This chapter is authored by clinicians Elizabeth Allured, PsyD (EA) and Barbara Easterlin, PhD (BE), both experienced in working with climate distressedFootnote ¹ youth clients. The focus of this chapter is on therapeutic perspectives and techniques. All client names used in the vignettes are pseudonyms.

Introduction: Hearing the Voices of Children and Parents

Therapist Defense Against Their Own Climate Distress

What happens when we read these children’s words? Does hearing these concerns set off too much anxiety of our own? It is hard to imagine a more tragic situation than the deaths of children due to a disaster that is unfolding because grown people, especially those controlling governments and businesses, will not adequately protect them. Hearing children’s fears may increase clinicians’ own anxiety, guilt, sadness, helplessness, rage, and other conflicting emotions tied to the climate emergency. Anxiety in particular is a response to losing important aspects of one’s sense of self or community and signals that something is amiss, that danger or losses lie ahead from an upcoming decision. If there is too little anxiety, dangers might be ignored. But if anxiety is too high, a kind of “emotional paralysis” can set in. Clinicians are not immune to this, nor are parents.

When we have brought up the climate crisis with parents, some of them have said, “It’s too much. I just try not to think about it.” This discomfort is not only quite noticeable to children but can also significantly impact adults’ ability to hear children’s attempts to discuss the topic.

Starting in earliest infancy, we are continually “reading” and “sending” emotional and social signals to those in close proximity (Beebe & Lachman, Reference Beebe and Lachman2013). Even infants a few months old react strongly to their caregivers’ emotional states. Our emotional energy is felt, even if we are silent or saying something quite different. This is partly because much of our communication is nonverbal; for example, our body language might convey tension or calmness, curiosity or disinterest, acceptance or rejection. Likewise, our voice tone, gestures, length of conversation, and distance or proximity to a child convey our intentions to deepen a conversation or to close it down. Messages to children are more often accepted and taken seriously when adults’ verbal and nonverbal messages are congruent. If we tell our children that we care about the ecosystem we are leaving them, yet do not take any actions toward protecting it, they may interpret our statement with mistrust.

For all these reasons, preparing to talk with youth about the climate crisis involves understanding our own feelings and thoughts. Our words must convey our honest, complex reactions in a digestible form without withholding the truth or trying to inappropriately reassure young people. Just as each child needs a listener to help them think about this challenging environmental situation, clinicians too need support in building awareness of their responses to this great threat to humanity and to children in particular. Expressing reactions to friends, colleagues, or family members can help clinicians listen to youth without bumping into unprocessed feelings of their own.

Clinicians who welcome climate conversations provide young people with a sense of stability as they sort through their varied reactions, which in turn establishes the therapist as a safe source of information, guidance, and community.

The Therapist as a Role Model for Managing Climate Distress

When children develop typically, they expect that adults will protect them and teach them how to recognize and react to dangers, both practically and emotionally. Currently, many children find that their parents and other authority figures are not useful role models for taking the climate crisis seriously because these adult figures are not acting as if their lives depended upon swift action. Mental health clinicians can step into this needed role by modeling an awareness of climate-related danger and risks, respect for related emotions, and willingness to consider climate change as a factor in life decisions. In line with research showing that tolerating uncertainty about climate change leads to greater engagement with the topic in adolescents (Ojala, Reference Ojala2015), clinicians can also model living with real uncertainty about whether action will be taken in time to avert the worst of the crises. Clinicians can reveal environmentally engaged aspects of themselves without “proselytizing” directly or indirectly by including sustainability themes in the waiting room or by offering play therapy materials that might engage environmental feelings. Young people are attracted to learning from and following Greta Thunberg, who models a life based on a reduced carbon impact and speaking the scientific truth about the problem. In a similar and therapeutically helpful way, clinicians can model an “environmentally examined” life, a life that is abreast of the climate science and bases decisions upon this new reality.

When Is Treatment Indicated for Climate Distress?

Not all climate distress requires treatment. Consulo et al. (Reference Consulo, Harper, Minor, Hayes, Williams and Howard2020) and others suggest that ecological threats are a cause for reasonable concern and possibly anxiety, but not necessarily a mental health problem requiring intervention. With support, validation, and encouragement of values-driven action, many people are able to manage their climate distress without psychological intervention. However, in our clinical experience, climate-informed therapy may be indicated when climate distress amplifies subthreshold or comorbid mental health vulnerabilities such as addiction, mood disorders, anxiety disorders, past trauma, and other psychiatric disorders. These conditions may also be exacerbated by extreme weather events or disasters, in which case treatment should be considered.

Climate-Informed Therapy Issues Specific to Children and Youth

Climate-Aware Intake and Assessment

Clayton and Karazsia (Reference Clayton and Karazsia2020) have published a validated climate anxiety research scale for adults; however, there are currently no validated measures of climate-related feelings for children for use in therapeutic settings. Without such scales, we advocate adding an item or two regarding the future to our diagnostic interviews conducted in the very beginning phases of therapy. An open-ended question such as “what are your concerns about the future?” can let our young clients know that we are open to the conversation about climate change or other social or cultural crises. The therapist may want also to enquire about the young person’s relationship with nature and animals, their understanding of climate impacts, pro-environmental behaviors, familial attitudes towards climate change and adaptation, and intersectional vulnerability and resilience to climate threats.

Core Components of Climate-Informed Therapy

Dooley and colleagues (2021) provide a cross-disciplinary, climate-informed therapeutic approach for young people, which is synthesized from their review of existing literature and resources, as well as insights from subject matter experts. They identified seven “core components” that have the potential to promote coping and emotional resilience in the face of climate distress: (1) acknowledging and validating feelings, (2) emotional coping tools, (3) social connection, (4) connecting with nature, (5) climate action, (6) self-care, and (7) climate justice awareness. We define resilience as the capacity to prepare for, recover from, and adapt in the face of trauma, challenge, and adversity. As shown in the vignettes later in this chapter, many of these components can be used with young children and adolescents.

In addition, environmental psychology research supports encouraging a relationship with nature as well as taking climate action to increase well-being and effectiveness. Both correlational and experimental research have shown that interacting and connecting with nature have cognitive benefits (Schertz & Berman, Reference Schertz and Berman2019) and even limited contact with natural environments improves well-being (Bratman et al., Reference Bratman, Anderson, Berman, Cochran and Devries2019). A comprehensive review shows a strong correlation between time spent in green spaces and children’s overall health, attention, and mood (Fyfe Johnson et al., Reference Fyfe Johnson, Hazlehurst, Perrins, Bratman, Thomas, Garrett and Tandon2021). Anxiety about the climate crisis is shown to increase some types of pro-environmental behaviors, especially among youth (Whitmarsh et al., Reference Whitmarsh, Player, Jiongco, James, Williams, Marks and Kennedy-Williams2022). We assume that all of these components are applicable and important to our therapeutic work with children.

Therapeutic Components of Two Major Schools of Psychotherapy with Children

Case Vignette: Environmental Disaster Fears and ACT

In the following vignette, elements of an ACT therapy orientation, as well as Dooley and colleagues’ (2021) seven-point formulation, described earlier in this section, were used with Cassidy, an 8-year-old white, cisgender girl who had endured a wildfire near her Northern California home, which she later learned might have been related to climate change.

Psychodynamic and Psychoanalytic Therapies

Research has shown that seven common factors underlie psychodynamic and psychoanalytic psychotherapy (Shedler, Reference Shedler2010):

1. 1. Psychodynamic treatments focus on expressing affect and verbalizing feelings. In the context of climate distress, treatment would focus on identifying emotions that are problematic for the child to express in other settings. Treatment would also identify conflicting feelings, such as sadness along with anger, and work to make these conflicting feelings more conscious and open for recognition and discussion.

2. 2. Treatment aims to bring to awareness to how individuals try to avoid troubling feelings and thoughts, whether these are expressed through behaviors or through psychological defenses such as denial, disavowal, or dissociation. With climate distress, the clinician might notice behaviors such as clients bringing up the topic but quickly dismissing it or using humor as a defense.

3. 3. Treatment helps the client understand repetitive themes woven through their relationships and other aspects of their lives. For example, if the client begins to see how they use obsessive thought in response to anxiety, they may be open to understanding how obsessive thoughts about apocalyptic themes are part of their generalized style and recognize that their anxiety will likely decrease when underlying conflicts or fears are understood.

4. 4. Treatment focuses on understanding early childhood relationships, and how patterns established in these attachment relationships continue to influence one’s choice of relationship partners and the way one interacts and expects to be treated within current relationships. Adolescents can learn how their attachment relationships have prepared them to face the current climate reality, and whether they are effective.

5. 5. Relationships play a key role in mental health, and any relationship difficulties we experience can impact our abilities to meet our emotional needs. Children and adolescents can be encouraged to pursue supportive peer relations and learn conflict management strategies. These relationships can allow for more functional communication of emotional needs and conflicts regarding external problems, including the climate crisis.

6. 6. The therapy relationship is a focus at times, with the intention to reveal the client’s repetitive relational patterns as they are expressed within the therapy dyad. For instance, the therapist can be a target for the client’s anger regarding the climate crisis, a target that does not retaliate the way other adults might. The therapist can allow new relational experiences (e.g., assertiveness, vulnerability, and curiosity about the larger world/political systems) “in vivo” that are useful in other settings, such as school or home.

7. 7. Psychodynamic treatments place value on the exploration of the client’s fantasy world. Some of this fantasy life becomes known through the client’s dreams and daydreams, and for children, in their play (Gil, Reference Gil1991; Santostefano, Reference Santostefano2004). This fantasy life is seen as bypassing the more rigid defenses that keep troubling feelings and thoughts from conscious awareness. For young children who express fears about the future or recollect prior extreme weather events, play figures of human and animal models as well as toy buildings and vehicles could be offered. For adolescents, curiosity about their dreams, during sleep as well as daytime fantasies, may reveal not only fears but resolutions and solutions as well.

Case Vignette: Psychodynamically Informed Therapy for Climate Distress

In the following vignette, several psychodynamic features above are noted, along with other therapy techniques.

The Use of Emotions in the Therapy Relationship in Working with Climate Distress

Allowing ourselves to experience fear and sadness for our young clients enables us to become more aware of their needs for protection, empowerment, and the right to a viable ecosystem. This can strengthen the therapeutic alliance and our attachment bonds to these youth. The therapeutic relationship can become a valued resource and grounding “anchor” within a society undergoing climate dysregulation, especially if clients cannot express their feelings of fear, anger, or despair in other settings.

Sociopolitical Discussion in Therapy

Sociopolitical factors significantly influence mental health (Hoggett, Reference Hoggett and Weintrobe2013; Samuels, Reference Samuels2017; Weintrobe, Reference Weintrobe2021) and are worthy of discussion in the therapy office. For instance, addressing the mental health needs of child immigrant refugees would seem inadequate without processing feelings about abandoned homelands, treatment by immigration officials, and their cultural identity in a new place. Discussing sociopolitical impacts in therapy is particularly important with adolescents, as these experiences are interrelated with the climate crisis and can impact emotional health, identity formation, and maturation toward responsible adulthood.

Likewise, concerns about social and environmental injustice can be distressing to youth and can be processed through to a productive resolution. A high school-aged adolescent in treatment with EA explored his fears and anger about the unequal impacts of the climate crisis on peoples and ecosystems in the northern versus southern hemispheres. He eventually pursued this interest by attending a summer program focused on international conflict resolution, and is eagerly pursuing a college degree in a related field (Allured, Reference Allured2019). As Samuels (Reference Samuels2017) noted, the development of a political self can be crucial in a growing sense of agency.

When we, as well as our clients, can face the damage done by our exploitative colonization of others, or as Orange (Reference Orange2017) puts it, to “hold the ungrievables,” there is the possibility for deeper change for everyone.

The Role of Hope

We can encourage hope with young clients while simultaneously acknowledging uncertainty about outcomes. Hope can be cultivated precisely because outcomes have not yet been determined for this crisis. Working within uncertainty parallels the general work of psychotherapy: Outcomes are not known at the beginning of treatment and depend on the hard work of raising awareness of the hidden etiology of problems that are creating havoc or dysfunction. Therapists are generally reluctant to predict an outcome in therapy; in a similar way, therapists need to refrain from predicting a specific outcome related to the environmental crisis when young clients bring this up. Instead, therapists can lean on definitions of hope that do not imply success of a specific action or actions. Vaclev Havel wrote:

Psychological maturity requires an acceptance of challenges, of disappointments, and even of mortality, held within secure attachment relationships. We can provide one such anchoring relationship as our young clients move toward this capability in uncertain times.

A reckoning with our climate crisis, in both its sociopolitical and ecological impacts, is central to young adults’ coming of age in the twenty-first century. Its impact differs depending on geography, proximity to direct and indirect threats, social location, social-emotional capacities, developmental stage, and other biophysical factors. In this chapter, we explore the role of intentional peer spaces that support young adults to express their feelings about the climate crisis, be heard with mutual respect, connect with something greater than themselves and replenish themselves for contributing to a better world.

Many young people engage in various forms of activism in response to the social and ecological impacts of the climate crisis. Climate activism has occurred in many forms for decades, although these efforts have often not been recognized by dominant cultures. Climate activism is not, therefore, new in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. What is new is its expansion into the mainstream and the growing recognition by adults and governments in positions of power. Climate activism presents potential risk and reward to the well-being of young activists. Benefits include a sense of agency, belonging, empowerment, existential meaning-making, sense of duty and ethical integrity, hope, stress-regulation, and development of an environmental self. In addition, participation in various actions can be highly energizing and galvanize emotions into embodied collective exuberance. In contrast, risks include physical and emotional depletion, hopelessness, despair, disillusionment, powerlessness, overwork and burnout, conflicts within and between peer groups, and vulnerability to mental health issues as covered elsewhere in this volume (Budziszewska & Głód, Reference Budziszewska and Głód2021; Fisher, Reference Fisher2016; Ojala, Reference Ojala2012; Schwartz et al., Reference Schwartz, Benoit, Clayton, Parnes, Swenson and Lowe2022). As such, young adults engaged in climate activism can use support to help restore and sustain them.

Studies demonstrate that youth climate activists associate the climate crisis with the harm perpetuated by colonialism and capitalism, including Indigenous genocide and displacement, systemic racism, femicide, and separation from direct connection with the earth. They seek to address climate issues from an intersectional perspective and process: “They want power to be shared differently, and to challenge institutional politics itself” (Bowman & Pickard, Reference Bowman and Pickard2021, p. 506). One example is Godden et al.’s (2021) collaboration among Western Australian young people, Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal academics, activists, and practitioners, notable for its inclusion of multiple points of view in research on these concerns. The authors recommend that facilitators “normalize caring; normalize collective action; normalize the conversation about colonialism, capitalism, and climate change and normalize the truth of the climate crisis. They ask us to join them in action” (pp. 1762–1763). Broadening climate conversations to address these other social ills makes explicit the complexity of intersecting systems; opening a dialogue with peers provides young adults an opportunity for a shared, explicit exploration of an often-unnamed fear – that their actions could unintentionally perpetuate the exploitative systems that they are hoping to change.

Because the climate crisis has different impacts on different generations, young people want and need the older generation to listen to their perspectives. Our program, the Earth Leadership Cohort (ELC), is one of many developed to address the social and emotional needs of young adults who are concerned about the climate crisis. A similar program, the Youth Leading Environmental Change program (YLEC), is a multinational environmental engagement initiative for youth (Harré, Reference Harré2016; Hickman et al., Reference Hickman and Riemer2016). The program views emerging adults as ripe for civic engagement due to their openness to change, identity formation in flux, optimism, and fresh perspective. Specifically, the YLEC model identifies four central ingredients: (1) fostering systems thinking, (2) encouraging personal reflection, (3) building action competence, and (4) providing role modeling and support. YLEC leaders recommend that youth engaged in environmental action need to understand the complex, global nature of climate change, their connection to and interdependence with the natural world, and the experiences of people currently most impacted by environmental degradation. Programs for young activists must be as complex and comprehensive as the issue itself (Hickman et al., Reference Hickman and Riemer2016, pp. 168–169).

Our program, an adaptation of the Work That Reconnects (WTR), was not a climate justice “training” program, but it attracted many young activists who felt called to be in service to the complex matrix of demands of these planetary times. Likewise, our program was not intentionally psychotherapeutic, but its core relationally based approaches were reparative: focus on reconnecting within the self, reconnecting with others in intentional community and reconnecting with the natural world. The foundation of the program was the central importance of belonging, literally, the work that reconnects – both human to human and humans to their natural world. The program offered opportunities to disrupt feelings of isolation and helplessness as well as address the false split between humans and nature. Within the holding environment of the program’s frame, the group itself provided vitality, spirit, mystery, and sustenance to the experience. Out of this emerged a kind of active hope – hope not in the sense of something you have, but something you do through engagement (Macy & Johnstone, Reference Macy and Johnstone2022).

In the remainder of this chapter, we offer an overview of the WTR and our adaptation for young adults (particularly late Millennial and Generation Z 18–30-year-olds from the United States who fall into the overlapping developmental stages of emerging [ages 18–25] and young adulthood [ages 25–30]). Then we discuss two features we have found to be essential when working with young adults in the context of climate justice issues. First, paradigms must shift from anthropocentric to ecocentric. Second, we must meet the generational demand for an intersectional approach. The climate crisis continues to reveal historical inequities, violence, and stressors disproportionately experienced by nondominant cultures and groups. For Westernized mental health practitioners working with young adults, it is thus essential to continually examine and address these assumptions embedded in healthcare theory, technique, and practice. In this chapter, we offer an example of one such attempt, albeit imperfect.

The Work That Reconnects and the Earth Leadership Cohort Program

The Spiral

Although every WTR program is different, each follows the same four stations of “the spiral”: Gratitude, Honoring our pain for the world, Seeing with new/ancient eyes, and Going forth (see Figure 11.1). In our program, we introduced the spiral in the beginning and referred to it throughout to provide a map that scaffolded the content, process, and intention of the workshop. Within each station, there are numerous practices that facilitate experiential and integrative opportunities. Conceptually, the spiral (an ancient symbol of transformation) reflects a dynamic, continual, and ever-evolving flow. The four stations, similar to the four seasons or four directions, invite psychological complexity of layered emotional experiences. Not unique to the WTR, these transpersonal concepts are found in Indigenous cultures, mythology, world religions, and various therapies.

Figure 11.1 The spiral of the Work That Reconnects, as painted by Dori Midnight.

The WTR spiral has endured across time, location, and constituencies, in part because of its foundation in sound psychological principles. First, it provides a map which offers form, predictability, and a shared understanding of what lies ahead. Second, the four stations introduce the inherent psychological complexity of the human experience and the importance of facing more difficult, painful emotions. Third, consistent with trauma-informed work, the sequence begins with Gratitude, which is based in a secure attachment – love – for some aspect of the living earth system before moving to areas of insecure, avoidant, or traumatic attachment experiences. And fourth, the spiral offers WTR facilitators a flexible rather than rigid balance between form and freedom, structure, and spontaneity; for each of the four stations, there are numerous options for practices and rituals (individual, small group, large group; cognitive, embodied, contemplative, creative, playful; indoors and outdoors; right brain/ left brain; raucous and solemn). Table 11.2 summarizes the psychological functions of each station of the WTR spiral.

Table 11.2 The psychological function of each station of the WTR spiral

Spiral station	Nature of the station	Psychological function
Gratitude	Orient towards gratitude, awe, and love for life	Helps to ground people and settle nervous systems, resources the capacity to be present with more difficult emotions. Initiates group formation.
Honoring our pain for the world	Allow feelings of fear, anger, sadness, numbness, and shame to arise	Expands capacity to experience and express a wide range of difficult emotions within self and with others. Often this release allows for embodied integration, and can feel cathartic, although the purpose is not to purge feelings, just to be present with them. Sometimes in allowing the feelings to flow, the intensity of them can shift or lessen. Helps to connect people with others thereby reducing alienation and isolation.
Seeing with new/ancient eyes	Explore insights into the interconnectedness of life and the wider web of connections available to us	Offers refreshing insights, connects participants with something wider than themselves, offers a reframe and empowering stance.
Going forth	Prepare ourselves to contribute towards the healing needed in the living world	Moves people into empowered action by discovering new possibilities, setting intentions, and preparing to enact them.

The first station, “Gratitude,” grounds the process of the retreat in the gifts of life and invites wonder and awe. In a practice called “open sentences,” participants complete a sentence fragment such as “A place that was magical to me as a child was …” while someone else listens to them without interruption before switching turns. Gratitude practices such as these help to settle the nervous system by eliciting positive affect and by offering individual and group connection.

In the second spiral station, “Honoring our pain for the world,” participants are supported through teachings, meditations, practices, and group rituals to be present with painful emotions – fear, anger, sorrow, outrage, despair, futility, guilt, shame – about what is happening in and to our world. In systems theory, open feedback loops are markers of health, using output as input for further growth and activity. When participants express and witness these emotions in this supportive context, many find an expanded sense of connectedness and reduced sense of isolation. Because we only mourn the loss of that which we love, the shared expression and witnessing of these feelings can create a bridge to an energetic collective caring for the world.

These feelings of wider interconnectedness can open people into the third station of the spiral, originally called “Seeing with new eyes.” In their book, Active Hope: How to Face the Mess We’re in with Unexpected Resilience and Creative Power (2022), Macy and Johnstone identify four empowering shifts in perception they call “the four discoveries”: a wider sense of self, a different kind of power, a richer experience of community, and a larger view of time (refer to Table 11.3). The focus of this station is to explore paradigmatic shifts counter to dominant culture to help participants make these discoveries of their interconnectedness with the living world, with ancestors and future beings, and with a more diverse understanding of each other.

Table 11.3 Four discoveries explored in the “Seeing with new/ancient eyes” station (Macy & Johnstone, Reference Macy and Johnstone2022, p. 81)

Discovery	Nature of the discovery	Dominant Western culture norm(s) it counters
Wider sense of self	View the self as connected parts of a larger whole. Self-interest is expanded, and self is rooted in wider circles of kinship.	View the self as a separate entity; hyper-individualism, you are alone and must go it alone.
Different kind of power	Power is conceived of as power-with and can be win-win and emergent when people work together. Because power is built through connectedness with others, safety and well-being are achieved through the strength of those connections.	Power is conceived of as power-over and is a win-lose proposition. Domination and coercion are used to achieve safety otherwise you will lose out.
Richer experience of community	Fellowship and diverse community are forms of wealth that enrich our lives, strengthen our security, and give us a more stable foundation from which to act. Interdependence and mutual aid networks can meet many of our needs and be enjoyable.	Self-sufficiency is idealized; it is weak or dangerous to rely on anyone; all our needs can be met through higher productivity which allows us to be secure through better and more material “stuff.” Thus, the primary objective is to fix dissatisfaction with consumerism.
Enlarged view of time	Time is circular; humans exist in a long unbroken chain of those who came before and those who will come after present generations. We can draw on the strength of ancestors and be guided by the interests of generations yet to come (encompasses nonhuman beings as well).	Time is linear; the past is in the past and the future which hasn’t happened yet is likewise inaccessible. Disproportionate focus on the short-term driven by capitalist economies.

Influenced by Patricia St. Onge’s (Reference St. Onge, Macy and Brown2014) contributions to the WTR, many WTR facilitators have expanded the title of this station to “Seeing with new/ancient eyes.” Shaped by her Mohawk heritage, St. Onge rightly reminds us that ecocentric and intersectional theories are more ancient than new for most of human history and inherent in Indigenous peoples’ lived experiences, wisdom traditions, science, and care of the earth (Charles & Cajete, Reference Charles and Cajete2020). By exploring both “new” and “ancient” ideas, we address who is being centered and who is being excluded; this furthers our commitment to discernment regarding cultural appropriation and assumptions.

The spiral, although not linear, concludes with “Going forth.” In this last station, participants explore and prepare for how they might like to contribute to the healing needed in the world. This station invites expanded imagination, collective feedback, realistic assessment of current internal and external resources, and intention. Many participants have experienced considerable rejuvenation through expanding their sense of self and agency and by finding hope through engaged and committed action.

Within each retreat, the ELC program followed the WTR spiral structure adapted to each cohort. Over the five years, the facilitators incorporated feedback and increasingly paid attention to group process enactments of sociocultural positions and power. Group dynamics inevitably followed Tuckman’s (Reference Tuckman1965) stages of forming, storming, norming, performing, and adjourning that loosely coincide with the spiral stations. We have experimented with new practices and have integrated other theories into our program including trauma-informed neuroscience concepts, such as Siegel’s hand model of the Triune Brain and Window of Tolerance (Siegel, Reference Siegel2020) and intersectionality theory (Nahar, Reference Nahar2017). Simultaneous with the larger national and global reckoning by white dominant institutions with embedded racism, intersectionality emerged as a new/ancient way of seeing within our ELC program.

The Young Adult Demand for an Intersectional Approach

Discussion

The ELC version of the WTR has evolved to meet many of the recommendations cited earlier in this chapter: it provides space, time, facilitation for peers and adults to experience caring, collective action, and conversations about colonialism, capitalism, and the climate crisis (Godden et al., Reference Godden, Farrant, Farrant, Heyink, Collins, Burgemeister and Cooper2021). We deliberately amplified activism protective factors and tended to the risk factors. We aimed to help young adults build capacities individually and collectively that might serve, support, and sustain them as they continue to live with the realities of this planetary time. We have integrated nervous system awareness and activation. Collectively, we foregrounded group process and the co-creation of norms and values.

In their verbal and written feedback, many participants reported that ELC was a profound life-changing experience where they felt held, seen, and validated in an intentional community. Throughout the retreats, many participants moved from disillusioned isolation to empowered connection with peers and the living earth, regenerating their care and commitment to present and future justice. The opportunity to be authentic, caring, and vulnerable can be invaluable in modern society, which can often feel isolating.

In addition, the ecocentric approach underlying the WTR provides an antidote to Western culture’s relationship to time and urgency. Intentional time outdoors invites re-membering, literally returning participants to the animal body in the present moment. Many ELC participants described feeling overwhelmed and exhausted by the unrelenting urgency of social and ecological threats caused by the climate crisis. While ELC addressed serious issues, it was imbued with spontaneity, play, and creativity. Along with a range of emotional states such as gratitude, anger, grief, confusion, shame, guilt, we continue to re-envision “work” and welcome creative emergence and open-hearted hilarity. We supported what adrienne maree brown (2019) describes as “pleasure activism.” ELC programs prioritize radical rest, respite, and reflection in which “being is a form of doing” that explicitly runs counter to the dominant Western culture of achievement.

Limitations and Future Directions

We recognize the inherent limitations of our recommendations due to our small sample size, the specificity of ELC as one particular application of the WTR, the common demographics of many of the ELC participants and facilitators, and that participants self-selected to this particular approach. As such, caution is warranted with generalizing our recommendations to the young adult population since the reflections offered may not be transferable to groups with a different demographic makeup or function. The reflections in this chapter are offered from the facilitators’ viewpoint and would become more three-dimensional and benefit from participants’ perspectives. Finally, we are aware that it is hard to capture the essence of an experiential program out of context (i.e., You just had to be there …).

We envision a future in which young people have access to climate justice communities and programs that are informed by ecocentric and intersectional principles. Qualitative and quantitative research of these emerging programs could contribute valuable credibility and exposure on behalf of best practices. These two lenses can be applied across settings such as mental health, education, parent resources, and community organizations. Realistically dismantling the knot of deep-rooted systemic oppressions will take generations. However, the climate crisis may be catalyzing those who have yet to be on the front lines to join those who have been building, sustaining, and thriving, in spite of centuries of apocalyptic-like conditions. As facilitators, ELC has transformed our dread into purpose, isolation into community, and overwhelm into a mysterious form of unfolding active hope.

Acknowledgments

The authors are grateful to each Earth Leadership Cohort (ELC) participant for breathing life into these programs, to cofacilitators Joseph Rotella and Kirstin Edelglass, to Joanna Macy and others who have contributed so much to the development of the Work That Reconnects, and for offering it as an open source so that so many people can benefit from it. In addition, we thank Sarah Pirtle and Patricia Harney for their feedback on earlier versions of the chapter, Satyena Ananda at the Starseed Healing Sanctuary where numerous ELC retreats took place, and all beings in the living systems that made these programs possible.

Introduction

The work of pediatricians has changed dramatically since the founding of modern pediatrics in the late nineteenth century. Infectious diseases, the leading cause of child morbidity and mortality last century (Shulman, Reference Shulman2004), are definitively being replaced by noncommunicable diseases, including mental health conditions, as leading threats to child health in the United States and globally. In 2019, self-harm (including suicide), depressive and anxiety disorders, and interpersonal violence were four of the top ten leading causes of global disability-adjusted life years in young people aged 10–24 years (GBD 2019 Diseases and Injuries Collaborators, 2020). Persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness and suicidal thinking in American high school students rose between 2011 and 2021, to over one in three and one in five students, respectively (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 2022).

This rise of mental health disorders in young people has presented a tremendous societal challenge which is exacerbated by the significant deficit in trained mental health professionals to provide care. In communities with limited resources, the lack of access to mental health services is profound (Becker & Kleinman, Reference Becker and Kleinman2013). This disparity between need and access to mental health professionals has led to efforts to train primary care providers, including pediatricians, in the provision of mental health treatment. The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) has endorsed the role of primary care pediatricians in managing mild and moderate mental health disorders (Walter et al., Reference Walter, Vernacchio, Correa, Bromberg, Goodman, Barton and Focht2021) and has developed core competencies for delivery of this care (Committee on Psychosocial Aspects of Child and Family Health and Task Force on Mental Health, 2009). Programs and resources have been developed in order to support provision of mental health care in the pediatric primary care setting (Romba & Ballard, Reference Romba and Ballard2020).

Pediatricians are uniquely positioned to support mental health in young people. We develop relationships with families over long periods of time and have opportunities to observe our patients as they develop over years. We are often aware of a family’s broader social context, have engendered trust through care over time, and have a perspective that is highly valued (O’Brien et al., Reference O’Brien, Harvey, Howse, Reardon and Creswell2016). Approximately half of pediatric office visits involve developmental, educational, behavioral, emotional, and/or psychosocial concerns (Martini et al., Reference Martini, Hilt, Marx, Chenven, Naylor, Sarvet and Ptakowski2012).

Pediatricians therefore have an opportunity to identify and address emerging mental health challenges early in their onset. In addition, pediatricians are well trained in preventative care that can prevent future health problems (Hagan et al., Reference Hagan, Shaw and Duncan2017).

As pediatricians assume greater responsibility for prevention and treatment of youth mental health challenges, there is a need to incorporate the role of environmental threats into our care of patients. While “decreasing exposure to environmental toxins and stressors” has been identified as a mental health competency, and “children displaced by disasters” have been identified as a special population of concern (Committee on Psychosocial Aspects of Child and Family Health and Task Force on Mental Health, 2009), climate change is not well appreciated by pediatricians as a mental health risk.

Pediatricians in the United States are already caring for children whose health is affected by climate change. The role of climate change on these health conditions, however, often goes unrecognized. For example, pediatricians caring for children affected by extreme weather events may see events as isolated emergencies rather than connected to the broader problem of climate change. Even pediatricians who embrace the “public health” perspective with regards to child mental health and well-being (Foy & Perrin, Reference Foy and Perrin2010) may not yet consider climate change within this broader framework.

There is a rapidly increasing body of literature on the intersections between climate change and the mental health of young people. As reviewed in depth in the other chapters of this book, climate change influences the mental health of young people at every stage of development, from birth through young adulthood. The psychological well-being of young people is affected by climate change today through diverse pathways that can be direct and immediate, indirect and gradual, or vicarious through overarching awareness (Hayes et al., Reference Hayes, Blashki, Wiseman, Burke and Reifels2018). Children in regions that are more vulnerable by virtue of geography, socioeconomic factors or racism and discrimination are often more susceptible to these effects (Burke et al., Reference Burke, Sanson and Van Hoorn2018). As climate change impacts continue to mount, the mental health toll can be expected to rise even further.

The need to educate pediatricians regarding the impacts of climate change on child health has been recognized for over a decade. The AAP was the first medical organization in the United States to recognize the health consequences of climate change with its publication of their Policy Statement (Committee on Environmental Health, 2007) and Technical Report (Shea, Reference Shea2007) on Global Climate Change and Children’s Health in 2007. These documents, and the AAP’s updated reports in 2015 (Ahdoot et al., Reference Ahdoot and Pacheco2015), marked a pivotal moment in medicine, whereby a leading medical society acknowledged that its members must care for the planet to care for patients.

Pediatricians serve numerous roles as we seek to promote the mental and physical health of our patients in a changing climate. Figure 12.1 depicts the roles of pediatricians in a changing climate as clinician, educator, and advocate.

Figure 12.1 Role of pediatricians in a changing climate.

As clinicians, pediatricians provide care to young people suffering from climate-related health harms. This work extends beyond the office encounter to the implementation of practical, protective policies that protect against these effects. For example, pediatricians can be instrumental in the creation and implementation of heat illness prevention protocols, emergency response systems that include child specific care, and protective strategies against climate sensitive infectious diseases, including vaccination programs.

Pediatricians can serve as educators on the intersections of climate change and health. This work includes working within our institutions to advance a climate and health curriculum for trainees and practicing professionals. Working through our medical societies and within our communities, pediatricians can educate policymakers and the public on climate health risks and protective strategies. These pathways of impact are depicted in Figure 12.2.

Figure 12.2 Pathways of impact.

Lastly, pediatricians have a unique opportunity to advocate for solutions that reduce further warming. Climate solutions, as advanced by schools, cities, states, and nations, provide a foundation for child physical health. Policies that reduce air pollution and carbon emissions simultaneously help address common child health conditions including asthma, obesity, and hypertension. What is good for the climate is generally good for children. Child health benefits such as active transportation, plant-rich diets, and protection and engagement with natural places, present opportunities for pediatricians to promote climate solutions that are also core to our preventative care work with children and families.

The work of pediatricians and their deliberate engagement with young people for climate solutions is vital, not only for protecting children and families, but for promoting hope and resilience. As described by Macy and Johnstone (Reference Macy and Johnstone2022), active hope is a practice whereby a problem is acknowledged, the desired outcome is identified and activities are initiated to help achieve that goal. Working collaboratively towards a shared goal can be mutually beneficial for both young people and pediatricians who may be experiencing climate-related mental health challenges.

In this chapter, I will discuss typical patients (deidentified for confidentiality) that present with climate change-related mental health harms in the pediatric setting. I will discuss the pediatrician’s role as clinician, educator, and advocate as we work to address these concerns. In each instance, I will tell the stories of pediatricians who are enacting these solutions across the United States (Textbox 12.1).

A Pediatrician’s Approach to Climate Change and Mental Health

Conclusion

Pediatricians are at the forefront of the youth mental health crisis. As we care for our young patients, it is vital that we incorporate an understanding of climate change into our practice. This includes a recognition of the pathways through which climate change contributes to child physical and mental health harms. Additionally, pediatric medicine in our changing climate requires unique approaches that go beyond traditional counseling and medical therapy. Pediatricians can promote the mental health of children through our active participation in the societal transition to systems that promote health and preserve a prosperous world. As clinicians, educators, and advocates, pediatricians are uniquely positioned to generate trust, positive engagement, and hope amongst our patients and ourselves.

From catastrophic flooding to deadly heatwaves, raging wildfires, and a resulting mental health crisis, young people are growing up in an unprecedented and daunting world. The last time global atmospheric carbon dioxide levels were where they are today, global mean sea level was up to 60 feet higher and spruce trees grew on the shores of the Arctic Ocean (Dutton et al., Reference Dutton, Carlson, Long, Milne, Clark, Deconto and Raymo2015; Dowsett et al., Reference Dowsett, Dolan, Rowley, Moucha, Forte, Mitrovica and Haywood2016). Currently, the United States is emitting carbon into the atmosphere at roughly the same rate (Jurikova et al., Reference Jurikova, Gutjahr, Wallmann, Flögel, Liebetrau, Posenato and Eisenhauer2020; Cui et al., Reference Cui, Li, van Soelen, Peterse and Kürschner2021) that resulted in the extinction of 95 percent of marine species at the end of the Permian era 251.9 million years ago (Foster et al., Reference Foster, Hull, Lunt and Zachos2018). It did not have to be this way. For decades, governments have overwhelmingly encouraged fossil fuel use; as described by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals’ majority opinion in the groundbreaking, youth-led climate change case, Juliana v. United States (2020), “A substantial evidentiary record documents the federal government has long promoted fossil fuel use despite knowing that it can cause catastrophic climate change, and that failure to change existing policy may hasten an environmental apocalypse.”

The burdens knowingly being placed on young people by governments, well-documented in the scientific literature, inevitably raise the question of how legal policy should respond to young people’s victimization in the context of their climate distress. This chapter explores that question by presenting stories from young people who are seeking to protect themselves by taking their governments to court. They are charging the government with violating their human right to a safe climate and the cascade of associated rights, including the rights to life, liberty, property, personal security, safety, health, privacy, and cultural and family autonomy. Youth-led climate litigation efforts that are using climate science to support claims of human rights violations illustrate that swift access to justice can help protect young people’s human rights and well-being.

The Impact of Climate Change on Young People’s Mental Health, in Their Own Words

The climate harms to young people’s physical and mental well-being manifest in various forms. Often, they arise from direct exposure to climate-related disasters. For instance, Lauren, a young plaintiff in a suit against the federal government of Canada, La Rose v. Her Majesty the Queen, has Raynaud’s Syndrome, which affects her ability to circulate blood and is painfully worsened by extreme temperatures. Because access to nature is important to her mental health, increasingly frequent extreme weather events that prevent her from going outside exacerbate her depression and physical discomfort (Wright & Rodgers, Reference Wright and Rodgers2022, p. 82).

Raine, another young plaintiff in the same lawsuit, reports how their Lyme disease and asthma become more severe due to the heatwaves and wildfire smoke that have plagued their home province of British Columbia in recent years. In the fall of 2021, a climate change-induced extreme precipitation event flooded Raine’s community, inundating neighboring farms and killing thousands of farm animals. The flooding closed the roads to Raine’s house, so they were trapped at home, trying to save their neighbor’s animals from drowning, and unable to go to work or get food. Raine experiences anxiety and bouts of depression when thinking about how climate change is impacting their life. Raine’s anxiety and depressive symptoms have increased in correlation with the increasing severity of climate-related impacts they experience (Statement of Sierra Raine Robinson, 2022).

Many young people are exposed to recurrent climate-related events which can compound feelings of loss and trauma. Reflecting on a severe flood event she experienced in Calgary at age 7, and which recurred several years later, Sadie, a young plaintiff, wrote that she “can see the effects of the climate crisis right in front of” her and that as she becomes more knowledgeable about the role of climate change in her life, she becomes “incredibly scared” (Sadie, personal communication, 2022).

Some young people, like Albert, a La Rose plaintiff, feel a sense of stress and powerlessness as they observe particularly vulnerable people undergo climate harms. Albert’s distress brings him to routinely question the value of attending school, pursuing a career, owning a home, and having children. Albert comprehends the dire projections that illustrate what will occur if emissions are not reduced consistent with what scientists say is necessary. This understanding contributes to Albert’s increasing mental and psychological pain and is part of the reason Albert took his government to court (Statement of Albert Jérôme Lalonde, 2022).

Young people recognize the threat that climate change poses to their lives and attribute the problem’s persistence in part to older generations, the fossil fuel industry, and governments (Hickman et al., Reference Hickman, Marks, Pihkala, Clayton, Lewandowski, Mayall and van Susteren2021). A survey of 2,000 young people aged 8–16 showed that 73 percent are worried about the current state of the planet, 19 percent have nightmares about climate change, and 41 percent have no trust that adults will fix the crisis (Atherton, Reference Atherton2020). Another survey of 10,000 young people aged 16–25 from forty-two countries conducted in twenty-six languages confirmed that climate anxiety affects young people’s everyday lives, and observed a positive relationship between climate anxiety and young people’s perceptions of their government’s role in causing the climate catastrophe (Hickman et al., Reference Hickman, Marks, Pihkala, Clayton, Lewandowski, Mayall and van Susteren2021). As the climate crisis intensifies, and governments continue to disregard the science in favor of continued fossil fuel production, young people’s mental health injuries inevitably worsen (Oregon Health Authority, 2022). Experts report that these harms are legitimate and should not be pathologized or seen as “wrong,” but should be listened to, treated, and seen as justifying a legal remedy (Van Susteren, Reference Van Susteren2018a).

The Importance of Science in Responding to Young People’s Climate Distress and Protecting Their Human Rights

A common plea from young people seeking to protect themselves from climate harms is to ask decision-makers to listen to the science (Milman & Smith, Reference Milman and Smith2019; Statement of Albert Jérôme Lalonde, 2022). Many common internationally recognized legal principles support the use of the best available climate science to protect young people’s substantive human rights and fundamental freedoms. The duty of care that ensures protection of these substantive rights is considered the “prime responsibility” of government.Footnote ¹ Further, there are procedural rights recognized in the American Convention on Human Rights, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, such as the right to access information, right to know, and right to benefit from scientific progress that are protected under international law and should inform the development and judicial enforceability of climate and energy legal policy (Orellana, Reference Orellana2021). Other human rights principles that are relevant to the protection of young people in the context of climate change, enshrined in some countries’ domestic laws, include the duty to do no harm, the principle of intergenerational justice, the right to access justice, the best interests of the child, and the duty to provide fully informed consent (Legal Response Initiative, 2012; Nguyen, Reference Nguyen2020; Access to Justice, n.d.; Humanium, n.d.; Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, 2011). Many national constitutions have provisions that explicitly protect the rights of young people, many of which protect the right to education and to be free from harm (Preda, Reference Preda2015). For example, Article 227 of Brazil’s Constitution explicitly recognizes the duty of government to protect young people’s rights to life, health, food, education, leisure, culture, dignity, respect, liberty, and freedom from neglect, discrimination, cruelty, and oppression.

It is imperative that courts honor and enforce human rights obligations to promote and protect young people’s substantive rights. Fundamentally, granting young people access to courts to present the best available climate science, and using that science to craft appropriate legal remedies, is a commitment to being truthful with young people, and using that truth to inform the greatest protective actions possible. Young people value the truth and when they hear scientists prescribing one thing (e.g., reduce greenhouse gas emissions), and their governments doing something vastly different (e.g., authorizing increased fossil fuel production), the distress and anxiety they feel is justified, appropriate, and deserving of access to courts for a legal remedy.

In the United States, climate change skyrocketed as a key campaign issue during the 2020 Democratic presidential primary (Kurtzleben, Reference Kurtzleben2019). Propelled by youth voices on climate change, the large field of Democratic presidential candidates clamored to present strong climate plans (Tamari, Reference Tamari2019). In one notable debate, then-Vice President Joe Biden promised to end new oil and gas leases on federal lands and offshore waters, stating unambiguously that such leases had to end, “period” (Washington Free Beacon, 2020). In 2021, the Biden administration broke that promise by approving more drilling permits than President Trump had in his own first year as president (Center for Biological Diversity, 2022). Similarly, in 2019, the government of Canada declared a national climate emergency the day before Prime Minister Justin Trudeau approved the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion, authorizing the transport of approximately 600,000 barrels of oil per day from Alberta to British Columbia (Mabee, Reference Mabee2019).

Many leaders at every level of the government around the world exhibit this behavior, which can lead to young people’s sense of “institutional betrayal” (Smith & Freyd, Reference Smith and Freyd2014). When a disaster happens, people, including young people, search for the cause (Van Susteren, Reference Van Susteren2018a, p. 15). Institutional betrayal is implicated both when a trusted institution creates the harm and when it fails to take protective action; it is “uniquely harmful because it involves a betrayal of trust in a relationship in which the individual depends on the institution” (Van Susteren, Reference Van Susteren2018a, p. 16). Human-created crises, known as “technological disasters,” may be more harmful to mental health than “natural disasters,” even when they create comparable magnitudes of harm, because they represent something that was done by one group of humans to others (Van Susteren, Reference Van Susteren2018a, p. 16).

Dr. Lise Van Susteren, a forensic psychiatrist and expert on the physical and mental health effects of climate change, is an expert witness in the case Juliana v. United States, one of the world’s first human rights-based climate change cases brought against a government, and in Held v. State of Montana, the first youth climate change case to go to trial in the United States. Dr. Van Susteren explains institutional betrayal using the analogy of a barn burning down. If your barn burns down due to an unpredictable accident, such as a lightning strike, the psychological impacts will likely be less severe than if it burns down because your neighbor deliberately set a fire close by (Van Susteren, Reference Van Susteren2018a). Dr. Van Susteren further highlights that in most contexts the US legal system also recognizes this idea – “the greater degree of intentionality with which a harmful act is judged to have been committed, the greater the cost to make the person ‘whole,’ and, for a criminal act, the harsher the punishment” (Van Susteren, Reference Van Susteren2018a, p. 17). As the predicted multifold losses from extreme climate events come to pass, young people’s resulting experiences of anger and betrayal will “greatly encumber[] the grieving process, making any recovery that much more difficult” (Van Susteren, Reference Van Susteren2018a, p. 17).

Perhaps the most widespread act of government-sponsored betrayal in the climate change context is the oft-repeated message that the Paris Agreement (2015) goal of “[h]olding the increase in the global average temperature to well below 2 °C above pre-industrial levels and pursuing efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5 ºC above pre-industrial levels” will fulfill governments’ duty to care for young people and future generations. In fact, the science says otherwise. Climate change is fundamentally the result of an imbalance in Earth’s energy system due to more energy being absorbed by Earth than is released back out to space (Our Children’s Trust, 2022). To restore Earth’s energy imbalance, the scientific consensus is that global carbon dioxide concentrations must be reduced from approximately 416 ppm today to 350 ppm by the end of the century, which would keep levels to well below 1.5 °C of heating (Hansen et al., Reference Hansen, Sato, Kharecha, Beerling, Berner, Masson-Delmotte and Zachos2008; Von Schuckmann et al., Reference Von Schuckmann, Palmer, Trenberth, Cazenave, Chambers, Champollion and Wild2016; Lidji, Reference Lidji2020; Hoegh-Guldberg, Reference Hoegh-Guldberg2018; Lindsey, Reference Lindsey2022).

Achieving the Paris Agreement goal, on the other hand, would not restore Earth’s energy imbalance and would result in heating that would be catastrophic for current and future generations. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has found that warming of 1.5 ºC “[i]s not considered ‘safe’ for most nations, communities, ecosystems, and sectors and poses significant risks to natural and human systems as compared to current warming of 1 ºC…” (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, 2018). At 1.5 ºC of heating, 70–90 percent of the world’s coral reefs, which feed over 500 million people, will disappear (Hoegh-Guldberg et al., Reference Hoegh-Guldberg, Jacob, Taylor, Bindi, Brown, Camilloni and Zhou2018, p. 1), and worldwide glacier melt will result in multi-meter sea level rise, which would inundate coastal cities (Pörtner et al., Reference Pörtner, Roberts, Adams, Adelekan, Adler, Adrian and Zaiton Ibrahim2022, p. 61). Scientists have shown “that even the Paris Agreement goal … is not safe as 1.5 ºC and above risks crossing multiple tipping points,” which occur when parts of the climate system “become self-perpetuating beyond a warming threshold” (Armstrong McKay et al., Reference Armstrong McKay, Staal, Abrams, Winkelmann, Sakschewski, Loriani and Lenton2022). Legal policies or judicial remedies that equate the protection of young people’s rights with achieving the Paris Agreement represent the highest order of institutional betrayal because they reflect intentional governmental action allowing for harmful levels of warming that demonstrably impair the fundamental rights of young people. As Hawai‘i Supreme Court Justice Mike Wilson stated: “We are facing a sui generis climate emergency. The lives of our children and future generations are at stake. With the destruction of our life-sustaining biosphere underway, the State of Hawai‘i is constitutionally mandated to urgently reduce its greenhouse gas emissions in order to reduce atmospheric CO₂ concentrations to below 350 ppm.” (In re: Hawai‘i Elec. Light Co., 2023).

Institutional betrayal contributes to young people’s sense that they must act to protect themselves, which is a tremendous burden to take on in childhood. Dr. Van Susteren explains that some young people have “feelings of frustration towards adults who praise them for their actions instead of taking more actions themselves” (Van Susteren, Reference Van Susteren2018a, p. 20). Those feelings are especially strong when “directed at the federal government for the abject injustice of being abandoned to a ferociously uncertain future” (Van Susteren, Reference Van Susteren2018a, p. 20). In 2015, the American Academy of Pediatrics issued a statement alongside a technical report finding that the “specter of far-reaching unchecked climate change” threatens the “social foundations of children’s mental and physical health” (American Academy of Pediatrics, 2015). The American Psychological Association, which has been working on climate change issues for over a decade, has stated that “[r]esponding to the climate crisis is an essential task for the current generation and many generations to come” (American Psychological Association, 2022). As we stumble closer to the future that scientists have warned government officials of for decades, young people will know more, not less, about governments’ failure to protect them.

In the context of this institutional and judicial betrayal, allowing young people to access their courts in pursuit of rulings that are consistent with scientific knowledge and that ensure government accountability in protecting human rights could have an immediate positive impact on young people’s mental health (Van Susteren, Reference Van Susteren2018b). Luisa Neubauer, a young plaintiff who prevailed in her climate change case against government, poignantly observed that “[t]his can change so much, not just for us here in Germany but for activists worldwide” (Treisman, Reference Treisman2021). André Oliveira, a young plaintiff from Portugal who filed a case against 33 countries in the European Court of Rights said, “It gives me a lot of hope to know that the judges in the European court of human rights recognize the urgency of our case. But what I’d like the most would be for European governments to immediately do what the scientists say is necessary to protect our future” (Watts, Reference Watts2020).

Access to the Courts Is Vital to Protect Young People’s Mental Health

Courts are critical to protecting young people’s human rights. The US Supreme Court has developed jurisprudence that favors treating young people as a special class entitled to special protection when state action threatens their constitutional rights (Smith, Reference Smith2018). While US courts, unlike other nations, have not widely embraced the legal principle of “best interests of the child” outside the family law context, the application of heightened standards of review when judging governmental conduct that uniquely harms young people has a similar effect (Schiratzki, Reference Schiratzki2013).

For example, in Brown v. Board of Education, the Court overturned the “separate but equal” principle that allowed for school segregation by focusing on the long-term harms, specifically stigmatic and psychological harms, that racial segregation has on Black and white young people (Smith, Reference Smith2018). In the context of education rights for undocumented immigrant children, in Plyler v. Doe, the Court “characterized the education of immigrant children as an ‘area of special constitutional sensitivity’” worthy of heightened scrutiny by the courts (Smith, Reference Smith2018, p. 28). Courts find several factors relevant in applying heightened scrutiny when reviewing government policies that harm children, including the dangers of targeting young people for their age, over which they have no control, the related importance of protecting young people from economic and psychological harm, and the large scale of government systems, which allows them to impose a lifetime of hardship on children if misused (Smith, Reference Smith2018).

All but three countries (including the United States) have ratified and incorporated the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (Child Rights International Network [CRIN], 2018). The use of the Convention in domestic courts has expanded greatly over the past three decades, with more than 350 cases in over 100 countries (CRIN, 2018). Many cases either directly use or refer to interpretative guidance on the Convention’s enshrined principles of the need for special protection of young people, including the best interests of the child, the right to be heard and to access justice, and the right against deprivation of liberty (CRIN, 2018). Regional human rights courts offer similar heightened protection. For example, the European Court of Human Rights and other regional European judicial bodies have extensive protective jurisprudence on the rights of the child (European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights & Council of Europe, 2015).

Justice Delayed Is Justice Denied: Juliana v. United States

In 2015, twenty-one young plaintiffs sued the United States, challenging the government’s affirmative actions and policies that contributed to ongoing climate change, on the basis that such conduct violated the young plaintiffs’ constitutional substantive due process rights to life, liberty, and property, as well as their public trust rights (Juliana v. United States, 2016, pp. 94–95).

As of 2024, young people still had not had their day in court, despite many substantive victories. In November 2016, District Judge Ann Aiken denied the government’s and fossil fuel industry intervenors’ motions to dismiss and issued a decision recognizing, for the first time, that the US Constitution protects a fundamental right to a safe climate. Specifically:

The trial date was originally set for February 2018, then delayed until October 2018, before ultimately being stayed by the US Supreme Court ten days before trial (Our Children’s Trust, n.d., Juliana).

After the US Department of Justice used a series of unprecedented and extraordinary litigation tactics to delay the case, the case went up to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, where a panel of three judges agreed with many of the young plaintiffs’ rights-based claims, including that the young people were suffering concrete injuries at the hand of their government (Juliana v. United States, 2020, p. 1164). However, despite the “plaintiffs’ impressive case for redress” (Juliana v. United States, 2020, p. 1164), two of the judges on the panel denied the young people the ability to access the courts for a remedy. Instead, the judges urged the young plaintiffs to appeal directly to the executive and legislative branches to redress their human rights violations, even though few of them could vote and the court had already acknowledged that the political branches of government had breached their duty of care (Our Children’s Trust, 2020). Judge Josephine Staton dissented, arguing it was the role of the court to hear the case. Judge Staton concluded her opinion (Juliana v. United States, 2020):

The young plaintiffs have filed a motion to amend their complaint with the district court, which was granted, and could put them back on the track to trial. Regardless, a new trial date cannot obscure the reality that these young people have already waited over eight years to be heard; for some of the young plaintiffs, that is nearly half of their lives, all while the government’s conduct continues to exacerbate the climate crisis.

Justice Granted Is Hope Achieved: Held v. State of Montana

In 2020, sixteen young residents of Montana challenged their state government’s policies promoting the development of fossil fuels, alleging that such actions violated their rights to life, liberty, property, and a clean and healthy environment under the Montana Constitution. Young people in Montana are experiencing climate change impacts that include severe wildfire smoke, flooding, decreased stream flows, and destruction of treasured places such as Glacier and Yellowstone National Parks (Held v. State of Montana, 2020). Judge Kathy Seeley ruled that the young plaintiffs have a right to access their courts to obtain declarations of their constitutional rights, and subsequently set a date for trial in June 2023. The case was the first of its kind to go to trial in the United States.

Judge Seeley’s decision provided much-needed optimism and validation to young people around the world. Grace Gibson-Snyder, a plaintiff in the case, explained that young people’s “voices are actually being heard by the courts, the government, the people who serve to protect [them] as citizens, and Montana’s youth” which makes her “feel hopeful that finally [her] government may begin to serve [her] best interest” (Corbett, Reference Corbett2022). In August 2023 Judge Seeley ruled entirely in favor of the youth, recognizing that “[c]hildren are uniquely vulnerable to the consequences of climate change” and “face lifelong hardships resulting from climate change.” Judge Seeley held that the state violated the Youth Plaintiffs’ “fundamental constitutional right to a clean and healthful environment, which includes climate as part of the environmental life-support system.” (Findings of Fact, Conclusions of Law and Order, Held v. State of Montana, 2023).

The Encouraging Trend towards Youth Access to Courts for Climate Justice

In recent years, young people around the world have been successful in holding their governments accountable for violating their human rights. For example, young people in Belgium, Canada, Colombia, France, Germany, Ireland, and Norway have all been granted access to courts where they could present arguments and evidence that their governments were violating their fundamental rights. While most courts have not yet ordered governments to protect young people’s rights in line with best available science (i.e., restoring Earth’s energy imbalance), courts have recognized that there is a fundamental right to a life-sustaining climate (e.g., Juliana v. United States, 2020; In re: Hawai‘i Electric Light Co., 2023), acknowledged that “it is indisputable” that climate change exposes youth to “an increased risk of death and an increased risk to the security of the person” (e.g., Mathur v. Ontario, 2023), have required governments to comply with political commitments to address climate change (e.g., State of the Netherlands v. Urgenda Foundation, 2020) and recognized that the burden to address climate change cannot be placed disproportionately on young people (e.g., Neubauer v. Germany, 2021). While young people being heard is a victory, the call for a science-based remedy that bends downward the global curve of greenhouse gas emissions remains unanswered.

In the United States, judges have begun to directly question the slow progress towards climate justice in the courts in recent dissenting opinions. The canonization of dissents is the elevation of a once minority viewpoint to a “constitutional stature far superior to that accorded most majority opinions in other cases” (Krishnakumar, Reference Krishnakumar2000, pp. 782, 788). Today, dissents play a powerful role in shaping the future of the law in two major ways. First, dissents serve as a warning to current and future courts to be wary of its own biases and readings of the Constitution (Krishnakumar, Reference Krishnakumar2000). Second, dissents can serve to pave the way for expanding constitutional protections beyond the majority opinion (Krishnakumar, Reference Krishnakumar2000). Such dissents are usually less controversial because they extend rights and liberties without necessarily overturning past majority decisions (Krishnakumar, Reference Krishnakumar2000). As US Supreme Court Justice Charles Evans Hughes wrote, a dissent “is an appeal to the brooding spirit of the law, to the intelligence of a future day, when a later decision may possibly correct the error into which the dissenting judge believes the court to have been betrayed” (Hughes, Reference Hughes1936).

Judge Staton’s powerful dissenting opinion in Juliana serves to develop climate rights jurisprudence because her admonition of the Ninth Circuit’s “judicial restraint” calls on future courts to consider that the majority opinion was wrong in denying young people injured by the harmful climate actions of their own government redress through their courts (Juliana v. United States, 2020). Judge Staton’s dissent also lays the groundwork for future rights expansion by connecting the young plaintiffs’ claims to a longer history of jurisprudence correcting social injustices and stating in no uncertain terms that, based on the science, their claims establish real and redressable violations of the rights to life and liberty (Our Children’s Trust, 2020).

Other dissenting judges in the United States have already heeded Judge Staton’s call. Dissenting to a Washington State Supreme Court order denying young people access to the court, Chief Justice Steven Gonzalez and Justice Helen Whitener highlighted the hypocrisy of “recit[ing] we believe children are our future” then leaving them “no mechanism to assert their rights or the rights of the natural world,” concluding that “[t]he court should not avoid its constitutional obligations that protect not only the rights of these youths but all future generations who will suffer from the consequences of climate change” (Aji P. v. State of Washington, 2021). Justices Peter Maassen and Susan Carney, dissenting in a youth climate change case before the Alaska Supreme Court, explicitly recognized a constitutional right to a livable climate – arguably the bare minimum when it comes to the inherent human rights to which the Alaska Constitution is dedicated (Sagoonick v. State of Alaska, 2022).

Historically, there is a lag between a powerful dissent and its ultimate adoption as the majority viewpoint. It took Brown v. Board of Education (1954) nearly sixty years to overturn Plessy v. Ferguson (1896). In the context of climate change, however, the scientific reality does not afford the courts the luxury of time. It is thus imperative that courts be accessible and accept their role in defining young people’s rights to protection.

While young people are gaining access to courts to protect their human rights in certain parts of the world, concerning trends and obstacles to justice remain. Governments’ legal defense strategy, often engineered by political appointees, can be designed to restrict court access, even when there is a recognized rights-based injury. For instance, in the summer of 2022, over 50,000 organizations and individuals signed a petition asking the US Department of Justice to end its opposition to young people’s access to the courts in the Juliana case and allow them to proceed to trial (Our Children’s Trust, n.d., Sign the Petition), showing how the public has been stepping up to support youth access to courts for climate justice. Another challenge to court access is the increasing politicization of courts, with harmful consequences for the protection of individual rights and the rule of law. In Montana, for example, the election for one seat on the state Supreme Court became a hot button issue, largely because of a political divide about the court’s role in allowing access to courts for constitutional rights claims (Brulliard, Reference Brulliard2022). In the past, judicial elections and selection processes have received little attention, but they are a crucial aspect of democratic systems because it is often judges who are called upon to declare and protect fundamental rights.

Overcoming these obstacles requires the strengthening, and at times rebuilding, of fundamental principles of democratic institutions. For young people, many of whom do not have suffrage rights, seeking access to courts is the sole means available to pursue protection of their rights. It is important for adults to support these young people in taking on the burden of securing climate justice in the courts. To do so, lawyers can begin building avenues for law students and young lawyers to gain litigation experience in the climate context, or by showing up for young people in court at hearings or by filing amicus curiae briefs, so that judges and government attorneys can see that young people have a broad base of community, legal, and political support (Our Children’s Trust, n.d., Law Library). Other professionals can work to further advance the scientific record that supports young people’s claims and can provide expertise in the form of expert testimony or by educating, organizing, and mobilizing their communities of practice. The American Psychological Association, for example, established a Task Force on Climate Change because “Psychologists have conducted valuable work on the climate crisis and can make even greater contributions to understanding the crisis, mitigating and adapting to climate change, and achieving climate justice” (American Psychological Association, 2022). The media can cover these cases and the young people leading them, making sure to center young people in their stories and ensuring that climate science is accurately reported. Teachers can use the stories of these young people in their classrooms and educate young people about human rights and climate science. Authors, publishers, and filmmakers can write and publish books and films about youth climate change cases, such as the book As the World Burns by investigative reporter Lee van der voo, or the film Youth v. Gov, directed, produced, and written by filmmaker Christi Cooper. Elected officials can highlight the efforts of these young people and use their influence to bolster the democratic systems needed to protect youth facing a climate emergency. Members of the public can work to ensure the appointment and election of judges who respect the rule of law and open access to justice. A binding, science-based remedy is what will truly respond to young people’s climate distress, and supporting young people in their quest for such a remedy is more important now than ever before.

Conclusion

Young people are experiencing undeniable mental health harms due to climate change and government actions that directly contradict scientific consensus and prioritize the use of fossil fuels over young people’s futures and well-being. Courts play a vital role in mitigating young people’s injuries by counteracting the effects of institutional betrayal through considered review of the science and young people’s claims, and by issuing enforceable remedies. Moving forward, legal policy that respects the human rights and fundamental freedoms of young people requires listening to the experts and the young people themselves, both inside and outside of the courtroom. Already, favorable decisions in countries around the world, the US Supreme Court’s evolution on expanding young people’s rights, and the powerful dissenting opinions from judges in the United States have paved the way to a more just future for young people, but there is still much further to go as Earth’s energy imbalance grows and the climate crisis deepens.

Global climate change is not only an imminent threat to the environment and society, but also a psychological risk (Reser & Swim, Reference Reser and Swim2011). Facing the climate threat fully can lead to hopelessness and decreased mental well-being. Young people may be particularly vulnerable to psychological consequences of climate change as they may lack both the material and the psychological resources to deal constructively with the negative emotions that this problem arouses (Crandon et al., Reference Crandon, Scott, Charlson and Thomas2022; Fritze et al., Reference Fritze, Blashki, Burke and Wiseman2008).

In a review of adolescent coping, Frydenberg (Reference Frydenberg2008) identified societal problems, for example climate change, as one of the main concerns reported by adolescents. Recent research conducted in several countries around the world also shows that young people are very concerned and worried about climate change (Hickman et al., Reference Hickman, Marks, Pihkala, Clayton, Lewandowski, Mayall and van Susteren2021). This worry can be triggered not only by personal experiences with this problem, but also indirectly through school and media (Flöttum et al., 2016). The question then arises: Is this worry a positive motivational force for engagement, or is it related to poor mental well-being – or perhaps both?

Aim of the Chapter

In this chapter, we argue that the way in which young people cope with climate worry plays an important role in how worry impacts their actions and wellbeing (see Ojala, Reference Ojala2012a, Reference Ojala2012b). We focus specifically on one way of coping, namely meaning-focused coping. We also emphasize the importance of positive emotions such as constructive hope in the coping process (Folkman, Reference Folkman2008; Park & Folkman, Reference Folkman1997). In addition, we will discuss how these ways of coping can be promoted among young people, with a focus on early adolescence (ages 11–12) to emerging/young adulthood (ages 19–29).

The chapter is organized as follows: First, we review research about coping with climate change and argue that it is vital to consider positive emotions in the coping process. Thereafter, we describe the importance of constructive hope. Next, we discuss the importance of meaning-focused coping in activating hope and promoting positive emotions. We then review studies of meaning-focused coping and hope in the context of climate change and elaborate on the different meaning-focused strategies young people use. We also show how this coping strategy is related to engagement with climate change and well-being, as well as to communication patterns with teachers and parents. We conclude the chapter by discussing different ways in which teachers, parents, and others can help in promoting meaning-focused coping and constructive hope among young people.

Coping, Positive Emotions, and Hope

Meaning-Focused Coping

Climate Change, Meaning-Focused Coping, and Constructive Hope

Practical Implications

What, then, are the practical implications of the research reviewed in this chapter? Although research is ongoing, intervention studies in this field are still rare, and in a strict scientific sense, evidence-based interventions are not yet available. However, as other chapters in this book show – for example, Chapter 16 by Van Hoorn and colleagues on parenting, and Chapter 17 by Carmichael on education – it is still important, based on the research that does exist, to provide guidance on how to communicate with young people about climate change and support constructive coping. Below we present some suggested practical implications.

Acknowledgment

The writing of this article was partly supported by the Swedish Research Council VR under Grant 2021-04607 to Maria Ojala.

Introduction

Climate distress (often referred to as climate anxiety) describes a range of emotional experiences felt in relation to the climate crisis. Common experiences may include anxiety, grief and loss, shame, sadness, anger, guilt, and hopelessness (Hickman, Reference Hickman2020). These experiences may range in severity (e.g., mild to severe) and adaptivity (from unhelpful and debilitating distress to distress that leads to helpful and productive coping) (Hickman, Reference Hickman2020). Although experiences are heterogeneous, young people are more likely than adults to endorse climate distress (Clayton & Karazsia, Reference Clayton and Karazsia2020). There is a need to consider the interplay of systemic factors that differentially impact the experience of climate distress in young people. Systems theory provides a framework of understanding how a young person’s interactions with their surrounding environments can shape how they feel about and cope with climate change (Crandon et al., Reference Crandon, Scott, Charlson and Thomas2022).

Systems Theory

Systems theory is a transdisciplinary field of study that examines and explains the behavior of complex systems. From a systems perspective, human and environmental systems are intertwined and interconnected. These systems are made up of living organisms, whether humans, animals, or biospheres. Such complex interactions produce, influence, and maintain the patterns of systems over time. Systems thinking describes the act of adopting such a perspective (Whitchurch & Constantine, Reference Whitchurch, Constantine, Boss, Doherty, LaRossa, Schumm and Steinmetz1993).

Systems theory was formulated in response to simplistic and traditional scientific approaches to the studies of living organisms and has been applied to climate change and mental health. As a relatively new and rapidly evolving field, much of the research exploring climate change and mental health examines direct associations between factors. For example, how natural disasters may be associated with increases in climate distress, or how distress and pro-environmental behavior are linked. Yet the ways that climate change may impact the mental health of humans, as well as how humans impact climate change, are multifaceted. As one example, rising heat is likely to have a negative effect on physical and psychological well-being. This can affect work/study, or time spent outside or socializing, which in turn further impacts health and well-being. Spending more time indoors (to escape extreme temperature) may mean young people are more socially isolated or unable to engage in their enjoyed activities (e.g., sports). This may influence their social, physical, and emotional health.

Systems theory and its branches (e.g., Family Systems Theory) can provide useful frameworks when understanding the complex relationship between climate change and mental health (Crandon et al., Reference Crandon, Scott, Charlson and Thomas2022).

Social-Ecological Perspectives and Young People

Drawing from systems theory, social-ecological models are used to understand problems related to physical, psychological, social, and economic health. When conceptualizing health problems, social-ecological models consider the complex interplay between systems. This is often visually depicted as overlapping layers, whereby the factors within one system influence and have a ripple effect on other systems.

Bronfenbrenner’s social-ecological theory applies a systems perspective to child development, positing that a child is nested within a complex system of relationships between the child and their surrounding environments (see Figure 15.1). These systemic contexts span from the child’s immediate family and peer networks to their broader societal and cultural backdrops (Bronfenbrenner, Reference Bronfenbrenner1979; Klichowski, Reference Klichowski2017). As the child grows, their experiences, views, emotions, and behavioral responses will be shaped by: the young person; the techno-subsystem; the microsystem; the mesosystem; the exosystem; the macrosystem; and the chronosystem. At the center of the systems is the individual young person. The young person’s unique biological, developmental, and psychological history are considered influential. This includes characteristics such as age, temperament, gender, and geographic location, as well as physical or mental health history.

Figure 15.1 An example of Bronfenbrenner’s social-ecological framework.

The microsystem refers to the young person’s immediate surrounding social and ecological environments with which they directly interact. This layer may include physical spaces that the young person most frequently operates within (e.g., home, garden) as well as the social circles closest to the child (e.g., parents and caregivers, peers, teachers). The influence of these immediate structures may shift as the young person ages. For example, family may be the child’s predominant social influence in adolescence, while peers may become more influential in late adolescence into early adulthood. It should be noted that developmental progression may differ according to culture.

The techno-subsystem is a dimension of the microsystem, added in recognition of the increasing role that technology plays in the development of young people. The techno-subsystem captures how young people interact with the world through phones, television, computers, and the Internet. This system is proposed to mediate between a child and the microsystem. That is, technology is often the tool through which a young person interacts with their immediate environments such as their family, friends, and school (Klichowski, Reference Klichowski2017), and likely also the outer social-ecological systems.

The mesosystem encompasses the child’s community, including their local environments such as their neighborhood, schools, and public places. The mesosystem may include both community places (e.g., buildings) and the local natural environment (e.g., local parks or green spaces). Through the mesosystem, the child’s microsystemic social structures intersect, including their parents and caregivers, their peers, teachers, and neighbors.

The exosystem layer includes environments that influence a young person’s development, despite the young person not necessarily having direct experience or involvement. This system deals with structures such as governmental agencies, healthcare or social services, economic systems, the educational curriculum, or mass media. The exosystem may also include broader environmental landscapes, nationally or internationally.

The macrosystem relates to broader collections of influences on a young person which provide a cultural, societal, spiritual, or political contextual background. The history, traditions, values and beliefs, ethnicity, laws, geographic location (e.g., quality of the landscape, vulnerability to weather) and socioeconomic standing of societies and cultures provide a framework for a child’s beliefs, perceptions, and experiences.

The chronosystem is the overarching layer of time. Over time, events that occur will affect a young person and the systems within which they live, as well as how they interact with or experience these environments. Events may include life transitions (e.g., moving out of home), experiences unique to the young person (e.g., the birth of a new sibling), or historical events (e.g., the evolving impacts of climate change).

Systems thinking and climate distress. Systems thinking has been emphasized in climate science as a useful way to understand the broad range of climate change impacts and adaptation efforts needed (Ballew et al., Reference Ballew, Goldberg, Rosenthal, Gustafson and Leiserowitz2019). Experiences within a system can profoundly shape how climate change impacts population mental health and outcomes (e.g., access to healthcare, policies that address climate change). This calls for whole-population adaptation and intervention, rather than individually focused interventions (Berry et al., Reference Berry, Waite, Dear, Capon and Murray2018). An emerging perspective is that climate distress occurs as a result of the complex interactions between a young person and their surrounding environments (Crandon et al., Reference Crandon, Scott, Charlson and Thomas2022; Ma et al., Reference Ma, Moore and Cleary2022; Vergunst & Berry, Reference Vergunst and Berry2021). These influences frame how a young person perceives the threats of climate change and shape their emotional, cognitive, and behavioral responses. Thus, psychological support for young people dealing with climate distress must consider systemic-level interventions.

Bidirectional influences. It is also important to note that these influences are bidirectional in nature, whereby a child or young person may mutually shape their surrounding environmental contexts. For example, a young person has the ability to influence their parents’ and caregivers’ views on climate change, their school’s engagement in pro-environmental behavior, and their government’s decision-making regarding policies addressing climate change.

Table 15.1 summarizes the positive and negative influences in each system and the associated recommendations and considerations.

Social-Ecological Influences on Young People’s Climate Distress

Systems Adaptivity and the Chronosystem

As mentioned, systemic influences are bidirectional and implementing interventions at any level can have ripple effects that shape youth mental health. Several authors suggest that identifying “vicious cycles” and moving towards establishing “virtuous” cycles at multisystemic levels is critical to reaching long-term beneficial outcomes for human and planetary health (Tidball et al., Reference Tidball, Metcalf, Bain and Elmqvist2018). From a social-ecological perspective, cycles relate to how systems create and maintain patterns of behavior through feedback loops. Virtuous cycles are considered feedback loops that positively benefit and reinforce the well-being of systems. Vicious cycles, however, are catalyzed by destruction, neglect, and ill-health (Tidball et al., Reference Tidball, Metcalf, Bain and Elmqvist2018). In the chrono-system, these cycles strengthen and compound over time (e.g., unmitigated climate change events progressively accumulating versus mitigation and restoration efforts across time). From a systems perspective, there is a need to challenge and adapt existing systems to promote optimal child development and resilience (Doppelt, Reference Doppelt2016).

For example, virtuous cycles could be established through pro-environmentally focused programs at school, which feeds benefits back into nature, young people, and teachers. As young people conserve, restore, and protect these natural environments, the benefits for environmental and human health become reinforced and strengthened. Further research may look to developing causal loop diagrams aimed at identifying potential systemic feedback cycles that may be impacting youth mental health. Importantly, taking this multilevel approach considers the complexity of systemic interactions, providing the opportunity to intervene early and potentially prevent negative impacts on young people. Furthermore, identifying areas where virtuous cycles can be established might provide guidance for the development, evaluation, and scaling of interventions that are aimed at supporting the mental health of young people.

Conclusions

This chapter provided an overview of how environments can shape a young person’s experiences, as well as their views and emotions towards climate change. Using a systems perspective to understand climate distress in young people points to a range of systemic interventions needed, including for family, peer, community, policy, and at the public health level (see Textbox 15.1 for a case example). These interventions should focus on how best to create environments that allow young people to express and harness their climate distress, connect with others, and engage in tangible activities aimed at mitigating climate change in a way that also supports their mental health. Psychological intervention can then focus on those who most need support due to the most severe climate distress that may result from uncontrollable exacerbating factors at various systems levels.

We, Judith, Susie, and Ann, are all psychologists, parents, activists, and in the case of Judith and Ann, also grandparents. Judith and Ann have worked as developmental psychologists and researchers for many decades. We have studied children’s and young people’s responses to global crises, and how to support them in home, school, and community contexts. Susie, in her work as a therapist, has worked with many people who have shared stories of climate distress, and their challenges as parents and teachers raising children amidst the threat of climate change. As activists and advocates for climate, we have clocked up many years of climate action between us – campaigning, marching with our children in climate rallies and protests, writing submissions and speaking at Parliamentary inquiries on psychological aspects of the climate crisis. In recent years, we have been writing together about the psychological impacts of climate change on children and young people, and exploring how families are coping (Sanson et al., Reference Sanson, Burke and Van Hoorn2018, Reference Sanson, Malca, Van Hoorn and Burke2022).

The Challenges of Parenting in the Climate Crisis

Throughout history and across cultures, parents, grandparents, and others caring for children have tried their best to raise, protect, and prepare their children for adulthood. Today, parents have the unprecedented challenge of supporting their children to survive, cope with, and adapt to the current impacts of the climate crisis while simultaneously preparing them for an uncertain future in which the climate will continue to change rapidly in largely negative ways. At the same time, parents need to cope with their own climate distress. Given the enormity of these challenges, we understand why many of today’s parents are anxious and uncertain about how to raise their children and prepare them for what lies ahead.

These tasks are particularly urgent and difficult for the majority of families who live in geographically vulnerable areas already experiencing climate-fueled emergencies such as storms, floods, and fires, or gradual climate changes such as droughts and sea level rise. The Children’s Climate Risk Index (CCRI) is UNICEF’s (2021) calculation of children’s exposure and vulnerability to the impacts of climate change worldwide. Many countries in Africa and Asia have the highest CCRI scores, reflecting that children there are most exposed and vulnerable. This 2021 UNICEF report emphasizes that approximately half the world’s children are considered high risk and extremely vulnerable, with about one-third currently exposed to four or more environment-related stressors.

In contrast, the direct impacts of climate change on young people and families in other parts of the world are not yet so noticeable. In these areas, primarily in the Global North, climate change is still largely a future or vicarious threat. Consequently, parents are challenged to help their children cope with the distress of learning about the implications of climate change for the planet and their future lives.

Theoretical Framework

This chapter draws on research and practice relating to the impacts of climate change on youth mental health, and on parenting research and practice. Climate change and youth mental health is an emerging field that involves health and mental health professionals, social scientists, climate scientists, and groups of citizens including parents and young people themselves. Similarly, parenting science is a multidisciplinary specialization drawing from psychology, medicine, social work, and related disciplines. Recognizing differences across cultures, we use the term “parents” in a broad sense to include all who take primary responsibility for raising children, and use more specific terms such as grandparents, carers, and adult relatives when appropriate.

Adults in different cultures have varied expectations of children and young people. The roles and responsibilities of parents, grandparents, and other carers differ as well. However, a universal parental responsibility is to try to ensure children’s survival and well-being.

The existing literature in the field of parenting through the climate crisis is limited in two ways: (1) the great majority of research and writing focuses on young people and parents/grandparents in the Global North, whereas families most impacted by climate change typically live in the Global South; (2) there is very little research on the efficacy of different parenting approaches regarding the climate crisis. Consequently, this chapter draws on the relatively small number of studies of parenting and family responses in disaster situations related to climate change as well as clinical insights and generalizations from effective parenting practices in other difficult situations.

To discuss the developing person, we employ two frameworks we view as complementary. First, the whole child framework emphasizes the interrelationships of all domains of individual development, including emotional, cognitive, language, social, and physical development. Second, Bronfenbrenner’s (2006) bioecological framework considers developing persons within their social and historical context over time.

Throughout this chapter, we discuss the great variations in individuals’ experiences of the climate crisis depending on where they live and the climate-related disasters they have already experienced. We also consider the resources available in their family, community, and country to protect them or help them recover from climate impacts. A recurrent theme is that climate change exacerbates current and future social inequalities.

Helping Young People Cope with the Direct Impacts of the Climate Crisis

We begin this section by examining how parents help their children cope with the direct impacts of climate change, starting with sudden extreme weather events (EWEs) such as hurricanes/cyclones, floods, heatwaves, and wildfires that are occurring with increasing frequency and intensity around the globe, particularly in the Global South (UNICEF, 2021). Next, we turn to how parents can help their children cope with more gradual impacts of climate change measured in years and decades, such as droughts and rising sea levels. Throughout, we discuss the indirect or flow-on effects of climate change. For example, droughts result in loss of crops, which can lead to famine and deaths, force families to migrate and navigate significant post-migration stressors, and lead to conflicts over diminishing resources.

Additionally, specific demographics place some young people at higher risk from the impacts of climate change, thus increasing the need for parents to keep them safe and healthy. These include young people with disabilities, those with mental health or behavioral problems, young people from low-income families, Indigenous youth, and pregnant young women (Sanson et al., Reference Sanson, Malca, Van Hoorn and Burke2022). Clearly, parents may be at higher risk themselves if they are pregnant, disabled, or elderly. In these situations, young people often have added family responsibilities.

Helping Young People Cope with Vicarious Impacts of the Climate Crisis

Not all children and young people have yet been directly affected by the climate crisis; however, most young people globally – whatever their experience – are aware of the threat it poses, and many express high levels of distress and concern (Hickman et al., Reference Hickman, Marks, Pihkala, Clayton, Lewandowski, Mayall and van Susteren2021). In the following sections we explore what parents everywhere can do to support their children’s coping with the knowledge that climate change will bring massive changes to their lives and to the planet.

Conclusion

Parents are facing an unprecedented situation: they are tasked with managing their own concerns for their children’s (and their own) future while simultaneously supporting their children both to cope in the here-and-now and to develop the capabilities to cope in an uncertain, but likely difficult, future. Awareness that urgent climate action at a global scale is needed to save future generations from a catastrophic future adds an extra dimension to the complexity of parenting.

Climate change is a threat to the well-being of families and children everywhere. The specific challenges differ greatly according to contextual, familial, and individual child characteristics; however, some general parenting strategies, drawn from theory and research on child development, parenting and mental health, and disaster research apply across direct sudden climate changes and more gradual changes:

• Attend to basic needs of food, health, shelter, safety

• Communicate in age-appropriate ways

• Restore everyday routines as quickly as possible

• Engage children in helpful activities

• Soothe, reassure, and foster children’s hope for the future

• Promote social support.

Whether families are currently facing climate effects or not, parents everywhere can help their children manage the wide gamut of emotions that knowledge of climate change can engender. Here, themes of emotional regulation, community connectedness, building a sense of efficacy and agency, action, and cultivating active hope are central.

At the start of this chapter, we emphasized that the literature in the field of parenting in the climate crisis is limited. There are critical gaps in our understanding. We encourage researchers and practitioners to take up the challenge of filling these gaps in culturally appropriate ways, including:

• How parents can help children cope with impacts that may continue through their adulthood

• Models of family support in low- and middle-income countries

• Models for families living in wealthier countries

• Development and evaluations of parenting programs and services

• Develop culturally based parenting advice from NGOs and researchers for families in refugee camps

• Investigations of the many ways in which systems beyond the family affect parents’ ability to support their children, for example schools, communities, health systems, social welfare systems, overall infrastructure, cultural values and attitudes, and political systems.

A central theme that emerges from this review is that climate change contributes to the perpetuation and exacerbation of social and economic inequalities and prevents many children from reaching their full potential (Sanson et al., Reference Sanson, Malca, Van Hoorn and Burke2022). A second theme is the crucial importance of parental modeling – not only modeling effective coping, pro-environmental values and behavior in their family lives, but also engaging in their own climate action.

Change is always difficult, but standing by and drifting towards a catastrophic future for our children because we are afraid of change is worse. This means that we, whether as practitioners, researchers, parents, grandparents, or carers, need to act as citizens and engage with political decision-making processes. We end by encouraging all of us to take action in our personal, professional, and community lives because it’s the right thing to do, and “standing by” is unacceptable.

We are in a difficult place in time, but we are here together. To keep facing the tough truths and to sustain our motivation requires attention to our inner and outer world. As John Wiseman (Reference Wiseman2021) writes:

Introduction

I recently attended a “teach the teacher” event held in Manchester, England in which a panel of young people explained climate change to an audience of teachers. Of the educators in the audience, one geography teacher was already well informed, but most had never received any training and knew only what they’d gleaned from media and friends. Many had basic misunderstandings. An art teacher was surprised that her meticulous recycling, whilst welcomed by the panel, would not save carbon emissions; an English teacher learned that the ozone hole is a separate issue; a primary teacher who has young children of her own seemed shaken by a graph showing global carbon emissions this century – she’d assumed they were coming down by now. The panel of young people finished by talking about their feelings about climate change, mentioning anxiety, frustration, a sense of abandonment, dread, and confusion. The experienced geography teacher asked, very humbly, how he could teach the topic better, and a 17-year-old panelist suggested that he could make it more human. He said, “You called it a topic, but for us it’s not a topic like a separate thing before you move on to volcanoes,” and spoke about how it affects everything – whether there will be enough food and water, whether to have children, what clothes to buy and where from. He said he wanted to go traveling but also felt that would be too selfish if he did it for its own sake, so he was finding ways to justify it through volunteering. “So that’s what I’m thinking about when we’re looking at a picture of the carbon cycle. Give us space to talk about that.”Footnote ¹

Globally, climate change education as it is currently practiced is woefully inadequate to serve young people’s needs to understand and prepare well for the future they face. Very few educators have ever had the opportunity to consider the social and emotional impacts of what young people learn about climate change, or of how they learn it. While studies involving climate change abound in the field of education, few address the mental health implications that can arise from students’ thorough understanding of the current global predicament. For example, from 2013–2022 the Journal of Environmental Education published only eight studies relating to schools or school-age young people in which mental health, an emotion, or state of mind was included in the title. Hardly any studies exist on the specific impact of school-based climate change education on young people’s mental health.

Despite the lack of research and training in this area, teachers and others in education are generally motivated by a genuine desire to care for young people and contribute to their future success. A growing minority of educators are well informed about the climate crisis and are finding ways to facilitate climate change education in sensitive and empowering ways. A discourse has begun in the education community which will no doubt develop and, as the global crisis deepens, will likely inform future education-based practice on a grand scale, depending upon whether national governments opt to encourage or restrain good practice in climate change education.

An Overview of Climate Change Education

Globally, we are failing to inform young people about the basic facts of climate change. In a major study of nearly 17,500 young people from 166 countries, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO, 2022) found that 70 percent of respondents knew little or nothing about climate change, and only 13 percent had been asked to consider their feelings about it. In separate research investigating the extent to which climate change education is included the National Curriculum Frameworks across 100 countries, UNESCO (2021) found that 47 percent of the National Curricula investigated made no mention of climate change. Only about half of a representative sample of twenty teachers interviewed in greater depth had any teacher training for climate change education at all, generally in geography and science. A separate global survey of over 58,000 teachers from 144 countries on their readiness to integrate climate change education into their teaching found that 95 percent of teachers rated climate change as an important or very important topic, but only 40 percent felt confident teaching about it. Similarly, roughly 40 percent of these educators felt confident in teaching the factual aspects of climate change, but only about one fifth could effectively explain how to take action. Action, which builds young people’s sense of agency, is an essential pillar supporting young people’s mental health in the context of climate change.

Education is a largely unrecognized domain in the formal pledges made by nations to tackle climate change. Of 140 new or updated pledges submitted since 2021, only a third mention education, and those which do are mostly from countries with high climate vulnerability (Education International, 2022). Education is, however, a key component of the Action for Climate Empowerment (ACE).Footnote ² In 2021, ACE put forth a four-year plan mandating the UN to map and collate guidelines and good practice on climate education annually.

One country has already implemented climate education policies that include social-emotional support, providing a potential model. A key architect of New Zealand’s climate change education policy, Green Party Member of Parliament James Shaw, explained to The Guardian newspaper (Graham-McLay, Reference Graham-McLay2020) how a pilot program on climate change education led to increased emphasis on processing emotions: “By necessity … students would ‘delve into the bad news’ of the science explaining the climate crisis. But the resources had been bolstered with ‘quite an emphasis on talking through with students how they’re feeling about it.’” Concrete resources for supporting students’ mental health were also provided for teachers; for example, encouraging students to keep a feelings thermometer to track their emotions, learning how to challenge defeatist self-talk, and considering how students’ feelings could generate action. These very much reflect recommendations made by Maria Ojala (Reference Ojala2012), who is a leading researcher on coping with climate change.

In my home nation of England, politicians generally make no mention of the emotional impacts of learning about climate change. To my knowledge, the only exception to this involved a candidate in the 2022 Conservative Party leadership contest to become prime minister, who used young people’s climate distress as a reason not to teach them the truth about climate change. Campaigns to make climate change education fit for purpose in England and Wales have been led by teaching unions and, strikingly, by young people themselves. Teachers’ unions agree that a comprehensive review of the National Curriculum is needed to ensure long-term sustainability, and cite eco-anxiety as a reason.

A remarkable youth-led organization, Teach the Future, has arguably been the most effective in raising the profile of climate change education policy in the UK through its innovative and eye-catching projects. In 2021 they presented their Climate Education Bill to parliament – the first Bill ever written by young people – seeking wholesale reform of school curricula and buildings. And in 2022 their “tracked changes” project added annotations to the National Curriculum in seven subject areas, explaining how these curricula would have to be changed in order to bring them into line with ten climate education principles, all of which support the inherent mental health challenges of climate education and three of which are explicit in this regard (see Appendix A for this resource).

At the school leadership level, responses to the growing pressure to address climate change occupy the full spectrum from actively hostile to progressive and innovative. The Youthstrike 4 Climate walkouts in 2019 succeeded in getting the attention of many headteachers, whose unions’ advice about how to handle the situation demonstrated no awareness of the distressing emotions lending impetus to the movement. Activist teachers often highlight climate change as a safeguarding issue (i.e., relevant to the role of schools in keeping children safe), using this as a kind of trojan horse to get it on the agenda of harried school leaders.

UK-based teachers have indicated in surveys that they feel ill-equipped to deal with climate change in their classes (e.g., Teach the Future, 2021). Some high school geography and science teachers are required by the National Curriculum to deliver content about climate change, but this does not guarantee an emotionally literate approach; some textbooks are actually misleading, for instance by presenting equal benefits and drawbacks of higher concentrations of greenhouse gases, and even exam questions can trigger climate distress (Harvey, Reference Harvey2022).

Educators’ increasing awareness of and interest in climate change means that more well-meaning educators are likely to venture onto this territory, with or without the explicit knowledge of their institutions. In the absence of adequate guidance or training, many go it alone, using their own knowledge supported by a proliferating range of online resources. While this can be done well, any approach that lacks sufficient socio-emotional supports for students risks causing climate distress that may go unacknowledged and/or unsupported.

Climate Change: It’s Emotional

A Qualitative Study of Climate-Related Educational Practices

Case Studies

Thematic Analysis

Conclusions

Leadership in climate-change education is coming from the grassroots. Understanding the severity of climate change inevitably causes distressing emotions, and this is especially true of young people. Ignoring this emotional dimension in our teaching about climate change is harmful. However, promising approaches which support young people’s mental health can be effectively implemented across different contexts. These approaches are age-appropriate, acknowledge and validate negative emotions, balance the responsibilities of the educating institution with those of the young people, and nurture connections between young people and their social and natural worlds. In practical terms, they often involve outdoor learning, and prioritize providing opportunities for learners to build agency by making a positive difference.

What Is Activism?

This chapter discusses climate activism in young people. We review types of activism and principles that have been important for youth climate activist groups to help them be most inclusive and effective, as well as the literature on the mental health risks and benefits of activism, both generally and for youth climate activists in particular. This conceptual basis for the chapter is interwoven with the activist journey of author Jennifer Uchendu, founder of SustyVibes, in hopes that her story of resilience through eco-anxiety and burnout can help others apply the relevance of these concepts to their own experiences and feel inspired and empowered by her story.

We define activism as actions and expressions, both small and big, towards social, environmental, or political change. These actions are not limited to campaigns, political protests, and social movements, but are initiated when people challenge power and dominant narratives in any form. There are many types of activism: it can happen through art (artivism), computer hacking (hacktivism), education, judicial activity, consumer choices or brand campaigns, shareholder activity, alternative community building, guerilla tactics, peace camps, nonviolent resistance, vigils, culture jamming, and in many other and surprising unusual places – even just speaking one’s truth in social settings (see Textbox 18.1). Activism is about standing for something you believe. The people who become activists often recognize that doing nothing about a situation makes things worse. They show up and make moves with a clear demand for what change they seek in our world. And our world today, in its often-repressive form, so desperately needs change. There are so many things that have come to be that should never have happened, and when the cycle of oppression, greed, and hate is allowed to go unchecked, we are presented with a society dealing with anthropogenic climate breakdown alongside deeply rooted social injustices.

A Brief History of Children and Youth Activism

The first systemic efforts to advocate for the rights and needs of children emerged from the Industrial Revolution, as harmful child labor practices that also deprived children of their education became prevalent. One significant event of youth activism recorded from that time occurred in the United States in 1903, where child textile workers organized by Mary Harris “Mother” Jones marched from Pennsylvania to New York, where they sought unsuccessfully to meet with President Theodore Roosevelt. These efforts, as well as those of many other child welfare agencies and commissions, culminated in 1990 in the adoption of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC), a document that advocates for the provision for and protection of children’s rights, including the right to participation (United Nations General Assembly, 1989). The participation aspect of this policy broadly expresses a child’s right to be heard in all matters that affect them and is articulated in Article 12 of the UNCRC, protecting their right to activist activity, amplifying children’s voices, and outlining the moral and civic responsibility of governments and parents to listen to and act on children’s demands and perspectives. Through the lens of Article 12, there have been numerous studies and judicial and civic interventions taking steps to ensure that children’s voices are heard and that their well-being is protected, especially on issues that concern their future, such as climate change.

Four Roles for Social Activism

Child and youth climate activists often seek urgent changes in the way that society is organized and hence contributing to the climate crisis. Given that these demands involve difficult social change, it is imperative to learn about the ways activism succeeds.

As conceptualized by Bill Moyers (2001), there are four roles that activists, including young people, can play in order to achieve social and environmental change. Each role has its own distinct set of skills and styles and serves different purposes. The following is a summary of his work.

Jennifer’s Climate Activism Journey

When I was an 8-year-old, our mango tree was cut down to provide space in the compound. The mango tree had come not only to be but also to mean so many things to me and my family. Concerned and stressed, I struggled with the justification provided by the landlord who owned the property. The tree for me was a place of shade and resting place for us. It also provided us with food. It was my favorite tree in season, and I loved its thick, broad trunk all year. Although I was not exposed to the idea of environmental protection as a child, something in me felt uneasy when the environment was littered and I instantly felt relief and calm within nature. I grew up knowing that I had some form of affinity to nature, and to trees especially. I also wanted to be a medical doctor, a gynecologist in particular. I was interested in work that supported women and women’s rights. Growing up in a patriarchal society in Nigeria made me very sensitive to injustice and to the cultural stereotypes placed on women and girls. Then I did not get into medical school; this was one of the many setbacks I have faced in my journey. I studied biochemistry instead, and became fascinated with biomimicry and biotransformation. Through this new interest I learnt about biofuels and renewable energy and began to explore a career in the energy sector. By the time I graduated college in 2011, I was able to secure an unpaid internship in my state government’s Ministry of Energy and Mineral resources. There I was afforded the opportunity to learn about renewable energy projects, and especially to connect with young students in the classroom and tell them about the science and technology of solar panels. Through this experience, I began to notice my flare for environmentally focused education and advocacy. The power of passing scientific information to people in a way they could apply at home propelled me into my current work in sustainability.

I started to learn about sustainability when I worked at the Unilever company in Nigeria. The job was mostly part of my placements as a junior officer on the mandatory National Youth Service Corps program, a one-year service requirement for young Nigerians. At Unilever, I learned about businesses and their roles in environmental protection. I learned about the triple bottom line of people, planet, and profits, and their interconnectedness. As an activist in the making, I was always passionate for new knowledge. The more I learned, the more I realized how much I did not know. This humbling reality made me desire a master’s in environmental sustainability. Year after year, I would apply to programs abroad and get accepted. But I did not have the funding to take these on. More setbacks. I took free online courses and training, attended related conferences and events in Nigeria and networked with a lot of professionals who were working on sustainability or corporate social responsibility projects. Understanding sustainability and our environment from the lens of people, livelihoods, and protection made me interested in one day building a platform that made sustainability projects possible for young people like myself.

After five years of actively trying to get into school for a masters degree, I decided to start SustyVibes – first as a blog for young people to read and learn about sustainability from a youth lens. SustyVibes was about bringing in a fun side to environmental protection and making climate action exciting, attractive, and enjoyable for young people in Nigeria. Through storytelling, I was building a community of readers who agreed that it was time to have a youth lens to environmental sustainability, and that the lens had to be fully owned by us and for us. We were the sustyvibers, and, with time, we grew from 50 to 100 to over 500 scattered across the country.

Despite this success, my journey has not been straightforward. Activism has many setbacks, and I have learned to cope by finding communities of like minds and experimenting with small steps together.

Our first logo was the head of an African woman in the shape of a tree, expressing that our community sought to incorporate women’s issues in our work as environmental warriors. As an ecofeminist, in SustyVibes I could blend both of my passions, for women and for the environment, and also find like-minded comrades who believed in the importance and intersection of the two issues. As a group, our community worked on several projects for women’s empowerment and environmental protection. For instance, we taught some young girls living in the Niger Delta how to use photography for environmental advocacy. We planted thousands of trees across the country. We even went into schools to discuss the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals and climate action with pupils. Because pop-culture was at the core of our approach, we held parties, movie screenings and several other interesting events as part of our efforts.

People often wonder how we were able to do all these things as young people. We wrote letters to schools and government bodies – we still do – and they do not get tired of us. In these letters, we declare our intentions. When people see that we have no bankroller or adult setting our agenda behind the scenes, they genuinely welcome us into their spaces and schools. We have also been very fortunate to work with some state agencies on projects such as our street conference, where we go into the streets to discuss issues such as climate change and waste pollution with the average Nigerian.

SustyVibes has now become a training ground for young people looking to make a change in the environmental space. So many new and creative initiatives have been born since our inception seven years ago. Our work was organic and funded from our own pockets. It is a testament to what happens when young people lead on issues they care about.

Our brand of activism falls within the model of the reformer, bringing about change within the system. It involves thinking about the ways young people can intentionally change; they deepen their understanding of our relationship with the environment and then actively make changes in their lifestyles. It is about understanding the impacts of climate change on us as a people and figuring out the best ways to hold our leaders accountable while holding space for intergenerational support and action. This form of activism wants to build a community of young people who are empowered by the skills they have acquired and are going into jobs that heal, repair, and solve critical problems in the world today. We know we are doing the right thing when our numbers increase and impacts spread across the country.

Mental Health and Activism at SustyVibes

By the time we got to our third year at SustyVibes, we were starting to feel stressed and overwhelmed with our work as activists and advocates. It was not exactly burnout, because we were incorporating a lot of fun and rest into our work. Rather, it was a case of eco-anxiety or eco-distress, a weaving together of feelings that included hopelessness, fear, overwhelm, and most especially anger – anger at the sheer burden of responsibility we felt about having to continuously demand for a safe future, and anger at the injustice of climate change and the unequal burden we have to deal with in the Global South.

Young people in the group who were already dealing with mental health challenges felt added stress when they read or witnessed something triggering about climate change. It seemed as if the more we knew about the problem, the more we encountered mental blocks that made us feel small and powerless. We were also presented with power dynamics that used cultural stereotypes to make activism hard. For instance, when the #EndSARS protests were abruptly halted by the Nigerian government and our access to Twitter was banned, we felt impotent and silenced, and this strongly impacted how we felt about our work as climate activists. When we read reports such as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and tried to analyze them as a community, climate change felt too big and complex and we felt too small and powerless. These were some of the ways climate distress showed up in our work at SustyVibes.

We could not define these emotions at the time, but we made an effort to explore them. We created a physical space and invited our community members to attend and share their experiences of emotional stress related to working as climate advocates and activists, establishing that we were not alone. Something was happening to us on a psychological level, and we needed support to build up our mental resilience.

Fortunately, I secured entry into a master’s program in the United Kingdom and was afforded an opportunity to attend my first ever UN Climate Conference in Madrid, Spain. Ironically, what should have been one of my most energizing opportunities left me disillusioned. I witnessed youth tokenism and a general disregard for the urgency of the climate crisis from the world leaders present. Living in Europe made me even more aware of the racial roots of climate change and the colonial linkages to climate injustice. I decided to focus my master’s research on eco-anxiety. This led me to start up The Eco-anxiety Africa Project (TEAP) upon my return to Nigeria. TEAP has been focusing on inquiry into climate change and its impacts on our mental health through participatory and lived experience-based research, space making, community action, and climate-aware psychotherapy. All of these, of course, are not very familiar to Africans; however, we recognize the need to do this work and bring African perspectives and solutions that are contextual and relatable.

Our Core Values at SustyVibes

As activists, we encounter multiple emotions through our work. To be resilient through these feelings and to heal damage that occurs, it is important to develop and maintain some core values and principles. While I do not claim to have completely hacked this area, I believe we are onto something.

The first core value at SustyVibes is passionate. Activism requires passion and genuine commitment towards a cause. At SustyVibes, being passionate about the environment is a first step to being part of our community. Passion fuels us on hard days and makes us ever creative and willing to lead on new ideas. The second core value is community. A community-centered approach to activism, whether virtual or physical, helps to navigate feelings of individual guilt and individualism and helps members draw strength and inspiration from one another. The third core value is having a sense of ownership within the movement. Every member is allowed and encouraged to contribute to our overall decision-making; any member can step up to lead a project at any time. We talk about our community members both serving the work of others within our collective and feeling as if they founded SustyVibes and are entitled to take the lead. The fourth core value is knowledgeable. We feel empowered when we have knowledge about our histories and the policies and science of climate change. We want to learn so we can teach our community members and other young people well. Finally, we have a core value of centering our work in fun and simplicity – we incorporate joy into our activity work at every stage; we also ensure that our campaigns, projects, and communication are simple to understand. This way, we are making sustainability cool, relatable, and actionable.

The Relationship of Activism, Ecoactivism, and Mental Health

Jennifer has not felt that activism is a clear fix for eco-anxiety and related climate distress. Community action does impress her, however, as having a positive impact on how we interact with the emotions of climate crisis. She is inspired by organizations such as Plogging, which incorporates sports with community clean-ups, and the World Clean-up Day as a way of bringing world communities together. She has also been inspired by the use of Indigenous practices, including storytelling, to motivate people to persist in the fight against climate change. Indigenous narratives and folklores can remind people of community and shared history and keep up important traditions of caring for the natural world. For example, one Nigerian organization, Health of Mother Earth Foundation, supports community resilience by exploring narrative building and storytelling through fictional writing and roleplay in what they call healing circles.

In Jennifer’s earlier research with Extinction Rebellion (XR) leadership in Brighton, XR leaders highlighted the importance of embedding resilience within their activist movement. In fact, XR describes itself not by activism but by regeneration, defined by building a culture that cares for self as well as for others and the planet in order to get us out of toxic social structures: self in action and in relationship to community, planet, and all life. XR has a list of governing concepts to support this culture:

1. 1. A shared vision of a world that is fit for future generations

2. 2. Mobilizing the 3.5 percent of the population necessary for a cultural shift to embody this vision

3. 3. Leaving the practices of our toxic system and comfort zones behind

4. 4. Reflecting, learning, and planning again

5. 5. Welcoming everyone

6. 6. Striving actively to break down hierarchies of power

7. 7. Avoiding blaming and shaming

8. 8. Emphasizing autonomy and decentralization

9. 9. Nonviolent regenerative work that supports all members.

This form of activism has been called “Alter-Activism,” similar to Patten’s evolutionary activism, in which the way activists live and connect is the power of the change. Organizing groups based on interests and professions, such as doctors and parents, helps XR address the change needed within their particular group more easily and is valuable for this community building.

XR groups declare their commitment to regenerative principles as part of their meetings:

Implicit within this pledge is an awareness that activism may be damaging to mental health as well as beneficial. Activists may be exposed to harassment, arrest, violence, and, rarely, death. Even within the most careful approach, there can be structural inequity, with those more vulnerable to unjust and brutal treatment suffering the consequences of their activism disproportionately to those whose privilege more often protects them from police brutality and discrimination by the courts (Wretched of the Earth, 2019). Activists are confronted with backlash, lack of progress, and feelings of overwhelm from trying to solve large problems. Activists may miss out on sleep, exercise, and school work, and can develop symptoms of burnout that include depression, frequent headaches, and insomnia (Gorski & Chen, Reference Gorski and Chen2015). In a review of the field that includes a study of forty-two student activists of all types, (Conner et al., Reference Conner, Crawford and Galioto2023a), 60 percent reported adverse consequences of activism for their psychological well-being – particularly stress, exhaustion, and guilt for not doing enough.

At the same time, activism has been associated with many positive effects on mental health. For racially marginalized and LGBTQ+ youth, activism can be profoundly healing, buffering the negative mental health impacts of discrimination and violence (Alexander et al., 2022; Fine et al., Reference Fine, Torre, Frost and Cabana2018). By providing a space to examine and challenge embedded discriminatory structures and assumptions through critical consciousness – a teaching and inquiry technique that seeks to look for embedded power narratives and biased assumptions in societal structures and knowledge – marginalized youth shake both internalized and external oppression and gain cultural authenticity and self-knowledge (French et al., Reference French, Lewis, Mosley, Adames, Chavez-Duenas, Chen and Neville2020). The power of the collective to effect change and the concept of radical hope, that positive change is possible even without having words for it, can help youth overcome demoralization and cynicism. While activists can suffer the harm of inadequate or hostile responses to their demands, most studies have shown that activism promotes positive affect, self-actualization, vitality, hope, and meaning (Klar & Kasser, Reference Klar and Kasser2009). For a scale measuring the costs and benefits of activism, see Appendix B (Costs and Benefits of Activism Scale, adapted from Smith et al., Reference Smith, Hibbing and Hibbing2019).

Ballard and Ozer (Reference Ballard, Ozer, Conner and Rosen2016) describe five ways that activism can support young people’s mental health and well-being, including through improved social capital and connections to others, increased sense of personal identity and purpose, and lessened stress through empowerment and improved coping. More recently, research has shown that activism can be an effective place for youth to practice emotional regulation, decentering from and observing their reactions to their activist experiences and the causes they care about to bring those reactions under control (Fernandez & Watts, Reference Fernandez and Watts2022). As one study summarized, activists feel “skilled up, in it together, with power in numbers and a place to go” (Montague & Eiroa-Orosa, Reference Montague and Eiroa-Orosa2017b).

Activism not only supports emotional well-being and buffers the negative mental health impacts of adverse stressors; it can also be important for the development of skills. Studies have shown benefits of activism on youth school grades, risk behaviors, civic knowledge, communication, time management and planning skills, interpersonal knowledge, capacity for social analysis and leadership (reviewed in Conner et al., Reference Conner, Greytak, Evich and Wray-Lake2023b). The learning that accrues in the climate activism space is also less likely to suffer from neoliberal cultural biases that equate progress with free-market privatized economic expansion and educate students towards such goals (Sharma, Reference Sharma, Iyengar and Kwauk2021), rather than the more collectivist and sustainable goals of a just and care-based circular economy.

Perhaps one of the most important benefits of youth activism is its role in identity development and efficacy. “Identity achievement” is a term that refers to “commitment to a particular set of values, priorities, or interpersonal style” (Pancer et al., Reference Pancer, Pratt, Hunsberger and Alisat2007). Activists can cultivate many areas of identity, including sociopolitical, civic, and moral aspects of the self. Harre (2007) explores the role of activism as an “identity project,” a term that unifies activities done in response to psychologically salient concerns – beyond the basics of survival and reproduction – including belonging, stimulations, efficacy, and integrity. Within the enhanced personal identity gained through activist “identity projects,” activists can also feel more efficacious, both at an individual and group level (see Montague & Eiroa-Orosa, Reference Montague, Eiroa-Orosa, Brown, Lomas and Eiroa-Orosa2017a; Pearce & Larson, Reference Pearce and Larson2006). The support and efficacy of the collective can also support the activists’ identities during setbacks and increase their chances of achieving other goals (Bandura, Reference Bandura2000), again showing the buffering effect of activism on stress, personal development, and well-being.

When we seek an empiric understanding of the relationship between youth mental health and activism for climate change specifically, we find a much narrower literature. Godden et al. (Reference Godden, Farrant, Yallup Farrant, Heyink, Carot Collins, Burgemeister and Cooper2021) collated subjective narratives about activism from Aboriginal and West Australian youth who participate in School Strike 4 Climate, Millennium Kids Inc, Climate Justice Union WA, and Sharma versus the Minister for the Environment. These young people said they benefitted from having a space to be honest and real about their climate distress, being supported by peers, parents, and mentors, engaging in collective action, communicating with each other during climate crises, and being honest and validated about the realities of the crisis. The researchers call for more participatory action research and decolonization of the systems damaging the well-being of these young people, including research strategies that mute individual voices.

In a study involving in-depth interviews of 15 New Zealand climate strike leaders, Bright and Eames (Reference Bright and Eames2022) found that these leaders described a series of preliminary stages to activism, including apathy, awareness, anxiety, and anger. These findings highlight the importance of understanding what feelings are most motivational in order to provide young people with climate education experiences that will help them engage most fully in their learning, a call echoed in Sharma’s description of the young people he interviewed, who felt climate education in schools had treated it as superficial, negligible, and as an “aside” (Sharma, Reference Sharma, Iyengar and Kwauk2021).

Schwartz et al. (Reference Schwartz, Benoit, Clayton, Parnes, Swenson and Lowe2023) have provided one of the only studies that included an adequately robust assessment of environmental activism in assessing its relationship to climate anxiety in young people. In their analysis, which correlated the general anxiety and depressive (functional) subscales of the Climate Change Anxiety (CCA) scale (Clayton & Karazsia, Reference Clayton and Karazsia2020) with a scale of eighteen types of environmental activist activity (Alisat & Riemer, Reference Alisat and Riemer2015), engaging in collective climate action significantly lessened depression associated with the severity of the climate problem and individual powerlessness to affect it. Similar to other research on activism in groups with high levels of emotional distress due to discrimination, such as LGBTQ+ and youth of color, these results confirm that activism can reduce distress about the problem.

Conclusion

Throughout this chapter, we have discussed and defined movements and activism led by youth and children from all over the world. We described the four roles of activism and provided some examples of past and current movements that use different activism strategies. We dove into a detailed personal journey of founding SustyVibes in Nigeria and how Jennifer Uchendu and her colleagues built a movement grounded in youth participation, leadership, and fun. We also discussed some core values that have made SustyVibes continue to stay active in Nigeria and beyond, building self-care, passion, fun, and community as they work towards their goals. As we conclude, we want to mention one final consideration. Not every movement has to last forever. Some movements go viral and inspire others to start other spin-off movements or develop new creative forms of climate action. Others remain small and local until their task is complete. Evolution is a chaotic process of interweaving systems that rise and fall in their interactions. Acknowledging this aspect of activism helps us understand the role of movements and appreciate the value they bring in their most active years. Finally, being creative and allowing space for the growth, diversity of ideas, and discussion that have been maintained within SustyVibes and other generative and regenerative climate activist groups allows for the flexibility that keeps activist activity vibrant, no matter what type or what size. While strategies such as space making, community action, and storytelling protect against climate distress and the emotional toll of climate activism, ultimately it is our ability to live in harmony and support each other and other beings in cycles of rest, renewal, and activity that will sustain the most regenerative world.

Introduction: Being Young in a Time of Planetary Change

In late 2008, I had an experience that changed my outlook on life for good. I was 25 years old, and my interest in politics, anthropology, cybernetics, and chaos theory had led me to enter a master’s program on climate change. I remember sitting at the desk in my study, when I first came across the collection of graphs produced by Steffen et al. (Reference Steffen, Sanderson, Tyson, Jäger, Matson, Moore III and Wasson2004) for the report “Global Change and the Earth System: A Planet under Pressure.” The graphs show how human activities have become the main driver for change in the Earth system and illustrate trends in greenhouse gases, resource consumption, and habitat destruction between the years 1750 and 2000. Looking across all of the graphs, it was clear that all of these trends were accelerating exponentially. Extrapolating the trends to 2008, I felt physically overwhelmed. The thought that living in the twenty-first century is like riding a megatrend of accelerating destruction sent me to bed. I didn’t get out until days later.

Processing the emotional shock of understanding those graphs took years. It was a very lonely process in the beginning. Speaking to my friends about it felt alienating when they told me that everything will turn out ok – or deflected the topic altogether. I needed long breaks from thinking about it so as not to reenter an emotional sphere which was overwhelming and uncontrollable. But as I began research for my PhD on grassroots innovation and societal transitions, I found a group of people with whom I could have a different kind of conversation. The Dark Mountain Project began as an endeavor to start a literary movement that could confront being “trapped inside a runaway narrative, headed for the worst kind of encounter with reality” (Kingsnorth & Hine, Reference Kingsnorth and Hine2009). In the events and conversations that sprang up around the publication of the Dark Mountain manifesto – a publication that invited readers to join the Dark Mountain Project – a space emerged in which people could speak freely and openly about how they experience the climate crisis. By partaking in the conversational mode that formed within that space, something surprising happened to my feelings of despair and anxiety: they eased and, eventually, gave way to a sense of acceptance and, later, belonging.

As more and more young people become aware of the climate crisis and have to deal with the psychological consequences of facing an increasingly uncertain future, it is important that young people, those who work with young people, and those whose work affects young people, have access to a broad spectrum of approaches to help them deal with the psychological, emotional, and spiritual complications that emerge from growing up in a time of global climate crisis. Here, there is ample inspiration to draw from creative spaces – spaces where people bring their full attention and creativity to bear on whatever they are doing, individually or collectively – which explore the relationship between humans and more-than-human nature. In such spaces, people freely exercise a creative state of mind of the kind David Bohm says “is always open to learning what is new, to perceiving new differences and similarities, leading to new orders and structures, rather than always tending to impose familiar orders and structures in the field of what is seen” (Bohm, Reference Bohm2004, p. 21). Creative spaces can take the form of a creative practice, such as a craft, an art form, or body work, but they can also exist in collective learning environments, such as a class or a game. As such, creative spaces are not defined spatially or temporally but by the mindset of the practitioners.

In this chapter, I will outline some of the findings from my research on the transformative potential of creative spaces on the distress arising from growing awareness of the global climate crisis. I have used this approach in my work as a folk high school teacher at Ry Folk Highschool in Denmark, where I have taught a course on global ecology and alternatives to consumer society for the last six years to young people in the age group 18–25.

Making Sense of Systemic Global Crises

A seminal insight from cross-disciplinary research related to the history of human-made climate change is that global warming is best understood not just as a consequence or output of material systems but as a cultural predicament (Capra & Luisi, Reference Capra and Luisi2014; Graeber & Wengrow, Reference Graber and Wengrow2021; Lent, Reference Lent2017; Latour, Reference Latour2018; McKibben, Reference McKibben2019; de Oliveira, Reference de Oliveira2021). To understand the roots of climate change it is necessary to move beyond questions that merely focus on the material and technical aspects of societal evolution and instead ask questions such as: “how do societies that normalize waste and toxic by-products emerge in the first place?” Overconsumption, pollution, and unsustainable ways of life are not the result of separate environmental, social, and economic crises but rather part of an interconnected problematic with deeper roots in the worldviews, cultural values, and social structures connected with modernity and late capitalism (Jackson, Reference Jackson2021; Moore, Reference Moore2016). This perspective opens up and invites the opportunity to reenvision the ways in which we imagine and enact our relationship with the surrounding world as a way to ground and resituate our social roles within the places we inhabit. Transitioning towards more just, equal and sustainable societies involves transitioning the worldviews and ways of being of people living in high-consumption societies. This change can be conceptualized as a transformation of the epistemological and ontological frameworks that guide individual lives and collective action (Graugaard, Reference Graugaard2014).

The crux of such an “onto-epistemological transition,” understood as a transformation within personal and collective ways of knowing and being, is a shift in foundational beliefs and meaning-making. Beliefs about the structure of the world and how it is known guide our interactions and relationships (Larson, Reference Larson2011; McIntosh, Reference McIntosh2008). Meaning gives form to perception (Bohm, Reference Bohm2004) and meaning-making imbues lived reality with cognitive “patterns” and “restraints” (Bateson, Reference Bateson2000; McGilchrist, Reference McGilchrist2009). For example, if I understand the world to consist primarily of material objects where individuals compete to optimize their preferences and choices, I will perceive and experience life differently than if I see the world as made up of a variety of living beings who play different roles, and have different histories and functions, within integrated ecosystems and habitats. How we understand and make sense of the world, and of the global climate crisis, affects what we consider to be meaningful action. Putting meaning-making at the center of addressing social and environmental problems can help us understand how particular activities or interventions open up or close down new avenues for thinking and acting. To this end, it is helpful to look at the ways in which narratives of climate, nature, sustainability, and the future develop and function within interpretive communities and how mutual narration of these topics can reframe the storyline and give rise to new meanings and actions within narrators’ lives.

Narratives are both “recipes for structuring experience which direct us into the future” (Bruner, Reference Bruner2004, p. 708) and a form of “wayfaring” where storying is in itself knowing and storytelling is bringing what is known to life (Ingold, Reference Ingold2011). They can be seen as integral to the “framework of people’s reality structures” (McIntosh, Reference McIntosh, Williams, Roberts and McIntosh2012, p. 235) and this framework is partly revealed in the central metaphors that are employed to give stories their meaning: metaphors help us make sense of one thing in terms of another and thereby bring particular imageries, values, and ideas to the story. Metaphors focus attention on certain aspects of the wider movement of life and privilege certain ways of understanding over others with real social and political consequences. In his in-depth study of the role of metaphors in shaping cultural values and social relations, Brendon Larson (Reference Larson2011) describes how preexistent metaphysical and cultural suppositions have come to be accepted as “facts” in scientific and social discourse through the way metaphors connect, feed back, and resonate with each other. “Framing metaphors” form a web of meaning which place thought and language in living context and structure the experience of reality. For example, you are bound to think and feel differently if you take our current situation to be one of “being onboard Titanic” or see it as a phase of “humanity coming of age.” See Table 19.1 for examples of some key metaphors that frame how we think about the world and our place in it within Western cultures.

In this way, narrative inquiry offers possibilities for resituating the narrator within their lifeworld and opening up new ways of thinking and acting. Ten years ago, working with the stories we tell about the systemic crises connected with global changes in the Earth’s climate system – including what our role as a species has been in creating those changes and how we confront these circumstances on an individual level – seemed to provide an opening for reframing the sustainability challenge and reimagining relations between human and more-than-human worlds. Today, new concerns regarding the story of global crises have emerged – and these are perhaps even more pressing as global media (largely) have stopped sowing doubt around climate science and more and more young people become aware of the severity and scale of the crises we are dealing with. Faced with the terrible facts of climate catastrophe, mass extinction and extreme weather, how do we as parents, teachers, health workers, community activists, policymakers – from any position of authority – enable young people to become whole, healthy, and resilient human beings? How do we establish interpretive communities where young people can make sense of global crises and receive support for the cognitive and emotional processes they are going through? And how do we create spaces where young people can transform a direct experience of the regenerative force within nature into their personal lives and outlook?

Research within various disciplines which consider the effects of creative practices and nature experiences offer important insights into these questions – not just in terms of the potential of narrative inquiry as a way to engender new ways of thinking and being but also with regard to the transformative power of practicing convivial skills and relationships.

The next section outlines some of the findings from my research with the Dark Mountain Project on the ways in which this particular interpretive community helped individuals come to terms with the consequences of climate change through collective narrative inquiry and meaning-making. The research project investigated how alternative worldviews are imagined and embodied in grassroots innovations through an in-depth ethnographic study of the Dark Mountain Project.

Researching the Dark Mountain Project

In the years following the publication of “Uncivilisation – The Dark Mountain Manifesto” (Kingsnorth & Hine, Reference Kingsnorth and Hine2009), I followed different offline and online conversations, talks and events curated by the Dark Mountain Project. The manifesto was authored by the British writers Paul Kingsnorth and Dougald Hine, who decided to launch their own journal in response to a perceived lack of literary and artistic expressions that grapple with the realities of interweaving ecological, social, and economic crises. The project quickly attracted a growing number of participants and initiated various public debates about environmentalism, social-ecological collapse, art, and cultural narratives. The first issue of the Dark Mountain journal was published in the summer of 2010, showcasing a range of “uncivilized” essays, short stories, poems, interviews, and images authored by “mountaineers” from across the globe. The Dark Mountain website and associated Ning platform became fora for online discussions that spilled over into the blogosphere and other virtual social networks while a series of festivals, book launches, public debates, local meetings, and artistic events became the basis for offline interactions around the ideas of the project. Local groups sprang up across Britain, America, Australia, Sweden, and a number of other countries.

The Dark Mountain manifesto presented a perspective on global systemic crises which had not yet found its way to the mainstream in 2009: we live in a time of ecological and economic collapse and the foundations of global civilization are falling apart. This outlook calls for a different kind of conversation about the crises we are facing – and how we got into them:

The manifesto is an open call to join the discussion and contribute words and images to the Dark Mountain journal. The ambiguity and openness about the uncertainty of what would come of the project, combined with the poetic imagery of looking at socioecological collapse as a “journey,” an “expedition,” or a “climb up the Dark Mountain,” provided the reader with different possibilities for joining in. By opening a space for a discussion about the future with the premise that socio-environmental crises cannot be “solved” – but rather are realities we have to come to terms with – the Dark Mountain Project became a platform for a wide range of conversations about how to confront the prospect of “changes so massive that we have no way of gauging them.” As one person put it to me, encountering the Dark Mountain Project “was a realization that I wasn’t alone and that there is a way of being that can somehow cope with this” (Graugaard, Reference Graugaard2014, p. 138).

The manifesto opened up a lacking perspective on the mainstream framing of the sustainability challenge. Adams (Reference Adams2014) has observed that the narrative of Uncivilization occupies a space between two dominant narratives about climate change: one about consequences and catastrophic loss, another about solutions and averting crisis. Drawing on Rosemary Randall’s (Reference Randall2009) work on the psychological cost of this “split” mainstream narrative which “projects all loss into the future making it catastrophic and unmanageable, denies the losses that have to be faced now and prevents us from dealing with them” (p. 127), Adams suggests that the Dark Mountain Project provides a new narrative framing which lies outside both business-as-usual optimism and apocalyptic defeatism. For many, “Uncivilization” presented a necessary break with mainstream narratives and, perhaps more importantly, a meaningful countermeasure: creating a different reality by finding new stories about life within civilization. Kingsnorth and Hine’s (2009) critique and “questioning the foundations of civilization, the myth of human centrality” (p. 28) went hand in hand with a call for creative explorations of other ways of seeing and being in the world. The creative responses to this call became an important way for many participants to work through the overwhelming thoughts and feelings connected with climate catastrophe.

Working Creatively with the Frameworks That Delineate our Lifeworlds

At least two aspects of the creative spaces that emerged in connection with the Dark Mountain Project are particular to Dark Mountain – and the learning that has grown from the project should be seen in the context of the narrative of the manifesto and the evolution of Dark Mountain as a cultural movement. First of all, the acceptance of collapse as a framing of the present global situation can be both unsettling and disorienting; it can create a turbulence within familiar ways of thinking, which is both emotionally difficult and psychologically disconcerting. But the disruption of the narrative framing of progress allows for giving up hope or expectation – at least momentarily – and come to terms with the reality that cultures, languages, creatures, and habitats are disappearing at a rate that has very few precedents in Earth’s history. While this is not an easy process, it is an important psychological experience with parallels to Randall’s (Reference Randall2009) work on dealing with loss. In this way, the framing of collapse opens the door to grief and mourning. Collapse implies a dissolution of a particular imagination of the future and the gradual cessation of associated concepts, meanings, and beliefs. In this way, collapse is also a breakdown in the validity and meaning of some of the concepts and constructs that have previously made sense of reality and shaped a course of life. This also applies to the wider cultural realm where concepts and narratives framed by progress are increasingly failing to explain the course of history as well as individual lifeworlds.

Secondly, the explicit rejection of anthropocentrism and the embrace of animism and ecocentrism gives nature “centre stage, not as a receptacle for human activities, emotions, or narratives, but as itself, on its own inhuman terms,” as Greer puts it in the first Dark Mountain journal (Greer, Reference Greer2010, p. 7). Ecocentrism is not only an ethical outlook, it is connected with the view that stories are constitutive of reality, which, in the words of the manifesto, “remains mysterious, as incapable of being approached directly as a hunter’s quarry” (Kingsnorth & Hine, Reference Kingsnorth and Hine2009, p. 10). This approach supplements the narrative of collapse with a narrative of re-enchantment understood as “a reconceiving and a re-seeing and sensing of this wild-flowering world as something that cannot ever be fully objectified” (Hine & Abram, Reference Hine and Abram2011, p. 64). It is this element which brings the authors of the manifesto to speak of hope beyond hope: “The end of the world as we know it is not the end of the world full stop. Together, we will find the hope beyond hope, the paths which lead to the unknown world ahead of us” (Kingsnorth & Hine, Reference Kingsnorth and Hine2009, p. 19).

With these aspects of the research in mind, we can now consider how learnings from the Dark Mountain Project translate into suggestions for the significance of creative spaces in working with young people who experience distress in response to climate change and systemic global crises.

Conclusion

In describing the way meaning-making, narrative inquiry, and re-storying can affect onto-epistemological transformation through creative practices, I have suggested that this kind of experimentation can support young people in dealing with climate distress. Although the effects of this work may be therapeutic, I want to underline that I have worked with this topic as a question of learning in my work as a researcher and teacher. In holding the space for others to learn and to be creative it is important to acquire the attitude of humility described above: Embracing the uncertainty of what happens in a creative space requires the teacher to accept that she is as much a learner as the rest of those in that space. This means taking seriously that, as a person of authority, the teacher does not “have the answers” and that young people are capable of taking on responsibility for their own and our common future. The global crises in our midst are not just a socio-technical quandary, they challenge how we think about and carry out education and mental healthcare. To relieve the mental distress connected with the global perspective of climate change, it is necessary for educational and health perspectives to be integrated. These fields can help young people to approach sustainability as an integrative personal process rather than a mental abstraction of a future goal or state of the world.

The findings outlined here may transfer to other learning environments more or less easily. The participants I interviewed for my research tended to be middle class and white individuals aged 30–50, while the student cohorts I currently teach are middle class and white individuals in the age group 18–25. While some students have experienced significant climate distress, they tend to be stable characters with a strong support network. Where other personal complications enter the picture, it may not always be advisable to add further weight to the situation. It should always be assessed on an individual basis whether a young person who experiences significant mental and emotional distress is able to benefit from this kind of work. There is a strong cultural inclination to this work as it has been developed within groups of people who have become disillusioned with globalized Western culture but who tend to live relatively comfortably within Western societies. In working with other cultural groups, the conversations, practices, and framing metaphors will have to be appropriate to the culture they work within and the language they use to describe their experiences. Youth living with significant stressors, such as housing instability and poverty, may well have more pressing existential worries than climate change to attend to.

For most people who experience increasing emotional distress in the face of climate change, there is a seeming dilemma in the prospect of dealing with the affliction: Do I choose to enter deeper into distress or should I ignore or suppress these feelings so I remain functional within my everyday world? As I hope to have shown, establishing creative spaces where young people feel safe to explore different ways of seeing or being may offer new ways of creating alternate realities which enable meaningful and good lives in a time of global crises.

Introduction

Climate change and associated health impacts are experienced most acutely within historically oppressed, vulnerable, marginalized, and disenfranchised groups, such as elderly, youth, Indigenous communities and those who experience disabilities (EPA, 2023; IPCC, Reference Pörtner, Roberts, Poloczanska, Mintenbeck, Tignor, Alegría and Okem2022; Schramm et al., Reference Schramm, Al Janabi, Campbell, Donatuto and Gaughen2020; World Health Organization, 2022). The threats posed by climate change to Indigenous communities operate at the nexus of intersecting crises borne from a myriad of social, political, structural, and health inequities that correspond to a history of injustice vis-à-vis settler-colonialism. These impacts – recognized as social and ecological determinants of health – are unequivocally responsible for health inequities and undermine the resolve and sovereignty of Indigenous Peoples globally. Thus, while Indigenous communities grapple with risks associated with both direct and indirect impacts of climate change, they also continue to live according to ancestral knowledge systems that govern a spiritual kinship to Land. Given that Indigenous communities caretake as much as 80 percent of the Earth’s remaining biodiversity (Redvers et al., Reference Redvers, Reid, Carroll, Cunningham Kain, Kobei, Menzel and Roth2023), many continue to inherit the most immediate risks and health implications of climate change due to an enduring interconnectedness with Mother Earth.

The history of settler-colonial violence and ongoing structural and systemic oppression that signifies both the colonial subjugation of Indigenous communities and the anthropogenic causes of climate change are often cited as principal causes of contemporary health disparities, trauma, grief, damage, and loss (EPA, 2023). Taken together, these conditions substantially limit the adaptive capacity of Indigenous communities as they contend with the tremendous burden of climate change. Nonetheless, the prophecy and epistemic promise of the seventh generation recognizes Indigenous youth as the keepers of collective survival, resilience, and continuity of Indigenous community health, land stewardship, and Indigenous traditional ecological knowledge(s). These (and other) values guided resistance during the Dakota Access Pipeline (#NoDAPL) protests at Standing Rock, ND, when Mŋí Wičóni (Water is life) – a Lakota way of recognizing the power and importance of water as kin and source of spirituality, as a life-giving force to Indigenous communities and a sovereign being with a right to life – was a signal of resistance efforts.

Indigenous youth are inheriting the burden of climate-driven risk factors while grappling with vulnerabilities associated with deeply rooted systems of structural and systemic racism (EPA, 2023). The cumulative nature of these risks places considerable stress on Indigenous communities, which is exacerbated by high-heat days, air quality, pollen, coastal flooding, and vector-borne illnesses, among other factors (EPA, 2023). Yet Indigenous youth are amongst the most active subpopulations pursuing climate justice and are involved in grassroots organizing and resistance efforts on the frontlines. Landback, the “bat signal” for climate justice for Indigenous communities, has served as the conceptual and ethical basis for resistance efforts from Standing Rock and the #NoDAPL movement to saving Oak Flat, stopping the Line 3 pipeline in Minnesota, and the Keystone XL pipeline, all of which invariably threaten the delicate ecosystems and waterways home to scores of Tribal Nations. In each of these resistance movements to protect Mother Earth, young Indigenous people risk their mental health and well-being to lead climate justice efforts. Many of these young people experience acute and insidious mental health conditions that are often exacerbated by ongoing resistance efforts rooted in the Indigenous struggle to exist spiritually, physically, emotionally, and mentally, according to our own epistemologies – the same struggle that shares etiological bases with intergenerational and historical loss and trauma stemming from the genocide of Indigenous Peoples.

In this chapter, we outline the intersecting crises of climate change and Indigenous youth mental health and wellness as they manifest within the context of contemporary health inequities. We provide a glimpse into the impact of climate change on Indigenous Peoples’ mental health and wellness as a whole; Indigenous Peoples, by virtue of their designation as such, are communities that share an intimate relationship to land and place and that have experienced a profound social, cultural, and ecological disruption as a result of settler-colonialism (United Nations, 2015). Indigenous youth, or what many consider the seventh generation, have been recognized as among the most vulnerable subpopulation in the Anthropocene and are among those likely to shoulder the greatest burden of these crises moving forward. At the same time, as we take inventory of the strengths of Indigenous communities, particularly those communities that have ancestral land claims to Turtle Island (North America), interconnectedness and kinship to Land is regarded as central to existence and conveys a profound opportunity to steward climate adaptation movements at a global scale. Finally, we conclude with a call for climate justice that interrogates the ways in which settler-colonialism, White supremacy and capitalism have disrupted Indigenous lifeways, belief and knowledge systems, with corresponding impacts on Indigenous youth mental health and wellness.

As a matter of respect to the adaptive capacity of Indigenous traditional ecological knowledges (ITEKs), the seventh generation and the collective threats posed by climate change, we recognize that any efforts of truth and reconciliation with Indigenous Peoples are hollow until: (1) we atone for the historical and state-sanctioned systemic injustices that have disrupted cultural continuity and challenged the survival of Indigenous communities, their knowledge systems, and kinship to ancestral homelands and ecosystems; and (2) in efforts to adapt and mitigate climate change using ITEKs, we recognize the empirically supported causal attribution of anthropogenic causes to current and anticipated environmental shifts as a consequence of settler-colonialism and Eurocentric value systems (i.e., capitalism and egocentrism). It is our belief that we cannot truly convey the ideological impetus behind the calls for climate justice unless we can appropriately resource the knowledge of Indigenous communities on a global scale. As we expound on this solemn truth, we know well that this is not only a call for acknowledging or redressing the history of violence and genocide of Indigenous peoples worldwide as a residue of colonialism, but also a call to address centuries of state-sanctioned economic, political and socially mediated violence that have systematically eroded planetary health and the health of Indigenous communities (Redvers et al., Reference Redvers, Celidwen, Schultz, Horn, Githaiga, Vera and Blondin2022).

Current Indices of Indigenous Youth Mental Health

Indigenous communities experience disproportionate rates of mental health conditions relative to other racial groups, including substance use and other disorders, although the prevalence of these conditions can differ significantly between communities. While a thorough background on psychiatric epidemiology of Indigenous youth mental health is beyond the scope of this chapter, it is important to contextualize Indigenous youth climate distress within the overall mental health status of American Indian and Canadian First Nation youth on Turtle Island (North America). The most critical and enduring public health issue for American Indian and Canadian First Nations youth has been an enduring epidemic of suicide (Gone & Trimble, Reference Gone and Trimble2012; Indian Health Service, 2014), with rates as high as thirteen times greater than other races (Hill et al., Reference Hill, Eck, Goklish, Larzelere-Hinton and Cwik2018; Mullany et al., Reference Mullany, Barlow, Goklish, Larzelere-Hinton, Cwik, Craig and Walkup2009). Despite the low base rate of suicide overall, the etiological pathways of suicide within these communities, by and large, involve disconnection from lands, culture, family, and community (Alcantra & Gone, Reference Alcántara and Gone2007; Gone & Trimble, Reference Gone and Trimble2012). Thus, cultural discontinuity, historical trauma as a sequela of colonization, corresponding impacts on cultural identity, and the experience of adverse childhood experiences have been cited as risk factors for Indigenous suicidal ideation as well as depression, anxiety, PTSD, alcohol misuse, and smoking (Gone & Trimble, Reference Gone and Trimble2012; Hill et al., Reference Hill, Eck, Goklish, Larzelere-Hinton and Cwik2018). Furthermore, American Indian youth substance use, particularly alcohol abuse, has proven to be a risk factor not only for morbidity and mortality associated with suicide attempts but also for unintentional injuries (Gone & Trimble, Reference Gone and Trimble2012; Hill et al., Reference Hill, Eck, Goklish, Larzelere-Hinton and Cwik2018; IHS, 2014; NCAI, 2018). Finally, there are considerable mental health inequities related to the high rates of adverse childhood experiences within American Indian and Alaska Native communities (Brockie et al., Reference Brockie, Dana-Sacco, Wallen, Wilcox and Campbell2015; Warne et al., Reference Warne, Dulacki, Spurlock, Meath, Davis and McConnell2017).

The ongoing impact of climate change-related loss, damage, displacement, dispossession, and associated environmental shifts on Indigenous communities also contributes to disproportionate levels of ecological grief (Cunsolo & Ellis, Reference Cunsolo and Ellis2018). Indigenous communities experience existential and anticipatory reactions to current and projected environmental shifts and are considered vulnerable to eco-anxiety related to the potential loss of ecosystems and environmental habitability (Coffey et al., Reference Coffey, Bhullar, Durkin, Islam and Usher2021).

Following from a history of violent oppression, genocide, and historical loss, the intimate relationship of settler-colonialism to extractive industries (i.e., logging, mining, coal, gas, and petroleum) has been fundamental to the erosion of Indigenous community health while simultaneously operating as the largest anthropogenic contributor to climate change to date (Czyzewski, Reference Czyzewski2011; Ford, 2020; IPCC, Reference Pörtner, Roberts, Poloczanska, Mintenbeck, Tignor, Alegría and Okem2022; Jonasson et al., Reference Jonasson, Spiegel, Thomas, Yassi, Wittman, Takaro and Spiegel2019; Paradies, Reference Paradies2016). Altogether, the cultural discontinuity imposed by settler-colonialism and associated industrialization and globalization of North America on Indigenous communities has resulted in cumulative impacts of several forces, including forced land removal and land dispossession; prohibition of traditional activities; subsistence methods and spirituality; removal of children from families to boarding and residential schools via federal policies of assimilation; displacement and dispossession away from mineral-rich territories; and massacres of Indigenous communities (Cunsolo & Ellis, Reference Cunsolo and Ellis2018; Ferrell et al., 2021; Gone & Trimble, Reference Gone and Trimble2012; National Collaborating Centre on Aboriginal Health, 2013; Warne, Reference Warne and Wescott2019). These traumas directly affect how Indigenous communities experience climate impacts and their accompanying psychological responses. The ethics and values that govern Western, Euro-Settler versus Indigenous relationships to our environments and ecosystems are chasmic. Importantly, the epistemic divergence between the Western and Indigenous relationship to our earth and ecosystems is representative of ongoing colonial discourse; the extractive nature of our economies is, in and of itself, unsettling and disturbing to the lifeways and cultures of Indigenous Peoples. For these reasons, Indigenous health and well-being, as well as the vitality of Indigenous epistemologies and ontologies, have been recognized as determinants of planetary health (Redvers et al., Reference Redvers, Reid, Carroll, Cunningham Kain, Kobei, Menzel and Roth2023).

Climate Resilience and Well-Being of Indigenous Youth

As an Anishinaabe, Dakota and Lakota Ikče Wíčasa and scholar, both a witness and participant to this struggle for survival, four tenants become clear in resistance efforts that serve as an important ethos in the efforts to steward climate resilience and Indigenous well-being:

1. 1. Indigenous peoples are not activists, we are beings and relatives of the Land. Therefore, protection of the Land and ecosystems is about kinship and love for all – Mítakuye Oyásiŋ (all my relations)

2. 2. Movements are led with prayer and spirituality, recognizing the spirits and interconnectedness of the land, waters, animals, and other nonhuman relatives

3. 3. Indigenous rights and human rights are at stake, with critical implications for Tribal/Indigenous sovereignty

4. 4. The people cannot be healthy until the Land is healthy. Again, We are the Land, the Land is Us.

Centering planetary health while reconciling the imposition of settler-colonialism on Indigenous health will require the intentional development of economic and climate adaptation frameworks that revolve around ITEKs. Indigenous concepts of health rely on ITEK practices to support individual, family, and community well-being. In particular, cultural connectedness, language revitalization, and spirituality are critical to Indigenous youth mental health and well-being (Ullrich, Reference Ullrich2019). This lens can reframe public concepts of identity, illness, and healing from Indigenous perspectives, nurturing youth in their attempt to navigate the active perpetuation of violence in systems and institutions that threaten not only Indigenous well-being but also planetary health (Redvers et al., Reference Redvers, Reid, Carroll, Cunningham Kain, Kobei, Menzel and Roth2023).

Furthermore, previous literature has demonstrated the need to develop context-specific climate health planning which recognizes the important relationship between Indigenous well-being and Land/place (Cunsolo et al., Reference Cunsolo, Harper, Ford, Landman, Houle and Edge2012; Cunsolo & Ellis, Reference Cunsolo and Ellis2018; Ford, Reference Ford2012). Context-specific climate adaptation and mitigation planning has centered ITEKs in the efforts to revitalize sustainability in otherwise vulnerable ecosystems, such as low-lying coastal and desert ecosystems (Ford, Reference Ford2012; IPCC, Reference Pörtner, Roberts, Poloczanska, Mintenbeck, Tignor, Alegría and Okem2022; Whyte, Reference Whyte2017). While the prospect for preventing further ecological damage is quite clear and promising with these adaptation programs, such programs are also critical to revitalizing Indigenous lifeways that have been historically marginalized and targeted in ethnic cleansing campaigns in the United States and Canada (e.g., in boarding and residential school programs) (Heid et al., Reference Heid, Khalid, Smith, Kim, Smith, Wekerle and Thomasen2022; Schramm et al., Reference Schramm, Al Janabi, Campbell, Donatuto and Gaughen2020). Today, Indigenous youth are uniquely situated to reclaim ITEKs that diverge from the Western concepts of empiricism and positivism that challenge their rights to land vis-à-vis relationship to place, while inviting epistemic pluralism as a solution to the climate crisis as we know it.

Naturally, Indigenous communities have explicitly supported calls for justice over those of resiliency, largely due to the problematic assumption that further insult and oppressive circumstances are likely to continue (i.e., structural oppression) with the expectation that Indigenous people become more “resilient” in the face of considerable violence/injury. In recognition of this problematic and inflexible assumption, climate justice can be approached as conceptually similar to the United Nations Declaration of Indigenous Peoples, which privileges the right to place (territorial homelands), culture, spirituality, Indigenous languages and the maintenance of Indigenous traditional knowledge systems (IPCC, Reference Pörtner, Roberts, Poloczanska, Mintenbeck, Tignor, Alegría and Okem2022; United Nations, 2015).

Finally, concepts of climate justice and the portability of ITEKs extend to Indigenous connectedness frameworks for Indigenous youth. The Indigenous connectedness framework is one in which culture, Land, language, spirituality, and ceremony are central aspects of well-being and health for Indigenous youth (Ullrich, Reference Ullrich2019). Similarly, Indigenous-led climate adaptation and mitigation programs have been developed that are consistent with the Indigenous youth connectedness frameworks outlined above, which provides evidence for effectively converging Indigenous youth mental health/wellness and efforts to improve the health of our most vulnerable ecosystems. More recently, concepts such as cultural connectedness and Indigenous eco-relational engagement (IERE) have begun to proliferate in academic literature in efforts to translate place-based traditional and cultural activities, as well as Indigenous languages, into Indigenous health prevention program development and climate adaptation and mitigation frameworks.

Conclusion

Youth across Indigenous Nations in the United States and Canada recognize the importance of connectedness to land as central to Indigenous well-being (Kading et al., Reference Kading, Gonzalez, Herman, Gonzalez and Walls2019; Lines et al., Reference Lines and Jardine2019). One program, developed by the National Indian Health Board in collaboration with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), provides promising insights into how Tribal communities are developing climate adaptation programs that center ITEKs while remaining committed to Indigenous Peoples’ health and well-being (Schramm, et al., Reference Schramm, Al Janabi, Campbell, Donatuto and Gaughen2020). “Chemşhúun Pe’ícháachuqeli (When Our Hearts Are Happy): A Tribal Psychosocial Climate Resilience Framework” was developed in accordance with the Tribal vulnerability assessment to help community members care for their cultural and emotional well-being when preparing for projected impacts of climate change (Schramm et al., Reference Schramm, Al Janabi, Campbell, Donatuto and Gaughen2020). Within this same program, the Swinomish Indian Tribal community culturally adapted an existing CDC climate adaptation framework that incorporates complex atmospheric data to provide both short- and long-range climate data projections (Schramm et al., Reference Schramm, Al Janabi, Campbell, Donatuto and Gaughen2020).

Climate-related loss and damages to ecosystems that have governed a spiritual kinship to place, and maintained ITEKs since time immemorial, are not only a source of distress for Indigenous communities but are also a reminder of a painful history of settler-colonialism and the abrogation of natural law (Cunsolo & Ellis, Reference Cunsolo and Ellis2018; IPCC, Reference Pörtner, Roberts, Poloczanska, Mintenbeck, Tignor, Alegría and Okem2022; Redvers, Reference Redvers, Celidwen, Schultz, Horn, Githaiga, Vera and Blondin2022; Schramm et al., Reference Schramm, Al Janabi, Campbell, Donatuto and Gaughen2020; Whyte, Reference Whyte2017). Indigenous youth contend with the burdens of ever-widening health inequities, navigate a history of environmental racism, and bear witness to the day-to-day stressors of structural and systemic oppression, all while grappling with the acute nature of the climate crisis in hopes of justice, to any end. While ITEKs and Indigenous concepts of health and wellness have positioned youth to be principal stewards of Mother Earth, our role, according to seventh generation prophecies, is to support our youth in all their beauty, strength, and sacredness to be able to carry out these roles in a healthy way. In a good way. If we can appreciate the Lákota belief of our children as Wakáŋyeja “sacred gift,” we can begin to understand their importance to the survival of our Nations and our Earth. Therefore, as climate justice champions and stewards of future generations, we understand that both climate adaptation programming and Indigenous youth mental health and connectedness to language, spirituality, culture, and traditional activities are not mutually exclusive. In fact, these are the same – We are the Land, the Land is us.

As this volume has shown, young people indisputably comprise a globally dispersed vulnerable population that is unjustly threatened by climate change-related harm. Children shoulder more than 85 percent of the global burden of disease from climate change (Sheffield & Landrigan, Reference Sheffield and Landrigan2011), and while the danger this poses to physical health is well described, the injury this inflicts on young people’s mental health has been much slower to gain attention. It is a ripe time for a volume such as this one to help fill that critical gap. We see the major contributions of this book as having struck the sweet spot where three areas of knowledge intersect: young people, climate justice, and mental health. Itis not easy to identify climate as a sole stressor in a time of polycrisis – as young people face climate change, biodiversity loss, environmental degradation, pandemic, fraying democracies, rise of authoritarianism, war, financial crisis, structural inequality, racism, and more – but best efforts throughout this book are made. Taken together, the chapters weave expertise from family, developmental, and systems theory, psychoanalysis, psychology, psychiatry, neuroscience, pediatrics, law, activism, trauma science, ecotheories, environmental justice, Indigenous knowledge, theology, and the wide-ranging therapeutic practices derived from these fields. In doing so, they offer rich insight into research and practice at the raw bleeding edge of what is known about the youth mental health crisis within the larger climate crisis. Crucially, this includes what can be done to empower and support young people in navigating these challenges while protecting and promoting their personal and community well-being.

In concluding the collection, we would like to offer a nuanced thrust of resistance to the “mental healthification” of discourse around young people’s psychological and emotional responses to our warming world. By “mental healthification” we mean a fixation on Western psychology and psychiatry, therapies, treatments, and other pathways to recovery that see difficult climate emotions as something to be “overcome,” as well as a rigid loyalty to biomedical approaches to trauma and related responses. We see this approach as unfortunately deflecting attention from the political, cultural, economic, and structural systems that shape and are shaped by the mental and physical capacities and orientations of the body politic, whereby individuals are pathologized while harmful and potentially genocidal systems are perversely portrayed as innocent, neutral, and inevitable. At the same time, we recognize that the harmful complex systems in which people live that lead to climate distress and trauma have catalyzed the onset of acute pain for many people, and it is only appropriate that some individuals seek mental health care to live better with these afflictions. Climate-aware mental health professionals are increasingly organizing their communities of practice around a nonpathologizing approach to suffering in the face of climate change. This partly means experimenting with community approaches to mental health care that live beyond the biomedical model, as well as co-opting and adapting preexisting therapeutic interventions to support people who are struggling with diverse climate mental health outcomes. Seeking out a therapist when the climate crisis is a presenting feature in one’s pain therefore does not necessarily mean being faced with the real dangers of a misunderstanding and pathologizing professional. The climate-aware clinician can offer radical and empowering forms of support for the unique stressors of climate trauma and distress. However, these nonpathologizing approaches are still not the norm in the mental health professions at large, and the “mental healthification” of climate distress and trauma still looms uncomfortably large in the public psyche around care and response.

While many contributions in this volume have clarified and argued for the appropriateness of framing climate mental health issues through a non-pathologizing lens, oceans of insights from contemplative practices, environmental humanities, Indigenous wisdom traditions, spiritual approaches, MAPA (most affected people and areas) perspectives, affect studies, posthumanism, new materialism, betrayal trauma, queer theory, transpersonal psychology, existential approaches, social movement studies, and critical approaches to futurity, temporality, and extinction– not to mention traditional disciplines of ecology, sociology, economics, politics, history, literature, arts, and others – remain relatively untapped in our emerging field. This volume contributes to the bridging of the mental health world and these other epistemologies and methodologies from both within and outside the academy.

There are libraries full of knowledge about how to live better with suffering that stretch far beyond the typical shelves of mental health, as well as communities of people with lived experience of suffering whose wisdom has never been jotted down. Extraordinary opportunities await for supporting young people around the world with their wisdom and practices. While climate-aware mental health professionals with biomedical approaches must be uplifted in the work of sustaining young people through climate trauma (Li et al., Reference Verlie2022; Woodbury, Reference Woodbury2019), we encourage future contributions from diverse multidisciplinary perspectives that have historically been excluded from serious conversations about mental health. In this chapter, we break the ice with a few of these domains, in order to invite further investigation and strengthening of their shared purpose; that is, equitably safeguarding and fostering young people’s mental health and emotional well-being in the climate and wider planetary health crisis. At the same time, we offer our reflections on issues that need remedying for researchers to be more effective in this work.

Centering Emotions in Research, Policy, and Practice

What would future research look like if it centered emotion as the primary factor in climate change mitigation and personal action? The essays in this volume move us in that direction; Cartesian dualisms in Western colonial-capitalist thought treat emotions as needing discipline from the more superior faculty of reason, as the unruly barrier to progress and human potential. In this frame, emotions are shameful, private, transgressive, undignified, and pathological – the domain of stigma and deviance, requiring medicalized intervention to assist individuals in becoming accommodated to the demands of modern life. Emotions inhibit rational thought and thwart strategic efforts to influence political reality. In the realm of power-over (as opposed to power-with, as many grassroots social movements often prefer to operate), which remains the dominant modality of politics, emotions are thought of as needing to be suppressed, or if they are valued, are far more often exploited than supported.

The vast majority of people in globalized Western societies have been enculturated in this dualistic worldview that sees emotion as a barrier to progress – whether that progress is economic or social. This means that they often suffer maladaptation to the (often traumatizing) systems they live in alone, in private, and in shame. This isolation and stigma in turn serve to make matters worse for them, and increasingly, as climate psychologists argue, they are making matters worse for the planet. The more emotionally connected we are to ourselves and others, the more connected we may be to the greater web of life on this planet. We may be better equipped to access what is required to sustain life on earth by way of mutualism and partnership, as opposed to the domination, denial, and dissonance bred from isolation. Buddhism, for example, frames this healthy response to the state of existence in terms of “interbeing.” Climate and eco-psychologists add to a chorus of voices from spiritual and Indigenous perspectives saying we need more reflexive awareness and practice of interbeing, to not only survive the challenges ahead, but to honor other lifeforms and ancient lineages that still have a chance at evolving as sacred beings on their own.

This volume offers a critical corrective to some of these assumptions of Western thought by challenging the dualistic view, and posits emotions as a source of – not anathema to – political and social change. For the contributors herein, emotions, not just reason per se, are the terrain of political power. Rejecting the binary entirely, they amplify current research and the wisdom of many marginalized communities and social movements, which show there is reason to emotion, and conversely, that reason itself is based in emotion. Beyond the important work of delineating understandable and healthy climate-related emotional and psychological responses from preexisting mental health disorders (see Haase, Chapter 3), there lies a potent force field in which emotional disturbances are lifesaving instruments of political and structural change. Disturbances force movement, and difficult emotions have always been key ingredients of protest and societal transformation (Jasper, Reference Jasper1998). The emotional disturbances young people appropriately experience in relation to climate can constructively shape political aspirations and feed actions to build a more just and livable world.

Studies of social movements suggest that successful movements often build out from the intimacy of emotional motivation (hopes, fears, resentment, betrayal), personal stories, as well as through opportunities to voice and engage those affective phenomena as part of a wider shared community that feels the same (Ganz, Reference Ganz2010; Gould, Reference Gould2009). This is the work of building power with others through communities of care, such that people cultivate strong social ties and connectedness with each other, and learn how to lead and follow to achieve shared goals in the face of uncertainty. Social capital and the ability to organize are born from these skills. Evidence suggests that social capital can help prevent mental disorders when disasters strike, enabling communities to rebuild faster on the far side of adversity, as well as provide ongoing psychosocial support that builds resilience for turbulent times (Berry, Reference Berry2009; Wray, Reference Wray2022). Therefore, with one eye, we should admire the disturbing climate thoughts and feelings young people express for their potential to galvanize connections that have a protective effect. With the other, we should keep a lookout for risk factors that any number of events can trigger to harm young people’s mental health. To be a researcher or practitioner in this growing field is to be able to walk a balance beam as one’s eyes dart in two different directions. As many chapters have discussed, more research that investigates protective and risk factors that shape how climate distress becomes adaptive for some individuals, yet maladaptive for others, or, how it becomes adaptive at certain times and maladaptive at others within the same individual, is crucial.

These essays inspire us to think in even more ways about how emotion can be understood and leveraged for the climate. Climate change is often framed as a problem of the natural sciences, a matter of technology or even economics and politics. But the science of emotions, including its sister domains of mood and affect, and the proximate, cultural, and political environments that shape them, which the essays in this volume explicate, are perhaps even more important to study and address. As Paul Hawken (Reference Hawken2021) puts it, “The most complex, radical climate technology on Earth is the human heart and mind, not a solar panel.” This book treats the heart and mind as critical “technologies” to address climate change, a direction we need to keep pushing forward in policy, research, and practice.

The Danger of Big Climate Emotions

One of the arguments in favor of bringing climate emotions out of the therapy room and into research, policy, education, and mainstream discourse is that in doing so, we can untangle the threads between big feelings and climate politics, or healthy and unhealthy ways of acting in response to one’s emotions. Although the science of emotions tells us that we want to acknowledge nonjudgmentally, not all actions derived from those emotions are equally morally good. While intense emotions about climate change are indeed a reasonable response to what we are learning is happening all over the planet, unhealthy emotionality is always lurking in the shadows, as is reflected in extreme and often harmful behaviors on both the political right and left.

One area where this political lens on emotions is essential for the sake of climate justice (not just in addressing climate change) is in confronting eco-fascism and climate racism. People along the political spectrum, in many corners of the globe, are responding to climate forecasts with fear and urgency – emotions that are the intended consequences of climate discourse and science communication. Fear and urgency are effective orientations to motivate action, as several essays in this volume show, but not all action is good for the climate or for social justice. The line between actual, real threat and various communities’ perception of risk is rarely straight, and many interests, agendas, and filters can obfuscate it further. It is difficult to get a critical mass of people to agree on a course of action around a particular threat, such as climate change, but even before that can happen, there’s the challenge of getting everybody to unify around a particular threat as a priority over other threats that they perceive. (What makes a person “believe” in climate change as a threat is arguably the entire raison-de-entre of the field of climate communication.) The job isn’t done when we get all people to perceive and care about climate change; the politics of risk perception mix with the existing landscape of cultural politics and affects, and can lead, ironically, to actions that increase rather than reduce harms to the planet and its inhabitants.

Indeed, the mass shootings of El Paso, Christchurch, and Buffalo in the past few years, as well as the rise of authoritarianism in many countries, are the tip of the iceberg of a growing movement of white supremacists who hear in climate forecasts a scientific rationale for hoarding resources, eliminating communities deemed as threats to nature and nation, controlling the reproductive power of women (Sasser and Hendrixson, Reference Sasser and Hendrixson2021), and supporting policies that are less about the climate and more about social engineering and control (Hartmann et al., 2021). In Foucauldian terms, these are the biopolitical implications of climate distress, and they are not new; blood and soil ideology (most prominently espoused during the Nazi regime) has roots in Thomas Malthus’s ideas about resource scarcity and human population growth, from the late 1700s, and even as far back as scientific racism and expansionism of the seventeenth century (Ray, Reference Ray2013). Not only are these ideas not new, they are also not “fringe”; big climate emotions drive current reproductive, immigration, antidemocracy, and gun policy in the United States and beyond. From the survivalist fantasies of the ultra-rich (see Elon Musk and his dream to “occupy Mars,” for instance, which was hilariously spoofed by the character Peter Isherwell in the 2021 film Don’t Look Up), to the eugenicist, “great replacement theory,” authoritarian, anti-abortion, “white extinction anxiety” groundswell (especially in contemporary US politics), these ideas are only growing in popularity alongside mounting climate alarmism. Essays in this collection that focus specifically on climate justice (see Chapters 11 and 18, for example) insist on emphasizing the justice dimensions of climate distress; however, we need to continue to train our critical eyes on the parallel (re)emergence of this “new” climate racism and the role of emotions in emboldening it.

When we treat emotions as private, especially ones related to planetary-scale uncertainty, it becomes difficult to address the distress, much less the propensity toward climate racism and the politics that ensue. As this volume expertly navigates, emotions are always already the domain of politics and justice. If we seek to advance climate justice, not just climate change mitigation, we will need to continue to build expertise around the role of climate emotions in these myriad and seemingly unrelated political conversations.

Positionality, Climate Risk Perception, and Justice

The growing interest in climate emotions is an understandable consequence of the mass public awakening underway, wherein even the most privileged and protected individuals may for the first time be feeling ontologically insecure due to climate change. Unfortunately, this may risk over-privileging constructs such as climate anxiety, grief, and general climate distress at the expense of other acute, subacute, or chronic stressors that can affect mental health over the life-course and over the real physical threats of climate change to the Global South. Depending on who is doing the research, there is a risk of disproportionately playing into the interests of the worried well of enfranchised communities in the Global North, which are responsible for a whopping 92 percent of excess carbon emissions (Hickel, Reference Hickel2020), particularly worrisome from a climate mental health justice perspective. As this volume highlights, there are significant biological mental health challenges created and exacerbated by climate change that take root in early life, which are pronounced for the most vulnerable communities, and so developmental approaches are key (see Chapters 3 and 4). Prioritizing mental health and psychosocial support for young people in disaster and conflict settings, migrants, those experiencing food and water scarcity, extreme heat, air pollution, climate-related gender-based violence, and more are all critical pieces to work on for climate mental health justice.

Climate and mental health research has a rich opportunity to take seriously the ways that emotions have everything to do with positionality, which is constantly shifting and evolving in mutual co-creation with culture and politics. Climate change is often considered an elite concern, despite the ways that it is and will continue to be experienced most intensely by those with the least power (see Chapters 4 and 20). This is because climate change is a kind of epi-phenomenon, a meta-category that includes a wide variety of threats and risks (and opportunities) that are experienced unevenly across different populations.

Climate change touches absolutely everything; this is why philosopher Timothy Morton calls it a “hyperobject” that is vastly “dispersed across space and time” (Morton Reference Morton2013), and manifests like a “Whack-a-Mole” toy in so many different ways and contexts. One’s mental health response to it can vary as much. One can be experiencing climate impacts (such as an infectious disease pandemic, one example of this phenomenon) and yet fail to perceive the cause of one’s predicament as deeply intertwined with climate change, and vice versa. Much depends on the politics of risk perception and the stories we each disparately live within and believe. (This is where research about the psychological concepts of the availability heuristic, negativity bias, choice architecture, and confirmation bias, to name a few examples, could further bear on climate politics.) Whether any given community or individual position vis-à-vis climate change understands the risks they face qua climate change has everything to do with the stories circulating around them, their relative vulnerability to confirmation and negativity biases, and a whole layer of interpretative infrastructure that often goes unacknowledged in climate research (see, for example, Barrett, Reference Barrett2017 and Mesquita, Reference Mesquita2022). In other words, one person in one part of the world and one point in history may be experiencing climate change as an increased incidence of wildfire, and may have access to a culturally constructed suite of emotions and cognitive concepts through which to understand the threat as such. But in order for that person to understand the threat they’re experiencing as a function of climate change, much has to happen first. They have to have a particular understanding of climate change and of the risk they perceive. (This is perhaps why people who have had some kind of environmental education report feeling more climate distress, and why they are also relatively privileged.) This perspective enables them to connect the dots between what they are phenomenologically experiencing and the otherwise abstract scientific concepts of climate change.

And for them to respond with any particular emotion (such as “anxiety”), they have to have access to a particular vocabulary and cultural context where such an emotion has meaning and purchase as a response to the perceived risk, as we unpack further down. Their feelings emerge out of a complex dynamic of causes and conditions that shape their positionality, and same too of their perception of risk. Positionality not only determines how they are positioned vis-à-vis different threats caused by climate change; it also determines how they will understand their concerns within a particular frame or narrative, as well as what emotions they will feel in response to them. Put simply, if climate isn’t part of that frame, they won’t perceive their suffering in terms of climate change. In this way, we can see the stickiness of the questions, “who feels climate distress?” and “what are the mental health impacts of climate change on a given community?” Thus, if we want to shift climate politics, we will need to deeply query these complex matters of risk perception, threat response, positionality, and the science of emotions. This could look like doing more research on different communities’ perceptions of climate change and other risks, as well as exploring the ways different emotions are culturally constructed among various communities (instead of assuming the universality of emotions). This could involve using language that a community uses for itself to identify its own stressors and recognizing why, even though climate change may be connected to those stressors, there may be suspicion that climate change diverts resources away from that community. It could mean uplifting leaders from the community and listening to them on what needs are most salient to the community in order to see their tie-in (or, as is sometimes the case, their conflict) with climate politics, and attending to other sources of suffering as a primary goal that climate change will surely make worse. Otherwise, the risk exists that communities experiencing “more immediate threats” than climate change (police brutality, food insecurity, waste siting, etc.) will continue to distance themselves from the climate movement because they do not see their interests as aligned, even though climate change is predicted to exacerbate these other problems.

One direction in which to move in order to address this issue is to reframe climate change as lots of different problems that are interconnected. Deconstructing “climate change” as the problem allows us to see it in all of its proxies and knock-on effects. That is, we can recognize that a pandemic, a fire, police brutality, environmental racism, food insecurity, abortion controls, hunger, and any number of more “immediate” threats (immediate relative to different communities across space and time, that is) are inextricably tied to climate change. We should start to connect the dots between those disparate, immediate threats to distinct communities, while also acknowledging the tensions and costs of clumping all these problems under one umbrella of “climate.” For instance, a group of Black community members in New Orleans, Louisiana may not be all that energized to discuss how climate change writ-large is impacting their mental health. But when the conversation shifts to how hurricanes, floods, and tornadoes affect them personally, and how structural racism has long impacted the degree of help they receive from outside sources for dealing with the impacts of these disasters, people come alive around the topic. We are tasked to name the polycriss within the climate crisis, and know that one person’s climate polycrisis may be materially different – and, crucially, articulated differently – from the next (Ray, Reference Ray2021).

This book gestures in such a direction, but we call for even further thinking about this question: what is gained (or lost) when we get rid of climate change as the main frame through which we understand different communities’ concerns? Paradoxically, perhaps, might a more robust and justice-oriented approach to climate change jettison the concept entirely? Climate communicators are demonstrating that climate frames that are most accessible across most populations are ones that emphasize health (Maibach et al., Reference Maibach, Nisbet, Baldwin, Akerlof and Diao2010); if this is true, how might the mental health frame advanced in this volume help move the conversation around climate in this health-focused direction? And in terms of youth mental health, this line of inquiry asks, whose young people’s mental health are we circumscribing our concern around when we consider only those concerned about “climate change”? How might we expand our research if we understood that it takes a particular positionality to not only experience the threat of, but to articulate their experience of that threat as climate change? Further research on the role of positionality to threat assessment and response in climate mental health would expand the implications of this current volume for youth climate justice. However, caution should be applied to how much one dilutes the climate frame in order to make space for other connected priorities, as the further away we get from conceptualizations of climate change, the harder it is to keep the focus on the overall needed intervention to protect and promote the mental health of all: reducing the use of fossil fuels at global scale.

Gaining Clarity across Scales and Language

While exciting that the climate mental health space is gaining ground as more researchers flock to the field and the public takes interest in it, not all growth is good. Without many standardized, validated, and culturally sensitive scales for measuring relevant constructs in climate mental health, it can sometimes feel like we are adding more noise than signal to an already complex space. Furthermore, papers that measure distinct experiences such as eco-anxiety, climate anxiety, climate distress, or climate worry, are of great interest on their own, but the lack of clarity around the overlap and standardization of these constructs limits the comparison of findings across disparate regions and contexts. Future research that responds to the functionality (or not) of climate mental health constructs would be a boon to the field.

It isn’t just scales that lack clarity and unity. The vocabulary we use to describe our emotional and cognitive experiences with climate change often varies, yet carries political salience and cultural specificity based on our positionality, as discussed above. There is a thumping call for shared language that can transcend our differences so that humanity can effectively meet this moment, indict the political failures and name the structural forces that are making people mentally ill and subclinically distressed, and finally, find ourselves in partnerships with each other that support the shared existential project of fostering a better future. While there are many examples of climate emotions in other languages (Schneider-Mayerson & Bellamy, Reference Schneider-Mayerson and Bellamy2019), research on climate psychology is concentrated on emotions experienced in the Anglosphere. What does this leave out, considering that the majority of climate impacts will be felt in non-English speaking low- and middle-income countries? How are we to make sense of the psychological and emotional impacts of climate change for communities dealing with legacies of imperialism, colonization, extraction, and poverty at the same time as climate change if we are missing the words they use to make sense of these layered impacts for themselves? Linguistically diverse investigations of climate emotions – codeveloped with community members and diverse cultural brokers – are needed that respect local context and culture. So too is a broad cross-cultural vocabulary that local findings can be (roughly) translated into, in order to make sense of political and structural forces that shape people’s internal climates across disparate regions. Words are material to how we make sense of the world, and therefore how we can act in it. The lack of nuanced international vocabulary in this respect risks perpetuating the pathologizing or ignoring of young people who are impacted by any number of legitimate climate stressors.

Climate Hostages and Critical Consciousness

Young people worldwide could be understood as what the climate-aware psychologist Thomas Doherty calls “climate hostages” (Doherty et al., Reference Doherty, Lykins, Piotrowski, Rogers, Sebree Jr, White, Asmundson and Noel2022) – given that they are being forced to adapt to the damaging effects of climate change over their entire lives, are up against a system laden with an entrenched status quo, and have inherited the burden of being “the climate generation” that will somehow fix the problem inside said system. Terms such as hostage and “institutional betrayal” helpfully evade any passivity and underscore the political nature of being restrained by powerful structures that seek to dampen young people’s alarm about the destructive system in which they are living, contributing to mental health struggles. Institutional betrayal refers to wrongdoings, including moral injury, carried out by an institution upon individuals dependent on that institution, and it can lead to a number of harmful psychological consequences, including anxiety, depression, and suicidality (Smith & Freyd, Reference Smith and Freyd2014). In the climate context, young people are dependent upon national and global leadership to take climate actions that are in line with climate science in order to create a sustainable future and safeguard a planet in which they can grow up and thrive for generations to come. Young people may not be old enough to vote, let alone run for office or lead powerful institutions, and so are deeply dependent upon powerholders to uphold their end of the deal. When young people witness that these responsibilities are not taken seriously by powerholders over time, this violates a basic sense of right and wrong, causing mental suffering on moral grounds. Young people recognize that they are distressed not just because “the environment is not doing well,” but because something wrong is being done to them that leads to the emergence of their critical consciousness (Freire, Reference Freire, Ramos and Macedo2012). Critical consciousness is a key skill to support young people in cultivating, for their own agency, integrity and motivation to cause change, and future research that digs into this would be a striking contribution.

Queering Climate Anxiety

Another future direction of climate justice and mental health research that builds on what has been accomplished in this collection is to explore the impact of queer ecological theory on climate distress and other eco-emotions. Queer ecological theory attempts to expose the unacknowledged assumptions in much environmental discourse and politics that the actors and subjects are cis/straight/heteronormative people, operating within a system that assumes and rewards heteronormative nuclear family structures. It exposes the ways that ideas about how nature works are often culturally constructed from a homophobic culture, such that heterosexuality or monogamy, for example, are portrayed as “natural,” and anything else as “unnatural” and therefore morally bad. “Queering” ecology helps us see the ways cultural norms are projected onto nature, and how nature is used to reinforce existing or status quo expectations. What would it mean to queer climate anxiety?

Taking the lead from thinkers such as Nicole Seymour, affect theorists such as Sara Ahmed (Reference Ahmed2014), and disability and Indigenous scholars, what would a fuller picture of climate mental health look like if it challenged heteropatriarchy, ableism, and colonial ideas of individualism and anthropocentrism at their roots? One exciting example of this direction is Vanessa Mochado de Oliveira’s Hospicing Modernity, which brings together neuroscience, mental health, Indigenous critique, and environmental education in ways not yet seen in traditional disciplinary scholarship.

This question opens many lines of inquiry, which we cannot do justice to here. We mean to provoke the conversation to continue to develop these lines, as they are happening already in these fields, by bringing them to bear on research on youth climate mental health more fulsomely. For starters, queering climate emotions can involve expanding the range of emotions that dominant climate discourse avails. For example, queer climate activist and writer adrienne maree brown calls for pleasure as a central emotion for climate justice engagement (brown, Reference brown2019), while Nicole Seymour discusses irony, irreverence, and embarrassment as generative orientations for climate advocacy (Seymour, Reference Seymour2018).

Moreover, queer, Indigenous, feminist, posthumanist, and disability scholars challenge dominant models of relationality as it is defined as normative in mainstream psychology research and public discourse. That is, individualism, the family structure, social reproduction within capitalism, care work, kin, the role of community and “all our relations” (a term popularized by Winona LaDuke, Reference LaDuke1999), what it means to be dependent upon and in relationship with “others,” the transcorporeal nature of our bodies and cells (Alaimo, Reference Alaimo2010) – these are all topics of central interest to disability, Indigenous, posthumanist, and queer scholars (among others) that have implications for climate mental health.

Scholars rethinking the colonial, ableist, anthropocentric, and heteronormative models of family and bodily autonomy, much less binaries such as mind/body and reason/emotion discussed above, have much to offer the study of youth mental health and climate change. These fields also expose the unsustainability, misogyny, colonialism, and state-sponsored heteronormativity of the nuclear family structure, posing the question: How might non-normative views of temporality, kinship, and definitions of what constitutes the body expand the conceptual and ethical net of climate mental health conversations? And to connect it more explicitly to this book, what do young people have to teach us about the political and climate implications of these non-normative critiques? How might these critical inquiries be enlisted to support youth engagement with the polycrisis within which they find themselves?

With reproductive refusal due to climate change at an all-time high (Wray, Reference Wray2022), rather than bemoan this as tragic, as the dominant discourse does, perhaps there is an opportunity here for recognizing the failure of the dominant nuclear family heteronormative model – both in terms of its exploitation of invisible care labor and in terms of its unecological structure. What happens when we explore broader kinship models that include communities, the more-than-human, ecosystems? If isolation and ruptured relationships are at the root of both our existential and climate crises, might new models of relationality be the right medicine for both dis-eases? What does “care” mean in these conversations, and how might they dismantle the medical model to deepen our relationships and healing (Mochado de Oliveira, Reference Mochado de Oliveira2021)? These lines of inquiry only begin to scrape the surface of what queer, Indigenous, and disability theorists could offer the field of youth climate mental health studies.

Transformative and Transgressive Research

With the UN Secretary General telling the world that we are on a “highway to climate hell” (Frangoul, Reference Frangoul2022) and that the state of the climate crisis presents a “code red for humanity” (Joly, Reference Joly2021), nothing short of societal transformation is being called for at the highest levels of governance. In order to transform society, science and knowledge production itself must also be transformed in order to step away from dominant modes of thinking and doing that have historically marginalized non-Western wisdom traditions and practices that are now sorely needed (Temper et al., Reference Temper, McGarry and Weber2019). A key aspect of producing knowledge differently means producing it in equitable partnerships with people outside the university, who live in the communities we hope our research will serve. In the climate mental health context, this means coproducing knowledge alongside people with lived experience of climate mental health issues, with youth, with frontline communities, with disabled people, with Indigenous communities, queer communities, women, farmers, and migrants. What this looks like in practice is inviting members of disproportionately affected communities into codesigning interventions they develop shared ownership of, for the benefit of their community (such as through the global mental health model of “task-sharing”), with those from communities perpetuating the problems, and more. Sharing power so that research questions are guided through equitable partnerships will be key to enriching not only our academic outcomes, but its real-world impacts. We see climate mental health researchers as perfectly positioned to engage in this kind of transformational work, as long as we can admit to ourselves and our colleagues that what we aim to do is bring about structural change, not just observe the maladies of the moment. The tension this creates for us as scientists and researchers who have been taught to treat subjective desires and emotions around our work as artifacts that ought to be extracted signals that we are at a crossroads.

With so many “isms” shaping climate impacts, how harmful they are, and for whom, (colonialism, racism, sexism, etc.), scholars have argued for transgressive approaches that cut across the boundaries such “isms” create. Transgressive research is defined by Lotz-Sisitka et al. (Reference Lotz-Sisitka, Ali, Mphepo, Chaves, Macintyre, Pesanayi and McGarry2016) as “critical thinking and collective agency and praxis that directly and explicitly challenges those aspects of society that have become normalized, but which require challenging for substantive sustainability transformations to emerge (e.g., colonial practice or epistemology, gender and race relations, social exclusion, environmental injustice).” In order to maximize the ability of climate mental health researchers to achieve our shared goals of protecting and promoting mental health, climate justice, and youth well-being, we argue that it is not only appropriate but vital for climate mental health researchers to see ourselves as part of a bigger movement of scholarly activists doing transgressive and transformational work.

Conclusion

Community-based solutions that bring all of the above into view are on the rise. Mental health is part of a vast web of relationships, between individuals and each other, structures, and the more-than-human world, and conversations in books such as this one are casting this ancient truth in new, sharp relief, with a much-needed focus on youth. In coming to a close for this essential guide, we especially want to surface the ways the book opens up these possibilities, as well as for the positive mental health experiences activated by climate change. This book offers relationships between mental health and climate change in a series of overlapping domains and feedback loops, rather than a top-down model (as an unnuanced approach to the “mental healthification” of climate distress would have it); it is not just that climate change affects mental health; mental (and physical) health is required for its mitigation. All of these nuances and directions are advanced in this book, and it is an honor to have the opportunity to comment on its contributions. We look forward to seeing its impact on these many fields, and expect these conversations to unfold richly for years to come – hopefully, in service of us thriving together on a thriving planet.