Eco-anxiety, the psychological distress caused by environmental decline, is no longer a niche neurosis or a poetic abstraction. It is a condition both rational and real, not just felt but justified. As climate systems collapse, biodiversity vanishes, and the seasons turn strange, the rising anxiety among young people isn’t a disorder. It is a diagnosis. The symptoms aren’t within the crisis; it’s out there.
Clover Hogan, founder of Force of Nature, is a youth-led organisation that helps young people channel climate anxiety into action. She has become a compelling voice in mapping this psychological terrain. Her work articulates the existential dread of the climate crisis and the widespread dismissal of those feelings. For too long, therapists and commentators have responded with a patronising calm, urging anxious youth to regulate themselves while ignoring the fact that their fears are grounded in reality: rising temperatures, disappearing coastlines, water scarcity, and irreversible ecological degradation. The problem isn’t in their heads. It’s in the air.
For many in the West, eco-anxiety is often framed as anticipatory, a fear of what’s coming. But for many people around the globe, the crisis isn’t some existential dread. It is reality. Climate change is not an “if” or “when” but a daily condition: failed crops, poisoned rivers, unbreathable air, and the ever-present question of migration. For climate refugees, it is material rather than psychological. The West is only now catching up to what others have lived with for decades.
So why are young people in the Global North, particularly Gen Z, so fixated on the climate? They are the first generation born into this crisis and the last one who might do something about it. They inherited not only a broken housing market and shrinking job prospects but also a planet pushed past its limits. The Earth they have been handed feels less like a home and more like an emergency room.
Many Indigenous communities understand the land not as a resource but as a relation. The rivers are ancestors, the forests sacred. The climate crisis isn’t just a scientific or economic disaster. It is a desecration. The Ganges, long revered in Hindu culture, now chokes on plastic and sewage. Ireland’s pastoral beauty, once etched into the poems of Seamus Heaney, is burning under unseasonable heat. These are not just symbolic losses, but spiritual wounds.
As sociologist Avtar Brah and others have argued, identity is not just about blood or borders but about our embeddedness in place, our “roots in routes.” For many, particularly those from diasporic or colonised backgrounds, eco-anxiety also reflects a severing of that rootedness. When the land you’re tied to is desecrated by pollution, privatisation, and extractive capitalism, something essential is lost, not just biodiversity but belonging.
And still, in policy conversations, the dominant tone remains technocratic. Carbon markets, clean energy transitions, emissions targets… all important, but rarely do these conversations centre the psychic toll of collapse. Rarely do they speak to the grief of losing a world. Eco-anxiety is not pathological. It is the rightful mourning of a generation watching its future and its past dissolve.
There is, too, the matter of accountability. It is not enough to point to China or India as major polluters while conveniently ignoring the legacy emissions of Britain, the United States, and other historically industrialised nations. Blame is often used to defer responsibility. However, climate change is a global structure with local consequences, and every state, especially those that built their wealth on extraction, must act accordingly.
Hogan’s activism reframes eco-anxiety not as helplessness, but as fuel for engagement. For many young people, the climate crisis trumps everything, even education. What is the point of a diploma, they ask, if the future it promises no longer exists? There is no university on a dead planet, as the Fridays for Future movement has long insisted, turning strike slogans into existential truths. Hogan and her team don’t simply raise awareness; they equip their peers with the psychological tools to face uncertainty without retreating. It’s less about quick answers and more about cultivating what Keats called negative capability: the courage to act without guarantees.
To abate eco-anxiety, we need more than reassurance. We need action: systemic, structural, science-based change. But we also need something softer: space to grieve, reconnect, and re-root. Climate action must be more than emissions targets. It must include rituals of repair: cultural, emotional, and spiritual.
If eco-anxiety is rooted in disconnection, then healing must be about re-rooting in the land, in each other, and in the stories and traditions that remind us we belong here and that we have responsibilities not only to the future but also to the earth beneath our feet.
As Hogan says, “The biggest threat isn’t climate change. It’s the feeling of powerlessness in the face of it.” The antidote to that powerlessness is community. And care. And courage.
And above all, refusing to be told that fear is irrational when the world is on fire.