“Wretched is a mind anxious about the future” (Seneca, Letters to Lucilius, Letter 97)
The notion of “anxiety” has a long history of research, discussions and debates in philosophy and psychology. Anxiety is a multifaced affective state that is difficult to grasp, and there is no consensual definition of this term in the academic literature. Despite this, when we describe someone as “anxious”, we tend to picture a person who anticipates a potentially threatening future and, as a result, experiences feelings of uneasiness, stress, and worry.
This general picture also applies to anxiety turned towards ecological risks. Eco-anxiety is an increasingly widespread ecological emotion that can be very burdensome for individuals. It is associated with stress symptoms, psychological distress, insomnia, and depression. Eco-anxious people can experience impairment in day-to-day life related to eating, concentrating, work, school, sleeping, spending time in nature, playing, or having relationships. The most severe mental health effects include PTSD, depression, the exacerbation of psychotic symptoms, suicidal ideation, and even suicide completion.
As other forms of anxiety, eco-anxiety can be a threat to one’s mental health. This is especially true for those who are the most disproportionately exposed to ecological risks, such as children and young people, low-income households, climate and environmental scientists, and those who rely closely on the land and land-based activities, typically Indigenous people and small-scale farmers.
“Anxiety means you’re paying attention” (Mariana Alessandri, Night Vision, Princeton University Press, 2023: 11)
Although this dark side of eco-anxiety should not be underestimated, it is important to stress that eco-anxiety also has a more constructive side. This ecological emotion is usually triggered, at least initially, by the realization of the scope and severity of our planetary predicament. It is a normal, and even sometimes healthy reaction to a rapidly deteriorating ecological situation. In other words, it is a fitting emotional response to a truly threatening and uncertain situation. This helps understanding why so many climate and environmental scientists are experiencing anxiety, grief, and other forms of distress; it also helps understanding why many mental health professionals insist that eco-anxiety does not represent a medical condition.
Eco-anxiety is an adaptive response to environmental problems such as climate change and biodiversity loss that can help with maintaining positive mental health. It typically leads to two major kinds of behaviours to address ecological risks: risk-assessment behaviours, which are concerned with gathering information on the causes, the structure, and the effects of environmental problems; and risk-minimization behaviours, which foster deliberation and reflection on how to address the causes and adapt to the impacts of environmental problems. These constructive behavioural responses open the way for eco-anxious people to form moral and political communities of ecological citizens, for instance by making effective lifestyle changes to reduce their ecological footprint or by joining initiatives at the collective level to address the structural causes of global environmental changes.
“There is no hope without fear nor fear without hope” (Spinoza Ethics, Cambridge University Press, 2018: 132)
Eco-anxiety does not automatically lead to environmental action at the individual or collective level. Two parameters are important here. First, the degree of eco-anxiety should not be too high: beyond a certain threshold, eco-anxiety can become overwhelming and paralysing. These are the most worrying forms of eco-anxiety, and they must be addressed urgently with the support of mental health professionals, who need more support and training to identify and deal with such cases. Second, other emotions can strengthen or weaken the link between eco-anxiety and pro-environmental behaviours. One key emotion in this context is that of hope.
Although hope intuitively comes to mind as a way to counteract eco-anxiety, it is important to stress that it is not the opposite of eco-anxiety; actually, it is difficult to have one emotion without the other. To hope is to fear disappointment, and to fear is to hope for reassurance. Hope and anxiety are both based on doubt: if this element is removed, hope becomes confidence, and anxiety turns into despair, which represents the loss of the ground of hope, and which is one of the most dangerous (ecological) emotions.
A hopeful disposition is a source of personal motivation to overcome collective action problems such as climate change and can lead to a high degree of perseverance vis-à-vis the object of hope. For instance, hoping that global temperatures will be maintained well below 2°C, or that a just energy transition can be initiated at the local, national, or international level, helps the eco-anxious person to maintain levels of anxiety that do not become too severe. Hope provides pleasure and solace, it brightens up everyday life and allows balancing the stress and worry that comes with eco-anxiety. It feels good to hope. This helps to live with eco-anxious feelings.
Hope is however an ambiguous emotion. It can be illusory when it is based on wrong beliefs, such as the belief that ecological problems will resolve without the need for radical lifestyle changes or substantial institutional reforms. It can also lead to a denial of the seriousness of environmental problems and therefore a denial of any responsibility to take action as a way to cope with this reality. In these cases, hope is a hindrance to environmental actions.
For a hopeful disposition to remain constructive, it is therefore important for eco-anxious people to remain focused on evidence concerning whether certain future events will occur. Focusing on possible scenarios such as deep decarbonization pathways that lead to rapid and drastic emissions reductions makes them more psychologically resilient.
Being anxiously hopeful represents a fitting emotional response to the scope and severity of global environmental changes, but it is crucial not to let eco-anxiety turn into eco-despair.