For many of Connecticut’s children, coastal flooding and damaging storms are part of life. But for some, climate change has become a source of anxiety — and a call to action.
WSHU’s Ebong Udoma spoke with CT Mirror’s Jan Ellen Spiegel to discuss part one of her article, “Climate change and the young generations: Their anxiety is real,” as part of the collaborative podcast Long Story Short.
WSHU: You've covered environmental issues for many years, and in the U.S., young people seem to be the most moved by climate change concerns. Is that why you decided to dig a bit deeper into this?
JES: I have been looking to do something with young people about climate change for a long time, but trying to get to it essentially posed an issue: how to do it. I had heard something about climate anxiety among young people and decided that was a way to go. Once you talk to people, it is not hard getting them to talk about it, but it's not like you could go to some sort of psychological group and actually do it. So I basically reached out to people individually and discovered a lot of interesting things.
WSHU: One thing you discovered is this 2021 study, the Climate Anxiety in Children study. Could you tell us about that study?
JES: It was a big study, and it was done in about 10 different countries, with the main writer being a researcher from Britain. Caroline Hickman, who I did not speak with, but I certainly spoke to people who were very familiar with it. And everybody pointed to this. The interesting thing was, in terms of the countries, there was a whole variety from, you know, some of the poorest countries to the U.S., which obviously is going to be the wealthiest.
One of the key findings that struck me was that in the U.S., young people seem to have less anxiety than in other countries. Now you can guess as to why. It may have to do with the political climate here, where it gets downplayed by certain industries. It may have to do with just simply the wealth in this country, but certainly, other countries that have experienced some very, very severe climate impacts. Those young people felt it even more than those in the U.S. There were tons in the U.S. as well. I mean, it was a very high level. If you took all the categories together, it was about 75%.
WSHU: Very interesting. But there are some people here that are looking into this. You talk to a psychiatrist at Yale, the Connecticut Institute of Living, and he's on the faculty at Yale. What did he find, and what was his research on?
JES: Well, the interesting thing with that particular person, Joshua Wortzel, who is just coming into the state to the Institute of Living and will be on the faculty at Yale, is that there has been a push for a while through several organizations for psychiatrists and psychologists to get this on a front burner. And he deals with young people and adolescents, so that was certainly in his sweet spot. Others like him deal with older people. But we're also finding it as well. What they were finding is that the issue of climate anxiety seems to be a secondary issue to other, bigger psychological and psychiatric type issues and that if you don't ask young people about it, you might not know that it's not something they will say right away. You have to be out there asking about it, and that's where they found the information most compelling.
There is also the potential for, you know, literal physical impacts. Younger people can't deal with certain heat stress on their brains as well, and their bodies don't warm and cool as well. There are known stressors from heat in particular. At all levels, people are more irritable in hot weather. They get in more fights. There's more violence, that sort of thing. How that compounds into the psychological realm and the psychiatric realm is still being worked on. The other really interesting thing, and this was across the board. It wasn't like one guy found this and another found something else. They were all sort of headed in the same direction. If young people were to deal with some of the psychological impacts of climate change, action seemed to be the best solution, not just action, but action with other like-minded people, action in terms of a group effort.
WSHU: So channeling those anxieties into a social setting, helps?
JES: Where they can take some action, or even just talk about it among themselves. Action is better because you feel like you're doing something, but then you get into another level of interest, which is, well, if you're taking action, but say the governmental entities that have more power aren't taking action. Is that going to make you feel better or worse? This stuff is all fairly nascent, so we haven't seen how it totally plays out yet. There are many studies underway.
WSHU: Group support seems to be a major issue here.
JES: Yes, absolutely. But you can also ask the question: if you do all this group work and you're trying to do stuff but you're not succeeding, then we don't really know how that's going to play out. But at least the young people I've talked to, and here was the most amazing thing, they weren't seeking psychological help for any of this. They were figuring this out on their own. They said to me, independent of any kind of research or anything, that they felt better taking action. They felt better taking action with their peers. They, in some cases, felt worse if they didn't take any action. And again, they figured this out on their own. And that was just to me, anyway, so striking.
WSHU: One thing that I saw that was very interesting is that you found that some of them felt that they were getting information overload, especially from national and international news, and that trying to tune out from the daily news consumption kept them a bit more focused on what they were doing.
JES: Yeah, I heard that in a couple of cases, it's hard to avoid, but these were young people. The people I was talking to were mostly young adults at the end of high school and the beginning of college. They certainly had a more sophisticated view of what was bothering them than, say, if I had been talking to 12-year-olds or 14-year-olds. I mean, the other thing that I found really interesting was this focus on how the government does or doesn't help them.
The government would be setting climate policies and taking big groups nationwide or statewide or citywide actions and all of them very independently said to me that they got really annoyed when the government or older generations were out there saying, well, the young people will figure it out, it's not our problem. And they were feeling, you know, almost, How dare you? We can't, in some cases, even vote, never mind run for office, never mind have the capability of formulating policy. Some of them are trying, but it was a really interesting kind of singularity where a lot of these young people said the same thing to me, it's time for the older generation to step up and not throw this all on our shoulders. It's a lot of pressure for us.
