6 months.  I was at a hamburger thing I got the other plant made vegan thing“. Really?

I am very disappointed in Mr. Shatner. He has a platform, a public profile and the potential to influence people of all ages. Yet he chooses to use this platform in a completely unhinged way to imply the world only has 20 to 30 years left because of climate change and other anthropogenic environmental influences.

Now I recognize some will just dismiss my concerns by saying he’s just an old guy with odd views that shouldn’t be taken seriously. Unfortunately, such views from his position of influence do a lot of damage and undermine the efforts of so many who recognize the seriousness of climate change yet reject his outlandish prognostications. His words would land like a 16 ton weight on younger generations. How dare he espouse his unhinged views about the end of the world when all he has done is not eaten meat for six months. The hypocrisy and demonstrable lack of leadership is shameful.

When I wrote a piece for in The Conversation last summer decrying an outrageous story  in the Guardian claiming  “Gulf Stream could collapse as early as 2025, study suggests”, I appealed to Hannah Ritchie’s elegant framework for how people see the world and their ability to facilitate change.

Ritchie, a senior researcher at the Oxford Martin School, lumped people into four general categories based on combinations of those who are optimistic and those who are pessimistic about the future, as well as those who believe and those who don’t believe that we have agency to shape the future based on today’s decisions and actions.

Ritchie persuasively argued that more people located in the green “optimistic and changeable” box are what is needed to advance climate solutions. Those positioned elsewhere are not effective in advancing such solutions.

More importantly, rather than instilling a sense of optimism that global warming is a solvable problem, the extreme behaviour (fear mongering or civil disobedience) of the “pessimistic changeable” group (in which I include William Shatner) often does nothing more than drive the public towards the “pessimistic not changeable” group.

Mr. Shatner is not alone in channelling his own climate anxiety in ways that drive people to despondency and apathy (we’re all doomed and there’s nothing we can go about it – the red box). But unlike most, he speaks from a very large podium.

Next time Mr. Shatner wants to decry the state of the world from his personal, rather than scientific, perspective, perhaps he could tell us more about what he is doing about climate change from his position of privilege. Leadership involves demonstrating through your own actions what you are expecting in others. Failing that, Mr. Shatner’s is just taking a page out of Granpa Simpson’s playbook.