FACING OUR CLIMATE FEELINGS TOGETHER
Photo from Pixabay.
It’s a quiet Sunday afternoon and I’m fantasy house-shopping again. Since I live and work on the northern end of the New Jersey shore, I’ve got Zillow open in one tab (“Oo! A Queen Anne!”) and the NOAA sea level rise maps in another. I wonder to myself—not for the first time—why they couldn’t combine the maps and make this easier for me. It’s almost as if the average Zillow user isn’t constantly thinking about climate collapse, like I am. About sea level rise. About hurricanes and wildfires. About the tenuousness of the feeling of safety. It must be nice.
I moved to this area in July 2019 to take over at the helm of the nonprofit Waterspirit, whose founder, a Sister of St. Joseph of Peace, had just retired. As she recounted the history of her 21-year-old organization, she brought up how Hurricane Sandy started a chain of events that led to relocating our headquarters from Long Branch to Rumson—a little more north, a little inland. As more members of Waterspirit’s community told me stories and brought me up to speed, Hurricane Sandy was a character that continued to figure into their retellings. (One staff member was still battling insurance agencies after her house had been significantly damaged by the floodwaters.) Did I pick up on this shadowy figure in their stories because of my grad school ethnography training? Or was I primed to hear it because of a phenomenon I had recently heard named—that is, because of my new attention to eco-anxiety?
Eco-anxiety, according to the American Psychological Association, (1) is the chronic fear of environmental doom. Scholar Britt Wray cautions us away from thinking that eco-anxiety is a disorder; rather, she calls it a moral emotion, (2) a coherent and empathetic response to a system in collapse and the multitude of life collapsing with it. Eco-anxiety is only one of a series of emotions that the climate crisis can provoke, often discussed near its close cousins climate grief, solastalgia, pre-traumatic stress, climate guilt, and other related states of being. The climate emergency is taking a clear toll on our mental health.
Youth, the inheritors of our past and ongoing misdeeds, are suffering the worst. In a recent study by The Lancet, (3) over 60% of the 10,000 young people from across the world reported that the climate crisis was taking a negative toll on their mental health. 75% said that the future was frightening. 39% of respondents were hesitant to have children because of the climate crisis—presumably to spare them the pain of a planetary system in collapse. They suffer from the loss of their imagined future, and many are waking up to the impacts that they are already experiencing directly. (You might read comparisons between the unrealized threat of nuclear war and the climate crisis, as if this were a font of hope. Often those who are drawing this comparison miss the fact that the climate crisis is already happening.) Some people find comfort in the hope that the planet will recover eventually once humans have been wiped out. I do not find any comfort in the scale of human suffering that would entail.
Addressing the mental health and spiritual impacts of the climate crisis seemed, to me, to be something that an eco-spiritual nonprofit was uniquely positioned to do. I saw it as the bridge between our eco-spiritual programming and our clean water advocacy—the part that can help us do the emotional processing we need in order to stay in this fight for the long haul. When faced with an existential crisis like the climate crisis, a spiritual community must help its members find meaning and purpose, cultivate love, and find space for a deep, critical hope. We must help each other ward off despair and burnout, and that takes community-building and inner work.
Spiritual communities are often already poised to tackle this kind of grappling—it is often within the purview of the spiritual work they are already doing, like helping participants find hope and meaning in situations of adversity and suffering. It is important for spiritual communities to understand the real scope of the climate crisis and to use their tools to validate the impact that it is having on their community members. Each community can choose the tools that will work for them. For example, Waterspirit held a multi-day retreat shortly before the one-year anniversary of Hurricane Sandy. This retreat helped the participants acknowledge and share their conflicting emotions about that natural disaster in a safe space, shining light on every aspect of their past trauma and fear for the future. This work created room for meaning to begin to flourish. One participant felt that the retreat had saved her life.
In the late summer of 2019, I wondered what kind of program would be a good fit for our organization at that moment. A quick Google search of the phrase “climate chaplaincy” landed me on the Good Grief Network’s website. (4) This nonprofit had developed a ten-week program, loosely based on their experiences with twelve-step Adult Children of Alcoholics groups. Since their program is a peer-to-peer support group, that meant that anyone who bought the resource packet and underwent facilitator training could bring the program to their community. The program’s resource pack pulls inspiration from many spiritual teachers—including Terry Tempest Williams, Thich Nhat Hanh, and James Baldwin—but it didn’t speak from any particular faith tradition. This broad reach was aligned with Waterspirit’s inclusive eco-spiritual programming, so it seemed like a good fit for us.
I facilitated our pilot group in-person in the fall of 2019, just a couple of weeks after the youth-led Global Climate Strike for Future. The first group was in-person and offered socializing time over snacks. Our subsequent groups moved to Zoom in response to the pandemic, trading out tea and cookies for broader geographic reach. To date, we have completed eight rounds of the ten steps, with our ninth group beginning in early February 2022.
The ten steps strive to create resilience and a feeling of empowerment in its participants, and from what I have noticed in myself and in our groups, it often reaches that goal. The ten steps encourage participants to confront their fear of their own mortality, and to practice sitting comfortably with uncertainty. They endeavor to cultivate a nonreactive self from which to confront any difficulties with awareness. The ten steps validated the emotional experiences brought to them by the participants. There was no rushing into hope prematurely and no fear of looking at our shadows. This space for grief and love to coexist, and for courage to precede hope, spoke to my own climate feelings. Hope was not naïve, empty optimism—it was more like an action, or an egregor created by a community moving in solidarity. Each person had their role to play in the ecology of a community, and we were free to determine the form of action that best used our skills and channeled our confronted emotions constructively.
These groups are often a source of surprise and delight, even though they deal with feelings that can be very heavy. My assumptions about who this work is for are constantly overturned. When I first advertised the group, I presumed that it would draw Millennials and Gen Z, since those were the people appearing in the articles I had read about eco-anxiety. What I found was that this work has intergenerational appeal—even those who might not be facing the climate crisis for as long as the rest of us are still concerned for the well-being of future generations.
I had presumed that the group would appeal to people who hadn’t already found their niche within environmental advocacy and who were just beginning to confront the climate crisis. What I learned is that even long-term advocates need to create the space to intentionally process their climate feelings, since this is a piece that is often missing in their advocacy spaces. Action alone will not resolve climate feelings, and doing the inner work can help sustain our advocacy while avoiding burnout.
Finally, I hadn’t been certain whether a peer-to-peer support group would actually make a difference on the participants’ lives. After all—as I always make clear to the participants—I have not been trained as a therapist, social worker, or faith leader. Our surveys and groups—which have included multiple mental health professionals—have made it clear that this process helps. Being together and sharing without judgment helps us face an uncertain future with greater resiliency.
These ten steps have changed the culture of our eco-spiritual organization. Since all of our staff members and several of our board members have completed the steps, it has changed our relationship to our work and with each other. We have more tools at our disposal to handle the heavy feelings that our work can evoke. We mutually encourage each other to practice the steps when we are struggling. We have built contemplative practices into our work days, and we have a shared vocabulary to work with. We practice radical vulnerability toward our climate feelings with ourselves and with each other. On the whole, it has made our community stronger. Confronting climate feelings doesn’t need to mean spiraling out in despair, freezing, or feeling overwhelmed. It is only by facing our big emotions that we can begin to move through them and come out stronger on the other side. This is work best done together—and believe me when I say that if you are experiencing big climate emotions that you are not alone in what you are feeling.
A full listing of the ten steps can be found at https://www.goodgriefnetwork.org/10-steps/.
ecoAmerica, American Psychological Association, and Climate for Health. Mental Health and Our Changing Climate: Impacts, Inquiries, Responses (2021).
Wray, Britt. “Undeniable: Eco-Anxiety in the New Age of Pandemics”, Gen Dread, 11/2/2020. Available online: https://gendread.substack.com/p/undeniable.
Hickman, C., et al. “Climate anxiety in children and young people and their beliefs about government responses to climate change: a global survey”, The Lancet 5:12 (2021).
Now, in early 2022, you will find many more resources when you Google “climate chaplaincy”, a testament to how quickly this field is developing. A full listing of the ten steps can be found at https://www.goodgriefnetwork.org/10-steps/ .
