How Intersectional Environmentalism Can Heal Your Climate Anxiety
Out of all justice-oriented activism, climate justice activism attempts to tackle the largest and most complex problem, which is why I’m not surprised many climate activists experience depression and anxiety – termed “eco-anxiety” or “climate change anxiety” by psychologists.
The climate anxiety cycle goes like this: feeling existential dread from the knowledge of ecosystem collapse, which leads to activism as a way to combat the dread, which paradoxically both decreases and increases said dread. It decreases dread through intentional action, but because climate change doesn’t show any sign of stopping, the dread increases. This leads to more activism, and if you traverse the cycle long enough, it will surely lead to burnout.
Burnout is one thing, but feeling powerless is also common among climate activists who don’t see much change arising from their advocacy. It’s easy for this powerlessness to spiral into deep depression.
As a climate justice activist, I’m all too familiar with the feeling. The difficulty of it lies in part that there are no words to describe the extent of its pervasiveness. It’s somewhat like depressive disorders, but I hate calling it a disorder as if something was wrong with you. In reality, if you feel climate depression, your body and soul is highly attuned to the state of this world. You care deeply about other beings, whether that’s other people or other plants, animals, and ecosystems. Climate anxiety is a sign of a soft, gentle soul whose life is a burning signal for change – like amphibians as indicator species, for whom this publication is named.
Rather than psychologize our way out of climate anxiety (academic psychologists tend to view it as mental illness in a vacuum) or spout mildly hopeful climate messages (“renewable energy is now cheaper than coal”) there is a framework for viewing climate change that can heal climate anxiety while strengthening the collective movement for justice. If hopelessness and depression largely arises from feeling powerless as a climate activist, then reframing what climate activism looks like can allow us to reclaim our agency and our hope.
Climate change is often conceptualized as a nebulous, pervasive doom. I thought of it once as a black hole after watching Interstellar, but a more helpful analogy is a knotted ball of yarn. Since climate change is deeply entangled with social injustices, we can think of social injustices as the smaller knots and climate change as the big, overall tangled ball.1 This approach to climate change and environmentalism, seeing the various entanglements with social issues such as class, race, and gender, is commonly known as ‘intersectional environmentalism.’
The ball of yarn analogy is helpful because it visualizes the issues that are entangled with and contribute to climate change. While the overall problem – the big ball of yarn – hasn’t gotten any smaller, we can break it down into ‘smaller’ issues and take ‘small’ steps to unravel it, making the problem easier to tackle. Solving climate change requires unraveling all the other injustices. Viewing climate change in this way empowers us with the knowledge that there is a path through climate disaster. We don’t have to stay in hopeless climate distress; there are these social inequalities to unravel.
I think of this thread from Jason Hickel:
In other words, if you’re feeling hopeless from the largeness and nebulousness of climate change, ground yourself in the present reality of social issues.
Diving straight back into activism work while you’re feeling depressed and anxious isn’t helpful – we need rest and play, community and soul food – but likewise letting go of justice organizing completely isn’t helpful. Framing climate change as the large manifestation of continued and historic injustices grounds us in closer, tangible issues. It also allies the climate movement to the labor movement and the working class, strengthening the collective movement for justice.
Seeing as the climate movement tends to consist of middle to high class young people, it is especially necessary for the climate movement to grow its demographic through allyship and legitimize its concerns with the majority of the population, the working class.
One of the Filipino organizations at the forefront of this work is AMIHAN, the National Federation of Peasant Women. Uniting with oppressed and exploited classes, they fight for the best interests of all Filipino people through advocating for agricultural reform, climate justice, and an end to neoliberal policies, among many others. I’m inspired by their work because peasant farmers are truly at the forefront of the justice movement. As stewards of the land, they hold invaluable knowledge yet are one of the first to feel the impacts of climate havoc.
If you’re feeling climate dread or eco-anxiety, know that you’re not alone and that your feelings are a sign that you haven’t lost your humanity. It is good that you’re feeling this way because it means you care deeply about the Earth and all people. Take all the time that you need to process your feelings and experiences and return to a state of balance. Rest, play, and intentionally find and give yourself the small joys of life. When you’re ready, I invite you to return to the important work of creating a more just and safe future. The path is laid out for us. We just need to go together.
Essentially, social inequalities make up the giant problem of climate change. If all people had equal decision-making power and their inalienable rights to freedom and autonomy, it would be an easy fix to solve climate change – and perhaps we would not be facing climate havoc in the first place. It is in everyone’s best interest for climate havoc to stop. The problem is, the majority of the people who are affected by climate change are socioeconomically disadvantaged, so they don’t have power in our unequal capitalist society to do so. Even if we wanted to, we are forced by the economic system to comply with environmentally and socially harmful practices so that we individually can survive. The only way out of the climate and environmental crises is through collective action, by giving all power to all the people to pursue their best interests, which is also the outcome that is kindest to the planet. Thus, climate change can only be stopped and reversed by ending social inequality. (If you’d like to know more, this open access article discusses climate change and capitalism and is a helpful starting point to thinking about climate change as a social justice issue)