Personal climate resilience

Strengthening ourselves

Buddy had few anxieties. A strong support group helped!

More and more towns are taking local measures to control flooding, cool their residents, prevent drought, and adapt to other environmental dangers and costs. They’re creating physical resilience, and ClimateDog has described a dozen such protections in recent months.

But more and more we’re finding that, beyond the dangers growing in our neighborhood, other risks are growing in our minds. Global warming is threatening the thinking, emotions, and happiness of millions. Symptoms of stress, anxiety, and grief are growing as we think about our future and our family’s future. Children, the elderly and women are particularly vulnerable to the mental health impacts of climate change. So are those with close ties to the land, including farmers and tribal communities.

What stresses us

Trauma: There have been many serious climate disasters, and their likelihood is growing. Hurricane Katrina is the ultimate example so far: a million people were relocated and nearly 2,000 died. Some survivors remained, without access to stores, schools, shelters, and emergency services. Others evacuated, feeling profound loss, broken social ties, even violence. Years later, the psychological scars caused by Katrina continue to be studied.

Displacement: Many of us have a sense of place, solace, and security tied to where we live. When we’re no longer there, whether because of some climate disaster or because we feel the need to migrate (as Buddy, Hilary and I did two years ago), our sense of self, our social interactions, and the dependability of our world become threatened.

Vision of the future: Most Americans live in the path of one or more climate dangers, and if they squint they can see the damage to their hometown and their lifestyle down the road a few years. The news and the web put predictions of worsening drought, flooding, bad air, heat, fires, smoke, sea level rise, and landslides in front of us every day.

Generational: Many kids wonder why their parents are not doing something about these dangers? Many will say they are quietly angry. Some are even taking action by founding youth protest organizations and filing lawsuits against authorities.

Parents and grandparents are stressed when they think about all the perils their kids and grandkids are heading for. Some are even ashamed of how little their generation has done to contain those perils.

Uncertainty: On top of the risks, nobody knows when these predicted troubles will affect them. When might a wildfire strike, bigger storms and sea-level rise destroy the coastline, our water shortage become serious, or a flood of strangers move into our town? Uncertainty is a stressor itself. And some political and corporate players in America are working hard to foster it.

How we can cope

Anyone who thinks that climate change is affecting their mentality can take a quiz to gauge their resilience. This exercise points up certain attributes we can build that have proven to reduce stress, including

• Strong relationships: The mutual long-lasting back-and-forth bond with other people in our lives.

• Clear values and beliefs: The feelings and thoughts we have about ourselves and our lives and how effective we think we are at taking action.

• Initiative: The ability to make positive choices and decisions and act upon them.

• Self-Control: The ability to experience a range of feelings, and express them using the words and actions which society considers appropriate.

We might join a Resilience Circle, a small group of 10 to 20 people that come together to increase personal security during challenging times through learning, mutual aid, and social action. They’re not easy to find, but here are some starting places.

• The Unitarian Universalist church

• Citizens Climate Lobby

• MetroHealth in Cleveland

• The Good Grief Network

• One example, Cascadia Stack in the Portland, OR area, is very active.

Another option: we might start or join a nearby Transition Town group. Transition Towns work on a variety of local projects based on the belief that strong neighborhood networks create resilient people and help towns to build protections and weather future energy shocks. (More on Transition Towns in an upcoming newsletter.)

And, of course, we can always start a small resilience group ourselves to help us cope with climate anxiety.

---

Some more reading:

• The quiz - how resilient am I?

• Back in 2021 the very first issue of Climate Dog, Can we see the invisible epidemic?, was about documented mental health declines among young people attributed to climate change.

• A look at youth anxiety in Western Pennsylvania

• A good but technical summary of climate anxiety (and why we do not act on climate change)

• A later ClimateDog look at The emotional damage of climate change and how to deal with it.