Author: Professor Karen Malone, Snapshot of Presentations given at the University of OsloMET and University of Gothenberg (May 2023), University of Oulu and University of Helsinki (October 2023).
We need to look after our planet or otherwise, otherwise it will die.
Like koalas, animals, us. Us we will die.
Animals will die. Everyone will die.
I know everything is dying.
I know every plant will die.
– Elke, aged 4 years old speaking on a IPAD video
United Nations projections reveal that rather than falling below the internationally agreed limit 1.5C by 2030, the cut needed to keep a lid on increase the climate crisis, carbon emissions around the world are expected to rise by 16% in that time. At the same time according to a number of recent reports including the latest World Health Organisation, climate change is a major determinant of human health and the most significant environmental stressor experienced by all earth dwellers, humans and non-humans alike. For children the impact of the climate crisis on their health and well-bring is two-fold. Firstly, due to their fears and anxiety about the climate crisis it has psychological impacts on their emotional well-being, and secondly, with increased air pollution, heat waves, poor water quality, floods, food shortage and greater exposure to toxins it has scientifically proven impacts on their physical bodies and ongoing health. Given the projected acceleration of climate change in the next 50 years, it is likely this prevalence and the severity of emotional responses such as fear, grief and anxiety and health impacts will continue to increase substantially.
Children’s concerns about the future of the planet
I am troubling traditional climate science and climate change education by disrupting psychological terms, such as ecophobia and ecoanxiety which have been used in the literature to describe children’s concerns and grief about the state of the planet. In an article about her research on children’s environmental concerns in Denver USA, for example, Susan Strife (2012) found over 80% of children were concerned about the destruction of nature, global warming, air pollution and the way humans were killing animals. She highlighted a number of the children’s responses in her article and argued they represented children’s sense of pessimism, anger, helplessness, and frustration.
“I feel sad because the animals are going to die. (Jennifer, age 10).
Something is going to happen in the world, and everything is going to get destroyed. (Lucia, age 10).
I had dreams of people crawling out of these smoke filled environments coughing, and that really scared me…(Riley, age 10)
I know that I am a little too young to help right now, so I feel helpless not being able to do anything. (Cliff, aged 10)” (Strife, 2012: 43)
These concerns were further exacerbated when she asked children to draw the Earth in a 100 years’ time. The drawings revealed a common theme of doom and gloom; the world would end and animals including humans would die. Drawing on the work of David Sobel (1993, 2008) she argued children were not developmentally or emotionally able to cope with the distancing and abstraction of environment-related disasters shown on television programs or doom and gloom education; and these were adding to children’s feelings of environmental concern. She supported Sobel’s (1993) view children were experiencing ‘ecophobia’ and to counter this, the focus of science and environmental education should be on age-appropriate scientific learning and environmental actions at the local-level rather than global or earth-based knowledges.
With the impact of the climate crisis now penetrating all facets of our lives, most humans believe it will happen or are experiencing climate change so the belief the quality of human life is improving is impossible to sustain. Research studies, for example, are revealing particularly for children, the current climate crisis conjures up for most humans’ emotions of dread, feelings of denial and fear for themselves, their families and for ‘other’ beings we share the planet with. We are in a physical crisis and a crisis of the imagination.
Fear in this context evokes in children as it does in most animals a flight or fight response. It is often assumed ‘fear’ can lead to action yet as O’Neill and Nicholson-Coles (2009, 374-375) reveal while “fearful representation of climate change appears to be memorable and may initially attract individual action” due to the enormity of the problem the opposite effect can happen – it can evoke a distancing and disempowerment”. Overwhelming fear without hope can induce strong feelings of anxiety which may lead to action but more likely its leads to paralysis even denial (ecologist name this as the ‘great turning away’, feeling of despair, no hope, no way forward).
Children’s current responses in research on environmental concerns are not new, research over decades has shown they are particularly attuned to the ambiguities of science heroism and extractive models of ecological destruction as taught in traditional science education and how these fashion feelings of confusion and despair about the future. In the past, this confusion or despair was identified as ecophobia or children’s fear of the environment (Sobel 2008) in recent times this emotional response is now labelled as climate or eco-anxiety.
Asking children to fix the problem is not the answer.
Recently a large-scale health study was released by Catherine Hickman and colleagues from the University Bath on children and young people’s climate anxiety. Surveying ten thousand children and young people aged between 16-22 years from ten countries, Australia, Brazil, Britain, Finland, France, India, Nigeria, Philippines, UK, USA. These countries were chosen to reflect populations from different countries, representing a range of cultures, incomes, climates, climate vulnerabilities, and exposure to differing intensities of climate-related events. Hickman et. al’s (2021) research is by far the largest global study ever capturing children’s concerns about the planet that also includes the scale, extent and impact of adult’s climate inaction on children’s climate (eco) anxiety.
Hickman et. al’s. (2021) study focused on young people’s emotions by using the term climate anxiety to encapsulate a host of responses by young people when they asked them questions such as where they worried about climate change and did it impact on their functioning; whether they thought humanity was doomed; or that people had failed to take care of the planet; and the role of governments could they be trusted, did they take the crisis serious enough
The study looked mostly at trying to understand children’s psychological responses and manifestations to climate crisis including trauma and shock; stress, anxiety; depression; substance abuse; loss of autonomy; feelings of helplessness, fatalism, and fear. The results of the extensive survey revealed not only the disturbing scale of emotional effects of the climate crisis on children including high levels of fear, grief, anxiety, stress, powerlessness, but also the impact of adult betrayal on children. Hickman et. al. reported: “Respondents rated governmental responses to climate change negatively and reported greater feelings of betrayal than of reassurance. Climate anxiety and distress were correlated with perceived inadequate government response and associated feelings of betrayal”. Hickman et. al (2012) in contrast to Strife (2012) and Sobel (2008) when responding to the young people’s concerns argued education focusing on local environmental actions aren’t the solution to young people’s concern and eco-anxiety, instead what needed to be addressed was the impacts of adult’s inaction.
Hickman et. al argued for instance “Thinking the way to cure eco-anxiety is eco-action isnt right” it is a “simplified solution that doesn’t address the real problem – the need for governments to act urgently”. Hickman et. al suggest protecting the health and wellbeing of young people, those in power should be “reducing young people’s stress and distress by recognising, understanding, and validating their fears and pain, acknowledging their rights, and placing them at the centre of policy making”. (Hickman et. al. 2021). “Before we can offer the younger generations a message of hope, we must first acknowledge the obstacles that must be overcome” and “the failure of governments to adequately reduce, prevent, or mitigate climate change is contributing to psychological distress, moral injury, and injustice” (Hickman et. al 2021, 871). Asking children to fix the problem is not the answer. Neither is seeing eco-anxiety as a child’s problem.
Anxiety is caused by caring for the planet
Hickman et. al. support the view children and young people’s feel anxiety is because they are: “caring for the planet” (Hickman et. al 2021) They go on to claim, what children feel is a moral, ethical position not a psychological one. Hickman et. al (2021) call it ‘moral injury’ and explains: “Moral injury … is a sign that one’s conscience is alive”. For children, they argue, “it inflicts considerable hurt and wounding when they see adults including governments are transgressing fundamental moral beliefs about care, compassion, planetary health, and ecological belonging” (Hickman et. al 2021, 871). Hickman et. al (2021) advises educators if children asks hard questions about the future or their worries then we can respond by saying they should feel proud of having such feelings: “Because feeling anxiety or worry is about caring for the planet”.
Reciprocity and responsibility are the basis for Earth relations in many Indigenous and First Nation communities and is understood as a mutual obligation to adhere to ethical relations. Ethical kin relations means also expressing ‘care’ for the Earth including land, sea, waterways, animals, plants and all that makes up the cosmos. Joanna Macy (1995) has told us feeling pain within the enormity of a global crisis is natural and healthy, she argues we/children feel pain and anxiety because, as compassionate entities deeply interconnected with the Earth, we/they care. “The conspiracy of silence concerning our deepest feelings about the future of our species, the degree of numbing, isolation a burnout and cognitive confusion that result from it – all converse to produce a sense of futility. Each act of denial, conscious and unconscious is an addiction of our powers to respond (Macy 1983, 10).
Focusing on Hope and Healing
For many the current state of the world relays an image of precarity and disenchantment, devoid of hope. Bennett (2016) responding to this image of a disenchanted modernity asks not if this is real but, “rather, whether the very characterization of the world as disenchanted ignores and then discourages (or allows) affective attachment to that world” (Bennett, 2016 p. 3). This raises a question about our emotional response to the Earth during this time– to feel hope, enchantment, attachment and care she argues “is important because the mood of enchantment may be valuable for an ethical life”. “To be enchanted”, according to Bennett (2016 p. 159), “is in the moment of its activation, to assent wholeheartedly to life—not to this or that particular condition or aspect of it but to the experience of living itself”. She argues it is the wonder of minor experiences where the gift of enchantment purchases itself. I believe it is here in these gestures of love and care; hope and healing can grow.
According to Leslie Head (2016) in her book Hope and Grief in the Anthropocene; “Hope is not an optimistic affect nor a utopian dream, nor a sunny disposition”. “Hope is practised and performed; it is a sort of hybrid, vernacular collective worked out in everyday practice and experience” (Head, 2016, 90). Ecofeminist have long argued that emotional responses to the ecological crisis, are missing in many accounts of the world (Head 2016, 22). Emotions are seen as the anti-thesis of scientific rationality and in climate change debates emotions are often viewed as weak, irrational, childlike, feminine. Yet to nurture hope we need to take emotions more seriously, in the climate crisis while these as emotions can lead to fear, anxiety, even paralysis they can also be the stimulus for higher degrees of motivation, hope, faith, attachment, and potential optimism. Or as George Monbiot (2014) Environmental campaigner, journalist, writer, reminds us “if you feel at odds with the world, if your identity is troubled and frayed, if you feel lost and ashamed – it could be because you have retained the human values you were supposed to have discarded”.
Hope is important for healing grief and caring and this hope needs to be imagined. In the project Children in the Anthropocene (Malone, 2018) where like Strife (2012) I conducted research with children about their environmental concerns, but rather than asking them to draw the future world as it might end up, I asked children to dream an imaginary future of how they would want it to be.
Anna who was 11 years old and came from Semey in Kazakhstan, a city unfortunately notable as the site of where over a period of 40 years city dwellers were exposed to 456 nuclear tests.
She draws a picture depicting high mountains, blur river with fish and clear sunny day. She described her dream future world: “This is my dream planet. I love mountains I would want mountains with snow. The snow would stop melting. I love nature and animals. I would like to walk in the mountains with snow and take pictures of healthy animals. I want to swim underwater and see fish. And I would want to dance because of being so happy to be breathing fresh air and there would be no pollution”.
And Princess, 5 years old who lives in a typical middle-class suburban township in Melbourne Australia draws a picture of a host of seemingly joyful wild animals playing together and describes her drawing “This is my drawing of my dream um for the future. On the planet all children and animals would be free and not die”.
Children who are identified as struggling, having a psychological ‘condition’ such as anxiety are mostly viewed as needing help to overcome their symptoms, their problem. Yet what we urgently need is education where opportunities are available for children to reveal these painful emotions, to be heard by adults who will not dismiss their concerns or climate actions as merely childish or over-emotional. We need education to expose truths, bear witness to the profound impacts the crisis is having on children and support them to explore why painful emotions can be paralysing and whether it is possible to utilise these emotions to create hope and healing for children. Can we find ways to respond to their moral injury, to acknowledge their feelings of loss and mourning of their future lives on a planet that seems so fragile so precarious. To find healing in the wonder and enchantment, even joy of being with the Earth and come to move towards a mutual belonging where a new kind of power resides, an awakening and validation of the powerful emotions of gratitude, awe, beauty, love, care and compassion. A desire to love the world; to dream of potential better future worlds; to fight for hope and for its shared healing.
References
Bennett, J. (2001). The Enchantment of Modern Life, Princeton University Press, NJ.
Head, L. (2016). Hope and Grief in the Anthropocene, Routeledge.
Hickman, C. Marks, E., Pihkala, P., Clayton, S. Lewandows, R. E., Mayall, E., Wray, B., Mellor, C., and van Susteren, L. (2021). Climate anxiety in children and young people and their beliefs about government responses to climate change: a global survey, Lancet Planet Health, 5; 863-873.
Macy, J. (1983). Despair and Personal Power in the Nuclear Age, New Society Publishers, PA.
Macy J. (1995). Working through environmental despair. In Roszak T., Gomes M. E., Kanner A. D. (Eds.), Ecopsychology: Restoring the earth, healing the mind (pp. 240–259). San Francisco, CA: Sierra Club Books.
Malone., K. (2018). Children in the Anthropocene: Rethinking Sustainability and Child Friendliness of Cities. Palgrave.
Monbiot, G. (2017). Forget ‘the environment’: we need new words to convey life’s wonders. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/aug/09/forget-the-environment-new-words-lifes-wonders-language.
O’Neill, S., & Nicholson-Cole, S. (2009). “Fear Won’t Do It”: Promoting Positive Engagement With Climate Change Through Visual and Iconic Representations. Science Communication, 30(3), 355–379.
Sobel, D. (1993). Children’s special places: Exploring the role of forts, dens and bush houses in middle childhood. Tuscon, AZ: Zephyr Press.
Sobel, D. (2008). Childhood and nature: Design principals for educators. York, ME: Stenhouse Publishers.
Strife, S. (2012) Children’s Environmental Concerns: Expressing Ecophobia, The Journal of Environmental Education, 43 (1), 37-54.
Environmental Sustainability in the Anthropocene 