October 28, 2021 • 20 mins
Climate envoy John Kerry described it as “the last best chance the world has" — this weekend world leaders and thousands of negotiators, journalists, and activists converge on Glasgow for COP26, the 2021 United Nations Climate Change Conference. In the span of two weeks, can world leaders pull off what they never have, committing to realistic carbon-cutting policies in order to limit the planet's disastrous warming? Those who fear the worst may be familiar with the feeling of “eco-anxiety.” Caroline Hickman — a practicing psychotherapist and board member of the Climate Psychology Alliance — defines the phenomenon... and tells us what we can do about it.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:07):
From the recount on Marina nine in and you're listening
to the recount Daily Pod today's Thursday October. Children have
been telling me for ten years that it wasn't environmental
destruction that was the most threatening for them. It was
the fact that they found that adults weren't taking them seriously,
so children were feeling invalidated. That was Caroline Hickman, a
(00:27):
board member at the Climate Psychology Alliance. We'll speak with
her a little bit later on about eco anxiety, but
first your morning headlines ISIS and al Qaeda could prove
able to carry out attacks from Afghan soil, including against
the US. We have to remain vigilant against that possibility.
That was senior Pentagon official Call and Call, who gave
(00:50):
the assessment on behalf of U S intelligence on Tuesday.
He says it could take ISIS six months to a
year before getting there. For al Qaeda, the timeline is
twice that. Back in August and justifying the US withdrawal
from Afghanistan, President Joe Biden and Secretary of State Anthony B.
Lincoln had downplayed the strength of terrorist networks in the country.
(01:11):
Up until now, American passport holders have had to designate
themselves as male or female. But the US has issued
its first passport with the third option X that could
go a long way in validating the experience of non
binary or gender nonconforming travelers. The options should be more
broadly available next year, according to the State Department. President
(01:34):
Joe Biden heads to Rome today. He'll meet with Pope
Francis on Friday, then with world leaders at the G
twenty Summit. After that it's the u N Climate Change Conference.
Up to twenty five thousand people are expected at the
two weeks long event in Glasgow, Scotland. Biden's climate on
voyd John Kerry described it as quote the last best
(01:54):
chance the world has. But can world leaders pull off
what they've never done before? Committing to a broad set
of realistic carbon cutting policies, Can enough of them come
together to limit disastrous global warming? Those who fear the
worst may be familiar with the feeling of eco anxiety.
My guest today, Caroline Hickman, is a lecturer at Bath
University in the UK, practicing psychotherapist and a board member
(02:19):
of the Climate Psychology Alliance. She tells me all about
eco anxiety and what we can do about it. Caroline, welcome.
Thank you so much for inviting me. I don't usually
chied people for being late for an interview. You were
a few minutes late, and you have very good reason.
Tell me, yes, I'm really sorry. I don't like being late.
(02:41):
But I was stood outside in my house crying with
joy because I just had five or six text messages
all arrived from all different people saying do you realize
that your research that was launched publicly last week, which
is due to be published in the lancep Planets we Have,
was just referenced by Secretary Guitarrorists that the United Nations,
(03:05):
you know, for us, that is enormous validation that the
most powerful people in the world are hearing how young
people feel and what they need governments to do. I
can see still how emotional you are about just moments
ago hearing that from the UN Secretary in General. Why
is this so important that validation from him? The climate
(03:27):
crisis and the biodiversity crisis is a global problem and
unless we have global solutions, we're not going to resolve this.
So if countries start to position themselves to take care
of themselves and neglect the needs of the rest of
the world, we will never resolve this, and what will
happen is the most vunerable people in the world and
(03:47):
the loanline Pacific nations and the children. They will be
ignored and abandoned and they will pay the price. You know,
the children and the young people are currently paying the
price and the way they feel the future is compromised
and they feel they don't have a future. But I
want to read you something else because this is really
important to put alongside the u N Dear Caroline Hitman,
(04:11):
I'm only a single private person studying in Germany, but
I feel the urge to thank you in your colleagues
so much for the research and study about climate anxiety
amongst youth around the world. What the study reveals makes me,
for the first time ever, feel that I am not
alone with the future and climate anxiety I experienced every day.
(04:31):
I still don't know what places to go there are
in order to learn how to cope better with this anxiety. Still,
I consider the recent study of the University of Birth
as an incredibly important step for us young people around
the world to imaginary, emotionally connect and even visually realized
that no one of us is alone with this huge
issue pretty powerful to hear that from a young person.
(04:54):
For me, both are wonderful. So hearing our research recognized
at the u N in such an amazing way, and
getting that email from this teenager who's written me that
reached out feels that our research spoke to her and
meant something to her. So both made me cry. So, Caroline,
(05:14):
what is ego anxiety? It's a psychological phenomenon and it
affects not just our feelings, but also our thinking, and
it affects our relationships, and it affects our way of
living on a day to day way with the planet
that feels comfortable, natural, tolerable. So it's not just anxiety,
it's an emotional state. The anxiety hits when we first
(05:36):
start to feel the anxiety about what's going to happen
to the planet, what's going to happen in the future.
Anxiety is the first emotion, but it would be an
awful mistake to think it's just anxiety. It's also depression, despair, frustration, hopelessness, guilt, grief, shame.
We cycle through all the different emotions when we start
to think, well, what's going to happen and who's going
(05:56):
to take action? And we feel helpless, and we feel hopeless,
and which enormously vulnerable because the scale of the problem
is enormous. We measure mental health by looking at our
capacity to respond to external reality. And the external reality
as we've seen increasingly this summer, with the flooding in
Germany and China and New York recently, and the fires
and the heat dome and the Pacific Northwest, things are
(06:19):
getting worse. So it's natural that we would feel anxious
in response to this. When did people realize eco anxiety
is a real thing. Well, I don't think everybody has
realized it yet. I wish they had. I think if
everybody was able to emotionally and mentally engage with the
reality of the threats were facing, we would see quicker
(06:42):
action on this. The American Psychological Association defined eco anxiety
as chronic fear of environmental doom. That's a pretty strong term.
Do How do you help people deal with that feeling
of helplessness. First of all, let's define it very clearly.
Anxiety is not just asked about environmental destruction. So the
(07:04):
definition you've just given me is I think part of
the definition. I don't think it's the whole. It is
both anxiety about environmental destruction but also the fact that
people empower are failing to act. So we look at
what's happening in the world, we feel terribly anxious, and
then we look around ourselves looking for reassurance that people
in power will act to save the planet, act to
(07:26):
save us. And then increasingly we're seeing the world leaders
are declaring climate emergencies but not taking sufficiently rapid action
or sustainable action. And we have confused messages where we
see governments declaring a climate emergency and then continuing drilling
for oil or continuing to build, and our brains say,
(07:50):
what's this. I can't understand this. These two things don't
go together. If we look at the sort of global
response to COVID, it's a good comparison. COVID hit across
the world and governments responded quick to protect people. There
was a speed of action there. We don't see the
same speed of action with the climate and the biodiversity crisis,
(08:13):
which paradoxically are much greater threat to humanity in the
long term. So it's both the environmental anxiety plus the
fact that people empower aren't acting. And when I say
people empower. We have to think about what it means
for us as human beings. We always look to people
who are more powerful than us, who are wiser than us,
(08:33):
or have more knowledge than us, to take steps to
protect and preserve people and the planet. And when we
judge that maybe they're not doing what we'd like them
to be doing, we don't feel secure and we don't
feel reassured. And that's one of the things that our
research found was that children and young people did not
feel reassured by the action that governments were taking. But
(08:54):
we've got to take a quick break, but we'll be
back with climate change psychotherapist Caroline Hickman. Are the Recountingly
Part Welcome back to the Recount Daily pot of podcast
from the Recount and I Heart Radio. We're here with
climate change psychotherapist Caroline Hickman talking about how do we
dress eco anxiety. Tell us a little bit about the
(09:16):
research that you've done. You were the lead author of
a new global survey about how young people feel about
climate change. What stood out to you in those findings, Well,
first and foremost, this was the biggest survey of children
and young people globally that has ever been carried out,
so we were able to get ten thousand young people
across ten different countries across the global North and global South,
(09:37):
so there was a representation. So we included countries like
the Philippines and Brazil, and also the US and France
and the UK and Nigeria, so we had a range.
So these are countries which are facing the immediate impacts
of climate change in different ways. What we wanted to
do was measure how children and young people were feeling.
But then we didn't want to just stop with feelings.
(09:58):
We wanted to also of think about their thinking because
what you're feeling affects the way you think, and it
affects the ways that you function in the world. So
we asked them about their functioning in the world and
to what extent the feelings they had were impacting on
their daily functioning. So we had forty eight percent, for example,
who said they felt ignored or dismissed by other people
(10:20):
when they tried to talk about climate change, and then
we wanted to ask them who they felt was carried
more responsibility or culpability for this, so we specifically asked
them about government action and inaction, about whether they were
feeling reassured or not, whether they felt governments could be trusted,
because children have been telling me for ten years that
(10:42):
it wasn't environmental destruction that was the most frightening for them,
it was the fact that they found that adults weren't
taking them seriously, so children were feeling invalidated. So what
this research has shown us is that children are not
feeling listened to, but they also are not being helped
to feel secure by government action. And governments I think
are really important because of the power that they carry,
(11:04):
that governments are an extension of adults for children and
young people, but rather than us specifically about parents action,
because parents themselves have relatively little power to act on
the climate crisis in the same way as you and
I have very little power individually. We're only going to
address this in a systemic way if we have government
(11:25):
cooperation globally. So that's why we wanted to ask children,
young people what their relationship with that was and what
they thought about that, and what they told us was
really powerful. Only a third believed that governments could be
trusted or we're doing enough to avoid a catastrophe, and
that they were feeling betrayed and abandoned by governments. Two
thirds thought the governments were lying about the effectiveness of
(11:48):
the actions they're taking and they were failing young people
across the world. What is your advice to parents on
how they should be talking to their children knowing that
some of them might be carrying this anxiety. First, I
would day it's quite likely the parents are probably carrying
similar anxiety themselves. So I've been working for a few
years with groups of parents here in the UK where
(12:08):
they've been meeting monthly in a support group to support
each other and also talk through how they feel about
the climate crisis. Because it's very hard to emotionally regulate
and support your child if you're feeling anxious to yourself.
I think parents need to get support from other parents.
They can get support from teachers or local communities. We've
got organizations like in the United States, we've got the
(12:30):
Climate Psychiatry Alliance and the Climate Psychology Alliance. And what
that does is it reduces the anxiety, and it reduces
the isolation and loneliness that people can feel. And by
reducing that, it makes people feel they've got courage. It
makes them feel listen to and understood. What people need
above all else is to feel heard and understood and
validated and not alone with these things, and then we
(12:52):
can develop courage and have hope. I think it's really
important that we add hope to this mix. But the
particular kind of hope we need is what we would
call radical hope rather than naive hope. Certainly, I would
say to parents, don't sit on your own and think
it's just your family being affected, because it's not. Your
whole community will be being affected, your whole district, your
(13:12):
whole neighborhood. So this needs to be a shared concern,
and I think we can work with groups as well
as with pair of groups to support them. You know,
you talk about radical hope, there are so many people
who are just angry, so many people who feel this
is just beyond our control and throwing up their hands
saying why bother trying to stop it? At this point,
what do you say that? Well, first, I would say
(13:33):
I understand and that there are times I feel that way.
And I think if you are struggling with poverty or
racism or homophobia, are struggling to feed your children, then
you really don't need another problem on your table. And
it can absolutely feel like this is beyond you. So
I think those feelings make perfect sense. I think what's important.
Did you don't get stuck in those feelings, or don't
(13:55):
get stuck in feelings of hopelessness or helplessness or depression.
It's important to be able to feel all these feelings.
I talk about it as an emotional biodiversity. All of
these emotions are relevant, they have their place. But what
you don't want is for any one of those feelings
completely dominate your world. First of all, I would say
it makes perfect sense, but what can we do with
(14:17):
that anger? What can we do with those feelings of
frustration to turn them into some form of positive action.
So you're joining together with other people to actually feel
that you are making a difference, because individual action and
community action and family action does make a difference. And
if you add all of this up collectively, we could
have small domestic revolutions that cannot help but have an
(14:39):
impact on this global problem. We're going to pause and
take a short break. We'll be right back with climate
change psychotherapist Caroline Hickman on the Recount Daily Pod. They
welcome back to the Recount Daily Pod, a podcast from
the Recount and I Heart Radio. We're here with climate
change psychotherapist Caroline hick In. We're talking about how we
(15:01):
address eco anxiety. About what do you believe the future
of eco anxiety looks like. Our hope in our research
is that people will start to develop a deeper understanding
of what it really is and not just minimize it
as young people being anxious, or young people being snowflakes,
(15:21):
or young people not really comprehending the seriousness of what
we're facing globally. So first and foremost, we're hoping that
people will start to take this more seriously but also
not pathologize it as a mental health problem. So be
proud of feeling it. Let's turn it into eco passion,
eco community, eco empathy, eco care. It's this struggle to
(15:44):
care that gets in the way of us finding global
solutions to the climate emergency. So we don't want to
ask people to stop caring. What we need is for
people to start to care collectively and say, actually, because
I care, I want to do something about this, and
because I care about what happens to the children in Nigeria.
(16:04):
So it's my eco anxiety that connects me imperfectly with
the people around the world who are struggling with this,
So we wouldn't want to get rid of it, but
we do need to have a better understanding. We don't
need to leave people on their own with it. How
do you deal with eco anxiety? How do I deal
with it? I'm lucky in a way because I channel
it into my work, so I'm able to use the
(16:24):
anxiety to help me understand how other people are feeling,
and then as a psychotherapist, I can use that understanding
to help them understand for themselves. So I have a
place to go with my eco anxiety, So it has
meaning for me. I think when we lose meaning, we
have greatest psychological distress, and we can tolerate really complex
(16:47):
feelings so long as we feel understood and it has meaning.
Otherwise that's when we start to think, what's the point.
So I'm lucky because I'm able to turn it into
my writing, my research, my academic work, my speaking with
young people, and I spent last Saturday with fifty sixty
young people age sixteen twenty four, the same age group
(17:10):
that we did this research with, who are working together
in a resilience project group educating themselves about climate change,
supporting each other around eco anxiety, and I teaching them
about mental health and teaching them about emotional intelligence and resilience,
and just listening to them and the way they're processing it,
the way they're supporting each other, is profoundly affecting and
(17:33):
gives me incredible hope because they are so amazing. Caroline
Hickman coming to us from Bath in the United Kingdom, Congratulations.
I know this is a big moment for you personally
and professionally. Thank you so much. And now let's look
ahead at what's happening today. Big Oil is in the
hot seat. The House Oversight Committee will question top executives
(17:55):
at Epson, BP Shell, and Chevron on whether oil company
has misled the public about climate change. The accusation is
that they waged a disinformation campaign over the course of
decades on the science linking burnt fossil fuels to climate change.
The event has been compared to the hearings with Big
Tobacco in the ninety nineties, where executives swore under oath
(18:17):
that nicotine was not addictive. Those hearings caused a public
shift in opinion on tobacco and led to legislative consequences
for the industry. Opening arguments began this morning in the
civil case against organizers of Unite the Right, the two
thousand seventeen rally and Charlottesville, Virginia that energized white supremacists
(18:39):
and left one counter protester dead. You might recall the
infamous video of a group of white men tiki torches
in hand yelling Jews will not replace us. The trial
seeks to determine whether organizers conspired to commit violence. Plaintiffs
include residents of Charlottesville and counter protesters seeking damages for
physical and emotional injuries. As for the two statues of
(19:02):
Confederate generals that organizers sought to defend in the first place,
they were taken down. Earlier this year, the sci fi
epic Dune heads into its second weekend in theaters, and
the Council on American Islamic Relations will hold a press
conference on Thursday about Islamic themes and references in the movie.
It's an effort to address the conversation about depictions of
(19:25):
Islam in pop culture. The organization also recently called on
Warner Brothers to explain why a black actor was left
off a poster for the film in China. Dune has
brought in more than two hundred and twenty million dollars
globally so far. A sequel has already been announced. This
(19:45):
is a Recount Daily Pod, a podcast from the Recount Our.
Thanks to Caroline Hickman for being on the show. And
if you like this episode, I hope you'll subscribe to
the Recount Daily Pod and do leave us a rating.
I'm your host. Rena nine and Alexis ram Dao and
Corey Wara engineered and produced this podcast. Ariella Martin also produced.
Vanda Muangi did the research. Pierre Benemey is our senior
(20:06):
producer and our executive producer is Laura Beatty
From the recount on Marina nine in and you're listening
to the recount Daily Pod today's Thursday October. Children have
been telling me for ten years that it wasn't environmental
destruction that was the most threatening for them. It was
the fact that they found that adults weren't taking them seriously,
so children were feeling invalidated. That was Caroline Hickman, a
(00:27):
board member at the Climate Psychology Alliance. We'll speak with
her a little bit later on about eco anxiety, but
first your morning headlines ISIS and al Qaeda could prove
able to carry out attacks from Afghan soil, including against
the US. We have to remain vigilant against that possibility.
That was senior Pentagon official Call and Call, who gave
(00:50):
the assessment on behalf of U S intelligence on Tuesday.
He says it could take ISIS six months to a
year before getting there. For al Qaeda, the timeline is
twice that. Back in August and justifying the US withdrawal
from Afghanistan, President Joe Biden and Secretary of State Anthony B.
Lincoln had downplayed the strength of terrorist networks in the country.
(01:11):
Up until now, American passport holders have had to designate
themselves as male or female. But the US has issued
its first passport with the third option X that could
go a long way in validating the experience of non
binary or gender nonconforming travelers. The options should be more
broadly available next year, according to the State Department. President
(01:34):
Joe Biden heads to Rome today. He'll meet with Pope
Francis on Friday, then with world leaders at the G
twenty Summit. After that it's the u N Climate Change Conference.
Up to twenty five thousand people are expected at the
two weeks long event in Glasgow, Scotland. Biden's climate on
voyd John Kerry described it as quote the last best
(01:54):
chance the world has. But can world leaders pull off
what they've never done before? Committing to a broad set
of realistic carbon cutting policies, Can enough of them come
together to limit disastrous global warming? Those who fear the
worst may be familiar with the feeling of eco anxiety.
My guest today, Caroline Hickman, is a lecturer at Bath
University in the UK, practicing psychotherapist and a board member
(02:19):
of the Climate Psychology Alliance. She tells me all about
eco anxiety and what we can do about it. Caroline, welcome.
Thank you so much for inviting me. I don't usually
chied people for being late for an interview. You were
a few minutes late, and you have very good reason.
Tell me, yes, I'm really sorry. I don't like being late.
(02:41):
But I was stood outside in my house crying with
joy because I just had five or six text messages
all arrived from all different people saying do you realize
that your research that was launched publicly last week, which
is due to be published in the lancep Planets we Have,
was just referenced by Secretary Guitarrorists that the United Nations,
(03:05):
you know, for us, that is enormous validation that the
most powerful people in the world are hearing how young
people feel and what they need governments to do. I
can see still how emotional you are about just moments
ago hearing that from the UN Secretary in General. Why
is this so important that validation from him? The climate
(03:27):
crisis and the biodiversity crisis is a global problem and
unless we have global solutions, we're not going to resolve this.
So if countries start to position themselves to take care
of themselves and neglect the needs of the rest of
the world, we will never resolve this, and what will
happen is the most vunerable people in the world and
(03:47):
the loanline Pacific nations and the children. They will be
ignored and abandoned and they will pay the price. You know,
the children and the young people are currently paying the
price and the way they feel the future is compromised
and they feel they don't have a future. But I
want to read you something else because this is really
important to put alongside the u N Dear Caroline Hitman,
(04:11):
I'm only a single private person studying in Germany, but
I feel the urge to thank you in your colleagues
so much for the research and study about climate anxiety
amongst youth around the world. What the study reveals makes me,
for the first time ever, feel that I am not
alone with the future and climate anxiety I experienced every day.
(04:31):
I still don't know what places to go there are
in order to learn how to cope better with this anxiety. Still,
I consider the recent study of the University of Birth
as an incredibly important step for us young people around
the world to imaginary, emotionally connect and even visually realized
that no one of us is alone with this huge
issue pretty powerful to hear that from a young person.
(04:54):
For me, both are wonderful. So hearing our research recognized
at the u N in such an amazing way, and
getting that email from this teenager who's written me that
reached out feels that our research spoke to her and
meant something to her. So both made me cry. So, Caroline,
(05:14):
what is ego anxiety? It's a psychological phenomenon and it
affects not just our feelings, but also our thinking, and
it affects our relationships, and it affects our way of
living on a day to day way with the planet
that feels comfortable, natural, tolerable. So it's not just anxiety,
it's an emotional state. The anxiety hits when we first
(05:36):
start to feel the anxiety about what's going to happen
to the planet, what's going to happen in the future.
Anxiety is the first emotion, but it would be an
awful mistake to think it's just anxiety. It's also depression, despair, frustration, hopelessness, guilt, grief, shame.
We cycle through all the different emotions when we start
to think, well, what's going to happen and who's going
(05:56):
to take action? And we feel helpless, and we feel hopeless,
and which enormously vulnerable because the scale of the problem
is enormous. We measure mental health by looking at our
capacity to respond to external reality. And the external reality
as we've seen increasingly this summer, with the flooding in
Germany and China and New York recently, and the fires
and the heat dome and the Pacific Northwest, things are
(06:19):
getting worse. So it's natural that we would feel anxious
in response to this. When did people realize eco anxiety
is a real thing. Well, I don't think everybody has
realized it yet. I wish they had. I think if
everybody was able to emotionally and mentally engage with the
reality of the threats were facing, we would see quicker
(06:42):
action on this. The American Psychological Association defined eco anxiety
as chronic fear of environmental doom. That's a pretty strong term.
Do How do you help people deal with that feeling
of helplessness. First of all, let's define it very clearly.
Anxiety is not just asked about environmental destruction. So the
(07:04):
definition you've just given me is I think part of
the definition. I don't think it's the whole. It is
both anxiety about environmental destruction but also the fact that
people empower are failing to act. So we look at
what's happening in the world, we feel terribly anxious, and
then we look around ourselves looking for reassurance that people
in power will act to save the planet, act to
(07:26):
save us. And then increasingly we're seeing the world leaders
are declaring climate emergencies but not taking sufficiently rapid action
or sustainable action. And we have confused messages where we
see governments declaring a climate emergency and then continuing drilling
for oil or continuing to build, and our brains say,
(07:50):
what's this. I can't understand this. These two things don't
go together. If we look at the sort of global
response to COVID, it's a good comparison. COVID hit across
the world and governments responded quick to protect people. There
was a speed of action there. We don't see the
same speed of action with the climate and the biodiversity crisis,
(08:13):
which paradoxically are much greater threat to humanity in the
long term. So it's both the environmental anxiety plus the
fact that people empower aren't acting. And when I say
people empower. We have to think about what it means
for us as human beings. We always look to people
who are more powerful than us, who are wiser than us,
(08:33):
or have more knowledge than us, to take steps to
protect and preserve people and the planet. And when we
judge that maybe they're not doing what we'd like them
to be doing, we don't feel secure and we don't
feel reassured. And that's one of the things that our
research found was that children and young people did not
feel reassured by the action that governments were taking. But
(08:54):
we've got to take a quick break, but we'll be
back with climate change psychotherapist Caroline Hickman. Are the Recountingly
Part Welcome back to the Recount Daily pot of podcast
from the Recount and I Heart Radio. We're here with
climate change psychotherapist Caroline Hickman talking about how do we
dress eco anxiety. Tell us a little bit about the
(09:16):
research that you've done. You were the lead author of
a new global survey about how young people feel about
climate change. What stood out to you in those findings, Well,
first and foremost, this was the biggest survey of children
and young people globally that has ever been carried out,
so we were able to get ten thousand young people
across ten different countries across the global North and global South,
(09:37):
so there was a representation. So we included countries like
the Philippines and Brazil, and also the US and France
and the UK and Nigeria, so we had a range.
So these are countries which are facing the immediate impacts
of climate change in different ways. What we wanted to
do was measure how children and young people were feeling.
But then we didn't want to just stop with feelings.
(09:58):
We wanted to also of think about their thinking because
what you're feeling affects the way you think, and it
affects the ways that you function in the world. So
we asked them about their functioning in the world and
to what extent the feelings they had were impacting on
their daily functioning. So we had forty eight percent, for example,
who said they felt ignored or dismissed by other people
(10:20):
when they tried to talk about climate change, and then
we wanted to ask them who they felt was carried
more responsibility or culpability for this, so we specifically asked
them about government action and inaction, about whether they were
feeling reassured or not, whether they felt governments could be trusted,
because children have been telling me for ten years that
(10:42):
it wasn't environmental destruction that was the most frightening for them,
it was the fact that they found that adults weren't
taking them seriously, so children were feeling invalidated. So what
this research has shown us is that children are not
feeling listened to, but they also are not being helped
to feel secure by government action. And governments I think
are really important because of the power that they carry,
(11:04):
that governments are an extension of adults for children and
young people, but rather than us specifically about parents action,
because parents themselves have relatively little power to act on
the climate crisis in the same way as you and
I have very little power individually. We're only going to
address this in a systemic way if we have government
(11:25):
cooperation globally. So that's why we wanted to ask children,
young people what their relationship with that was and what
they thought about that, and what they told us was
really powerful. Only a third believed that governments could be
trusted or we're doing enough to avoid a catastrophe, and
that they were feeling betrayed and abandoned by governments. Two
thirds thought the governments were lying about the effectiveness of
(11:48):
the actions they're taking and they were failing young people
across the world. What is your advice to parents on
how they should be talking to their children knowing that
some of them might be carrying this anxiety. First, I
would day it's quite likely the parents are probably carrying
similar anxiety themselves. So I've been working for a few
years with groups of parents here in the UK where
(12:08):
they've been meeting monthly in a support group to support
each other and also talk through how they feel about
the climate crisis. Because it's very hard to emotionally regulate
and support your child if you're feeling anxious to yourself.
I think parents need to get support from other parents.
They can get support from teachers or local communities. We've
got organizations like in the United States, we've got the
(12:30):
Climate Psychiatry Alliance and the Climate Psychology Alliance. And what
that does is it reduces the anxiety, and it reduces
the isolation and loneliness that people can feel. And by
reducing that, it makes people feel they've got courage. It
makes them feel listen to and understood. What people need
above all else is to feel heard and understood and
validated and not alone with these things, and then we
(12:52):
can develop courage and have hope. I think it's really
important that we add hope to this mix. But the
particular kind of hope we need is what we would
call radical hope rather than naive hope. Certainly, I would
say to parents, don't sit on your own and think
it's just your family being affected, because it's not. Your
whole community will be being affected, your whole district, your
(13:12):
whole neighborhood. So this needs to be a shared concern,
and I think we can work with groups as well
as with pair of groups to support them. You know,
you talk about radical hope, there are so many people
who are just angry, so many people who feel this
is just beyond our control and throwing up their hands
saying why bother trying to stop it? At this point,
what do you say that? Well, first, I would say
(13:33):
I understand and that there are times I feel that way.
And I think if you are struggling with poverty or
racism or homophobia, are struggling to feed your children, then
you really don't need another problem on your table. And
it can absolutely feel like this is beyond you. So
I think those feelings make perfect sense. I think what's important.
Did you don't get stuck in those feelings, or don't
(13:55):
get stuck in feelings of hopelessness or helplessness or depression.
It's important to be able to feel all these feelings.
I talk about it as an emotional biodiversity. All of
these emotions are relevant, they have their place. But what
you don't want is for any one of those feelings
completely dominate your world. First of all, I would say
it makes perfect sense, but what can we do with
(14:17):
that anger? What can we do with those feelings of
frustration to turn them into some form of positive action.
So you're joining together with other people to actually feel
that you are making a difference, because individual action and
community action and family action does make a difference. And
if you add all of this up collectively, we could
have small domestic revolutions that cannot help but have an
(14:39):
impact on this global problem. We're going to pause and
take a short break. We'll be right back with climate
change psychotherapist Caroline Hickman on the Recount Daily Pod. They
welcome back to the Recount Daily Pod, a podcast from
the Recount and I Heart Radio. We're here with climate
change psychotherapist Caroline hick In. We're talking about how we
(15:01):
address eco anxiety. About what do you believe the future
of eco anxiety looks like. Our hope in our research
is that people will start to develop a deeper understanding
of what it really is and not just minimize it
as young people being anxious, or young people being snowflakes,
(15:21):
or young people not really comprehending the seriousness of what
we're facing globally. So first and foremost, we're hoping that
people will start to take this more seriously but also
not pathologize it as a mental health problem. So be
proud of feeling it. Let's turn it into eco passion,
eco community, eco empathy, eco care. It's this struggle to
(15:44):
care that gets in the way of us finding global
solutions to the climate emergency. So we don't want to
ask people to stop caring. What we need is for
people to start to care collectively and say, actually, because
I care, I want to do something about this, and
because I care about what happens to the children in Nigeria.
(16:04):
So it's my eco anxiety that connects me imperfectly with
the people around the world who are struggling with this,
So we wouldn't want to get rid of it, but
we do need to have a better understanding. We don't
need to leave people on their own with it. How
do you deal with eco anxiety? How do I deal
with it? I'm lucky in a way because I channel
it into my work, so I'm able to use the
(16:24):
anxiety to help me understand how other people are feeling,
and then as a psychotherapist, I can use that understanding
to help them understand for themselves. So I have a
place to go with my eco anxiety, So it has
meaning for me. I think when we lose meaning, we
have greatest psychological distress, and we can tolerate really complex
(16:47):
feelings so long as we feel understood and it has meaning.
Otherwise that's when we start to think, what's the point.
So I'm lucky because I'm able to turn it into
my writing, my research, my academic work, my speaking with
young people, and I spent last Saturday with fifty sixty
young people age sixteen twenty four, the same age group
(17:10):
that we did this research with, who are working together
in a resilience project group educating themselves about climate change,
supporting each other around eco anxiety, and I teaching them
about mental health and teaching them about emotional intelligence and resilience,
and just listening to them and the way they're processing it,
the way they're supporting each other, is profoundly affecting and
(17:33):
gives me incredible hope because they are so amazing. Caroline
Hickman coming to us from Bath in the United Kingdom, Congratulations.
I know this is a big moment for you personally
and professionally. Thank you so much. And now let's look
ahead at what's happening today. Big Oil is in the
hot seat. The House Oversight Committee will question top executives
(17:55):
at Epson, BP Shell, and Chevron on whether oil company
has misled the public about climate change. The accusation is
that they waged a disinformation campaign over the course of
decades on the science linking burnt fossil fuels to climate change.
The event has been compared to the hearings with Big
Tobacco in the ninety nineties, where executives swore under oath
(18:17):
that nicotine was not addictive. Those hearings caused a public
shift in opinion on tobacco and led to legislative consequences
for the industry. Opening arguments began this morning in the
civil case against organizers of Unite the Right, the two
thousand seventeen rally and Charlottesville, Virginia that energized white supremacists
(18:39):
and left one counter protester dead. You might recall the
infamous video of a group of white men tiki torches
in hand yelling Jews will not replace us. The trial
seeks to determine whether organizers conspired to commit violence. Plaintiffs
include residents of Charlottesville and counter protesters seeking damages for
physical and emotional injuries. As for the two statues of
(19:02):
Confederate generals that organizers sought to defend in the first place,
they were taken down. Earlier this year, the sci fi
epic Dune heads into its second weekend in theaters, and
the Council on American Islamic Relations will hold a press
conference on Thursday about Islamic themes and references in the movie.
It's an effort to address the conversation about depictions of
(19:25):
Islam in pop culture. The organization also recently called on
Warner Brothers to explain why a black actor was left
off a poster for the film in China. Dune has
brought in more than two hundred and twenty million dollars
globally so far. A sequel has already been announced. This
(19:45):
is a Recount Daily Pod, a podcast from the Recount Our.
Thanks to Caroline Hickman for being on the show. And
if you like this episode, I hope you'll subscribe to
the Recount Daily Pod and do leave us a rating.
I'm your host. Rena nine and Alexis ram Dao and
Corey Wara engineered and produced this podcast. Ariella Martin also produced.
Vanda Muangi did the research. Pierre Benemey is our senior
(20:06):
producer and our executive producer is Laura Beatty
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