48 / ROLLING STONE / APRIL 2020
CLIMATE CRISIS
build relationships? We buy them picture books
with rabbits and puppies or kittens. That’s how
we teach kids about relationships. That’s how
we teach them to care. So, of course, they care.”
Then there’s the reality that young people
are sensing the loss of a world they are still in
the process of trying to figure out and under-
stand — a heartbreaking form of FOMO (“fear of
missing out”) at a time when the vestiges of an-
other, healthier natural world remain. “I grew
up in the Pacific Northwest, and I
still live here,” says Jamie Margo-
lin, 18-year-old co-founder of Zero
Hour. “Our bus cards are called
Orca cards, but I’ve never seen
an orca in my entire life. In the
park close to where I live, there
are signs that say, ‘Please don’t
feed the resting seal pups.’ I’ve
never actually seen any seals or
wildlife in that park for as long as
I’ve lived here. Ever.”
This sense of impermanence
matters, as a child’s process of
making sense of the world is best
accomplished when that world is
seen as fairly immutable, if not
entirely predictable. “I remember
thinking it was so weird that all
these adults were saying that so
many different things were true,”
says Jane Nail, a 20-year-old col-
lege student who grew up in Ala-
bama and first heard about climate change when
Barack Obama was running for president. “It
was one of the first times that the adults in my
life weren’t all on a united front. The concept of
good and evil was in my head, and I remember
thinking that one side had to be good and one
side had to be evil. One of them was obviously
lying, but I didn’t necessarily know which side. I
remember being really jolted by that.”
There’s also the growing knowledge, in our
age of attachment parenting, that “attachment
to the natural world is just as important in terms
of security as our attachment to other human be-
ings,” says Elizabeth Haase, an assistant clinical
professor of psychiatry at Columbia University
and a founding member of the Climate Psychia-
try Alliance. “That’s actually a radically new con-
cept in psychology.” Just as children need to trust
that a caregiver will be there for them in order
for healthy psychological development to occur,
they need to trust that their environment will be
there as well. That it may not be — or not as it is
now — creates a sense of insecurity, a sense of
loss that can’t cycle through the normal stages
of grief because it’s a loss that’s ongoing. “When
you have a traumatic loss or any kind of disrup-
tion that’s very painful, you can come out of it
by going back to trying to do it the way you did it
before, right?” Haase asks me. “Which is mostly
what you hear from people: ‘I can’t wait to get
things back to the way they used to be and just
get back that sense of security, or get another
dog, or rebuild my house after the hurricane.’ ”
Not only do children not have enough life ex-
perience to envision that sort of regenerative
cycle as effectively as adults can, but they also
don’t conceive of climate change that way. For
them, there’s no going back to how things were,
which is leading to a type of dread that’s some-times referred to as solastalgia (a sort of an-
ticipatory grief caused by the climate crisis)
or pre-traumatic stress disorder, in which, as
Haase puts it, “the focus is not on being con-
stantly vigilant to what has happened, but con-
stantly vigilant to what can happen.” The limit-
ed studies of Pre-TSD — often done on soldiers
before they entered a war zone — shows that
those who have it are far more likely to develop
Post-TSD if something bad does in fact happen —
they are, in a sense, primed to have their stress
systems kick into overdrive.
“As animals, we are wired to react to trauma
and danger — the fight-or-flight system, right?”
says psychiatrist Beth Mark, who has worked at
the counseling center at the University of Penn-
sylvania for more than 20 years. The response is
not just psychological but physical: Heart rates
and inflammation go up, immunity goes down.
“The dilemma that seems completely new to hu-
mankind is that we’re having a pre-traumatic
response. We can look ahead and think about
what’s going to happen, which has to be raising
our fight-and-flight response in a low-grade way.
We are more and more at this constant edge, and
it creates a chronic state of depletion with nega-
tive impact on how we are going about our days.”
And for kids who assume that most of their
days are still in front of them, it can also create asense of paralysis. “I’m not even sure if I’m going
to go to college,” 18-year-old Alejandro Vasquez
tells me from the sidewalk in front of New York’s
City Hall, where every week he protests as part
of the Fridays for Future campaign. “What’s the
point of having an education if we’re not going to
have a future?” When I interviewed Zero Hour’s
Margolin, she was on her way to a college inter-
view, the irony of which did not escape her: “I’m
talking to you about my fear of there not being
a future, while I’m going through
the motions of preparing for my
future. I’m still preparing for a
future that doesn’t exist, out of
hope that it maybe will.”
Almost none of the teens I talk-
ed to want to have kids, though
some said they had wanted to
before learning about climate
change. “I feel like it would be
cruel to myself and to children
to bring them into such an unsta-
ble world,” said 15-year-old Fiona
Jarvis, a member of the New
York chapter of the youth advo-
cacy group Extinction Rebellion,
which has its own Slack channel
devoted to mental health. “If I
think 20 years out, I get stressed
out, to be honest. It’s very much
on a day-to-day basis for me.”
All of which may explain why,
according to the National Insti-
tutes of Health, nearly one in
three teenagers in America will
experience an anxiety disorder,
and why anxiety disorders in this
group rose 20 percent between
2007 and 2012. “Climate crisis af-
fects our mental state more than
we know and more than we ac-
tually understand,” says Jasilyn Charger, 23, one
of the original founders of the Standing Rock en-
campment, where thousands of Native Ameri-
can youth moved to protest the Dakota Access
Pipeline. Though the movement is famous, what
is less known is that it grew out of group called
One Mind Youth, which was created to com-
bat the spate of teen suicides that plagued the
Cheyenne River Reservation. The encampment
gave its young people singular purpose, reignit-
ing a sacred connection to the land that their
culture prized — and for its duration, suicide
rates on the reservation plummeted. When the
youth lost their battle with the fossil-fuel indus-
try and were forcibly moved from the encamp-
ment, rates spiked again.
“Standing Rock really helped a lot of my
friends with their mental problems — depres-
sion, PTSD, anxiety, insomnia. A lot of people
felt at home,” says Charger. “But when people
started coming back from the en-Jasilyn Charger,
who led
protesters at
Standing Rock,
says activism
gave her
friends hope.[Cont. on 96] DAWNEE LEBEAU