Environment
Another reckoning is coming with climate change. How do we deal with our mental health — and ultimately find hope?
I’m walking up a ridge of bedrock outside my house, talking to my brother 1,800 kilometres south in Calgary, when it hits me like a hurricane. The fears, the confusion, the existential dread that have been building in me for decades unleash in an emotional maelstrom.
“I’m worried they won’t be able to breathe… What if there’s no water?” I sob while lichens, desiccated from two years of drought, crunch into airy puffs at my feet and I choke on smoke that has consumed the southern Northwest Territories in a hotbed of wildfire emergencies.
“Oh, don’t think like that!” my brother says. “Think happy thoughts.”
I love my only sibling deeply. Yet in July 2023 — a month before three encroaching wildfires force my family, the city of Yellowknife and surrounding Dene communities to evacuate — I need a safe place to talk about the darkness creeping into my head and heart. The birth of five grandchildren, with a sixth on the way, has sharpened my focus on the precarity of their futures inside an escalating climate crisis. The first babies were born into the confines of a global pandemic; their siblings arrived under sickened, orange-black skies from May to September.
The accumulation of carbon dioxide throughout almost three centuries of industrialism, extraction, colonialism, consumerism and capitalist greed has landed on my northern doorstep. I stare down the belly of that fiery beast as it tries to block my way into the subarctic taiga I have come to know and love. Temperatures near the Arctic Circle break 37.4 C. Ice on Great Slave Lake, the deepest in North America, melts early, while to the south the Hay River turns bone dry and waterfalls slow to trickles.
For several years, the buzz of once-legendary swarms of mosquitoes and black flies have been replaced with eerie silence. In June, I stand on the quiet shores of the lake in front of my house and contemplate a life without loons.
This is my summer of awakening. My tipping point. The challenge becomes how to “be well” in this new climate-disrupted place (that is only going to get hotter) so I can serve it and the younger generations set to inherit the joys and sorrows yet to come.
I’m scared and angry but ready for a fight, a reckoning. Big Oil has exhausted me. So, I face off with myself — a lonely, no-holds-barred psychological wrestle with grief.
The 2023 summer of smoke, during the world’s hottest year on record before 2024, saw more than 200 communities evacuated across Canada, 19 in the Northwest Territories. In one study on evacuations here, mental health emerged as the biggest challenge. People had “primary anxiety and depression” from the evacuation, “but there’s also the secondary consequences where you’re losing your income, or your kids aren’t in school for a month, or you’re losing your insurance or you’re separated from your friends and family,” says Yellowknife student researcher Kira Young. Many people talked of persistent post-traumatic stress and eco-anxiety after evacuation.
I fully expected talk of climate change and action would be everywhere when we returned. There was initial talk of harrowing drives through smoke and flames down our only highway south to Alberta and what people did once they reached safety. But on the broader implications of the planetary health crisis: crickets.
There never seemed to be the right space or time to raise the issue of climate threats in social conversation, let alone discuss how they made me feel. I didn’t want to infect others with my bone-deep melancholy. “Did you know that six out of nine planetary boundaries needed to sustain life on Earth have already been breached, and oceans are perilously close to becoming the seventh?” is what I wanted to say. “Pass the salad,” is what came out.
People were struggling to get back to Business As Usual, because that’s what we do. That’s what we’ve always done. That’s why we’re in this hot mess.
Business As Usual didn’t make sense. Science was saying we had already surpassed the Paris Agreement’s recommended limit of a 1.5 C global temperature increase past pre-industrial levels and are on course for a catastrophic increase of about 2.7 C by 2100 — quadruple that for the polar regions. Yet everything else in my life implored me to Buy! Travel! Consume! Keep dishing out those greenhouse gases!
The western world’s growth imperative is the wrong playbook. In 1972, The Limits to Growth used early computer models to show if worldwide economic growth continued without regard for environmental costs, “we would reach and then overshoot the carrying capacity of the Earth at some point in the next one hundred years.” As predicted, we are starting to see those cracks with rising levels of poverty, pollution, water scarcity, food insecurity, forced displacement… the list goes on.
My life feels out of alignment because the systems supporting my life are misaligned. I isolate myself from social functions because the “not talking about it” feels like a betrayal to the urgent, COVID-level-degree of international crisis management I think we all should be lobbying for and coordinating.
Keep in mind, I’m doing none of that. From my deflated vantage point on the couch, weighted by a heaviness that feels like Mother Nature and all the innocents caught in armed crossfires everywhere are bearing down on my chest, I worry something is very wrong with me.
According to some experts, I’m having a reasonable emotional reaction in sync with the suffering planet of which we’re all a part. Eco-anxiety, ecological grief, eco-distress and climate anxiety are all largely interchangeable shorthand for the “challenging feelings” people have once they awaken to the planetary health crisis, writes Britt Wray in Generation Dread: Finding Purpose in an Age of Climate Crisis. More commonly, she says, these feelings are just called “fear, terror, anxiety, depression, despair, overwhelm, stress, worry, sadness, rage, grief, guilt, heartbreak, dread.”
Wray suggests eco-anxiety is “merely a sign of attachment to the world.” A moral emotion. Not an illness. Environmental philosopher Glenn Albrecht calls this emotional attachment to “perceived or felt states of the Earth” psychoterratic.
As damages ramp up globally from the climate crisis — like the estimated U.S. $100-billion in destruction from hurricanes Helene and Milton, or the $1.2 billion in insured losses from last summer’s wildfires in Jasper, Alta. — Albrecht says “the insanity of deliberate climate warming will shock all the generations, and they will enter all forms of negative psychoterratic states. It will shake the foundations of current human identity to its core.”
I see my own shaking foundations in that proclamation which, while profoundly disturbing, is also strangely comforting. I feel less isolated. Seen. It also helps explain my cognitive dissonance: that uncomfortable schism when the brain holds two conflicting thoughts at the same time — the climate crisis is killing people: let’s party like it’s 1999.
“Even thinking about this is really scary,” Courtney Howard — an emergency room physician, vice-chair of the Global Climate and Health Alliance, mother, dancer and writer — tells me from her kitchen overlooking Yellowknife’s Back Bay. Talking about it “helps everybody realize: ‘I’m not alone.’ It normalizes those feelings, and when we normalize and are vulnerable with one another … it actually naturally brings us into the community that we need to solve problems.”
Howard says people move from “not knowing what they don’t know,” where they think climate change is something in the distance that others will take care of, to having some awareness of the climate crisis, to experiencing a “climate awakening” that often leads to a feeling of shock when they realize what biodiversity and ecosystem loss will mean for themselves and those they love. Her own awakening left her “curled up in the fetal position” around her nine-month-old daughter.
For older generations who grew up without consciousness of the climate crisis and have had only semi-consciousness (or denial) of it as adults, that shock, that grieving — in all its painful, love-infused glory — is difficult. No one wants it, but there comes a point where the pain of facing the cognitive dissonance starts to exceed the pain of learning, taking action and seeking true safety, says Howard.
My life feels out of alignment because the systems supporting my life are misaligned.
“Every year as Mother Nature makes it clearer with her storms, her heat emergencies, her wildfires, her emerging infectious disease threats that the problem is already here — every year there’s a new wave of people who mount the courage to take this on,” she says.
Taking it on from a mental health point of view means there’s no avoiding grief. Grieving — doing the emotional processing to the way things are — and expressing your feelings is one of three pathways Finnish researcher Panu Pihkala says are necessary to cope and grow from waves of eco-anxiety and eco-grief throughout our lives. He calls the other two paths “action” and “distancing.”
Distancing means you unplug and spend time doing things you love. Meditation, exercise and mindfulness in nature are often recommended. Howard dances and hugs her daughters a little closer when she needs a break. “But take short breaks,” she cautions, “because there’s work to do.”
People experiencing eco-anxiety are often told to channel their pain into activism. This action is part of Pihkala’s “Process Model of Eco-Anxiety and Ecological Grief” equation. But unless you also develop what psychotherapist Caroline Hickman calls “internal activism” — a kind of emotional intelligence that lets you recognize and understand you can move through triggers like the smell of smoke or another devastating climate headline — you’re prone to get stuck in your own darkness, or else burn out on the frontlines of environmental activism.
From my deflated vantage point on the couch, I worry something is very wrong with me.
What can action look like? Plant a tree, or a garden. Press politicians for change. Within months of her climate awakening, Howard spurred support for increased peer review studies into Alberta’s oilsands, and led a successful campaign for the Canadian Medical Association to divest from fossil fuels.
At age 18, there has barely been a time when Kira Young has not been awake to the existential implications of riding her bike during Yellowknife’s smoky summers. Since middle school, the McMaster University student has been involved in environmental organizations and protests and more recently joined the Larose v. Canada lawsuit launched by youth to push the federal government for more substantial carbon reductions.
“That’s giving me a sense of purpose and I’m translating my challenging experiences with climate change and eco-anxiety and eco-grief into action and accountability,” says Young. “It makes me feel pretty scared, thinking about what the world is losing right now and is going to continue to lose based on this trajectory. This is the only place we know of that can sustain us or sustain our children.”
I’m peeved when Boomers suggest that youth will find a way to avert climate collapse and save us all; but it is heartening — and heartbreaking — to think that Gen Z-ers like Young carry a climate intelligence from childhood as their moral compass.
While I contemplate how to share and process my grief, maybe tackle some action, I get an auspicious call to run a writing workshop for climate anxiety. A dozen participants listen to my shaky, determined presentation, then wander off with pen and paper in hand to answer the question: How does climate change make you feel? Through a deluge of tears, one young woman shares her words about a cherished Elder who died during the period of evacuation.
I pass her a tissue and hold space. The caring, the solidarity, the empathy, the love I feel loosens the shackles of my own grief. Ecophilosopher Joanna Macy says when we “express our feelings to a compassionate witness,” those feelings get delineated solid boundaries. Later, the young woman sends me a thank-you email with the completed story, which she also shares with her large Dene family. As Macy would say, her feelings had “alchemized.” So had I.
The wellness teachings of Dene First Nations, who make up about a third of the Northwest Territories’ population, say fulfilling your own needs is your highest priority because that allows you to connect with and care for others and all Creation.
“It’s like people harvesting a moose. You harvest a moose, you fulfill your needs, but 98 per cent of the moose goes out as food to the community,” says Roy Fabian, Elder and former chief of the Kátł’odeeche First Nation in southern Northwest Territories, which has lost 20 buildings to wildfires over the past three years. Under this worldview, self-care means community care. “The Europeans have all the concepts to justify what they’re doing, you call it poverty,” he says, “but poverty is because people don’t share. Most of the wealth is owned by one per cent of the people and they don’t share. They’re greedy.”
Western mental health approaches focus on our mentality, which is where we discern “the meaning of life.” But Fabian says in order to be wholly well, people must tend to all four aspects of their being: mental, spiritual, emotional and physical. Known as the Medicine Wheel, which was adopted from southern Indigenous communities into Dene culture, this holistic approach is used to nurture Dene children from birth until they become Elders for their community. Those teachings, and the identities they instilled, were lost to Dene children forced to attend residential schools.
Fabian teaches that our sense of belonging falls under emotions. Our sense of purpose is our physicality, discovered through our customs and skills. Hope, that precious commodity everyone craves these days, lies in our spiritual realm. “Once you take away spirituality, there’s no hope. You take away emotions, there’s no belonging. You take away mental, there’s no meaning in life. You take away customs [physical], and you take away a sense of purpose.”
When you get up in the morning, just be grateful that the Creator gave you another day. Say mahsi, thank you for giving me another day, and I’m going to do the best I can today for Mother Earth and for mankind.
Nature is my source of spirituality. I wrote my memoir Voice in the Wild about the guidance and magic the natural world offered up to me when I found myself, as a young apprentice of nature in the early ’90s, living off-grid without phone service or a flush toilet in a fresh-aired, mostly frozen, often sunny world. We still pump water from our lake and drink it untreated.
Being outside, when it’s not smoky, feeds me, but I’m further along in my apprenticeship. I see and feel and hear change. Just writing this line shifts the way my lungs feel — like they’ve hollowed out, my heartbeat ricocheting off shallow walls — a bit of grief, probably, because no one wants to lose something they’re in love with.
I ask Fabian if there are ways people can find their spirituality after he raised the spectre of an all-out war in the Middle East and his concerns about supply-chain interruptions for his remote reserve. People have become dependent on the local store, and the burned-out forests no longer sustain rabbits, once a dinner staple.
“Did you get up this morning?” he asks rhetorically. “When you get up in the morning, just be grateful that the Creator gave you another day. Say mahsi, thank you for giving me another day, and I’m going to do the best I can today for Mother Earth and for mankind. And spend the day doing that.”
“So I can just build up my own personal spirituality based on gratitude and helping others and that will give me hope?” I ask.
“Yes, that’s 100 per cent. It’s about you, and it’s about me. And you and I can only do the best that we can and hope the other people will see it and accept that it’s a blessing.”
There’s a growing chorus of voices beseeching us to transform and grow our hope muscles.
Psychoanalyst Jonathan Lear’s Radical Hope, which explores what happens when a way of life becomes impossible — like that of Indigenous Peoples who depended on the buffalo — inspires us to imagine a “future goodness that transcends the current ability to understand what it is.”
We should acknowledge our despair so we can move together out of isolation and into the joyful work of nurturing stronger communities and a better world. Because Business As Usual is eating itself alive.
Here’s a warning. I appreciated warnings when I first locked eyes with literature about the collapse of post-industrial societies. Thankfully, they didn’t stop me. “Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced,” wrote James Baldwin. So, proceed with caution: this could trigger anxiety in those already concerned about the future and therefore may not be suitable for all audiences.
My anxiety isn’t just because carbon emissions are accelerating; so too are wars, authoritarianism, poverty, misinformation, food insecurity, and the catastrophic potential of artificial intelligence. Visions of The Handmaid’s Tale dance in my head when economists lament the world’s declining fertility rates at the same time as reproductive rights south of the border are viciously annihilated.
I feel split into two people: the dreary one on the couch trying to figure out why the world is unravelling when she thought it was only ever supposed to keep getting better — and “Nana,” a joyful, sparkly new persona who floats inside a bubble of love with six cherubs who follow her like ducklings and smell like meadow.
When words like metacrisis, polycrisis and complexity theory are introduced to me through Australian author Sarah Wilson, who is writing a book on societal collapse, I start to come together.
If our complex modern society is going to collapse within the lifetimes of my grandchildren, or anyone’s grandchildren, I want to be informed. I want to show up. A government think tank report on collapsing systems opens a path for me toward both. I share it with my brother. We talk about it.
That 2024 report, Disruptions on the Horizon by Policy Horizons Canada, delivers a disturbing top 10 list of “plausible” future threats. Most alarmingly, Canadians could experience a scarcity of critical natural resources, including water, within eight years. Ecosystems and biodiversity could collapse within just seven years. By 2030, our democratic systems, healthcare and the ability to respond to emergencies could break down.
As we’ve seen in the U.S., billionaires like Elon Musk are wielding immense political influence. Within as little as five years, the report says billionaires could rule the world. Both Policy Horizons Canada and the World Economic Forum’s 2024 Global Risks Report say misinformation and disinformation is the number one risk now.
Reliable information helps me regain my centre — because I never wanted to be placated or cheered up. I just needed things to make sense.
We should acknowledge our despair so we can move together out of isolation.
“Isn’t it the moment of most profound doubt that gives birth to new certainties?” Czech dissident Václav Havel asked. “Perhaps hopelessness is the very soil that nourishes human hope.”
Joanna Macy urges us to plant the seeds for the Great Turning, or what energy futurist Nate Hagens dubs the Great Simplification — the simpler, more sustainable world we could rebuild. That rebuild could learn much from Indigenous societies about reciprocity, setting limits and sharing. The Dene predicted the climate crisis in the late 1800s, and with that prophecy came successful efforts to conserve the biodiverse waters of Great Slave Lake and Great Bear Lake — not just for the Dene, but for all creatures and humankind.
This is the time for such magnanimity. Not a time to give up.
“We’ve never resuscitated a planet before,” says Howard, who likens this point in history to the moment she and emergency room staff throw everything they’ve got into coaxing a dying patient’s lifeforce back into the room. Howard is now part of growing efforts to have countries switch from growth economies to planetary health and wellbeing economies. Canada, New Zealand and Scotland are dabbling in this framework. That gives me hope.
I’m driving into town to deliver the climate writing workshop, going unusually slow, collecting my thoughts. I look to my left just as a male mallard swoops toward my windshield. I see the bottom of his webbed feet. His mate carries on, momentum and updraft on her side. I wait for the splat.
Instead, he lands on his bum, slides to the end of the hood and sits there like a metallic blue-green hood ornament, legs dangling over the grill. Then, with impressive nonchalance he flies off and perfectly resyncs with his mate. They circle a couple of times before landing smoothly in a pond precisely as I drive by — like we are all part of an interconnected, choreographed dance, which we are.
Shortly after that, the loons return. Their reassuring wails flood me with gratitude. With providence, they’ll be back again this year so my grandchildren can hear them, and we can take all the birds’ lessons forward. On and on.
This story is from the May/June 2025 Issue
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