Emotional responses to the environment.
Environmental concern, anxiety and grief - the role of eco-compassion.
Hello, and welcome to the fifth post on Compassionate Nature and in this edition I am going to attempt to bring together environmental psychology and compassion psychology in the consideration of anxiety and grief within an ecological context. This might not sound the most cheery of reads, perhaps considering some recently published articles may prove thought-provoking and even motivating. It’s turned into a bigger topic that I initially thought and wanted to include reviews of several recent papers, so there will be a second part next week.
Positive emotional responses to nature are well documented, often promoted as beneficial to physical and mental health. However there are other emotional responses, with the phrase ecological anxiety (eco-anxiety) gaining traction in recent years although there are differing views on its definition and it is not a formally recognised clinical diagnosis (Rao & Powell, 2021). A Google Trends report of online searches for “climate anxiety” and “eco-anxiety” showed a sharp rise over the last five years (Gilder, 2023). Other terms can be used and often overlap, such as ecological grief (eco-grief) or the more established environmental concern. The pain of experiencing environmental loss relating to your homeland and the psychological distress this may cause was termed solastalgia (Albrecht, 2005).
Definitions are important to help with thinking about meaning and relevance, especially given the inevitable interchangeable usage of these terms within media reporting and social discourse. Environmental concern may be defined as the personal evaluation of environmental issues which informs an affective attitude towards nature (de Groot & Thorgesen, 2019) and has been studied for many years. Eco-anxiety is a newer concept, which has a number of definitions broadly focusing on distressing emotional responses such as worry and dread due to the impacts of environmental degradation and climate change (Coffey et al., 2021) while eco-grief can be seen as a response to loss, both actual and anticipatory, within the natural environment (Cunsolo et al., 2018).
As I started thinking about this topic, the terms grief and concern resonated more personally, noticing an unease around the use of anxiety. I was interested to see if that perspective changed through some recently published research and wondered about context. Did concern and grief result from awareness of climate change and biodiversity loss, while anxiety was perhaps linked more to when impacts were experienced, suggesting a direct or indirect relationship? Other questions came up -does the use of the term anxiety also suggest an inability to respond, while concern is more indicative of a motivation? Is eco-anxiety a state anxiety, caused by events or learning about events, or are some people more anxious about the environment due to personality traits?
From concern to anxiety.
Another thought was around the emotional range and intensity that words like concern, worry and anxiety cover. Does that matter ? Yes, psychological research has to be clear what is being discussed and measured. For example if 100 people were asked “Are you highly concerned about the impacts of climate change to your daily life ?” and 75 answered “Yes” that could be reported as 3/4 of people having eco-anxiety. But the interpretation of “highly concerned” may be differ between people and have varying degrees of effect to their daily life. There is also the potential spillover effect from media reporting about climate anxiety, which may lead some people to be more likely to self-report it when asked as they have heard about it as a growing mental health issue which they identify with. My 3/4 of people example is slightly superficial and Lutz et al., (2023) considered this in much more depth across a series of studies, to explore a proposed continuum of eco-anxiety which included environmental concern. Across the 5 studies they used new and existing measures of environmental concern and eco-anxiety to evaluate these emotional constructs and assess the severity of distress being measured, alongside relationships to pro-environmental behaviours and nature connection. Their results suggest that a continuum, starting from environmental concern through to severe eco-anxiety was a helpful approach to research and highlighted that there is a risk that eco-anxiety measures being used are designed for the most severe end of the continuum. This suggests we have fairly well established measures of environmental concern, newer measures of severe eco-anxiety with perhaps a gap in the middle. The five studies included in the paper found that eco-anxiety appeared to correlate with reduced wellbeing in terms of stress and anxiety, but did not correlate with depression. Environmental concern did not correlate with any of those. These findings raise a question on the level of eco-anxiety being reported with the potential for over-statement, which is not to say that severe eco-anxiety does not exist, but rather that current measures may lead to higher severity scores, which are then reflected in media reporting. The authors also suggest mitigating benefits from levels of nature connectedness and pro-environmental behaviours may help to offset eco-anxiety, something will come back to in part two. The studies are cross-sectional and correlational, so caution is required around causal inferences and while the overall sample size of nearly 3000 participants was large, 4 of the 5 studies used samples drawn from undergraduate student populations, with an average age of around 20, of whom the majority were female. Limitations aside it’s a helpful paper to highlight an approach to measuring eco-anxiety and how it relates to environmental concern.
Influencing factors.
What factors might influence the levels of worry or anxiety someone experiences? (Asgarizadeh et al., 2023) considered 6 potential factors - knowledge, experience, level of General Anxiety Disorder (GAD), worry, media reporting, and perception of risk- to examine climate change anxiety, which can be seen as a part of eco-anxiety, although with a more narrow focus on climate change impacts. The sample consisted of 323 American and Canadian adults who self-identified as having experienced climate change anxiety. The analsyis was based on a set of self-report measures for the 6 factors and suggested that the number one direct predictor was an individuals level of GAD, followed by their personal experience of climate change, and then their knowledge of climate change, although this had a small effect size. Worry, defined as the cognitive response as opposed to the somatic response of anxiety, was linked to knowledge and experience, with the indication that knowledge may reduce worry. Those reporting worry and anxiety appeared to pay more attention to media reporting of climate change, while higher perceptions of risk related to higher levels of anxiety. The study is cross-sectional and the sample had demographic limitations (mainly female, Caucasian, higher education levels), along with a potential bias through the self-selection criteria to participate. The authors also highlight that the type and content of media that people paid attention to was not captured, an area for future research. Overall the paper is helpful in highlighting potential influences to climate change anxiety, with the predictive model of 5 (knowledge was excluded) factors explaining over half of the variances in climate change anxiety, indicating that more anxious individuals or those with direct experience of the effects of climate change may be at greater risk. The results also provide further evidence that environmental worry or concern is a different but related psychological construct to climate or ecological anxiety.
A new hope.
Asgarizadeh et al., also reported higher levels of anxiety amongst younger participants, supporting other research (e.g., Hickman et al., 2021) that suggests eco-anxiety may be more prevalent amongst children and young adults for whom the future looks uncertain and who often may have little agency to effect change. With this in mind Marks et al., (2023) undertook a pilot project which developed a workshop for secondary school students to consider emotions relating to the environment, covering both negative feelings and considering ways of finding hope. As a pilot it was very small scale with 4 pupils attending the workshop, with their thoughts and reflections captured at the end of the workshop and at a four-week follow-up, which were analysed using qualitative approaches of thematic analysis and emotion/sentiment analysis. The worksop was co-developed with 3 young people who helped design the format and materials to support a three-hour peer group discussion, including talking about issues around climate change, how the pupils emotionally respond to those issues, followed by activities to explore hope. Within the themes identified were painful emotions, such as grief, anger and worry, coupled with a desire to take actions to help bring change. This was linked to hope, with some participants hopeful of technological solutions while others saw hope in collective actions that hold governments and business to account, alongside personal behavioural changes. The participants suggested the workshop was helpful in allowing a sharing of both anxiety and hope, finding that they were at the follow-up point more aware of and more able to manage emotions towards climate change. What was interesting for me in the article was that the authors highlighted eco-compassion as a way of approaching environmental concerns, using the definition of Gilbert’s compassion I highlighted in the last post - that is, an awareness of suffering, with an affective motivation to address the suffering. Approaching eco-anxiety and eco-concern with a perspective that both recognises the painful emotions from climate change and environmental loss while providing motivational wisdom and courage to help address those impacts through behaviours and actions feels like a new hope for us all, irrespective of age.
From “Silent Spring” to “Silent Earth”.
Concern and anxiety perhaps do not represent the sense of sadness or eco-grief that can be felt at the reduction in and loss of species and habitats. Coincidently while reading the environmental psychology studies, a perspective paper on compassion and grief (Harris, 2023) was published, which has been helpful to consider and reflect on the idea of eco-compassion. In the paper grief is described as a natural response which everyone experiences, although with differences in how we respond, to any form of loss resulting from an event that prevents a return to before the event. This differentiates grief from bereavement, which is a specific grief felt after the death of another person. The paper expands on the assumptive world model, with grief resulting from an event that breaks at least one of three constructs - how we find safety in the world, our view on how the world should work, and our view of ourself. This leads to a reduced sense of certainty and personal coherence coupled with a search for meaning from the event. In time we may re-build through the process of grief our assumptive world model, incorporating the impacts and experience of the event, with that process influenced by cultural and social norms around grieving. Compassion may be helpful to the grief process, with its focus on awareness of distress and the motivation to engage with that distress, alongside emotion regulation and deepening wisdom towards what can be helpful. In the paper the three emotional regulation system model of Compassion Focused Therapy is linked with elements of grief, with the loss and associated emotions engaging the threat system, the search for meaning and attempts to cope linked to drive, while connections with others and places associated to the loss engaging the soothing system. The paper highlights a “new grief” of chronic sorrow, using examples such as growing levels of long term illness in aging populations, with chronic sorrow encompassing “the loss itself and the accompanying grief may coexist for years without a foreseeable end”, and suggests this often presents as anxiety rather than sadness.
Although the paper doesn’t mention environmental loss as an example, I think you could apply that definition of chronic sorrow to the sense of grief people may feel around species and biodiversity loss. While some loss is obvious, such as removal of woodland, not all loss is as visible, coupled perhaps with our expectations of the natural environment “adjusted” by each generation, who didn’t experience previous wildlife levels or perhaps from low awareness of how perilous current levels are. For example the “red list” of endangered British birds (British Trust for Ornithology, 2021) includes many well known birds such as the greenfinch, willow tit, swift and house martin, which may be surprising to those who see these birds visit their garden or in green spaces. We don’t notice the reductions in their numbers and each generation becomes accustomed to lower populations as their baseline. For those aware of the loss through their own experience or from gaining knowledge, a sense of grief may occur, an expression of which may not be as culturally accepted as other forms of grief. Eco-compassion may offer an opportunity to acknowledge the sorrow that comes from recognising that things may not be able to be returned to how they were, coupled with the motivation to take helpful actions that are meaningful to individuals and make a positive contribution to the environment, even though the future remains uncertain.
Perhaps by recognising that our threat system is engaged by awareness and experience of environmental degradation and loss which may result in emotional distress, and that our soothing system can be activated by social and place-based activities connected to the loss which may help with the distress, then maybe we can harness a compassionate motivational intention to be helpful rather than harmful to our local and global environments.
I posed some questions at the start around the use of terms related to terms such as eco-anxiety and eco-grief , although am not sure I have fully resolved those for myself yet. Hopefully I have illustrated how emotions such as anxiety and grief may be considered within environmental psychology, albeit only through the perspective of these recent papers, and also provided a reflection on the role of compassion to help with those emotions and motivate actions. Next week’s post will follow on that point, by considering recent research around whether emotional responses can lead to pro-environmental behaviours and what is the relationship to nature connectedness. If you are interested in hearing more from Darcy Harris talking about compassion and grief, please do have a listen to my interview with her on the #365DaysOfCompassion Book Club podcast, she shares lots of helpful information and thoughts.
I would love to hear your thoughts on this topic (or any previous posts) which you can add as a comment to the post on Substack, send me an email at TheCompassionateNatureHub@gmail.com or add a reply if you see it via a social media post.
References
Albrecht, G. (2005). 'Solastalgia'. A new concept in health and identity. PAN: philosophy activism nature, 3, 41-55. https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Glenn-Albrecht/publication/5820433_Solastalgia_The_Distress_Caused_by_Environmental_Change/links/02e7e51beff7eb0b3a000000/Solastalgia-The-Distress-Caused-by-Environmental-Change.pdf
Asgarizadeh, Z, Gifford, R., Colborne, L. (2023) Predicting climate change anxiety, Journal of Environmental Psychology, 90, 102087. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jenvp.2023.102087
British Trust for Ornithology (2021). Birds of Conservation Concern. British Trust for Ornithology.https://www.bto.org/our-science/publications/birds-conservation-concern
Coffey, Y., Bhullar, N., Durkin, J., Shahidul Islam, M., & Usher, K. (2021). Understanding eco-anxiety: A systematic scoping review of current literature and identified knowledge gaps. The Journal of Climate Change and Health, 3, 100047 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.joclim.2021.100047
Cunsolo, A., Ellis, N.R. (2018) Ecological grief as a mental health response to climate change-related loss. Nature Climate Change 8, 275–281. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41558-018-0092-2
de Groot, J.I.M & Thorgersen, J. (2019). Values and pro-environmental behaviours. In L.Steg & J.I.M de Groot (Eds.), Environmental Psychology (pp. 170-178). Wiley.
Gilder, L. (2023) Climate change: Rise in Google searches around ‘anxiety’. BBC News. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-67473829
Harris , D. (2023). An exploration of Compassion Focused Therapy for grieving individuals. OBM Integrative and Complementary Medicine, 8(4). https://doi.org/10.21926/obm.icm.2304052
Hickman, C., Marks, E., Pihkala, P., Clayton, S., Lewandowski, R. E., Mayall, E. E., Wray, B., Mellor, C., & van Susteren, L. (2021). Climate anxiety in children and young people and their beliefs about government responses to climate change: a global survey. The Lancet Planetary Health, 5(12), e863-e873. https://doi.org/10.1016/S2542-5196(21)00278-3
Lutz, P. K., Passmore, H. A., Howell, A. J., Zelenski, J. M., Yang, Y., & Richardson, M. (2023). The continuum of eco-anxiety responses: A preliminary investigation of its nomological network. Collabra: Psychology, 9(1), 67838. https://doi.org/10.1525/collabra.67838
Marks E, Atkins E, Garrett JK, Abrams JF, Shackleton D, Hennessy L, Mayall EE, Bennett J and Leach I (2023) Stories of hope created together: A pilot, school-based workshop for sharing eco-emotions and creating an actively hopeful vision of the future. Frontiers of Psychology, 13, 1076322. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2022.1076322
Rao, M. & Powell, R.A. (2021) The climate crisis and the rise of eco-anxiety. The BMJ Opinion Blog. https://blogs.bmj.com/bmj/2021/10/06/the-climate-crisis-and-the-rise-of-eco-anxiety/