SALT LAKE CITY — You can add worry about climate change — Will we run out of water? How wild will the weather get? Does this planet have a future? — to the list of things vexing teens and young adults who are already stressed over the cost of college and food and housing and myriad other issues.
Protecting the environment is a concern that spans generations. However, experts have observed that younger people increasingly grapple with a deep sense of doom — fearing that the Earth is on a trajectory of decline, with its beauty fading far too soon, destroying their future as well.
Scroll TikTok or Instagram, and it’s easy to find young adults expressing their worries on a spectrum that ranges from “What can I do” to “The world is burning.”
“I would agree that this is a growing concern. Young people have a more informed understanding of the science of climate change and the direct impact on their future inside of their lifetime,” said therapist Jenny Howe, an anxiety expert with a practice in Farmington. She said she hears those fears expressed by her young clients.
Luke Runyon, co-director of The Water Desk, a University of Colorado Boulder publication, told Deseret News he often sees what’s been called “climate anxiety” provoke one of two reactions: It sparks people to act or leads to despair.
Both emotions can be good motivators, but in the three-plus years he was on the Society of Environmental Journalists board, he said the topic of mental health challenges escalated by climate change came up frequently.
“I would never want somebody’s climate anxiety to turn into climate despair,” said Runyon. The amount of bad news in the hard science makes it easy to lapse into that, he added.
How concerns are addressed could make the difference between feeling paralyzed and figuring out solutions to real problems, while letting go of any overblown worries, according to experts.
Howe suggests the best way to handle “any large, overwhelming problem,” is to break it into smaller chunks.
For example, she said, “What are my concerns about the climate? Then, what actions can I take that directly align with my values in response to that?”
If someone is concerned about emissions, the response might be to ride share or take public transportation. Perhaps that person could promote awareness through activism. Or create a career path designed to address the concern. The question is how to address the climate challenges without being frozen by fear. There’s growing consensus that tone matters — and so does feeling there’s something you can do.
“Big problems create big fears, but we always have a choice to take values-directed action,” Howe told Deseret News.
Reacting to natural disasters
Superstorm Sandy energized environmental journalist Yessenia Funes’ career. She was attending college a safe distance inland when Sandy hit in 2012, but her mom lived on Long Island in New York and didn’t have the same geographical luck.
“My mom lost power for two weeks when Superstorm Sandy happened,” Funes told Deseret News. “While my mom was without power for two weeks, the same can’t be said for the more affluent parts of Long Island. That really solidified my commitment to covering environmental issues,” which she has done for nearly a decade.
Recently, she was part of a panel discussion at the society’s annual conference in Philadelphia discussing “Care and Community as a Climate Solution.”
She said journalists may carry a lot of trauma. “And many of us do this work because we care, right? There’s so much of that work that fuels me and keeps me going. And there are other aspects of the work that can be really paralyzing and heartbreaking.”
Rather than a source of hope for readers who struggle with climate-induced anxiety, she would like to be their source for solutions. “I see solutions journalism as a really important bucket of storytelling in the sense that it’s showing examples of how folks are perhaps building clean energy solutions without the support of the government or without tons of resources,” she said. “Communities are figuring it out on their own or tapping into what is available.”
She believes that “the stakes are too high” to allow despair and hopelessness to take over. So she writes with optimism and suggests determination can make a difference. But she admits that “for me, hope is a complicated emotion.”
Funes, like Howe, believes people worry about climate alongside a host of other concerns. And how those are prioritized may be situational.
“We need everyone to be involved in this,” said Funes, noting in the U.S. some people are concerned about putting food on the table or affording housing, so “it’s going to be really difficult for people to tap into those emotions of climate grief and climate anxiety when they just have so much grief and anxiety about everything else.”
Read the full article at Deseret News here to find out more.
The Key Takeaways for this article were generated with the assistance of large language models and reviewed by our editorial team. The article, itself, is solely human-written.
