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The planet is heating up and unchecked climate panic can stoke eco-fascism. So how can we keep calm — and save the planet?
BY ADRIENNE MATEI
IWAS A CLIMATE-ANXIOUS undergraduate before the concept of cli- mate anxiety really caught on. A decade ago, when I told my friends and family I was deeply worried about warming oceans, plastic pollution, and climate
denialism, they often asked, gently, “Okay, but what’s really going on?” They couldn’t understand the emotional intensity of my concern and thought I was being dramatic or deflecting from something else troubling me. Sometimes, I wondered if anyone else really understood what it felt like to watch the clock tick down toward probable doom.
Now, I know that many people do un- derstand and relate to the effects of climate change on mental health and well-being. In the years since my early experience with climate anxiety, the term’s use has skyrock- eted and a new taxonomy has emerged to capture its various nuances, such as “eco- grief,” “psychoterratic illness,” “climate trauma,” and “solastalgia.” In 2020, a study by the American Psychological Association found nearly half of young adults aged 18 to 34 feel stress over climate change daily. A recent study of Nunatsiavut found longer periods of warm temperatures significantly increased mental health clinic visits in Inuit communities. And a September 2021 Bath
University survey of over 10,000 16-to-25- year-olds across 10 countries found that 75 per cent believe “the future is frightening.”
Climate anxiety is a kind of suffering; fearing the future is a terrible burden. Howev- er, around 2016, when I started to see studies and articles about climate anxiety appear more frequently in the media, I interpret- ed the rise as indicative of a positive shift away from climate denialism and toward a non-partisan awareness that climate change is happening and will impact us all. Simply having a collective understanding of the issue would, I thought, be unifying; together we can fight the major causes of environmental degradation. We can transition out of fos- sil fuel−based economies and address the inequalities of wealth and power that both underpin the causes of climate change and condemn our planet’s most vulnerable peo- ple to its most devastating and immediate effects. “Now,” I thought, “we are all on the same page.”
Turns out I was not exactly right about that. It is becoming increasingly clear that cli- mate anxiety can affect us all very differently. For those with milder cases, like me, it can be stressful, though manageable — even provid- ing motivation to make eco-friendly lifestyle changes or pursue advocacy work. In more
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