Path to Here: Finding My Way to Climate Change Emotions

 Path to Here: Finding My Way to Climate Change Emotions 

 

Wake-up call 

 

For many people college-aged and younger globally—particularly those in wealthy, Western countries that have been privileged to turn away from the realities of the impending climate crisis previously—the release of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) special report in the fall of 2018 was a stark turning point and a powerful call to action in the face of climate change. It certainly was for me. It was for Greta Thunberg as well, a young Swedish climate activist who has become somewhat of a cultural figurehead and source of inspiration within the youth climate movement internationally. In 2018, Greta began Fridays for the Future, a climate movement that has now spread across the world demanding immediate climate action by government.  

 

For those who are unfamiliar with the IPCC, it is an intergovernmental body established by the United Nations (UN) in 1988 to assess climate science and further the knowledge about anthropogenic – human-induced – climate change. The 2018 report detailed a variety of scenarios for earth impacts due to climate change as a result of a possible warming of 1.5 degrees Celsius and 2 degrees Celsius respectively.   

 

In October of 2018 I was 19, a sophomore in college, who had recently decided to environmental studies as a major to my course of study. The first time I heard about the 2018 IPCC report, and frankly the IPCC in general, was in my Introduction to Environmental Studies (ENVS 001) class at the University of Vermont (UVM) during that fall. On the morning of October 8th, 2018, the day of the report’s release, a headline from The Guardian reading We have 12 years to limit climate change catastrophe, warns UN greeted my classmates and I upon arrival to class. As I found my seat, I remember feeling a panic set in—a tightness in my chest that I had never felt before. I do not remember much of what my professor actually said that day in class, but I do remember doing the quick mental calculus that in 12 years I would only be 31 years old. I ran over the words climate change catastrophe again and again in my head, struggling to fully comprehend what that meant for me in the present moment and for the rest of my life. 

 

Although before this moment of clarity I had engaged with climate change and environmental issues to some degree, this was a significant turning point for my emotional engagement with the subject. If you were to ask anyone close to me about my relationship with climate change between the ages of 16 and 18, they probably would tell you that I cared about it more than the average person indicative in part through my rants about inevitable ecosystem collapse. Rather naively, however, I thought about ecosystem collapse and climate chaos as a distant, albeit frightening, threat, that, although I cared deeply about it, did not need to occupy too much of my brain on a daily basis. I also had a very black and white perspective of environmentalism and bought into doomsday narratives.1 However, after the IPCC report there was a sense of urgency I had not felt before. I do not think a day has passed since this report was released during which I have not think about climate change at least once. This experience with the report was the first time it was made explicitly clear to me that time was running out to act on climate.  

 

The timing of my awakening to the seriousness of climate is in part a result of my age but is also, importantly, due to my immense privilege. Growing up in New England in a supportive, financially stable family as a 19-year-old I had not—and still have not—experienced the physical impacts of climate change firsthand. My family and home has always been safe from disasters, including natural and climate-shaped ones. This privilege cannot be overstated, and it, as privilege often does in a variety of contexts, shielded me from needing to intimately engage with the realities of climate change. Sarah Jaquette Ray does an excellent job unpacking the idea of white privilege around climate emotions and reflecting on her on work in the field of climate emotions in her 2021 piece published in Scientific American Magazine entitled Climate Anxiety is an Overwhelmingly White Phenomenon. 

 

Following the initial shock of and emotional response to the report itself, I was disappointed by the lack of outlets that allowed for the naming and processing climate change emotions. It felt like a kind of emotional whiplash to learn about what felt very literally like the imminent end-of-the-world and then to go on with my day like everything was just fine. It was exhausting to try to figure out how to process what I was learning productively rather than hold it at an arm's length so to not disrupt my life too much. Although my friends and family were loving and understanding, they also were not all too interested in hearing me drag on and on about my climate worry.  

 

As I navigated this draining emotional landscape I was curious about how my classmates, not to mention my professor who had been engaging with this material for years, were feeling, but I could not find the right words or way to broach the subject as everyone seemed to continue along. At the time I certainly was not using the language of climate emotions because I had not yet been exposed to it. Rather, I just felt sad and overwhelmed by what I was learning and did not know what to do with it—or how to specifically identify and name the range of emotions I felt.  

 

I would eventually come to learn that a rich body of scholarship and detailed set of language exists to describe this phenomenon – this knowing yet not reacting. In fact, what I was observing in those around me, and to some degree within myself, was likely a coping mechanism in response to the knowledge of the environmental crisis broadly. The words that come to mind are distancing, disavowal, and denial all of which in one way or another describe, simply stated,  the phenomenon of turning away from a known reality for one reason or another.2 

 

Finding the language  

 

In the spring of my sophomore year I took a class called Environment and Ecocriticism. In this class, I heard the word solastalgia for the first time. Australian researcher Glenn Albrecht coined the term defining it as the pain or sickness caused by the loss or lack of solace and the sense of isolation connected to the current, altered state of one’s home environment.3 It was the first time I had encountered language to describe an emotional response to climate change. Upon learning about solastalgia, I decided to do some writing for the course centered around what I understood to be my own experience with solastalgia. I wrote about the melancholy and grief I felt about the decreasing amount of snow in my home state of New Hampshire and, for the first time, dipped my toes into the world of climate emotions. 

 

Around the same time I began my studies in Environment and Ecocriticism, my former ENVS 001 professor, Amy Seidl, invited me to join a climate change “collaboratory” that she and an upperclassman had newly formed. After a semester of feeling helpless, anxious and overwhelmed in light of what I was learning about climate change, I jumped eagerly at the opportunity to take meaningful action and connect with others. The group was called the Climate Communication Advocacy and Literacy Laboratory (CCALL). Its goal was to bring together climate worried, passionate, and creative people to find and utilize avenues and opportunities for research, activism and engagement in the world of climate change. The aim was to effect change on a variety of levels. Although the main impetus for the creation of CCALL was to create an environment for collaboration around action-oriented projects and initiatives, an underlying and equally important goal and ultimate outcome was the cultivation of a rich community of understanding, support and validation around climate emotions. 

 

Through CCALL I found much more than I bargained for, including a rich community of friends, thought-provoking research opportunities, and an invaluable mentor for the remainder of my time at UVM.  I credit heavily CCALL for inspiring me to pursue a thesis on ecological anxiety among young people. I found that although my worries and anxieties about climate change did not disappear as a result of my involvement with CCALL, I certainly felt better and less constantly derailed by thoughts of the end of the world. I found solace in the fact that other people seemed to feel the same way and it felt really good to be engaging in work that felt impactful even if only in some small way. CCALL was the perfect balance of action and support. In many ways it felt like group therapy with a healthy dose of action and engagement beyond the session. 

 

Turning language into research 

 

As I alluded to earlier, when it came time to decide on a topic of study for my capstone thesis, I chose climate anxiety. My experience in CCALL coupled with my growing curiosity about what else there was to understand about climate anxiety drove me to the topic. One of the most challenging aspects of this research process for me was homing in on a specific research question. It is one thing to say that you are going to study climate anxiety and a completely different thing to operationalize it. I eventually decided that I wanted to know how participating in meaningful action might be helpful for coping with ecological anxiety. The primary question I sought to answer through my thesis was does action through involvement with environmental organizations serve as an antidote for eco-anxiety and its attendant psychological ills among members of the climate generation? The secondary question I sought to answer was if action does serve as an antidote for eco-anxiety, how? If not, is there something else that does?4 

 

As I began to conduct my literature review at the beginning of my thesis work I came across the name Dr. Panu Pihkala again and again. It seemed like in the world of eco-anxiety he was someone to look out for.  As it turns out, I was absolutely right, but I’ll get back to that a bit later.   

 

At this point I will importantly note that this research was in its beginning phases in January 2020 and, unsurprisingly, the COVID-19 pandemic changed the course of my research in many ways. I originally to answer the aforementioned questions was through an experiment in which action would be the treatment variable and participants’ level of climate anxiety would be the dependent variable. However, COVID-related restrictions made that kind of in person research impossible so I scratched that plan entirely to shift towards an interview-based methodology that could be conducted entirely remotely. Onset of global pandemic aside, there were certainly limitations to my original plan, so ultimately I think the pandemic and social distancing measures altered my research approach for the better.  

 

And so, my senior thesis began to take form amidst a global pandemic.  

 

Fulbright  

I am now going to take a step back to explain where applying for a Fulbright grant fits into this narrative. I have to give so much credit to the University of Vermont Office of Fellowships, Opportunities, and Undergraduate Research (FOUR) and especially the wonderful Katie Alexander. In both 2018 and 2019 I applied for the Udall Undergraduate Scholarship and was not selected as a recipient in either application cycle. During the summer of 2019, I met with Katie to go over my second attempt at the Udall application and she asked if I had ever considered applying for a Fulbright grant—I had not. She told me to seriously consider it and get back to her. 

 

Once Katie planted the Fulbright seed in my head I could not stop thinking about it and decided I better go ahead and apply. At first I was unsure about most of the details, including the country to which I would apply and what research I wanted to propose. Fast forward to the spring of 2020, when everything was falling to shambles and I was trying to figure out how to proceed with my thesis work, the University of Vermont’s internal intent to apply for a Fulbright Grant was due May 1, 2020, and I went for it. This is where my thesis and Dr. Pihkala comes back into the picture. After mulling over a couple other ides including expanding my previous research on internal carbon pricing in higher education, I decided it made the most sense and would be the most interesting for me to formulate a research proposal using the experience I already had and would continue to acquire around climate anxiety. With the encouragement of Laurie Kutner—a Library Associate Professor, liaison to the Environmental Program at UVM and mentor of mine—I reached out to Dr. Pihkala to see if he would be interested in being my affiliate if I was to be awarded a Fulbright grant to Finland.  

 

To my surprise and relief, he said yes. From there we began to exchange emails and eventually set up a Zoom call to discuss further. I have to say, as a young, aspiring academic, it was such a dream to get to talk to someone in my field who was so knowledgeable and so open to discussion. (I will discuss this opportunity and my first impressions of Finnish scholars in the field further in another blog.) 

 

Once Dr. Pihkala agreed to be my affiliate, the idea that I could actually continue this research beyond my thesis began to take shape and push me to think about my thesis in ways I may not have if I thought it would be over once I passed my defense. As I worked on completing my thesis – conducting interviews, coded transcripts and pulling it all together through writing, I could not help but think about what could be if I were to receive the Fulbright. As I synthesized, reflected and wrote I thought about what I would do differently, what questions deserved more attention and what new form this research could take abroad. Towards the end of April 2021 – a few weeks after I found out I had received the Fulbright and would get to continue- I had the opportunity to present my thesis findings to my senior political science seminar. After I presented, a classmate of mine asked what I would do differently and what new questions might I ask if I continued this research. I was humbled and thrilled to outline how I actually would be expanding upon the research in a few short months.   

 

Here 

 

Now I am here in Helsinki doing the work I talked about and envisioned for so many months. It is not as smooth or intuitive as I might have hoped but it is enriching and I am learning more as more each day. Helsinki is providing me with a rich new context for inquiry and curiosity. Dr. Pihkala and I have begun our collaboration sharing ideas and discussing questions over lunch each week. I have started to look forward to these weekly exchanges – it’s in many ways the ultimate dream of a young scholar to converse with an expert in their field. Beyond Dr. Pihkala I have met – and continue to meet each week – many scholars and students in Helsinki who are working on the issue of climate change from a variety of lenses. I will stop my reflections on Helsinki there as I will describe my experiences in further detail in future blog posts. 

 

I think one of my biggest takeaways from this whole experience of finding my research topic, writing my thesis, applying for and receiving a Fulbright fellowship is that it is okay to not be completely sure about what will come next. Each day I am here on my Fulbright, navigating this new research context am practicing embracing the mindset of not knowing exactly what is to come each every day. That, actually, is also what we have to do in relation to eco-anxiety: try to live with uncertainty and pursue meaningful goals. 

 

Endnotes

1. Later I learned that these kinds of reactions are common for climate-concerned young people coming from roughly similar backgrounds.
2. Maria Ojala’s work on climate change emotions and young people highlights this experience. 
3. Kari Marie Norgaard has done extensive research on this phenomenon. Namely in her book Living in Denial: Climate Change, Emotions and Everyday Life. 
4. This text details the foundation of the idea of solastalgia. Glenn Albrecht. (2006). Solastalgia. Alternatives Journal (Waterloo), 32(4/5), 34-36. 
5. This is the final version of my thesis. Isabel Coppola. (2021). Eco-Anxiety in “the Climate Generation”: Is Action an Antidote?. Environmental Studies Electronic Thesis Collection. 71. http://scholarworks.uvm.edu/envstheses/71