Tangible Tools for Climate Anxiety

Elena Bilheimer, EcoNews Intern

Sarah Ray, HSU Environmental Studies Department Head:

• I use a couple of mantras and strategies to get my attention to move away from the stuff I have no control over. One of them is “what else is true?”, which helps me direct myself to the beautiful and positive things that are flourishing, and the generative spaces in my life that I can then go and pay attention to.

• I lift the second mantra from adrienne maree brown’s work, which states “feed what you want to grow”. If we're despairing about something, it's because we're despairing that something is lost or that it's going to be lost in the future. We're afraid of experiencing loss, so we need to ask ourselves what we can do to attend to that thing or to nourish that thing's growth, rather than just standing back and feeling awful about it being under threat.

Brittany Kleinschnitz, Thrive Eco Grief Circle Facilitator:

• Get into your body! My favorite exercises are ones in which we engage our senses. Climate grief and anxiety is in part a trauma response. Trauma separates us from our bodies (that disassociation I mentioned) - and so the most important thing we can do is find ways to return to ourselves.

• Go out and be with the land. Not on the land, with the land. Not just taking a hike - as I learned from Humboldt local and ecotherapist Ryan Van Lenning, "Give a hike". Really get present with your gratitude for the land where you live.

• Come to Thrive (the Northcoast Environmental Center’s Eco-Grief circle). And/or be in community.

Klara Hernandez, HSU Environmental Studies Student:

• In my opinion, a tangible tool for dealing with eco anxiety and climate grief is believing in myself and others, that we will beat this.

• When I participate in activism it helps me believe in it more, as I have noticed that I start to get sad and depressed when I am not doing any kind of activism because I have realized that it's easier to believe that nothing is being done to make the world a better place.

• Another tool I use is being okay with the work I've done, that I've done what I could and that is worth everything to me.

• My third tool is to take a break, and have fun doing what I love. Personally, what makes me happy is traveling and seeing new places.

Laura Johnson, HSU Geography & Environmental Studies Lecturer:

• Find community, find support, find the practices that you naturally gravitate toward, let your activism stem from what you love, from what lights you up and brings you joy.

• Personally, I gravitate toward yoga as my fortifying practice - yoga is inherently a relational, somatic, and embodied practice.

• Other amazing resources include the Good Grief Network and The Work that Reconnects.

Ryan Van Lenning, EcoTherapist:

• I could list things that work for me….sunset and moon therapy, offering a poem to wild berries, letting go with leaves, sitting with a tree, but I’d rather just say go to the river and talk to it. Then listen, open all your ears and lend your tears to the watershed.

• Find people to do this and feel this with, to name it and talk about it with others. It’s an insidious impulse of modernity that we should hide it, to grieve alone. No. You’re not alone; we’re in this together.