Your anger is part of the hope

A conversation about staying in the struggle without losing your mind, featuring Leah Thomas

Hey friends,

While the civil society sector in America braces for possible executive orders that are expected to be designed to kneecap tons of organizations by attacking their non-profit status (climate non-profits especially), and are even rumored to designate some groups as domestic terrorists, for, uh, working to stabilize the climate, we are also celebrating Earth Day. Happy Earth Day everyone, I know that those of you reading are united with me in our love for this Earth and all life on it, and are aghast at what’s happening to try and snuff out the protections that come with that love.

To celebrate today, I thought I’d share an enlivening conversation I had with Leah Thomas, founder of Intersectional Environmentalist, author of a book by the same name, and bonafide online sustainability and climate justice powerhouse (@greengirlleah). I got to meet Leah for an event we did together a couple months ago at The Great Northern Festival, a winter wonderland in Minnesota that uses art, dialogue, and outdoor experiences to deepen the culture of climate care.

Read on for our chat about how climate distress intersects with systemic injustices, channeling rage, and how to cultivate a form of hope that isn’t naive, but active, strategic, and real. We also get personal, sharing what keeps us going, what helps us navigate the heaviness, and how time spent in nature is a total lifeline in this work.

I hope this convo brings you into the room with us. With that, here we go!

Leah: So sometimes when I'm looking at the world, there's so much going on. And I don't know, am I anxious because of our failing health care system? Am I anxious because of student loan debt? Or am I anxious because of the climate? How can we pinpoint specifically when it is climate anxiety? And for marginalized communities that might be experiencing, as you mentioned, many anxieties at once, how can we kind of narrow in and say okay this is the one that's impacted by the environment?

Britt: It's a really great and important question because we're living in a polycrisis, and many groups are more impacted than others with historical privilege. So how do we actually tease this out? Well we've long known how to study and measure things like generalized anxiety disorder, we have validated scales for that, and similarly we now have validated scales for climate distress and climate anxiety, that have a lot of data around them to show that we can actually get discreet about what we're looking at and seeing within individuals and communities. Multiple studies now show that climate anxiety does not map onto generalized anxiety disorder as a 1:1. They are different in terms of how they can activate our cognition, our thought patterns, our emotional output and behaviors and affect our well-being.

That said, there's also a lot of data to show that those with pre-existing generalized anxiety will often get more riled up about the climate crisis. If you're typically a really vigilant and anxious person, yeah, the climate crisis is very reasonable to get worked up about too, so you might also experience climate anxiety. But you don't need pre-existing mental health challenges in order to tap into this type of non-pathological anxiety. However, there may be thresholds after which it can become clinically significant in terms of how it affects your well-being, and it might require some kind of community or in some cases clinical support to ease the pain.

Your question about marginalized communities is so important here because we see that those who have been dealing with other existential threats throughout time because of unjust systems do feel climate anxiety disproportionately. We often see it affect women and girls and BIPOC communities, Black and indigenous people of color, more than their white counterparts. And this isn't surprising given the impact being greater in their communities.

Many young people, especially those from marginalized communities, feel deep anxiety about having children in a world facing escalating climate threats. My colleague Dr. Jade Sasser of the University of California, Riverside found that youth of color in the U.S. are more distressed about raising kids in the climate crisis, often reconsidering family planning due to the added burden of economic insecurity, systemic racism, and environmental collapse. This highlights the urgent need for justice-based and equity-driven climate mental health support.

Thank you for that. So speaking of uncomfortable emotions, I was talking to a 100 year-old park ranger (former park ranger!) named Betty Reed Soskin, an amazing woman. And I told her I was angry. I was so angry, but I didn't want to be angry because of all of the climate injustices that were happening. And she said in her very sweet voice that it's OK because anger is one of the most powerful emotions, because it can transform into action. So I'm curious, what sort of tools can people use to turn that—you said climate rage earlier—that climate rage or climate anxiety into action vs. apathy?

Yes, the anger piece is so important to liberate ourselves into a place of non-judgment when we feel it. I think that when this anger is kicked up, it's a sign that our sense of violation is intact and our moral consciousness is kicking in a healthy way. And what we're dealing with in this space and time of climate distress is often tightly paired with a feeling of being morally injured, of living inside a system that is actively violating our sense of what is right and what is wrong. We see that profit is being put above people and planet, again and again.

Climate grief is real, and we need spaces where we can be vulnerable, witness each other’s pain, and remember we’re not alone. Community is a powerful antidote—it gives us relief, perspective, and the strength to keep going. Learning to engage with difficult emotions, whether through mindfulness, movement, time in nature, or ancestral wisdom, helps us process feelings rather than suppress them. And let’s not forget that self-care, taking breaks, resting and finding joy aren’t distractions from the work, they’re what keep us in it for the long haul.

Yes, props to that!

Okay, so on the other side of things, getting away from climate rage, is climate optimism and climate hope. Being in the environmental space, there's probably an abundance of these very well-meaning folks where you might tell them, "I'm having a bad day." And they immediately respond and say, "Well, it's okay. Everybody has a bad day. Everything's gonna be rainbows and sunshine and all that”, which people have nicknamed toxic optimism or positivity. So what role does hope and optimism play in the climate fight, but in a way where we can get away from ignoring the realities of the situation or kind of spiritually bypassing or participating in toxic positivity?

The example you give is so potent. When there's a flippant response that's just trying to fix it and dismiss it rather than look at it, people feel unsupported and unseen. We will encounter that a lot with mainstream narratives or sometimes in our circle of friends and family. If we expose our distress about climate and we get met with that kind of, "Oh, the sky’s not falling. It's not that bad. You're just having a bad day." Or maybe see a therapist, get a pill, deal with it. And that's not helpful.

But what is baked into this culture is an obsession with easy fixes and the kind of passive optimism that says the right leader will come along and fix this, or the right technology will emerge and suck all the carbon out of the sky, and so on and so forth, when what we are dealing with demands so much more courage than that and the ability to bear witness to suffering and still work to improve odds along the way. So hope is not actually this passive wish or belief or feeling that things can get better than they are right now, even though that's often how we mobilize it in our language and in our culture. When we look at how psychologists study hope, the science of hope says that it's actually a mindset that you believe the future can be better than it is today based on actions you can take and it requires three things:

The first is goals. You need to have an actual picture of what you're working towards that needs to be articulated. You can't just be wandering in the forest not knowing where you're going. So having a sense of that mighty virtuous goal you're strategizing to.

Secondly are pathways. You need to see some viable pathways by which you can express some agency. You can start to feel effective when you do that. And it might be very, very small,but anything to kick-start that cycle of expressing your agency, working towards your goal, strategizing with others.

And then the third is willpower. A belief, a sense, that it's actually worth getting off the couch to do something and knowing that the dye is not cast. It's not a pass/fail test. Every fraction of a degree of warming that we prevent translates into supporting millions of lives. And then that willpower and having your battery charged allows you to engage with what is then psychologically protective. And yeah, it's hard to know if you're gonna be able to improve the future as an individual, just if you follow your goals and have your pathways and your willpower.

But if you can belong to a community, a population, a group where you can have some rigorous belief that together you can actually have that better future by enacting those three things, then that is really protective. And it helps us keep moving. And we also don't need to have this kind of emotionally immature version of hope or optimism that says no difficult emotions are allowed here, like the toxic positivity you were talking about. We can get to the far side of grief and despair. We can integrate those emotions. We can respect them for the insights that they have to teach us about what is under threat and what we ought to do. And then they can become important mechanisms of that more radical hope, of that active hope, of that what's been called stubborn optimism, which has always been a part of social movements through time, helping people to achieve change.

So let's get personal for a second. Lately, I've been crafting instead of watching the news, and doing ceramics. People will call me and say, "Do you know what he did now?" And I don't know. I will know, eventually, but for now, I'm going to make recycled paper.

How do you personally navigate staying engaged while also protecting your well-being?

Honestly, it's tough out there as a frontline climate professional, as you know very well. If you're a climate scientist, if you're an environmental journalist, if you're any kind of researcher working on these issues eight plus hours a day, it's mentally taxing. We're bearing witness to the breakdown of life support systems that we care so much about that we devote our lives to, so it's hard.

And we need to support ourselves. I have looked all around the block many, many times on what's most effective for me. And when I notice, when I go through my journals, when I see when I'm at my best, when I feel most supported to stay in the work, but also when I'm grounded and calm, is when I'm doing some really basic stuff. I'm exercising, I'm sleeping well, you know, I'm eating well. Incredibly, something like 80% of depressive symptoms can be resolved by doing those things that our parents have always told us to do.

In addition to that, what really helps me with the pointy ends of the climate anxiety and the existential despair are contemplative practices coming out of Zen Buddhist traditions. Meditation has been a lifesaver, yoga, breath work, different types of somatic approaches working with your body, but again, if I'm just working out, that also feels like it's being taken care of. And then having community where we can commiserate together and keep each other buoyed up and keep moving and talk through whatever is going on. And then nature, having intentional time spent in nature, which we all know. There's been a lot of discourse on this.

Spending time in green and blue spaces helps us with stress reduction and management, it improves our immune system. It helps with memory and cognition. It's overall just really relaxing and good hiking and that sort of a thing. And it allows for those aspects of awe, being able to be overwhelmed by the awe and beauty of even being here, this absurd miracle that we are here on this planet. And tapping into gratitude practices when the going gets tough, like just before you go to bed, try to have a practice where you recount three things that happened that day that you were really happy about. And it can really start to change your thought patterns, which then affects the way you feel.

Thank you. And the last question is that there's often another tension—there's so much tension in the world—but in the climate space, we have people talking about individual action versus systems change, so much so that people in both camps might say the other camp is wrong for one reason or another. Can you break down systems change, individual action, and the tension between the two? Is there a right answer, or does it take both of those things?

I think it's a really unfortunate debate that we're still having. I think it's absolutely a non-dualistic space where we need both. And they work together. And at some point they become the same thing, you know, if we're individually active and we're then influencing people in our spheres of proximity, in our family, we're talking about it at the dinner table, in our professional sphere, we're organizing with colleagues or getting our company or organization on track with some climate goals. And then in our political sphere, when we're voting for those systemic actions, we do become part of the fractals of collectives that create those ripples of change that then turn into some systemic pressure, but also the top-down systemic part is so absolutely critical.

So I see them as both being necessary. And one way that I have found that helps relieve that tension is to really learn from a variety of different kinds of indigenous wisdoms and thinking about being a future ancestor, trying to configure that, and see yourself as the fact that you are a future ancestor. How do you want to be? How do you want to create these paths that you leave behind in your legacy in order to care for those future generations? You know, the Haudenosaunee have this philosophy of seven generations—thinking seven generations out. And when all of your decision making has in mind the moral perspective of what is good and right for the human and more than human world, seven generations out, you see very clearly that everything depends upon both collective and individual actions and how you show up in this time.

So I would also say it's really important to just have self-compassion and accept the incompleteness of all of this. Like we can't have a squeaky clean carbon footprint. We are all, as Thomas Doherty has said, climate hostages at this time. We're living in fossil fuel dependent systems. And it's not easy to just move to the woods and have everything be self-sufficient. We're climate hypocrites and that is okay, you know. We need to be able to own our incompleteness and still push for change anyway because perfect is the enemy of good.

Thanks for the great chat, Leah!

+Our new study: Psychological impacts of climate change on US youth

Also for the nerds among us: happy to share our new study "Psychological impacts of climate change on US youth" that my colleagues and I published last week in PNAS. We find that youth eco-anxiety increases when one perceives themselves as having been directly impacted by a climate hazard, and that this perception of direct impact also strengthens the level to which climate change shapes young people's future plans (i.e. family planning, education, etc.) At the same time, fortifying responses such as psychological adaptation, meaning-focused coping and agency are part of the picture, as they too are associated with thinking one has been impacted by a climate event. The key takeaway of this study is that the psychological impacts of climate change in US youth can have either impairing or strengthening effects, especially in the face of increased perceived direct exposure.

---

If you liked reading this, feel free to click the ❤️button on this post so more people can discover it on Substack 🙏🏼

With love, anger and hope,

-Britt