Climate Anxiety is Death Anxiety
Why eco-distress reveals mortality to confront, not pathology to treat
Twenty percent of young Americans are afraid to have children — not because of finances or career concerns, but because they’re terrified of bringing a new generation into a steadily warming world. That number jumps to over thirty percent for those who’ve experienced severe weather events firsthand. Meanwhile, seventy-two percent of psychotherapists in Germany report that patients have expressed concerns about climate change during treatment, yet when researchers analyzed over 32,000 therapy sessions in the US, climate and weather topics constituted only 0.3% of discussions. Concern over the climate is obviously there—with new screening tools being developed to assess what Yale researchers have termed “Climate Change Psychological Distress”—but that concern is largely going unaddressed.
First, some definitions. The term “eco-anxiety” was coined by Australian environmental philosopher Glenn Albrecht in 2012, who defined it as “a chronic fear of enviro…
