Public concern over environmental change is at a record high. Doomsday scenarios are capturing the headlines at an accelerating rate.
Eco-anxiety is defined by the Climate Psychology Alliance as “heightened emotional, mental or somatic distress in response to dangerous changes in the climate system".
“Ecological grief” has been described as “The grief felt in relation to experienced or anticipated ecological losses, including the loss of species, ecosystems, and meaningful landscapes due to acute or chronic environmental change".
To balance the term ‘topophilia’, a love of place, environmental philosopher Glenn Albrecht opposes ‘solastalgia’ — the desolate feeling associated with the chronic decline of a homescape. Solastalgia names the emotions we have at the loss of species and habitats through climate change and other environmental changes.
Ecopsychologists Linda Buzzell and Craig Chalquist have put together a list of “eco emotions”, in which they list – to name a few – eco-dissociation (the way that we “forget” that we are an interconnected part of nature and instead see ourselves as superior or separate from it), eco-rage (for example, anger at those we see as responsible for climate change) and eco-guilt (seeing humanity as a dangerous, destructive parasite on earth and feeling a sense of personal responsibility).
A Yale survey (Climate Change in the American Mind: March 2018) shows that 62% of participants said they were "somewhat" worried when it comes to climate. That number is up from 49% in 2010. The number of those who claimed to be "very" worried was 21%, which is double the rate of a similar study conducted in 2015. Another 2018 survey showed that 70% of people in the US say that they are worried about climate change, or that they feel helpless (51%).
A survey in January 2020 found that 2/3 of young people in the UK are experiencing eco-anxiety.
Although it is helpful to know that you are not alone in your worrying about the future, labelling it as a form of anxiety risks pathologizing a perfectly natural response to an existential threat.
It can seem a little rich for privileged white Westerns to cry about their environmental grief when we have barely begun to see the impacts of climate change, while our brothers and sisters across the globe are already suffering the results of droughts, floods, extreme heat and crop failures. Unless we are willing to work through and process our own feelings, we are likely to do more harm than good.