A Guide To Climate Emotions: They're Not All Bad
In case of emergency, break out of your glass case of emotion
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My life changed five years ago at a potluck in Park Slope. That was the night I met Margaret Klein Salamon.
Margaret’s the first person I met who put plain words to the way I was secretly feeling–and she wasn’t afraid to do it over hummus at a dinner party. She’s obsessed with confronting the truth about climate change.
Margaret trained originally as a clinical psychologist. When Hurricane Sandy hit New York City in 2012, she realized that she could no longer successfully suppress her own anxiety and terror about the climate crisis. When she brought it up in therapy, her own therapist pointed out, “you’re worried about this, but you don’t know very much about it.” So Salamon started to get informed, and quickly this drew her into action. Her prime directive: tell the truth and get others to tell the truth.
She co-founded an organization, The Climate Mobilization, that campaigned successfully to have cities and localities around the world declare a “climate emergency”. By 2019, The Oxford English Dictionary had declared the phrase to be its word of the year. She then founded, and now directs, the Climate Emergency Fund, which supports some of the most headline-grabbing, nonviolent climate activists around the world—activists whose urgency matches the scale of the problem.
Margaret’s also written a radical self-help book, called Facing The Climate Emergency: How To Transform Yourself With Climate Truth, that I helped her edit and promote, which was my own first baby step into meaningful climate action.
Adam McKay, the writer/director of Don’t Look Up (and, of course, Anchorman) a huge personal supporter of Climate Emergency Fund, and an absolute climate zealot in the best possible way, wrote in the forward to the second edition:
“Ultimately Margaret Klein Salamon understands, as few do, that the biggest challenge we face with the collapse of the livable atmosphere is that it is almost emotionally unimaginable in its scope.”
I know this is going to sound weird, but personally I find this to be an extremely hopeful and inspiring message.
Why? Because McKay, and Margaret, are saying that the climate crisis is about feelings and imagination. These are very human phenomena, and as a journalist and writer and a woman and friend and daughter and mother and person, I feel empowered to engage with them.
Climate change is about physics. It’s about politics. And it’s about our psyches.
I don’t know how to organize international activist campaigns. I don’t know how to wire up solar panels. But I know how to articulate hard truths, feel hard feelings, tell stories about the future, and I also know a little something about how to find joy when you’re also grieving.
And I think these are skills we can all stand to get better at. And if you do, your life will improve right now. You’ll become a better friend, a better partner, a better parent, a more creative person, and you’ll probably be moved to act in alignment with your emotions, rather than stress and waste energy trying to suppress them.
You are living in a climate crisis. You have two choices : work with the emotions that arise from that, or engage in strenuous, vein-popping levels of denial.
And working with climate emotions will likely draw you into some kind of action. Which is good, because everybody needs to be doing something–the problem is just that big. And because taking action will often make you feel better.
I do want to stipulate that this essay isn’t meant to substitute for mental health care.
If you’re feeling intense sadness or anxiety and having a hard time engaging in daily activities, try the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline,
These feelings are tough! They can break you even on a good day. What we’re trying to do is widen our “windows of tolerance” so we can feel more, safely.
What Climate Emotions Are You Feeling?
According to the Yale Program On Climate Change Communication, Americans report a range of climate emotions. The surprise? They’re not all negative.
More than half of Americans (58%) say they feel “interested” when thinking about global warming.
Four in ten or more say they feel “frustrated” (48%), “hopeful” (41%), “sad” (40%), or “disgusted” (40%). Then come “angry” (35%), “afraid” (34%), “outraged” (34%), “anxious” (32%), “hopeless” (29%), and “depressed” (23%).
About one in ten Americans report experiencing symptoms of anxiety because of global warming for several or more days out of the last two weeks.
Almost as many report experiencing frequent symptoms of depression.
Young people, women, and those in the global South report more intensely negative climate emotions.
According to a 2021 survey of 10,000 16–25-year olds in 10 countries around the world,
45% of youth globally reported that their thoughts and feelings about the climate crisis are interfering with daily life tasks, such as eating, sleeping, and concentrating.
In the Global South countries surveyed, like India, the Philippines, and Nigeria, this jumped to a staggering 70%.
75% of youth said that the future is frightening to them.
56% said that humanity is doomed.
39% said they feel hesitant to have kids one day because of it.
I see these responses as a huge indictment of our education system and media narratives around climate change, not just our failure to respond to the crisis itself.
Young people need to see adults are engaging in solutions, and they need to learn about the massive amount of positive climate action that’s taking place right now and see opportunities to take part themselves. In a future essay, I’ll go into more detail about the different tools I use to process climate emotions. I believe a multifaceted approach is needed.
I also want to say that I am intensely, intensely concerned about the climate crisis, but I don’t believe humanity is doomed. Late-stage capitalist consumerism with private jets and giant yachts and aisles full of cheap processed corn derivatives? Maybe. But humanity? We are such an adaptable species, and there are so many sustainable ways of living already happening.
I recently talked to Panu Pihkala, a professor in Helsinki who is the author of a paper looking at the research to date categorizing climate emotions. The bad stuff–anxiety, depression, shock, fear, and trauma–dominates the research literature as well as the headlines.
But, he said, it’s crucial to give space to the more positive sides of this experience as well. For example, there are what Pihkala calls “moral emotions.” These are feelings of motivation, righteous determination, and even outrage that arise when we think about the challenges facing humanity.
The truth will set you free, but first it will piss you off
I feel incredibly galvanized with moral emotion when I engage with Amy Westervelt’s work about holding the fossil fuel industry accountable for its decades of concerted disinformation. Following the playbook (and hiring some of the professional liars) from Big Tobacco, companies like Exxon effectively polluted the discourse on climate change for decades so they could continue racking up record profits right up through the present moment.
Or if you want to be incandescent with rage, look into the case of Steven Donziger, an attorney who won a multibillion-dollar judgment against Chevron on behalf of indigenous people in Ecuador, only to be held on house arrest for three years.
These aren’t necessarily pleasant feelings, but they are energizing, and they can lead you to want to take a brave moral stand on climate change yourself.
The other positive climate emotions are softer. Hopeful, optimistic, connected, grateful—they are our intrinsic reward for staying in touch with the truth, staying in the moment, and living with hard things.
We might feel even more connected to nature and our sense of place when contemplating the threats to the ecosystem around us. We might feel a sense of solidarity and compassion when we see other people doing the right thing for the planet. Breathing smoke from a wildfire, I can tell you first hand, can make you extra grateful for blue skies and fresh air. Every day my kids get to spend outside, every wildflower and every bee, I no longer take for granted.
And even climate grief itself can be experienced as a form of love. If we didn’t feel connected to the living world and the people in it, including the ones we’ve never met, we wouldn’t have this intense feeling of mourning in relation to events that happen far away or don’t necessarily affect us personally.
Check out this incredibly moving video where the actor Andrew Garfield speaks to the fact that grief is really a form of love.
Next time, I’ll go into how we cope with, and help our children cope with, these emotions.
What are your dominant climate emotions?
Some links:
I wrote about tips for families with very young children to address climate change.
Jia Tolentino on climate emotions in The New Yorker
Britt Wray’s Substack, Gen Dread, and particularly her recent speech on living meaningfully with climate anxiety
Leslie Davenport’s All The Feelings Under The Sun , a lovely book for tweens about climate emotions