Everybody Hurts: Embracing Plurality and Empathy in the Climate Anxiety Conversation

Abstract

Introduction

Climate anxiety is pervasive in today's world. The occurrence and anticipation of global climate change has precipitated a period of profound unsettling as people around the world contemplate the uncertain futures of formerly taken-for-granted livelihoods, values, relationships, and identities. Even as the breadth of climate change experiences and responses becomes increasingly well-documented, our understanding of individuals' attitudes and actions remains incomplete. As a result, those with divergent views often exacerbate divisions and disparities rather than underscoring how much we all stand to lose. What if conversations about climate change, anxiety, and response began instead from a position of empathy for others' circumstances and feelings? What if we fostered understanding by amplifying a more diverse range of cultural perspectives and individual accounts? What if changing the climate anxiety conversation in these ways could open productive new spaces for dialogue and collaboration?

This discussion proceeds from the premise that emotion is a key driver of climate change response that has too often been overlooked in academic discourse. An ecological model of emotion implies that emotion influences how we inhabit our environments (in general) and how we approach the climate crisis (in particular) (Brugger et al., 2013). Although climate change is now a popular research topic, relatively few studies attend explicitly to how anxiety influences individuals' engagement with climate change discourse and their tangible responses to altered realities and expectations. Fewer still do so in a way that addresses cultural differences and/or the diversity of individual experiences—including intimately meaningful “microexperiences of change, suffering, and risk” (Burke et al., 2020, p. 4)—over time and space.

This article outlines an ecological model of emotion and synopsizes current climate anxiety research. Drawing from recent qualitative work in the environmental social sciences and humanities, subsequent discussion explores how anticipated losses of futures, relationships, and identities induce diverse but culturally appropriate reactions to climate change. Ultimately, numerous climate anxieties come into view. This multiplicity contours the complexity of climate response and, in turn, confounds the construction of a predictive pathway from emotion to action. At the same time, recognition of climate anxieties' plurality and ubiquity generates new possibilities for more empathetic—and more effective—conversations concerning our era's most urgent issue.

Ecologies of Emotion

In Loving Nature, Kay Milton argues that emotions are “prime motivators of human activity” that work in concert with other processes of thinking and learning (Milton, 2002, p. 3). Emotion operates in conjunction with—rather than in opposition to—rationality. Furthermore, emotion is profoundly relational, emerging out of exchanges among individuals and the environments they inhabit. While social interaction among humans is an important environmental element, this perspective acknowledges a broad array of eco-emotional interchanges with other-than-human beings and phenomena. Whether fleeting or enduring, encounters with plants and animals, soil and water, fire, and ice (and much more) produce a rich assortment of feelings. Such encounters matter, Milton says, because emotions are essential catalysts for action. They “motivate by identifying what matters” (Milton, 2002, p. 150), and thereby underpin all of our commitments and campaigns. Far from irrational, emotions are an essential impetus, galvanizing people to act collectively and in their own lives (Nairn, 2019).

As sensations that “inherently involve both meaning and feeling, both mind and body, both culture and biology” (Leavitt, 1996, p. 515), emotions guide how people respond to environmental changes and challenges. Urgent and repeated warnings regarding climate change and its consequences are rarely sufficient to motivate amelioratory action, even when they are clearly communicated and make rational sense. For many of us, it is only when we “feel the catastrophe” that we are compelled to act (Neckel & Hasenfratz, 2021, p. 255). Just how we feel the catastrophe is contingent upon direct environmental observations as well as culturally constituted interpretations, which together give rise to a wide range of possibilities.

Climate Change, Climate Anxiety, Climate Response

Climate anxiety takes numerous forms. A subset of eco-anxiety, it implies “a chronic fear of environmental doom” (Clayton et al., 2017, p. 68). More specifically, climate anxiety signifies apprehension about the adverse effects of climate change. Climate anxiety can have profound impacts, disrupting life courses and triggering intense existential angst, as individuals' security is replaced with “a sense of temporal rupture and feeling of betrayal and deception” (Askland & Bunn, 2018, p. 19). While climate anxiety is not a pleasurable experience—in some cases it has even been implicated in mental illness and insomnia (Ogunbode et al., 2021)—it is not intrinsically pathological. On the contrary, climate anxiety is “a rational, if painful, response to climate change that can motivate action” (Verlie, 2022, p. 50). As such, climate anxiety often “opens doors to information seeking and problem solving” (Panu, 2020, p. 12) and inspires sustainable life choices.

Climate anxiety is not a simple phenomenon. Anxiety intermingles with grief, guilt, anger, and despair as eco-emotions converge, diverge, and transform over time in response to external events and information, social and political pressures, and internal thought patterns and processing cycles. Neither is it possible to separate climate change from concomitant manifestations of environmental decline: Species extinction, toxic contamination, and habitat destruction share many of the same causes and consequences as climate change and often provoke similar sentiments. Finally, climate anxiety is not always readily discernible. Beyond recognizable feelings of frustration and fear, underlying and unspoken (but equally powerful) affective states can influence climate response even while eluding conscious perception (Neckel & Hasenfratz, 2021, p. 255).

Recognizing, like Milton, that emotions inform action, numerous scholars have recently turned their attention to climate anxiety and its effects. Data from North America, Australia, Norway, South Korea, Sweden, China, and the Pacific Islands reveal worries about livelihood and daily survival, future generations, coming catastrophes, and lack of response as common concerns, along with the daily struggle to “place climate change” amongst multiple other pressing problems (Soutar & Wand, 2022, p. 14). This anxiety is managed in ways that are alternately problematic (panic, rumination, avoidance) or productive (taking action, fostering support, cultivating adaptive strategies) (Soutar & Wand, 2022).

At the same time, environmental psychologists have endeavored to explain how anxiety and other eco-emotions translate into climate action. While grief, fear, anger, and anxiety are all unpleasant, they possess very different motivational capacities (Stanley et al., 2021). Jochen Kleres and Åsa Wettergren (2017) draw on semi-structured interviews with 41 climate activists to suggest that eco-anger is a better predictor of both mental wellness and engagement than eco-anxiety or eco-depression. They also propose that fear, if accompanied by hope, can be a potent motivating force.

Similar research has transpired among youth activists. For young Norwegians, anxiety-infused sentiments of injustice and guilt are even stronger predictors of action than anger. Youth activists describe feeling “unjustly deprived of their anticipated lives” and tend to share a politicized social identity, awareness of environmental threat, and sense of collective responsibility (Haugestad et al., 2021, p. 4). Because people are more likely to act if they believe they can influence outcomes, sense of agency is also an important piece of the emotion-to-action puzzle (Ojala, 2018).Understanding relationships among manifestations of climate change, feelings of apprehension, and actions thus taken demand a holistic approach capable of capturing distinctive cultural contexts, individual differences, and dynamic details, but the emerging body of literature on climate change, anxiety, and response that compares cases and elucidates common themes has so far taken a distant, top-down view that obscures these rich realities. Concurrently, “climate ethnographies” (Crate, 2011, p. 185) that amplify and analyze how diverse communities and cultures experience and respond to climate change are becoming increasingly abundant. However, because climate anxiety is rarely the central focus of such work (and because it often appears in monographs or edited volumes rather than peer-reviewed journals), standard keyword searches are inadequate.

Aiming to generate a deeper comparative dialogue, this article collects contemporary qualitative literature to illuminate the diversity of climate anxiety experiences. Literature was located through Google Scholar and WorldCat searches, peer recommendations, and citation chaining. I included English-language work published by any academic outlet, in any form, and in any discipline so long as it: 1.) discusses one or more examples of people experiencing apprehension about climate change, and 2.) contains detailed descriptions of distinctive local circumstances. Materials were read thoroughly and coded thematically based on the types of anxiety discussed and the responses demonstrated. Sources cover both Western and non-Western contexts and represent work in anthropology, sociology, and interdisciplinary environmental studies.

Anxiety and Anticipated Loss

There is no one such thing as climate anxiety. Furthermore, climate anxiety can be a catalyst for very different types of action, ranging from anti-fossil fuel campaigning to practical strategies to mitigate loss. But it can also serve conversely to discourage—or even pointedly oppose—active response. Further, evidence supports an affinity between climate anxiety and loss. If climate change is a kind of loss, as Verlie (2022, p. 54) compellingly claims, it follows that climate anxiety is about the anticipation of loss (see Cunsolo, 2017). Accordingly, the following summaries are organized around three key life-spheres that stand to be lost: futures, relationships, and identities.

Futures

The loss of the future is among the most poignant losses associated with climate change. Especially for young people, future loss encapsulates many other erasures—gone are potential skills and opportunities, faith in leaders, innocence and aspiration (Goldman, 2022, p. 22). I was initially taken aback by Sarah Jaquette Ray's description of a failed university course exercise. She asked her Humboldt State University students to

imagine yourself thriving in a climate-changed world. What needs to happen to you, and what needs to happen around you, to make you feel you have been successful in your efforts to flourish and to improve the lives of others? Imagine 10 years from now, being thanked by the next generations for your role in achieving this vision. What exactly are they thanking you for? (2020, p. 1)

The exercise failed because students could not visualize a future; they were unable to imagine a world in which they could thrive. This was not because they are lazy, entitled technology addicts. Far from it. In fact, Ray says, many youths are “so frozen by their fears that they are unable to desire—or, yes, even imagine—the future” (2020, p. 2). When and where the future feels irredeemably lost, individuals retreat into overwhelmed inaction, even when they comprehend and care deeply about climate change.

But those who perceive the future as threatened rather than altogether absent often take vigorous action to salvage what they can. In the face of potentially paralyzing uncertainty, hope delineates the difference between inaction and action. Around the world, threats to the future are met with culturally appropriate responses ranging from conventional activism to proactive transformations of daily life to pragmatic adaptation. For Westerners well aware of the challenges climate change will bring, anxiety surrounds both expected futures and present choices. Young Australian climate activists, for example, express intense anxiety and anticipatory grief, both for the planet and for the demise of their “modern selves” and the “promising futures” they were told to anticipate (Verlie, 2022, p. 52). One particularly introspective participant in Karen Nairn's study of climate activists in New Zealand worried not only about the changing climate but also that she could be missing out on “the last of the really good times” because she was so distracted by despair (2019, p. 441). Still, because these activists believe they can make a positive difference, their anxiety is answered with involvement in the global movement to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and avoid worst-case climate scenarios.

The author's research among participants in the Transition movement for climate resilience reveals how anticipation of future energy scarcity and systemic decline motivates proactive preparation, everyday activism (Mansbridge, 2012), and experimentation with sustainable ways of life (Willow 2021a, 2021b). As the future of fossil-fueled progress, what we were taught to expect becomes increasingly untenable, Transition participants' practical adaptive action proceeds apart from formal political engagement. Instead of resigning themselves to the coming catastrophe, they work locally—strengthening food and energy systems, developing re-use and re-skilling programs, and networking with neighbors—to (re)build a more sustainable and just reality.

The loss of the future, of course, is not confined to climate-concerned residents of wealthy nations. In rural South Africa, climate change is already undermining agricultural livelihoods. As reported by Osadolor Ebhuoma and colleagues, residents of the KwaZulu-Natal region are suffering intense anxiety over the erasure of their communities and emplaced identities. Reflecting on the number of young people leaving the area as opportunities decline, an elderly female research participant declared: “By the look of things, the future looks empty” (Ebhuoma et al., 2021, p. 3179). Villagers fear that their place in the world will soon cease to exist. Their reactions are practical in nature: They resist future loss by seeking agricultural assistance, increasing their knowledge of farming under changing conditions, participating in poverty alleviation programs, and sustaining kinship ties. For them, anxiety for the future is inseparable from concern for community.

Relationships

Climate change—like other environmental damage—irrevocably alters relationships to places and, by extension, compromises the myriad attachments that emplaced connections convey. Home is no longer a place of solace. While cherished locations are sometimes literally obliterated (inundated by ocean waves or burnt beyond recognition), they may also endure as degraded reminders of former fulfillment. Glenn Albrecht's notion of solastalgia (a neologism that captures the “ongoing loss of solace and sense of desolation connected to the present state of one's home and territory”) is relevant here (2019, p. 38), as is Deborah Davis Jackson's (2011) notion of “dysplacement” (the sense of alienation that results from the tangible degradation of homeland).

As climate change threatens relationships to places, social groups, and ecological communities, intense anxiety—and amelioratory action—often ensue. In Kwa Zulu-Natal and countless other communities, surviving as a cohesive entity is now a stressful struggle. Elizabeth Marino's ethnography of Iñupiaq Eskimo villagers in Shishmaref, Alaska, is a pertinent case in point. As the permafrost underlying the island community melts, storms on the Chukchi Sea are gradually eroding the land. Discussion about relocation is ongoing and has itself become an intense, if indirect, cause of climate anxiety. In addition to anxiety about how their subsistence livelihoods may change, fear of community diaspora and disintegration is a highly emotional topic, since Iñupiaq see “removal from subsistence territory as a mechanism of cultural disintegration” (Marino, 2015, p. 94). Their response has included organizing for a coordinated move, insisting on self-representation, and reinforcing the importance of land-based self-sufficiency.

For those who live close to the land, relationships with the non-human world represent another significant component of what is—or will be—lost. The Viliui Sakha of eastern Siberia, for instance, lament and worry about how these relationships are jeopardized by climate change. Shifting temperature and precipitation patterns have imparted a sense of confusion and lack of control, as long-standing socioecological adaptations no longer make sense (Crate, 2008). The importance of such relationships cannot be overstated. Symbolic culture—expressed through stories and rituals—and pastoral subsistence are transformed together as Viliui Sakha attempt to adjust hay harvest and animal care cycles to novel conditions. Yet even people who celebrate adaptability as a key component of their identity and history recognize limits to what they can tolerate.

On the other side of the globe, Inuit residents of Rigolet, Labrador (Canada), are distraught over their inability to practice traditional land-based subsistence activities that have been rendered perilous due to warm temperatures and unstable ice. Some citizens fear they will “go mad” if unfavorable conditions persist, indicating anxiety over both future conditions and their own inability to cope (Cunsolo Willox et al., 2013, p. 20). While concern about how climate change will proceed in the years ahead is widely shared, some community members are more optimistic than others that innovative solutions will keep alive traditional land-based subsistence and the cultural relationships it sustains. Continued support for subsistence programs will be vital to Rigolet's adaptive efforts.

And in Peru's Quilcayhuanca Valley—where rapid glacier melt has literally changed the river from blue-green to red—residents say that climate change has provoked “suffering as great as the loss of ‘a member of the family’” (Haverkamp, 2021, p. 9). For local and Indigenous peoples, Jamie Haverkamp reminds us, climate adaptation is not only about dealing pragmatically with an altered climate, but also about sovereignty and self-determination. Love of place and community (on the one hand) and loss and grief (on the other) are among their key motives for action, as citizens endeavor to endure as emplaced communities. With Haverkamp's assistance, Quilcayhuanca collaborators are now collecting community perspectives and discussing local concerns with the state government as they work toward self-determined climate change adaptation.

Identities

Anticipated identity loss is a source of climate anxiety that inspires strong (and strongly divergent) responses. Typically, people worry about—and work in culturally appropriate ways to stave off—adverse impacts of climate change on places and practices that define them. Examples of this pattern come from far and wide: In northwestern Greenland, Inuit elders lament that youth no longer learn to hunt and process skins; climate change is undermining the traditional way of life, along with the distinctive sense of self that accompanies it (Hastrup, 2016). Far away, inhabitants of Tangier Island—a small island in Chesapeake Bay (Virginia) that could soon be uninhabitable due to rising sea levels—worry that loss of place will mean loss of identity if their unique social and linguistic patterns can no longer be sustained on the mainland (Yarrington, 2020). Unless the pace of change slows, people in these and similar locales will struggle to maintain distinctive identities under altered physical, cultural, and socioeconomic circumstances. Occupational and recreational identities are also vulnerable: In Maine, farmers, fishers, and loggers whose livelihoods and identities are tied to the land view climatic change as a threat to both their relationships with the environment and their sense of self (Olson, 2021). And with climate change jeopardizing hunting and fishing opportunities, conservative harvesters in the United States are working to preserve valued place attachments and identities by promoting climate adaptation policies (Love-Nichols, 2020).

Identification with and/or empathy for victims of climate change—whether non-human or human—can also provoke powerful emotions and robust responses. As Milton notes, “anyone who identifies with natural things, who sees them as part of themselves, is therefore likely to feel inclined to protect them” (2002, p. 75). Thus, Australians leapt into action after over 50,000 square miles burned during the 2019-2020 wildfire season because they see the landscape as an extension of themselves (Verlie, 2022) and concerned Swedes prioritize climate change as a serious threat because they perceive—and identify with—nature as its chief casualty (Isenhour, 2010).

Empathy for people facing the disproportionate impacts of climate change can also motivate privileged residents of not-yet-affected areas. Climate change, we know, is not at all fair: People in undeveloped regions of the world who have benefitted very little from the burning of fossil fuels will suffer the most as heatwaves, hydroclimatic extremes, and sea-level rise render their homelands uninhabitable. Conversely, those in industrialized areas have benefitted enormously from centuries of carbon emissions and are now better positioned (financially as well as geographically) to cope with its destructive effects. For those of us embedded in the industrial settler colonial system, “climate change can leave us feeling deeply unsettled because it disrupts the sense of security—comfort, control, complacency—that global histories of imperialism have afforded us” (Verlie, 2022, p. 7). The unpleasant feelings that flow when injustice is acknowledged are capable of catalyzing action, as anxiety intertwines with a sense of responsibility and guilt. In some cases, this plays out through political activism, but it may also occur at a hyper-individual level, as when members of Western societies reduce their consumption of meat or deliberately decline airline flights (Neckel & Hasenfratz, 2021).

In the preceding examples, individuals identify with environments, places, and communities threatened by climate change and seek to protect that with which they identify. But the fear of identity loss also plays out as climate change denial. Broadly defined as a “conscious or unconscious repression of events, experiences, or truths” too traumatic or frightening to cope with while retaining regular functioning (Mathers, 2020, p. 29), denial allows normality—and affirmative identities associated with it—to proceed. What looks on the surface like simple apathy may actually “be feelings of grief and disempowerment that are too difficult to engage with, leading to denial as a mechanism for short-term emotional coping” (Verlie, 2022, p. 2).

Kari Norgaard's work on passive climate change denial in Norway—where knowledgeable, concerned individuals go on with their daily lives as if the problem did not exist—is profound and well-known. It is not that those who inhabit this “double reality” don't care, but rather that climate change is so overwhelming that they protect themselves from harsh truths in order to continue living (Norgaard, 2011, p. 5). Around the world, emotional and existential overwhelm is joined by overwhelm in another sense; for many people, climate change is eclipsed by needs that appear more urgent—harvesting crops, coping with illness, paying the rent, managing government imposition (Brugger et al., 2013; Nutall, 2016).

Threats to identity posed by climate change can also lead to active—even aggressive—climate change denial. For those whose identities and status depend on maintaining current economic structures, climate anxiety is experienced very differently and only rarely recognized as such. This is why conservative white males are much more likely to be climate change deniers than other segments of the US population: It poses a clear and present threat to the existing social, political, and economic hierarchy upon which their identity and status are based. Like others, they “seek to deflect threats to identities they hold, and roles they occupy” (McCright & Dunlap, 2011, p. 1164). These individuals are not unable to understand basic science and are not somehow immune to climate anxiety. On the contrary, they are so overcome by the anxiety of anticipatory identity loss that they vehemently refuse to face reality and actively invest in the illusion of a perpetual status quo (Hochschild, 2018).

Concluding Thoughts

The world is not ending. But for billions of people, climate change will bring an end to the world they know. Fundamental expectations, relationships, and identities will inevitably unravel. Everyone stands to lose. As declared in the eponymous 1992 song by the rock band R.E.M., “Everybody Hurts.” The cases collected here, while by no means exhaustive, demonstrate that climate anxiety is multiple, plural, and omnipresent. From our diverse localities and positionalities, we experience it differently and respond accordingly, but all of us now live in climate anxiety's shadows.

Pushing past realizations to implications, embracing climate anxiety as a pervasive global phenomenon can inform a more constructive climate change response. This does not mean disregarding interpretations and reactions that appear incongruent or diametrically opposed; on the contrary, it requires more fully investigating them. Climate anxiety engenders complex—and sometimes surprising—responses. Because climate anxieties and the actions they inspire are multifaceted and mutable, predictions about individuals' reactions and assumptions about their underlying causes are often misleading. Accepting climate anxiety's diversity and ubiquity moves the starting point of the climate anxiety conversation from a place of animosity to one of empathy. When we validate others' climate anxiety and anticipatory grief—even when it looks very different from our own—we set the stage for better questions, richer understandings, and potential collaborations. Instead of wondering why others don't share our views, we would do better to search our experiences and emotions for common ground. What do others fear losing? Why—and in what ways—are they so upset? What can be done, together, to clear a path toward mitigation and adaptation?

Footnotes

Author's Contributions

The author is responsible for all aspects of this project and manuscript including conceptualization, methodology, analysis, and writing.

Funding Information

This research did not receive any specific grant from funding agencies in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.

Author Disclosure Statement

The author declares no conflict of interest related to this article or any entity described therein.

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