46 / ROLLING STONE / APRIL 2020
CLIMATE CRISIS
“IT’S LIKE
THE WORLD’S
GOING TO
END,” SAYS
ONE BOY.
“AND I MIGHT
BE THERE TO
EXPERIENCE
IT. SO I’M
KIND OF, LIKE,
SCREAMING
INSIDE.”
going to come — and possibly in my lifetime —
but I expected it more in the distant future.”
Jasper took it upon himself to find out more.
He learned that parts of Florida were flooding
regularly. “It’s just going to be gone. It’ll be like
a hidden state,” he says. When the temperature
reached 95 degrees one day, he worried about
what that might mean. When he returned home
from camp, he told his parents he wanted to par-
ticipate in the youth climate march in Septem-
ber, and after the march, he joined his school’s
Green Team along with his friend Kavi, who now
sits next to Jasper in the coffee shop with his own
hot drink and shared concerns.
“I’m scared,” says Kavi, who is 10. “Like, at
some point, this is all just going to be gone. And
there’s going to be no second chances. It’s just
going to be game over.”
“The fires in Australia made me really sad,”
Jasper adds. “Whenever I think of it, I’m like,
‘Oh no!’ ”
It’s hard to predict these “oh no!” moments.
The boys say they’ll come to them unexpected-
ly, souring childhood memories that older gen-
erations have experienced without any emotion-
al undercurrent of despair. Jasper thinks back to
the time, a few weeks prior, when he was in his
garden having a snowball fight with his dad. “I
was in a snow fort, ducking and throwing snow-
balls, and I was like, ‘I’m so sad I won’t be able
to do this with my kids.’ It just came to me that I
might not be able to do this with the next gener-
ation because the Earth is warming.”
“I try to forget about it, but that doesn’t work,”
admits Kavi. “It’s like the world’s going to end —
not now, but it’s going to end at some point —
and I might be there to experience it. So I’m kind
of, like, screaming inside.
“Other generations did not have to worry
about this. They didn’t have to try to save the
environment.
“And all the people that made this happen and
fueled it are just going to be gone by the time it
really takes effect. They have the most power,
but they refuse to use it.”
Kavi looks down into his cup glumly. “It’s just
up to us, a couple of 10-year-old kids, to fix the
world’s problems now.”T
HE WORLD’S PROBLEMS have not usually
been the domain of its 10-year-olds, but
the climate crisis has changed that, cre-
ating a veritable tide of tiny and teen-
age warriors who have taken to the
streets and halls of power to demand
that their futures be safeguarded by the
actions of today. Behind their signs and placards,
their anger and frustration are clear. What is
harder to see is their anxiety, the psychologicalburden of those “oh no!” thoughts that threaten
to arise, the private moments of panic and fear
felt by a generation that cannot remember a time
before the planet’s future was imperiled.
“I grew up in the nuclear era, and I feel like
the nuclear threat activated my nervous system
at a very young age,” says Renee Lertzman, a
psychologist and founding member of the Cli-
mate Psychology Alliance, a group of psychol-
ogy professionals who specialize in addressing
climate change. When she began learning about
the climate crisis in college, Lertzman felt a sim-
ilar sense of panic and came to believe that, psy-
chologically speaking, “There are really import-
ant parallels: The threats are human-created,
and there’s a pervasive, visceral anxiety about
the future at all times.” Yet much of Lertzman’s
research has been into how the climate-change
threat is unique to our time. “Unlike the nuclear
threat, we’re talking about how we live,” she
continues. “This is about virtually every aspect
of our contemporary lives. This is about how I
eat, how I get around, how I dress myself, what I
put on my face. It’s very intimate.” And as such,
it implicates normal people — all of us — in our
own potential demise. Which, quite frankly, can
really mess with your head.
In 2015, the American Academy of Pediatrics
issued a policy statement positing that “the so-
cial foundations of children’s mental and phys-
ical health are threatened by the spec-
ter of far-reaching effects of unchecked
climate change,” and that “given this
knowledge, failure to take prompt, sub-
stantive action would be an act of injus-
tice to all children.” Since then, those in
the mental health fields have started to
see the effects of this specter: children
coming to therapists grief-stricken at
the thought that they wouldn’t live in
a world where it was ecologically sensi-
ble to have children of their own; kids
arriving at the ER, suicidal with despair
about damage to the environment; chil-
dren who refused to drink water during
droughts or who suffered from panic at-
tacks at the thought of human extinc-
tion. These may be the more extreme
cases, but for many of those who traffic
in mental health, they represent a bub-
bling over of what is just under the sur-
face for scores of young people today.
“This time last year, there was maybe
one request a month,” says Caroline
Hickman, a British psychotherapist whose par-
ticular focus is eco-anxiety in children. “This
year, there are two or three a week. I’ve got the
NHS, I’ve got the civil service, I’ve got counsel-
ing organizations, I’ve got schools approaching
me on a weekly basis saying, ‘Can you help?’ ”
“I’m struggling to find the words to describe
the magnitude of what is being faced from a pub-lic mental health perspective,” says psychiatrist
Lise Van Susteren, who was an expert witness
in Juliana v. United States, a 2015 case in which
21 young plaintiffs sued the federal government
for infringing upon their right to life and liberty
by failing to take substantive action on climate
change (the case is currently in appeal). “If we
think the storms are bad outside, wait until we
see the storms inside,” Van Susteren contin-
ues. “You cannot continue to hold up in front of
young people the fact that things are only going
to get worse and expect that they can create a
kind of life that will allow them to thrive.”
Indeed, a December Amnesty Internation-
al survey of more than 10,000 18- to 25-year-
olds in 22 countries identified climate change
as the most important issue facing the world in
these Generation Z’ers’ minds (pollution came in
second). In the fall, The Washington Post/ Kaiser
Family Foundation released the results of a poll
in which 57 percent of American teenagers (ages
13 to 17) said that climate change made them
feel scared, 52 percent said it made them angry,
and only 29 percent said they were optimistic
about the issue. Among young adults (18 to 29),
the results were even more stark — with 68 per-
cent of that group reporting feeling afraid and 66
percent saying they feel helpless — implying that
distress grows with age.
In 2019, both the National Association of
School Nurses and the California Associ-
ation of School Psychologists endorsed
climate-change resolutions, the latter
declaring climate change a potential
threat to the psychological development
of children and calling on “Congress to
take effective action on climate change
to protect current and future students.”
This came after the United Nations In-
tergovernmental Panel on Climate
Change reported in 2018 that policy-
makers have only 12 years to act before
the consequences of global warming be-
come irreversible, a timeline that young
people have latched onto with what has
been referred to as “ecological doom.”
The home page of youth activist group
Zero Hour features large black numbers
counting down the years, days, hours,
minutes, and seconds to this deadline,
like a ticking bomb.
And while it makes sense that young
people would be particularly suscepti-
ble to eco-anxiety — knowing that they
will be the ones inheriting the brunt of the is-
sues — there’s more to it than that. There’s also
the particular makeup of young minds, and the
way those minds function. “Children are incred-
ibly switched on to fairness and unfairness, and
what’s right and wrong,” says Hickman. “They’re
also emotion ally connected to other species.
How do we teach children how to empathize andSenior writer ALEX MORRIS profiled the actress
Natasha Lyonne last issue.PHOTOGRAPH BY Amy Lombard