By Jacob Chalif

The Adirondack mountains of New York. Photo: Jacob Chalif.

When I mention in conversation that I am a climate scientist, I invariably hear one of two responses. People will either jokingly ask, “are we doomed?” or they will earnestly ask, “how are you not depressed?”

These responses touch on a real issue.

The fear and hopelessness surrounding climate change is serious, especially in young people. In a 2021 survey of 10,000 young adults (aged 16–25) across the world, most reported feelings of sadness, anger, fear, or anxiety due to climate change. Nearly half of the respondents said these feelings negatively affect their daily functioning.

With science under attack on all fronts and environmental protections thrown out daily, it seems easier than ever to succumb to despair. But to be honest, I’ve never and still don’t feel climate anxiety.

I’ve often struggled to convey how I remain calm, but in an effort to spread some climate optimism, I’m going to try.

My climate studies grew out of an esoteric love for mountains. Growing up in suburbia, I found my release each summer roaming the gentle woods and peaks of the Adirondacks. If you’ve never been, the High Peak Wilderness Area, in the heart of the Adirondacks, is a remarkable place. Unlike the Greens and Whites to the east, which are bespeckled with towns and lashed with roads and highways, there are hardly any roads that weave through the Adirondack High Peaks. Looking out from the comparatively densely packed mountaintops there, I felt uncomfortably and thrillingly like I had entered a world within the mountains.

This was where I first came to know a feeling encapsulated by Nan Shepherd, the mid-20th century Scottish novelist, in her beautiful, almost mystic nature memoir, The Living Mountain. Mountain lovers, Shepherd wrote, are “fey, a little mad, in the eyes of the folk who do not climb.”

I certainly felt fey, and I embraced it. Like Shepherd, there has always been something about the mountains that has fueled me. “I am a mountain lover because my body is at its best in the rarer air of the heights and communicates its elation to the mind,” she wrote. I began my traipses in the mountains toiling to reach this “rarer air.” I sought directly for the treeline, completely forsaking the forest and streams along the way. I’ll confess I still do this, sometimes.

With time, I began to spend more of my days rambling the wooded valleys than running the ridgelines; to leave the trails entirely and wander through dense foliage, bogs, and meadows. I learned to appreciate intuitively the geologic processes that led us precisely to where we are today: that unfathomably large ice sheets dropped the immense boulders I found shelter under, and that soils are caught in a constant struggle between trees, the great slope stabilizers, and running water, bane to trail builders. As a scientist, I came to understand that our very atmosphere is chemically unstable at its essence, but sustained only by a complex network of physical and biological processes.

Yet, as Shepherd put it, “the more one learns of this intricate interplay of soil, altitude, weather, and the living tissues of plant and insect… the more the mystery deepens.” This has certainly proven true for me as I began researching Earth’s climate.

Every 100,000 years, for instance, the Adirondacks and Vermont are completely scoured by a mile-thick ice sheet—only the highest points of the tallest mountains may have emerged from the ice sheets as minor nunataks. Just 15,000 years or so have passed since the ice sheet last receded from this area, leaving a barren tundra in its aftermath. Yet since then, in a geologic blink of time, soils regenerated, forests readvanced, ecosystems flourished, humans moved in, westerners deforested the landscape and killed off many big animals, and now forests are regrowing and natural habitats are expanding yet again.

Earth’s resilience, demonstrated here, is the basis of my optimism. If you go farther back in history, you’ll find a series of five “mass extinction” events, including the asteroid impact that killed the dinosaurs. Each of these events eliminated over 70% of species on Earth. Many scientists believe that humans are in the midst of causing a sixth mass extinction.

I understand why it may be difficult to find solace here, but bear with me. For a moment, try to shed an anthropocentric worldview. I am inspired here by Lovelock and Margulis’ Gaia hypothesis, which asserts that life on Earth has shepherded the planet to remain habitable over eons, virtually rendering Earth as a living being of its own. Earth persisted after previous mass extinctions, and Earth will recover in the future. Jeff Goldbum, as Jurassic Park’s Ian Macolm, said it simply: “life finds a way.”

While this philosophy—looking past people—might seem nihilistic on the surface, on the contrary it helps me find meaning. In my wandering, I have developed an infinitesimal understanding and kinship with Earth. I can’t put it better than Shepherd: “Simply to look on anything, such as a mountain, with the love that penetrates to its essence, is to widen the domain of being in the vastness of non-being. Man has no other reason for his existence.”

Try to comprehend Earth’s incomprehensible long arch of history, briefly join its wildness by rambling aimlessly through the woods, seek to see our imprint as just a ripple in the current of time, and find comfort that Earth will be okay. On humanity, well we don’t have the luxury of geologic time to see us through, which is why I work on climate change issues. But Earth, with all its endless mystery and extraordinary life, will persist and grow only stranger and more wonderful.

In my mind, I’ve often likened our impact on the planet to the permafrost wasteland left behind by an ice sheet. So, I’ll close with one last excerpt from Shepherd, remarking on the resilience of Scottish alpine flora. “These toughs of the mountain top, with their angelic inflorescence and the devil in their roots, have had the cunning and the effrontery to cheat, not only a winter, but an Ice Age.”