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By Chiara Klein
The lecture hall seats were the kind that sprung back into a folding position if you didn’t sit in them fast enough. That’s one of those details I remember years later, for no particular reason. It made for pretty awkward attempts at sitting down, made worse if you were late and therefore visible to the rest of the assembled class.
I sat close to the front, to avoid having to look over a sea of heads to see the professor who stood on a sort of shallow stage at the front of the hall. The class was Geography 103: Environment and Society, taught by Robert Wilson, Associate Professor in the Geography and Environment Department. He went on to become a friend and mentor and we are still in touch on Facebook, affording me the ability to see his son grow up and his work be published.
However, in our first encounters, he scared the daylights out of me. A gentle, soft-spoken man, it was not his demeanor nor harsh grading that created an impending sense of doom every time I entered his classroom. Rather, it was the graphs and charts he was putting up on the screen, showing that the earth was in seriously bad shape.
Given that this was an intro-level class, the students were hardly eco-warriors. It was more of an “I need this to graduate” kind of class. Still, I remember being shocked by the apparent apathy of the students around me, as Professor Wilson hurled out stats and facts that made my blood run cold. It wasn’t just the polar bears melting off their ice caps; it was much, much scarier than that.
I looked around and saw students covertly playing on their phones, staring into space, fiddling with their hair…no one seemed particularly concerned. Meanwhile, my body was filled with dread. Those first few weeks of learning about the climate crisis, I lost sleep. I would lay awake in my closet-sized dorm room turning this knowledge over in my mind against my will: how could this have happened? What would the future look like? It did really feel like the ground was crumbling under me. Looking back, I can now identify this potent combination of grief and fear as “climate anxiety” or “eco-anxiety.”
The concept was first defined, although the term itself hadn’t yet been coined, by Thomas Doherty and Susan Clayton in their paper The Psychological Impacts of Global Climate Change, published in “American Psychologist” in 2011. According to a New York Times article titled “Climate Change Enters the Therapy Room,” these early findings were initially met with skepticism that has since dissipated: climate anxiety and its related emotions are becoming widely acknowledged and prioritized—and not just in formal therapy settings.
Lying awake staring at the ceiling during what should have been a liberating time as an undergrad, I could see no way forward. How could I impact the trajectory of a global climate crisis? But, like so many first encountering the data, I felt like I had to do something. My chance came several weeks later, sitting in the back of our campus chapel, listening to author and environmental activist Bill McKibben speak about the fossil fuel divestment campaign he said was sweeping the nation. I had only seen McKibben’s name in articles for class and, full disclosure, I was only in attendance at his evening lecture for extra credit. But sitting there listening to his call to action, seeing photos of large groups of students gathered in exuberant protest, I felt a stirring. And as soon as he closed his remarks and asked for questions, my hand was the first in the air.
For many, understandably, the experience of climate anxiety creates a paralysis that, as some psychologists are beginning to argue, is actually a major reason why climate action has been and continues to be so stalled.
In “Hijacked by Anxiety: How Climate Dread is Hindering Climate Action,” Dr. Renee Lertzman, a climate and environmental psychologist, explains that “in simple terms, the human psyche is hardwired to disengage from information or experiences that are overwhelmingly difficult or disturbing. This is particularly true if an individual feels powerless to affect change.”
Therefore, she, and others, make the case that climate anxiety is not only affecting our day to day lives and happiness, it is also sending us further and further down the road of climate destruction.
Fortunately for me and my budding climate anxiety, Bill McKibben responded to my question with a ready-made solution. When I asked what if we were ready to take action, he suggested starting a fossil fuel divestment campaign at my university.
So when the talk concluded, I made my way up to the front of the chapel, pulled a sheet of lined paper from my notebook, and stood at the front of the room, asking people if they wanted to join the campaign that did not yet exist. Between myself and an equally eager grad student, we had almost two full sheets of email addresses in only a few minutes. The question then became, what’s next?
Caroline Hickman, psychology lecturer at the University of Bath, contends that “climate trauma has been lurking within western society’s collective psyche for the last 40 years, rendering most people unable to act on the looming crisis we have known for decades would come.”
So where does that leave us now? Well, for most of us not responsible for fossil fuel production, policy, or sales, it leaves us in the precarious position of knowing we are careening towards an unlivable future, while still being obligated to carry on the normal routines of everyday life, and even trying to plan for said unlivable future with some level of optimism. What does that look like? Well, pretty fractured and chaotic.
A close friend of mine recently had her climate anxiety come to a head largely in the form of guilt (a frequent bedfellow of anxiety). She primarily felt guilty for her choices as a consumer and how she was contributing to wildly unsustainable supply chains and the generation of waste.
Her response was to, unsurprising in this day and age, start an Instagram documenting her journey to live more sustainably. She stayed consistent and active with it for many weeks, purchasing sustainable products from sustainable brands and doing product reviews, sharing insight, including relatable faux pas and slip-ups, and making inspiring but accessible changes in her lifestyle.
Eventually, of course, life caught up. And the demands of the day to day meant she had to drop some things from her plate. Understandably, her sustainable living Instagram was left on the cutting room floor. Now, when we talk about the crisis of the world, she proverbially throws her hands up and laments how it just feels like there’s nothing we can do.
Her response is not a character flaw and it’s not unique to her. So many of us struggle with this cognitive whiplash day in and day out: if we’re paying attention, we know how bad things are. But with no tangible, impactful way to make anything better, we tune out and try to repress our dread, or else carry it around with us as a nameless anxiety that has no cure.
Then when we do try to tune in again, we are automatically overwhelmed, overstimulated and, oh yeah, in the time we were away, things have gotten worse. It is evident that we can’t live like this and neither can the planet. So what is the answer?
According to Dr. Doherty, some answers can be found in employing elements of cognitive behavioral therapy and existential therapy (also known as logotherapy) in a fairly traditional therapy setting to aid people in processing their guilt, grief, and fear to the point where they can function effectively in their daily lives and maybe even contribute to the efforts to mitigate climate change in a meaningful way.
The goal is not, as a client of Dr. Doherty says, relief. Relief, she says, would potentially erase the urgency of the moment and release her from her obligation to be engaged in the fight.
Rather, the goal is to be able to face the situation realistically, while making meaning in whatever ways we can. Existential therapy, for what it’s worth, was founded by Viktor E. Frankl after surviving the Holocaust in Auschwitz. Dr. Doherty sees the scale of threat as being similar.
Myself and a group of other committed students formed a chapter of the fossil fuel divestment campaign at our university. We researched, we reached out, we gained faculty support, we wrote op-eds, we stood outside buildings in protest.
We even slept a now-forgotten number of nights in an administration building on campus, when the demands we wrote up in a manifesto of sorts were not being met. We were bolstered by the enthusiasm and optimism of youth, and buffered from the world by our privileged position as university students. We secured a victory the year after I graduated: our university divested their massive endowment from the fossil fuel industry. We celebrated, we congratulated each other, life went on. Climate change continued to blaze a path forward.
This is not to undermine the achievement; certainly, if nothing else, the decision our university made inspired other groups to start at other universities, prompting them to eventually make the same symbolic decision. But from the standpoint of climate anxiety and mitigation efforts, nothing much changed. The crisis continued to grow and life continued to make exponentially increasing demands.
Now when I experience climate anxiety, it is with the exhaustion of adulthood. When the climate crisis is piled on top of COVID-19, unending student debt, inflation, personal challenges, violence, racism, and global conflict, it’s hard to even be stirred to the point of anxiety. Instead, now, climate emotion presents itself as a steady, low-level feeling of unease.
Nothing is ever completely okay because our planet is slowly dying in the background. I, like many, am fortunate enough to live in a place and in an income bracket where I don’t face regular climate disasters or consistent evidence that climate change is even happening—that is not the case for the most vulnerable populations, at greatest risk of climate disaster.
I am in the privileged position of needing to either pay attention to the news or pay close attention to the phenology of nature around me to know that climate change is happening. Neither of which I am too keen to do because I feel at emotional capacity nearly all of the time.
But in the times I allow myself to think about the future, or do more than glance at a climate crisis headline, the feeling is grim. Unlike a painful season of life, no one can or would be advised to reassure that there is an ending in sight. There isn’t.
So beyond hiring a climate therapist, how can we manage these emotions for our own well-being? How do we address this constantly looming yet largely decentralized threat to our existence and the existence of all life we know? If we ourselves are not grappling with these emotions, how do we help those who are?
Since my time as a climate activist, my worldview has shifted many times. My energy has become more selective, and my life has naturally become more nuanced and complicated. I have engaged with the environmental sphere as an educator, policy advocate, student, and writer.
I have approached the climate crisis from many angles, though none with as much vigor as when I was first understanding the threat we were under. I go in and out of concern. I let the mundane take over sometimes. I allow joy and I allow myself to tune out. This is not to say that any of these choices are the “right” way to engage with climate emotion.
However, what I will say is that there are things that I have found that make the emotion more manageable: community and mindfulness. Both of these practices serve to build resilience in the face of fear and grief. Mindfulness can be formal meditating or it can be any number of grounding practices: gardening, walking, deep breathing, dancing, hiking—anything that connects us to the energy of the present moment and creates perspective and space.
Community allows us to be held. It enables us to feel the collective and use it to move ourselves forward. It dispels our hopelessness by reminding us that we are not alone. And in a very practical sense, there is strength in numbers.
There was always the chance that we would not successfully convince our university to divest. There was also the glaringly obvious fact that getting our university to divest would not stop the climate crisis.
Taking the action to form the campaign and therefore feeling purposeful was, I believe, a secondary benefit. The primary benefit was being able to sit in a room full of people— undergrads, graduate students, professors, staff—and be able to dialogue about our fears, our grief, our frustration, and our outrage. And then to be able to eat meals, attend events, study, play, and travel with these same people.
The benefit was in the shared experience of the immense emotion, of the enormity of the moment, of the call to action, and in the ability to recognize ourselves in others—In doing so, we felt less alone. Disconnection is destabilizing. It is misleading and it breeds negative emotion and despondency. In order to bring ourselves and our world out of this crisis, we must reconnect with each other and with the world around us.
A list of resources for reconnecting, processing, and moving forward:
Sources:
“‘Hijacked by Anxiety’: How Climate Dread Is Hindering Climate Action | Environmental Activism | The Guardian.” Accessed April 4, 2022. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/oct/08/anxiety-climate-crisis-trauma-paralysing-effect-psychologists?fbclid=IwAR2jfkHZXSi7NFqEWocXI-kY3jTxR-jXwXbS2UDPecN42bnjsv70p4D79SI.
“Climate Change Enters the Therapy Room - The New York Times.” Accessed April 4, 2022. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/06/health/climate-anxiety-therapy.html?fbclid=IwAR3W2brcFrozyTRnwAKNtKsPCeUvNyVvnKRb39qCM-Iy9PIIPEFkjEM6meE.
Pihkala, Panu. “Toward a Taxonomy of Climate Emotions.” Frontiers in Climate 3 (2022). https://www.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/fclim.2021.738154.
Doherty, Thomas. “Dr. Thomas Doherty Offering Climate Therapy Training for Mental Health Professionals.” Sustainable Self (blog), September 15, 2021. https://selfsustain.com/blog/dr-thomas-doherty-offering-climate-therapy-training-for-mental-health-professionals/.
Foundation, Thomson Reuters. “The Rise in Climate Anxiety: Expert Tips on How to Beat It.” news.trust.org. Accessed February 23, 2022.https://news.trust.org/item/20220210091958-dwe56/.