A generation of kids faces a more dangerous world as they come of age in the era of eco-anxiety
Jasper took it upon himself to find out more. He learned that parts of Florida were flooding regularly. “It’s just going to be gone. It’ll be like a hidden state,” he says. When the temperature reached 95 degrees one day, he worried about what that might mean.
“I try to forget about it, but that doesn’t work,” admits Kavi. “It’s like the world’s going to end —not now, but it’s going to end at some point — and I might be there to experience it. So I’m kind of, like, screaming inside. “I grew up in the nuclear era, and I feel like the nuclear threat activated my nervous system at a very young age,” says Renee Lertzman, a psychologist and founding member of the Climate Psychology Alliance, a group of psychology professionals who specialize in addressing climate change.
“I’m struggling to find the words to describe the magnitude of what is being faced from a public mental health perspective,” says psychiatrist Lise Van Susteren, who was an expert witness ina 2015 case in which 21 young plaintiffs sued the federal government for infringing upon their right to life and liberty by failing to take substantive action on climate change . “If we think the storms are bad outside, wait until we see the storms inside,” Van Susteren continues.
Then there’s the reality that young people are sensing the loss of a world they are still in the process of trying to figure out and understand — a heartbreaking form of FOMO at a time when the vestiges of another, healthier natural world remain. “I grew up in the Pacific Northwest, and I still live here,” says Jamie Margolin, 18-year-old co-founder of Zero Hour. “Our bus cards are called Orca cards, but I’ve never seen an orca in my entire life.
Not only do children not have enough life experience to envision that sort of regenerative cycle as effectively as adults can, but they also don’t conceive of climate change that way. For them, there’s no going back to how things were, which is leading to a type of dread that’s sometimes referred to as solastalgia or pre-traumatic stress disorder, in which, as Haase puts it, “the focus is not on being constantly vigilant to what has happened, but constantly vigilant to what can happen.
All of which may explain why, according to the National Institutes of Health, nearly one in three teenagers in America will experience an anxiety disorder, and why anxiety disorders in this group rose 20 percent between 2007 and 2012.
Weeks afterward, when she finally returned to her neighborhood, the outlines of where her home had been were all you could see. She looked for her favorite tree, the one with the swing she had played on almost every day, but it was gone — along with everything she had owned or made as a child. “The hardest possessions to lose were things like diaries and artwork from when I was little,” she says. “Of course, I remember my childhood, but I don’t have any first artworks.
The psychological enormity of what they’re up against has actually helped fuel the Republican argument that climate change should not be taught in schools, that reiterating the subject could augment student distress; and it’s true that among some young people, there’s a level of alarmism that reflects the most dire of all possible outcomes. But it’s also true that those outcomes could come to pass, and that eco-anxiety is not necessarily pathological.
For her part, Margolin has found activism to be the only way to push back on overwhelming eco-anxiety, the only way to navigate the precarious line between existential dread and improbable — but necessary — hope. “I think the psychological is what we need to impact,” says Allured. “We need more people to be thinking psychologically about this and to be feeling what’s going on.
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