Season 1, Episode 3: Eco-Anxiety Demystified

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image credit | Cosiela Borta

Season 1, Episode 3 | Eco-Anxiety Demystified

How do we navigate eco-anxiety as an idea and as a feeling? Is it one thing or many things? Thomas and Panu talk about eco-anxiety, or “ympäristöahdistus” in Finnish, as a primal emotion, as a feeling we can describe in various languages, as a cultural idea, and as a psychiatric diagnosis. They give a history of the concept of eco- or environmental anxiety in psychology research and in pop culture. Eco-anxiety predates concerns about the climate crisis to take in the Rachel’s Carson’s warnings in “Silent Spring” about human-made chemicals in the ecosystem and global anxiety about nuclear destruction felt during the cold war. Eco-anxiety is a practical emotion, and it can be debilitating at times. You are not alone with this. 

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Transcript

Season 1, Episode 3: Eco-Anxiety Demystified 

[music: “CC&H theme music”]

Introduction voice: Welcome to Climate Change and Happiness (CCH), an international podcast that explores the personal side of climate change. Your feelings, what the crisis means to you, and how to cope and thrive. And now, your hosts, Thomas Doherty and Panu Pihkala.

Thomas Doherty: Well hello, I am Thomas Doherty.

Panu Pihkala: And I am Panu Pihkala.

Doherty: And welcome to Climate Change and Happiness. This is our podcast and a show for people around the world who are interested in exploring their feelings about climate change, their emotions, their personal experience and well, today, our word of the day is a common one in our culture right now — eco-anxiety. It’s something Panu and I have talked about many times but this is an open conversation that we’re inviting the listeners to join in. As I say, [anxiety] is a fear wrapped in a cloud, anxiety is a normal and healthy emotion that we are hardwired to have. And when we have some apprehension about a potential threat we feel anxiety. And it causes us to think about what might happen and take some action. And it helps us to survive. 

So as they say in counseling, anxiety’s job is not to make you happy, it’s to keep you alive. So, we’re going to talk about eco-anxiety and some different ways that you as the listener can — well, feel about this. I know you have a lot of feelings about this, you all, and also think about it and understand it and — Panu do you want to talk a little about your history with this feeling, with this emotion and with these ideas?

Pihkala: Yeah definitely, ympäristöahdistus, that’s eco-anxiety in Finnish. Literally that would be environment anxiety so ympäristö = environment, ahdistus = anxiety. The words are again important here because anxiety is such a loaded term. For some people, it brings into mind more intense anxiety and then for some, like you Thomas, there’s the recognition of the fundamental practical dimension in anxiety and in the Finnish language, my native language, the way we use ahdistus — anxiety, is not very pathologizing. Of course, people in healthcare in Finland might have a connotation heavily geared towards intense anxiety or even anxiety disorders, but common people also use it as a very — something is “anxieting you” and so that means that something is troubling you in a general sense.  And that’s probably one of the reasons why so many Finns have resonated with the concept of eco-anxiety and climate anxiety and those have been big parts of my work here. 

But originally I came across this area around 2009 or 10. Of course, implicitly I had encountered it even before but explicitly then in cooperation with environmental educators especially my colleague and friend Essi [Aarnio-Linnanvuori] who is also a scholar of environmental education. We started organizing sessions for people where they could encounter some of these difficult emotions and those related to many issues including biodiversity loss, and in Finland what’s happening with the forests was a major thing. So, it started for me as a general anxiety / distress, worry-related thing not especially related to climate and that’s been influencing my work also later — but how about you Thomas? What’s your history with eco-anxiety? 

Doherty: Yeah, thanks Panu. Yeah there is history to eco-anxiety and so I think that’s a great way to get into this a little bit too, it’s not a new idea. I mean the feeling of anxiety is a primal, you know, primordial feeling. I think certainly all mammals can feel anxiety in some form and sentient beings of various kinds can probably feel some sorts of existential anxiety in terms of threats to their life, and we as humans have, you know, existential anxiety in terms of threats to meaning and how we make sense of things too. 

And I’ve been tracking this for … too many years now, it goes back to my time with the American Psychology Association Climate Task Force about 10, 12 years ago and you know really exploring what we were calling then “environmental anxiety” and it’s important to realize that this idea of eco-anxiety is not — didn’t specifically even start with climate change. You know, by my reckoning the first mention of the term eco-anxiety in the media as we know it now was around 2004 [2007] and it was really about, you know, concerns about chemicals in the natural environment and chemicals in our systems — endocrine disruptors and various chemicals and things like that. That’s the article that I saw that was looking at that, so this is a long standing concern that people have. 

Really to understand eco-anxiety in that sense you’d need to go back to, say, Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring in the 1960s. That’s a real harbinger of this idea of eco-anxiety, so you know “eco” meaning ecological and ecological threats. You know Roszak had a great quote in his book The Voice of the Earth from the early 90’s and talking about this prefix eco being affixed to many words like eco-politics and eco-philosophy and even eco-terrorism but he said this quote “this tiny neologistic flag flies above our language like a storm warning meant to signal our belated concern for the fate of the planet. It’s often awkward connection with words from many sources, politics, economics, the arts (and therapy of course) reveals our growing realization of how many aspects of our life that concern will have to embrace.” 

So you know this neologistic storm flag that was flying in the 90s, you know, was the harbinger of what we’re feeling here, today in 2021. And you know I’ve got a book here on my desk from Alan Watts The Wisdom of Insecurity: A Message for an Age of Anxiety right and that was written in 1951, right so here we have to think about the nuclear, the Cold War, and the fear of nuclear threat so that’s another variation on eco-anxiety so people have been feeling, you know, over many eras I think we could do some archeological thinking on many eras and times people have had some sort of sense of threats in the larger systems. And so, again —

Pihkala: Exactly.

Doherty: So, I think that’s a good place to help ground ourselves. We’re not alone. This is not new, but we have our versions of it and then how does that play out in your books and research Panu?

Pihkala: Yeah, I’ve always found the historical dimension also very important. Part of that is related to my own history of doing a dissertation related to historical forms of Christian ecological theology, especially the first half of the 20th century and there definitely was distress related to ecological concerns already during that time, sometimes local or regional like during the Dust Bowl, for example. And then in a growing manner, related also to global conditions, so I think Rachel Carson is a prime example here. Even though the concept of eco-anxiety is not mentioned, that doesn’t mean that the substance matter wouldn't be there. So I think that’s very important to note and in the early 1970s, lots of people had this. And since I’ve been working with the subject, many people who were alive then and very concerned have resonated now with the concept of eco-anxiety, it just wasn’t conceptualized that way in the early 70s, for example. 

But for me, it went so that in 2014/2015 I started focusing heavily on eco-anxiety research. It was very new back then in Finland. It was quite a lonely, lonely road but very, very interesting also, and partly I was home taking care of the kids during that time so it was sort of a special time. And I wrote a monograph in Finnish about eco-anxiety and hope which came out in October 2017 and that became quite well-known in Finland. Finland is after all a relatively small country, so if some of the major newspapers cover a book you do, then the information spreads. And many people started to resonate with the concept in its Finnish form and, as I mentioned in the beginning, the pathologizing aspect wasn’t as severe in the Finnish language as it has been in other places. 

And then one year after, in autumn 2018, when there was serious heatwaves in Northern Europe and the new IPCC report came out and Greta Thunberg and others started these school strikes, for example, the level of climate awareness grew rapidly and with that there was also a renewed interest in my eco-anxiety book and work. So it sort of started to fly a second time one year after it was published. 

But a big part of academic work has been, sort of theoretical foundations for thinking about these issues and that’s also of course one place where I was drawing on stuff that you Thomas have been doing with others like Susan Clayton and many of these ecopsychology people — Roszak is one and several others. So, one of the aims of that work is to avoid the pathologizing dimension also in other languages and to underscore that fundamentally eco-anxiety is so called “practical anxiety”, using a concept developed by Charlie Kurth, a anxiety philosopher whose book The Anxious Mind is very helpful in this regard. But of course it can become very intense and people often need support for it. And that’s why I think that Thomas, also in your daily work the subject matter comes up pretty frequently.

Doherty:  Yeah, it does and this has been, you know, as I joke sometimes in a dark way the future or the present has caught up with me in terms of my, you know, you say lonely road working on some of these issues. And so any of you all listening who have been working on this or thinking about this for a long time, you know, for 10, 20, 30, 40 years. It is a lonely road in the sense of being open to these kinds of circumstances. There’s a lot of directions to go with this conversation, you know, “we hurt where we care” as the saying goes. You know the people listening that have environmental values or altruistic values or you know concern about the planet or other species or feel a sense of interbeing, you know, that they are a part of nature, part of the web of life are particularly — I share some of those beliefs and feelings and sort of knowings and that leaves us vulnerable, you know, to this kind of anxiety and also just pure education and awareness leaves us vulnerable to these kinds of anxieties. 

You know, again back in 2008 when I was working on that climate task force and I plunged into the disaster research you know it was interesting to learn about the early writing on environmental anxiety, a lot of it came around chemical — people living around chemical plants and things like that — and you know what they found was that people — if you were living in close relation to a chemical plant you were more likely to have anxiety or physiological symptoms concerned about the chemicals if you could see that plant. So there was a visual piece there even if someone was living closer to it they would have less symptoms if they couldn’t see it. So what we can see affects us and so we do have a mind that’s actively working to, you know, to see these threats — so the more we see, the more we understand, then the more we’re vulnerable. 

And you know to bring it up to the present day, you know why climate change is really you know channeling this eco-anxiety is because you know 10, 20 years ago when you’d think about climate change it was all kind of an abstract, distant — a distant kind of problem maybe for another part of the world — particularly for people in the Global North — Oh yeah, this is going to happen maybe in the future, things like that. So there was seen the direct impacts of disaster that we all can understand. But then there was the indirect impacts of climate refugees and ripple effects and geopolitical, you know, conflicts around, you know, climate and drought and things like that and then the — what I was really working on — was the emotional impacts, the weight, the emotional weight of sitting with all this — this stuff even if we’re not personally, you know, in harm's way. 

But, you know, those categories of impacts have now started to come to be what I call a “singularity” where the disasters are coming to where we live now and the disasters and the ripple effects and the emotional things are all happening in the same place and time and that’s what’s happening for us. It’s happening for me, for you Panu, for listeners around the world and so that, that singularity is really amping up you know this anxiety and it’s beyond — we have to understand, anxiety is about a potential threat, but fear is about a real threat that we can see, so anxiety is getting more — you know, for some people it’s not, the feeling isn’t anxious it’s fear or something like that and so we, we can get into these kinds of things but again remembering that anxiety is hardwired into us in a healthy way, evolutionary way we have both a propensity to, you know, affiliate with nature and to love nature and to understand nature. But we also have - we’re wired to be concerned about threats because we’re mammals. 

So again embracing this, celebrating eco-anxiety to a certain extent is really important. You know I think of books like The Uninhabitable Earth by David Wallace Wells and things like that, these really scary, scary stories are also prompting people to take action. I know I just saw some research that you know natural disasters — disasters of various kinds, like heat waves and droughts, they’re, you know, that the amount of actual deaths are going down even as the disasters are increasing and we saw that with the European, European heatwaves over the successive heat waves they’ve had over the last decade or so. People - systems are, we’re getting better systems you know to deal with the problem, so again as the problems ramp up, our responses are also ramping up so we have to, kind of, keep that in mind as well. 

Pihkala: Yeah that’s one, one thing that brings comfort and the concept of eco-fear has been suggested also. And it would be, in my mind, also important to realize that there is that fear component also. And worry, of course, worry is also a big word which can mean many things. It can be sort of constructive caring — you know, you have worrying about your kids who are out on the town, for example, and much of that is constructive. Then if it controls your life in the sense of negative rumination, that’s of course problematic, but I think the same kind of dynamic applies for many of these threat-related emotions and feelings: that we really need a certain amount of them to protect ourselves and our dear ones. So they have this life serving function as you, Thomas, so well said and that’s very important to keep in mind. 

One of the problems with climate anxiety is that because it’s related to so many things. Overall, we have this eco-social crisis, and then climate change is related to all of the ways of production and consumption and mobility and so on, and that means that the possible triggers and stimuli, the list is sort of endless. So coming back to what you said Thomas about seeing the plant and then getting more anxiety, that’s one of the problems with climate anxiety is because you can see signs of it basically everywhere. And I remember those times when my climate anxiety was higher. I, for example, got anxiety by seeing these major construction sites in Helsinki because they are not done as climate friendly as they should be, and anyway the whole society has big problems with climate issues. Just to mention one personal example.

Doherty: Yeah, yeah. This is — we’ve got about — we’ve got some time left in our talk and I think for our listeners I want to go in a couple directions, I mean, I want to come back to that practical, that practical piece and some takeaways. You know I think one helpful thing as two people who have really spent a lot of time in this area, is how to navigate eco-anxiety because it’s in the media a lot, it’s being written about and it is, like you say Panu, it’s very personal. But then you’re talking about these big systems so I think when you as a listener, when you’re seeing discussions of ecoanxiety you’re seeing it typically talked about in one of two ways.

One is the broad, cultural, people are talking about this on a broad cultural level and you know often as a critique of society and our system or capitalism or things like that and so we’ve got this - similar to the writing about nuclear war, you know, it's a societal problem. So we’ve got this idea of climate change as a hyperobject you know, Timothy Morton, philosophers — it’s this big thing. So we’ve got philosophers coming in, we’ve got psychoanalytic thinkers, therapists talking about denial and repression. You know we’ve got legal scholars, you know, and the legal scholars they see eco-anxiety as a form of “self governance” right, and self protection in the absence of care by the state. So we can see that people's forms of eco-anxiety are ways to take care of themselves because their leadership is not, so it's a form of governance in a way. So there’s really a lot of interesting ways to think about eco-anxiety and climate anxiety — you know Sarah Ray has A Field Guide to Climate Anxiety, so have various environmental educators have been talking about climate anxiety, eco-anxiety because they’re seeing it in their classrooms, with their students and things like that. 

So again, it gets back to this “climate cosmopolitanism” idea that we talk about that there’s many different languages — you’ll see many different languages around eco-anxiety and so it is a bit of a blind man and elephant problem like everybody's sort of seeing it from their piece, so it can be fragmented. And then there’s the personal, there’s … the personal in a lot of the writings on eco-anxiety that comes across as a kind of a personal confession. People confess their eco-anxiety because it's somehow, you know, still a little bit stigmatized to talk about this sort of stuff and that gets into the personal mental health, you know, as we were joking earlier, we, Panu and I, are parents and you know we’re privileged in our way, but we also are humans and have a life and I’m doing this early in the morning and Panu is late in the evening in Finland and I rush to get my 14 year old daughter off to her school and getting her with her lunch and all the special things she needs for her spirit week at school and then I come to this podcast and we talk about these global existential issues and so, we, and so that’s what happens, we’re in our lives, our daily lives and then we’re carrying the weight of the world and that’s are all personal experience of being planetary citizens now. 

It’s a beautiful thing, Panu I think, it’s a real honor that we have this ability to understand and know — at least us, those of us who have the ability to be educated and have access to technology and things like that. But it does cause — it can cause diagnosable problems, you know, as a therapist I see this and that’s another part of the conversation.

Pihkala: Yeah, yeah definitely there’s a lot to unpack here and this sort of fact that we have our daily lives to take care of, that’s on one hand a complication to encountering many sorts of difficult feelings, and on the other hand it can be a resource of course also many times. You are sort of grounded also in other issues, so the dynamics are manifold here. And one part of my work in Finland has been to advise various institutions who have become more interested to help people to cope better with eco-anxiety.

To serve those needs and workshop needs I did a short text in 2018 “10 Recommendations for People with Eco-Anxiety.” The first three ones that I mentioned was, one, “don’t feel weak or unsuccessful if you experience eco-anxiety”. The second one was to “appreciate and respect your eco-anxiety”. So echoing some of the things you said, Thomas. And third, “you’re not alone, don’t remain alone”. And back then, and in many places today, there may be feelings of isolation and loneliness, and that’s one of the reasons why we are doing this podcast of course. So to manifest that you’re not alone: there’s a great company.

Doherty: Yes indeed. Well said, Panu and you know from the clinical psychology perspective the other piece of the — this dialogue is around the medical and the psychiatric and the psychological and is eco-anxiety a disorder? And all these other things that people talk about. Most people don’t understand that, you know, how the disorder system works and the diagnosis book — you don’t need to have a special context for a disorder. Anxiety can be around any number of issues in life or depression or trauma, so we don’t need a particular “drought depression” or “wildfire distress disorder,” but we can certainly have depression or traumatic stress around these kinds of things and so we can certainly have, again we have — it’s levels for people as you think about this yourself, the listeners, there’s a normal level. 

Anxiety is a normal part of our emotional repertoire and so if you feel anxious about climate change, well, join the club, we all do and it’s a big issue. And then some people have trouble managing their anxiety. Some people are more vulnerable to anxiety in general and they tend to ruminate and worry and, or have you know their body all keyed up and have difficulty sleeping and you know that can happen around climate and eco-anxiety for sure. It could get to the point of being like what we call an adjustment disorder, where people are struggling to adjust to a stressor. And then some of us might have a full-fledged depression or anxiety diagnosis because that’s just our situation. You know it's not a stigma or pathology. 

And so finding our place in this is really important you know and again this is contested because some of you want to make sure that we medicalize this social issue. They don’t want to medicalize and say, oh this is just a personal psychiatric problem; this is a social problem; this is a structural problem; this is a political problem, so people fight. Some people are fighting against that diagnosis in a right way because they don’t want it to be — they don’t want it to be reduced or reductionistic. Right? But we don’t want to reduce eco-anxiety in any way. We don’t want to reduce it to just a social problem or just a psychiatric problem. It’s all of the above. 

It’s a hyperobject, right, so it’s multiple things. And we can have issues and issues. So like I can have a psychological issue and issues with society at the same time, right? That’s my therapeutic work with clients. That's where I would go - what are the issues you want to work on and what are your personal issues and how do we get in sync with that — and it’s — that’s just something we all have to do and I have to do as well. Yeah. Anything else, Panu? We’re going to wrap this up in a moment. You know and, again, this whole podcast is - we’re coming at this from different directions you know. We did a talk on inadequacy, the feeling of inadequacy. I’m actually looking forward to a talk on cynicism and celebrating cynicism because I can be a very cynical person myself, so there’s a lot of directions here.

Pihkala: Yes, yes there is definitely and a theme that has been sort of implicitly mentioned here is the ability to counter the negativity bias, and we’ll return to that one I think several in times in our talks. And I might close for my part by reading the last recommendation of this old text of mine from 2018. “Accept the ‘seasons of the mind’ and practice the skill of seeing on two levels. No one will ever be perfect, just like in the natural world the human mind also has seasons. Sometimes you just have to accept and live through a period of dark, melancholy while waiting for the spring.

Difficult emotions are also part of life. Seeing on two levels means regularly focusing on both difficulties and good things. A paralyzing bout of eco-anxiety can often hide the many signs of hope that exist in the world. Remembering the good things and being grateful allows us to cope better.” Now that’s almost paraphrasing Joanna Macy, so respect for Joanna, another pioneer also.

Doherty: Yes, yeah and again the emotional work as you say for some of us is really going deep into the despair to really sit with that and be able to express that in a safe way. And others of us want to build … build bricks of positivity so we want to start with positive emotions and build - so a “broaden and build” kind of positive approach. So each, each of us are going to have our own way in dealing with these troubling emotions in general and I know just in terms of counseling and therapy, you know anxiety again it's a - what I say with clients is you need to “close the loop” on anxiety. So anxiety is a signal, it's like a warning flag and then we go and explore what the issue is as best as we can and then we take some action, that closes the loop in our mind. It activates our entire mind and ourselves and we do something with our hands so we have to try to close the loop with your eco-anxiety either by taking some action of some sort. It could be making a list, it could be reading, it could be doing research, it could be talking to someone, but that closing the loop can get it out of the rumination and the worry and into the world and into action, and then we can come back around again. But think of it as a series of loops. 

I think it is helpful because if we’re just ruminating and sitting in our own stew of worry and fear and the cloud it’s – there’s ultimately, there’s a point of diminishing returns there, where we’re just becoming internalized in it and it disempowers us. So, I know this is easier said than done, but small actions make a difference  – “so small things often.” 

But listeners, thank you so much for joining us. This is Climate Change and Happiness. You can find us at climatechangeandhappiness.com. Please send us your thoughts and questions and we will be talking about more things. All climate, all emotions, all the time. Panu, take care of yourself and have a great evening.

Pihkala: You too, Thomas, have a good day and thanks to all the listeners.

[music: “CC&H theme music”]

 
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