World Environment Day in an age of fear

This World Environment Day does not feel like previous Environment Days. The rituals remain familiar: plantation drives, sustainability campaigns, corporate green branding, climate pledges, and renewed appeals for ecological care. Yet beneath these annual performances, something deeper appears to have shifted in the global mood itself. We are no longer confronting the environmental crisis in isolation. Climate breakdown is now unfolding inside a wider condition of civilisational anxiety.

The world today is passing through what many scholars increasingly describe as a polycrisis, a historical moment where multiple crises overlap and intensify one another simultaneously. Climate breakdown, wars, democratic erosion, technological disruption, inflation, displacement, economic insecurity, and geopolitical instability no longer operate separately. They increasingly feed into one another, producing a generalised condition of exhaustion, insecurity, and uncertainty across societies. According to the World Health Organisation, the COVID-19 pandemic alone triggered a 25 per cent increase in global prevalence of anxiety and depression worldwide, and today over one billion people are living with mental health disorders, a figure that has continued rising as successive crises compound one another.

Under such conditions, environmental concerns do not simply disappear. Something perhaps more troubling happens instead: they gradually recede into the background while societies reorganise themselves around more immediate anxieties of survival, security, and stability. This is what makes the present moment particularly different. The environmental crisis is now unfolding inside a world increasingly governed by survivalism and defensive politics.

And as insecurity becomes politically central, states, too, begin shifting priorities. Across much of the world, climate cooperation is increasingly overshadowed by militarisation, energy-security anxieties, border politics, and strategic competition. In January 2025, the United States simultaneously withdrew from the Paris Agreement, the UNFCCC process, the IPCC, and the Green Climate Fund, signalling a deeper weakening of the institutional imagination that once sustained global environmental cooperation itself. Recent geopolitical conflicts from Ukraine and Gaza to the expanding military confrontation involving Iran have further exposed how quickly ecological concerns recede once societies enter survival mode.

Wars, emissions, and return of survival politics

The contradiction is striking because the scientific warnings have only become more alarming. According to the World Meteorological Organisation, 2024 was the hottest year ever recorded globally, with average temperatures temporarily crossing the 1.5°C threshold for sustained periods. Atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations have crossed 420 ppm levels unprecedented in human history. The current rate of CO2 increase, approximately 2.5 parts per million per year, is nearly three times faster than the average rate recorded in the 1960s, according to data from NOAA's Mauna Loa Observatory. Yet global emissions continue to remain near record highs despite decades of climate summits and transition promises.

At the same time, military expenditures across the world are increasing dramatically. According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, global military expenditure reached $2.7 trillion in 2024, a 9.4 per cent increase from the previous year and the steepest annual rise since at least 1988, with spending rising for the tenth consecutive year. Wars themselves are becoming major ecological events. A recent study by researchers at Queen Mary University of London estimated that the first 14 days of the Iran conflict alone generated nearly five million tonnes of carbon emissions, exceeding the annual emissions of several smaller nations, including Iceland. Updated research published in One Earth estimated that the Gaza conflict has already generated more than 33 million tonnes of carbon emissions through military operations, reconstruction demands, fires, damaged infrastructure, and fossil-fuel-intensive logistics. Yet military emissions remain weakly regulated and often partially excluded from climate accounting frameworks.

This reveals something deeply unsettling about the contemporary political condition. In moments dominated by insecurity and violence, ecological destruction quickly becomes politically secondary. The environmental crisis remains acknowledged rhetorically, but materially subordinated to the immediate imperatives of survival, protection, and strategic competition.

Fear, mortality, and denial of ecological limits

But perhaps the deeper issue here is not only institutional or technological. It is psychological and civilizational. Environmental politics has always depended upon the difficult ability of societies to think collectively and long-term. Climate action requires restraint, coordination, interdependence, and the willingness to act beyond immediate self-interest. Anxiety, however, often pushes societies in precisely the opposite direction.

This is where Ernest Becker's reflections on the fear of death become newly relevant. Becker argued that much of modern civilisation can be understood as an attempt to manage existential anxiety and human mortality through systems of meaning, expansion, achievement, and symbolic permanence. Building on this insight, Terror Management Theory research repeatedly shows that reminders of mortality often do not produce openness toward collective responsibility. Instead, they push individuals and societies toward stronger attachment to familiar worldviews, greater defensiveness, intensified consumption, nationalism, accumulation, and symbolic forms of control.

Ecological limits become psychologically difficult precisely because they confront societies with finitude, vulnerability, and restraint at a moment when political cultures increasingly promise insulation, security, and endless growth. One can see traces of this everywhere today: the obsession with fortified borders, private protection, gated infrastructures, technological control, and developmental expansion, even in the face of visible ecological breakdown.

Consumer culture, in this sense, does not merely sell comfort. It increasingly sells symbolic protection against vulnerability itself, mobilising forests, rivers, oceans, minerals, and fossil fuels to sustain developmental promises of security, mobility, and permanence. According to UNEP's Global Resources Outlook 2024, global material extraction has more than tripled since 1970 rising from 30 to 106 billion tonnes and is projected to increase a further 60 per cent by 2060. Yet ecological systems cannot endlessly absorb collective anxiety without consequence.

Rise of inverted quarantine

Ironically, the response to ecological breakdown often intensifies the problem further. As environmental conditions worsen, societies increasingly shift toward what sociologist Andrew Szasz called inverted quarantine. Traditional quarantine attempts to collectively contain a threat at its source. Inverted quarantine works in the opposite direction, instead of collectively addressing structural causes, individuals increasingly attempt to privately insulate themselves from the consequences while allowing the larger crisis to continue expanding.

Air purifiers replace the demand for clean air. Bottled water replaces investment in public water systems. In India alone, over 40 per cent of urban households now rely on private RO purifiers for drinking water, and the country's packaged and purified water market reached an estimated USD 40 billion in 2024, a market built almost entirely on the failure of public water infrastructure. Gated communities replace shared urban infrastructures. Private healthcare, climate-controlled consumption, and private generators become substitutes for rebuilding collective ecological resilience. Across cities of the Global South, one increasingly witnesses parallel ecological realities emerging within the same urban space: insulated islands of private survival existing alongside collapsing public infrastructures.

This creates a dangerous feedback loop. Environmental degradation produces anxiety and fragmentation. Fragmentation generates privatised forms of survival. These privatized responses intensify ecological extraction and inequality further, leading to deeper environmental breakdown and even greater social disintegration. Collective action becomes progressively harder precisely when collective coordination becomes most necessary.

And this fragmentation is not politically neutral. Anxiety, scarcity, and insecurity eventually become organised through selective politics of protection rather than democratic ecological solidarity. This perhaps partly explains the contemporary rise of eco-fascist tendencies across different parts of the world. Eco-fascism does not always appear through openly ideological language. Sometimes it emerges more subtly through politics organised around borders, demographic anxieties, selective protection, and securitised access to resources. Climate vulnerability is never distributed equally. Nor is the ability to temporarily escape ecological harm. The World Bank's Groundswell report projects that up to 216 million people could be forced to migrate within their own countries by 2050 due to climate change, the overwhelming majority in the Global South, the regions that have contributed least to the crisis.

Crisis of collective life

At another level, environmental politics today also faces a deeper communicative crisis. For decades, climate discourse largely operated through scientific warnings, policy frameworks, emissions targets, and technical expertise. While all these remain indispensable, they often underestimate the emotional and psychological conditions shaping contemporary societies. Human beings do not respond to crises through information alone. They respond through humiliation, exhaustion, aspiration, identity, and the search for meaning.

This perhaps explains why environmental conversations increasingly oscillate between apocalyptic anxiety and superficial techno-optimism. One side continuously announces collapse; the other promises salvation through green growth and technological innovation. But neither adequately addresses the deeper emotional conditions preventing collective ecological action from taking root. A society exhausted by precarity, war, fragmentation, and acceleration may struggle to sustain long-term ecological thinking even when scientific evidence becomes overwhelming.

And yet the environmental question refuses to disappear. Heat waves intensify. Floods become more frequent. Air grows increasingly toxic. Groundwater collapses. Ecosystems fragment. Climate disasters repeatedly return societies to the same realisation: there is ultimately no fully private escape from ecological collapse. No gated community can indefinitely isolate itself from destabilised climates, toxic air, collapsing groundwater systems, or failing public infrastructures.

The environmental crisis is no longer only a question of sustainability. It is increasingly becoming a question of whether societies organised around fear, acceleration, and privatised survival can still sustain any meaningful form of collective life at all.

(Soumyajit Bhar is Senior Assistant Professor and Assistant Dean at the School of Liberal Studies, BML Munjal University)

The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not purport to reflect the opinions or views of THE WEEK.