Climate Anxiety and Eco-Grief: Finding Community in a Changing World
Every spring, I get excited about digging out my tent and camping gear. I look forward to the kinds of adventures that shaped my youth and still feed something essential in me. I almost ache for the stillness of a northern lake at dawn, a hot coffee made over the campfire, warming my hands after what feels like the best sleep I've had in years, with the forest floor just millimetres from my bones. And then, somewhere in the middle of planning, the sky turns orange for the first time. My throat tightens. The air quality report re-enters my morning routine. The disappointment lands in a way that feels difficult to explain. It reaches beyond ordinary frustration. Something I love is being taken from me season by season, and there is no clear place to put that grief.
I know I am far from alone in this. The clients who find their way to me, and the people who show up to Climate Cafés, often carry versions of the same experience. A beloved hiking trail that now closes every August. A family camping tradition that no longer feels worth the uncertainty. A child asking questions about the future that a parent doesn't know how to answer honestly.
These experiences may not always resemble what we think of when we hear the word anxiety. They feel more diffuse, more ongoing, woven into the texture of ordinary life. Climate distress often arrives through erosion or the gradual loss of predictability, trust, attachment, and future orientation. Researchers increasingly describe this as a constellation of climate emotions rather than a single psychological state. Grief for what is being lost. Guilt about participating in systems we did not create. Anger at political inaction. Numbness. Fatalism. Fear. The Climate Mental Health Network's Climate Emotions Wheel attempts to map this range because the language of anxiety alone misses much of what people are actually living with.
A 2023 Canadian survey found that nearly 80 percent of young people reported climate change affecting their mental health, while over a third said it interfered with their daily functioning. These numbers do not surprise me. What continues to stand out, both in my practice and in my own life, is how often these feelings are carried privately.
When the Place You Love Begins to Change
The language of anxiety captures part of the experience, though not all of it. Philosopher Glenn Albrecht uses the term solastalgia to describe the distress that emerges when a home environment changes in ways beyond one's control. Originally developed in response to environmental devastation experienced by specific communities, the concept now resonates far more broadly. You do not need to live next to a data centre or inside an evacuation zone to feel it. You can feel it where you are, when smoke settles over your home, your neighbourhood, your province, your hemisphere, and the season you were counting on begins to shrink around you.
Panu Pihkala, a Finnish researcher and theologian who has written extensively on eco-anxiety, distinguishes between the acute distress that follows direct disaster exposure and the more chronic form that comes from sustained awareness of ecological crisis. Both are real. Both make sense. Both become heavier when there is little social space to acknowledge them openly.
Part of what makes climate emotions difficult is that many of the usual outlets fail to hold them well. Conversations with friends can feel risky or exhausting, especially when concern is unevenly shared. Doom-scrolling intensifies rather than relieves distress. Individual action, however meaningful, can feel painfully disproportionate to the scale of the problem.
Even therapy, for all that it can offer, is not always the right container for experiences that are deeply collective in nature. For decades, philosopher and eco-activist Joanna Macy has argued that ecological grief requires more than private coping strategies. Through what she calls The Work That Reconnects, she has developed collective practices that help people speak honestly about fear, grief, anger, and love for the world in the presence of others. The aim is not to eliminate these feelings, but to make them more livable and less isolating.
Gathering Together
A Climate Café is a facilitated group space where people gather to speak about what it feels like to live on a changing planet. It is not a group therapy session, a debate, or an action-planning meeting. No one arrives as the expert on how others should feel. The emphasis is on reflection, listening, and understanding. People come carrying very different experiences. Some arrive with grief that has had nowhere to go. Others carry anger, dread, guilt, exhaustion, confusion, or a feeling they have not yet found language for. Some simply know that something feels increasingly difficult to hold alone. What emerges in these spaces is recognition.
I first encountered Climate Cafés through an international online group and later through facilitation training. What struck me each time was a moment that seemed to repeat itself across gatherings. One person hears their private experience spoken aloud by another person, and something in them shifts. The isolation loosens. That matters.
I began hosting Climate Cafés through Inner Agora Counselling because I believe there is a genuine need for spaces where climate-related distress can be acknowledged without immediately being pathologized, solved, debated, or minimized. The climate crisis is generating real psychological and existential strain, much of which remains difficult to speak about in ordinary life. I do not think the answer to that is solely clinical. I think part of the answer is community.
These gatherings are free to attend because climate-related distress belongs to all of us. This spring and summer, we will meet online on the last Wednesday of each month at 7 PM (May 27, June 24, and July 29). You do not need expertise in climate science or a particular kind of emotional response to attend. You only need to arrive as you are, alongside others doing the same.
Books to Explore
Glenn Albrecht, Earth Emotions: New Words for a New World (2019). Cornell University Press.
Britt Wray, Generation Dread: Finding Purpose in an Age of Climate Crisis (2022). Alfred A. Knopf Canada.
Joanna Macy & Molly Young Brown, Coming Back to Life: The Updated Guide to the Work That Reconnects (2014). New Society Publishers.
Arne Næss, There Is No Point of No Return (2021). Penguin Random House.
Martha Nussbaum, Justice for Animals: Our Collective Responsibility (2022). Simon & Schuster.
