Is rage the antidote to eco anxiety?

I tell myself that pursuing a greener lifestyle is, really, all about empowerment.

I tell myself that every step we have taken so far and will take in future to reduce our personal impact on the Earth is about wrestling back control of something that seems not only out of our individual control, but out of almost everyone’s right now.

The kids, I tell myself, are going to be OK after all because we, and many like us, will keep working to do better on our carbon footprint, on pollution, on awareness and self-education every day and that we won’t ever let up.

In many ways then, our family’s environmental position and the actions we take in our private family life has always been a domestic matter, not a political one. Sure we vote in accordance with our environmental priorities, we have written to our MPs, signed petitions and joined our kids on climate marches and demonstrations, but so far at least, it has all been a fairly contained, and deeply personal, road less travelled.

Something has changed though.

To be honest, the last week has been a depressing and infuriating combination of dire reports and political impotence, culminating in more than one online search for tips on dealing with eco anxiety. Somehow, I don’t think it’s just me either.

The warnings from the UN - that greenhouse gas concentrations hit a new record last year, and increased at the fastest rate in the last decade despite deep restrictions to industry, movement and consumption across the world thanks to Covid - wasn’t a great start.

Oh, and now, even with all those 2030 carbon reduction pledges, we’re on course for a rise in global temperatures of 2.7C. It’s officially nothing short of catastrophic.

And yet our politicians don’t appear to have got the message.

With Cop 26 – our very last chance to turn this around as a collection of supposed leaders – now within breathing distance, there was, for example, the bizarre matter of our prime minister describing environmentalists as sandal wearers and carrot pointers simply for championing the ground source heat pumps his government has just announced subsidies for.

But that was only a tiny precursor to last week’s main event – the deep rage unleashed from every corner of the country and every walk of life over the latest vote on the Environment Bill last week.

The bill, whose broad aim is to set targets and policies for improving and protecting the natural environment, from waste to air quality and biodiversity, came back from the House of Lords with a handful of key amendments on air quality, bee protection and water pollution through raw sewage dumping.

Unless you’ve been hanging out under a rock somewhere, you’ll already know that the Tories largely did what they were told and voted those amendments down. That includes my MP incidentally, junior environment minister Rebecca Pow, who has spent this year repeatedly promising to improve and protect the health of our waterways.

You’ll also know that the British public, now nauseatingly aware that raw sewage was pumped into our rivers and seas more than 400,000 times last year for a total of more than 3 million hours, went nuts.

I get that MPs are understandably twitchy following recent traumatic events, but not all of the social media backlash on this has been abusive. Indeed, everything I have seen has been a constituent calling their MP to account while batting away the frantic gaslighting over the cost and practicality of upgrading our antiquated system.

Our politicians would do well to remember what happened this week because this feels like a pivotal moment.

This was the week that the British people told their representatives, on social media, by phone, by letter and no doubt in person, that they had collectively recognised an extraordinarily obvious and absolute truth – that nothing else matters, not the influence of highly profitable businesses nor that of the whip, without our health and, ultimately, without our very survival.

The result? A government U-turn that saw tougher legal controls on water firms dumping raw sewage in the sea and rivers.

To be very clear, we will not let up. We will be checking the votes. We will call our MPs to account on their environmental position every single time. And as more of us see the writing on the wall that they choose to turn away from, we are only going to get louder.

Maybe this week has been about empowerment after all.