From climate grief to climate action
Young people need hope, concrete goals
VANCOUVER — The Earth is a ticking time bomb with a 10-year fuse.
Whether you believe that or not, many young people are already in mourning for a world they believe will perish in their lifetime. It’s called eco-anxiety, or climate grief.
“I think about wanting to have kids and not knowing if I will be able to bring new life into this crumbling world,” said Simon Fraser University (SFU) student Kaiya Jacob.
She is not alone. Activists say feelings of environmental despair are increasingly common among teens and young adults.
The climate change conversation has taken on a relentless urgency, complete with doomsday scenarios suggesting that the planet will reach a catastrophic tipping point by 2030 without dramatic reductions in greenhouse gas emissions.
The fight against global warming and climate change has given way to climate crisis, and most recently “climate emergency.”
“Call it climate anxiety, eco-anxiety, climate grief, but what it seems to be is a sense of helplessness,” said George Radner, the 24-yearold executive director of Be The Change Earth Alliance . “It’s very widespread. Young people understand climate change, they perceive it to be the crisis that it is, they perceive it as the world ending.”
Be The Change runs workshops for students using university-aged facilitators to help young people learn to express their fears and to turn their energy to solutions.
“We want to give students a sense of hope and agency when it comes to climate change,” he said. “Youth are paralyzed by their fear and have the sense that they are powerless to fix this massive issue caused by adults.”
The facilitators are just a few years older than the students and they share their own relatable stories about how they became involved in climate action. By the end of the session, the students are the stars of their own climate story with a call to action, something tangible they can do.
Radner does worry that the recent trend to treat climate action as an emergency is having “unintended negative consequences on youth.”
“I wish that youth could be receiving different messages than adults,” he said.
Dozens of governments, mainly in North America and Europe, have declared a “climate emergency” and Oxford Dictionary made the term its 2019 word of the year, in part due to a 10,700 per cent increase in its use.
“The adults of this world need a wake-up call and they need to hear that urgent tone,” said Radner. “I want media to tell the truth, fundamentally, but they should set a tone of crisis because we really haven’t woken up yet to climate change as a society.”
The Vancouver school board is hosting a Be The Change professional development workshop for 60 secondary school teachers, who often see firsthand how vulnerable teens are to despair in the face of climate emergency messaging.
Teachers will take part in “experiential processes” designed to explore their own “planetary grief.”
Be The Change has created resources tailored to the B.C. curriculum around themes of sustainability. Teachers can apply those lessons in the classroom and with “students looking for opportunities to have hope and take action,” the board said.
The VSB sustainability plan notes that “evolving research indicates that presenting environmental ‘disasters’ to children at an improper age does not foster action — rather it can dissuade engagement with nature.”
“The Plan focuses on education and highlights that a connection to nature is an important part of sustainability,” the board said.
The district offers mental health resources to students in schools and through partners such as B.C. Children’s Kelty Mental Health Resource Centre. Kaiya Jacob can barely remember a time when she wasn’t concerned about the state of the planet.
“The burden of trying to fix the world is a constant in my life,” she said.
She feels the 2030 deadline for action acutely.
“I feel it very heavily, and just saying that I feel sweaty, like there’s a giant weight on my chest,” she said. “When I talk to my friends it’s rare that climate doesn’t come up. I try to find moments of humour, so I don’t feel overwhelmed.”
Jacob is studying climate messaging in her communications studies at Simon Fraser University.
“Right now, the language is too crisis-oriented,” she said. “There’s not enough connection and shared caring for the environment. I’d like to see more messages about direct action, so we can start to solve these problems.”
Chest-tightening and the feeling of butterflies in the stomach, along with problems sleeping, are classic manifestations of anxiety, said psychologist Christine Korol, director of the Vancouver Anxiety Centre and an adjunct professor at the University of British Columbia.
While children experience anxiety much as adults do, they may lack coping skills to manage their feelings.
“As people get older they’ve seen more things and they know that predictions of doom aren’t new,” she said.
In the past 40 years, the threat of global nuclear annihilation, acid rain and the hole in the Earth’s ozone layer were all punctuated by end-ofthe-world scenarios.
“Having seen doomsday predictions come and go, (older adults) are better able to take a wait-and-see attitude and they trust that when something terrible does happen, we can cope with it,” she explained.