Coping or not coping?
Eco-anxiety, and imagination for the Stressocene
I had to skip the post that should have appeared a fortnight ago; there was a lot on in the ‘work’ world and I didn’t have the space for writing, sadly. This new post has taken twice the amount of time to think and write and somewhere near twice the number of words to write it, but only feels half as ready. So, am I catching up, or just falling further behind?…
Waving or drowning?
In the last ClimateCultures & more post — What is imagination? Resisting a definition — I gave just a flavour of an online conversation I’d been part of, Climate Change and the Imagination. Now, Ecology and the Imagination, the follow-on course from the Centre for Climate Psychology, has just completed. That’s been a fascinating series, with our guides sharing their creative practices and deep insights into imagination, and this extended conversation is only just beginning to settle within my understanding. More on that, no doubt, as my own creative enquiry here develops.
But I mention all that because one of the suggestions from that first event — that “It is tempting but perhaps misleading to try and abstract a definition away from the moments in which imagination speaks. So I love to encounter it in the moment.” — has been a question in my mind: what are the moments when I encounter imagination? Not necessarily encounters within a specific framework, such as engaging with the climate and nature emergency, or with imagination to draw on for inspiration in a creative idea or project; but imagination ‘pure and simple’?
Coping strategies
That question has become entangled somehow in my mind with one posed on LinkedIn by an old friend of mine, Simon Kemp (Professor of Education for Sustainable Development at Southampton University). Over the years, Simon has worked with, taught and encouraged a great array of people at the forefront of all things sustainability; many people now working in the field are working in it because of his friendship, teaching and example. So when he asks the question, “How do you cope, living and working in our field?”, I know this comes from someone who understands the nature of the work and the audience he is addressing, and understands eco-anxiety.
“Climate-anxiety, eco-anxiety, sustainability-anxiety. Whatever you call it, it's very real and not to be underestimated. Working in our sustainability field is emotionally exhausting as you can never escape it. It's constantly overwhelming. I'm sure many of my friends and colleagues of 'a similar vintage' will agree that this is something many of us have struggled with most of our careers and lives. I know it's smothered me since the 80s - not that many reading this post would have been around then - and continues to do so at considerable cost to my general wellbeing, over such a long time. And it's clearly having a huge impact on our younger generations which I worry about even more.”
Simon Kemp, Linkedin July 2025
I’m in that ‘similar vintage’ camp and, yes, this is true for me too. ‘Smothered’ is such an apt word. So Simon’s question spoke very directly to me, as if he’d asked it quietly in a lull in one of the many work sessions of an evening *cough* years ago, when the two of us headed to the pub … pint paused midway to his mouth: ‘How do you cope with all this?’
It’s probably not exactly the question either of us would have asked back then, when we were so busy just getting on with it all, living it, and our most obvious complaints were just not having enough hours and resources to do it all, and our felt need to do more. To get more people to get ‘it’, for all of us to be more fully part of the solution, not just part of the problem. (I can assure you, those pub meetings were ‘work’: drink, background noise and a lot of humour were all part of it, as well as a way of coping by being away from more ‘overtime’ hours at desks in our different parts of the city. Not all coping strategies are sustainable, of course, and I’m glad no one responded to Simon’s LinkedIn thread by saying, ‘Alcohol’.)
Back then, for me anyway, it was not the scale and the nature of the ‘environmental’ problems as such — those seemed ‘doable’, somehow — so much as the pressure of the work. For me, getting to grips with a growing programme and team in a still new and small organisation, and trying to collaborate with partner charities, businesses, local authorities and others to make the change happen. It was relentless. Also, good fun a lot of the time, very sociable, but quite addictive, and never enough.
Now, of course, the crisis itself is deeper, bigger, more complex, more urgent. See how all that work paid off?…
Looking through his LinkedIn post and all the comments there, arts, music, the outdoors, exercise, meditation and creativity all feature as ways that many of us do cope with the stresses of not just the climate/nature thing itself but the work. There are some beautiful responses there. Just a couple of examples here:
“I swim, paint and dance - being ADHD it’s difficult to switch off just because of the tendencies I have.”
“I find solace in cooking and food. There’s something deeply human and hopeful in preparing and sharing food and the stories behind it. Beyond that, I have to believe that we can and do make a difference for the better.”
“I write down things I'm grateful for and put them in a jar, then I can go through them at a later date. Right now I'm grateful for it raining!!!”
“It helps me to meet and talk to other big worriers so I don't feel like I'm quietly going crazy in the corner of the room.”
“I also find I need different things at different times though. Sometimes, I just need to shut myself off from the news for a while. Sometimes physical exercise helps. And sometimes, I need to just get out, rain or shine (have discovered that wild rainy raspberries are a great re-connector with the moment and the world!).”
“Coping? Just about but I feel like it’s getting worse! Even for the smallest of things I feel a sense of guilt and I do more than most! What has been giving me some respite these past few months though is vegetable gardening. I can zone out and just focus on my little patch of Earth.”
And, for many people lots of music, which is Simon’s own go-to: “Music takes me away from everything, whether in terms of memories, finding amazing new music or simply just losing myself in the sonic whirl of it all. I'd be lost without my music and I really do question whether I could cope without it.” It’s a very honest post, and encourages our honesty.
But for all the self-care and the generosity in helping others by sharing these simple and effective and inspiring ideas, there is also something disturbing about the question itself, "How do you cope living and working in our field?"
Disturbing because, of course, I don’t think we want to merely ‘cope’ but to flourish. And because, so often, we don't feel we are coping. Sometimes, something deeper, more remedial is needed, and a helpful suggestion from a friend or stranger can seem as wide of the mark as the advice to someone deep in depression to just "Go for a walk!" Yes, but...
Disturbing also because, however dark and urgent the climate and nature emergency is, for those of us working here in the UK at least, it is not usually the existential, ‘front line’ experience of, say, feeling embattled within our national health or social care crises, or the humanitarian crises in Gaza or Ukraine, or…. Or pick whatever unending and wilfully perpetuated calamity is confronting so many people around the world right now as their daily lived reality and which presses down on those working long, unhealthy and poorly rewarded hours, months and lives in an attempt to bring others relief or solutions.
But for all that, working to help counter the climate and nature emergency without question has its very real toll, and coping with the enormity and urgency of it now and coming down the line all is part of that.
So how do I cope?
Partly, my approach is to ‘get away’ from all the issues, pressures, questions, expectations. Escapism, pure and simple. Music is good for me too. More often, books and films. For me, fiction is a great escape into other realms, and I’m sure that immersing myself in characters, settings and plots that navigate different problems, predicaments and uncertainties helps me in some way to ‘live with’ those I’ve chosen to work on. Personal escapism of any kind is part getting away from ‘it’, and part being refreshed or refocused when we come back to it.
But I’ve learned that, as well as finding music, books, films, or conversations where I can place my head somewhere away from the imminent problems, I also need to get ‘out’ of my head, into my body. I am once again exploring mindfulness, which was so important to me fifteen-plus years ago and has been a familiar but taken-for-granted presence ever since, more of an implicit than an explicit practice.
And, stepping back into my head without the need to busy myself, appreciating the more-than-human within with an awareness that ‘I’ am more than ‘me’ alone: the microbiome, the mitochondria and the merging, mutating ancestral gene-dreamlines… And the more-than-human close to hand, as I idly wonder what’s going on in the cat’s head as I stare blankly at him staring blankly at the floor…
And then yes, there’s definitely the need to get into the more-than-human outside, with a daily walk to the woods and water and heath that I’m grateful to have so close around me, but which I can easily take for granted just because of the proximity.
But coping strategies can have their shadow side. My daily walks often have their own costs, as I realise more and more how depleted even my expansive green neighbourhood now feels compared with just a very few years ago. The woods are quieter, emptier of the animals that were commonplace but where now a sighting feels startling, exotic almost. When did I last see a fox, a buzzard, a rabbit — even a squirrel? Where are all the birds? The baseline is shifting, but I have not yet forgotten where it was … is exactly the sort of internal monologue I find can surfacing as I look through the trees ahead. No matter how restful ‘nature’ can feel, there are moments of solastalgic apprehension. A feeling of being out of kilter both with what was and should be and with the ‘culture-as-usual’ amnesia that mostly washes away the extreme abnormality of where we have already arrived… So, as a cure for eco-anxiety, eco-presence can be a double-edged scalpel.
Sometimes I drown out the sense of nature-silence with an audiobook on my walk; also good for the soul (try the Deep Time Walk app to add new dimensions to your local landscape), but I know that I am in effect disabling my own attempt to reconnect with what matters, because what matters is being destroyed in front of me. How to cope with this coping? Back to the mindfulness…
And back to other forms of exploration. I am trying to find new ways into photography after so many years of dissatisfaction with just taking the same old pictures all over again, and then not taking any. I started to explore sound recording too a few years ago, but have struggled to get beyond the obvious first forays into capturing the dawn chorus and the woods. Better for me, I think, to just experience the dawn chorus and nature or else I might need to face the reality that what I’m actually recording is the decline.
As an MA Climate Change student, I helped design and undertake some oral history research in a local community facing coastal loss and the unlikelihood of the authorities paying for the sea defences that people wanted. One of the villagers referred with bewilderment to a local field study centre that brought university students in every year to monitor the freshwater habitat inland of a narrow sandbar that storms and rising tides continued to threaten. This witness to the witnessing shook her head as she said: “All they are doing is looking at what’s going, and when it’s gone they’ll be able to say ‘well that’s how that happened’.” Not, I’m sure how the students framed their research — but it’s a feeling I can understand among people who find themselves on the frontline of change and on the sidelines of science, policy or public money.
As some of the answers to Simon's post testify, creativity is another way to address the stress. For some, of course, creativity is the work itself, but for many others it offers that necessary release valve away from their work. On that MA, I also helped a local writer at the university to deliver a couple of her workshops for local communities to explore climate change by writing short stories to the prompts and scenarios offered by invited experts. Not only did this produce some excellent stories and a space for different -- sometimes completely opposed -- political views on human-caused climate change to coexist through the sharing of those stories; it also clearly brought imaginative expression and relief for the deep concerns and worries participants had. Creative exploration as a way to feel our way forward and to reach out to others as we go. A way of knowing we are not alone in experiencing eco-anxiety or in trying to counter it.
All of these approaches — escaping into music, films, books, being more fully part of nature, bringing attention to breath, body, mind and feeling, exploring creativity — and, of course, conversations like the one Simon started and maybe this post can — are some of the ways I find to help with the eco-anxiety and the pressures of working and the feelings of not working enough or well enough to ‘solve’ the problems.
Creative enquiries
For me, I like to think I can find creative approaches that bring image and words or sound together in ways that help with eco-anxiety while also showing me something more about the world around me. I’m inspired by approaches such as ‘intentional camera movement’ and defocused imagery that sidestep our usual internal lenses and filters and anthropocentrism and offer abstract accounts of the world. And I’m re-engaging with writing stories, where encounters like the coastal erosion conversation I mentioned above can find some expression. A form of creative coping, and maybe something more.
And, to at last acknowledge that other question, I find that these routes to eco-anxiety release are also some of the moments when I encounter imagination. The image, the feeling, the thought that emerges within the mindful meditation on breath or body? Stay with it for just the moment it takes to move on, rather than try to either push it away or grab on to it. The lyric that seems to say something new, unexpected, this time after the hundreds of times it suggested something else entirely? The way the shadow moves or the light through the leaves seems to shift focus with a movement of the branches in a breeze. The chance, one-sided encounter when I look up from my work at the moment someone on the pavement opposite pauses for some reason I can’t know and they don’t see that they are seen. The snatch of half-heard conversation as I pass the bus stop. Those evaporating memories of a dream on waking, or the mysterious, dreamlike moments that descend when I’m sitting quietly for a break, not tired exactly but my mind slipping out of focus and something just emerges as vision or sound or a sensation somehow in between these. When idle imagination just catches, and some aspect of the world is not quite as it was before…
The oppression of the climate and nature emergency can also surface at any moment, in any setting. It doesn’t just leap out in a meeting or an online conference, when absorbing new research, drafting a note or document, or while doomscrolling the latest revelations, false claims and tired reassurances that all will be well because, hey, we’re humans — we fix things. Our imaginations can compound these moments and feed the anxiety, naturally. Which is where a mindful attention can help us to notice that tendency, remind ourselves that this reaction does not need to be so, and nurture our imaginative capacity so that it in turn can do more helpful, nurturing work.
Because if imagination can spark at any time, then maybe when it comes to eco-anxiety there is something in the suggestion I learned of in the Ecology and the Imagination course: “But where the danger grows, there grows the saving power also.” (Friedrich Hölderlin, German Romantic poet.) The point, I now think, is exactly what that speaker at the Climate Change and the Imagination event suggested about imagination: “… love to encounter it in the moment.” With that, maybe, even the simplest moments of imagination become part of the coping, and part of the refreshing of the work, part of the work — without supposing that whatever is imagined needs to be so grand a thing as a ‘solution’.
Alongside that Hölderlin quote also came the suggestion that imagination is a faculty of dwelling as much as one of creative ability, that part of what it offers is a shelter or home for things yet to be realised. The threshold of such a shelter or home might also be the place to bring our burdens and to let go of them, such as our eco-anxiety.
Well, that was a long one, wasn’t it? If you made it to the end, thank you. And if you didn’t, thank you too, and it’s back to a normal length next time!
Just time to give again the link for The Centre for Climate Psychology, which offers online learning and practices that transform embedded cultural, emotional and relational habits. “We weave psychological and systemic wisdom into the way we think, act and lead in a time of upheaval.”
And to encourage you to read the latest ClimateCultures post, Worlds in Progress: a Retreat to Feed the Seeds of Imagination, where poet and artist-book maker Sarah Hymas looks ahead to the Imaginarium ‘Worlds in Progress’ retreat she is running for a second year. I’ve enjoyed previous iterations of Sarah’s Imaginarium work, which offer, as this time, an open, fluid, multi-layered spacetime for writers to sow and care for the seeds of imagination.
ClimateCultures offers a wealth of creative responses across our blog archive from 2017 to right now, as well as our Creative Showcase and Longer feature and other series.