Besides, I joked to some friends recently, I’m unlikely to live long enough to even develop lip wrinkles from the smoking, let alone lung cancer. Think: The chronic, ongoing anxiety of living in a world that’s so uncertain, where starvation or war or forced migration or suicide replace traditional retirement plans. Photograph: Alamy

On the other side of dread and overwhelm, lie solutions, action, and hope. It captures what has become known as the , something which many astronauts experience when they leave Earth’s atmosphere and look back at this blue-and-white swirled marble spinning through the darkness of space and realise that this is home.

There are small groups popping up around the country, led mostly by therapists who call themselves eco-psychologists, that are pulling together to support people as we confront the enormity of it allOne group that I’m working with is designing a process that involves moving beyond the cold, brutal facts of climate collapse, ecological overshoot, and the reality that we are bringing about an extinction level event. In truth, we also can’t repackage these messages in catchy three-minute video clips when the newsroom budget for a feature-length idea barely pays for a basket of groceries, let alone what it takes to put out a slick multi-media package. This makes the threat of World War II look like a kindergarten pantomime. The way we were schooled to plan for old age don’t hold true anymore. If we stopped GHG emissions tomorrow we’d be in some trouble. There is something exhilarating, too, in reading a novel whose context is wider than human life. She’s spent her life proving that trees talk with one another, and trying to convince the world that these precious entities are more than just potential lumber. At the heart of the novel are two women, Patricia Westerford, a botanist who “discovers” that trees are communal, that they communicate with each other, an idea that costs her an academic job before the intellectual fashions change and it makes her famous. I figured it’s a safer way, in the short-term, to self medicate through the stress of this. If societal collapse really is on our doorstep, and many of us may not die of natural causes in the unfolding geopolitical mayhem, does it matter if I die traumatically in 20 years’ time, or now? Patricia gives up her life for the study of trees, Olivia dedicates herself to the eco-cause, Neelay to his virtual game, and so the ordinary diversity that tends to shape plot on a human scale doesn’t get much of a look-in: marriages, kids, jobs, moving house, fighting with friends. Package your messaging as funky animated videos or powerful short movies. Patricia Westerford is a botanist whose life’s work made her an inadvertent champion for saving the old growth forests in North America. The exception is Patricia Westerford, a botanist, author of The Secret Forest, opponent of clear cutting, and Powers’s spokesperson, who is about twenty years older than the others. We cannot afford to turn our gaze away from what seems inevitable. Game publisher Electronic Arts has been voted "The Worst Company in America" two years in a row 2012 and 2013.There are many great benefits to being a Maverick Insider. Because if we don’t, the fatigue will, quite literally, kill us. Lawyer and activist The fibres of my being have finished screaming. Photograph: Alamy A romance takes place several hundred feet up a giant redwood in the novel. Patricia Westerford is a botanist who discovers how trees communicate with each other, and is first vilified then revered for her work. Characters die, from gas poisoning or suicide or strokes; marriages collapse; people get arrested. Neelay Mehta, son of a Silicon Valley engineer, grows up dreaming of code until he realises that the genetic sequences written into the various trees of the Stanford arboretum bear a profound relationship to his own computer programs – inspiring him to create a game that reproduces as closely as possible the complexities of the real world.If all of this sounds high concept, that’s because it is; but Powers is also skilled at capturing a character, a family, a culture with a few swift brushstrokes. By various ways and men, she ends up fighting the destruction of California’s redwoods. We must confront the reality of this unprecedented existential threat that our species has brought to all of life on Earth.

Although we’ve tried that too. Removing advertising from your browsing experience is one of them - we don't just block ads, we redesign our pages to look smarter and load faster. And still the editors are reluctant to commission or publish these pieces, and readership of these articles is distressingly low.Try to keep your stories light, supporters of the cause suggest. It draws together a bundle of useful, everyday tools to deal with the grief, fear, and dread so that we can move through the kind of freeze response that psychologists like professor Susan Clayton say is typical in the face of emotional overload, so we can find our agency within the collapsing system. Powers, according to the dust jacket, lives in the foothills of the Great Smoky Mountains, and to be fair, his treescape is more sentimental. Old-growth is that which has evolved without human interference. We must move effectively towards creating what writer Jeremy Lent calls an But more than anything, as each of us faces another few decades of this exhausting Sisyphean battle, we need to help each other survive the daily toil.


I’ve started smoking again, after 20 years of clean living. Regeneration is the point. Photograph: Alamy Family tree … taking photographs of a horse chestnut becomes a family tradition in The Overstory. I’m not the only one feeling this way. Her plan is to die before she leaves the podium. The real point of nature was to go out in it and have a feeling; it was a necessary luxury of the poetic classes. But we are INCREASING THEM. After 17 years of doing what feels like a doomsday audit of this unfolding catastrophe, with what appears to be little measurable impact, I’ve spent the past two years giving at least a third of my billable time to pro-bono writing, in an effort to turn up the temperature on our collective conversation.