96 | Rolling Stone | April 2020
CHILDREN OF THE CRISIS
[Cont. from 48]
hope. “I think the psychological is what we need to
impact,” says Allured. “We need more people to be
thinking psychologically about this and to be feeling
what’s going on. In terms of social tipping points, we
never know what is going to push a system out of its
equilibrium into a new level of awareness.”
In other words, we need the Jamies of the world,
the Gretas, the iconoclasts, the idealists, the people
whose brains are still wired for exploration. And we
need them not to solve the climate crisis for us but
rather to invite us into their way of seeing the issue. If
young people are scared, anxious, and grieving, then
so should we all be. We need the psychology of chil-
dren to be our guide.S
OMETIMES, THOUGH, THAT scares me almost
as much as the climate crisis itself. This past
September, on the Facebook page for my son’s
first-grade class, someone posted the question, “Is
anyone taking their kids out of school tomorrow for
the climate march?” Some parents wrote that they
were, but I opted against it. At the time, my son was
only five. I didn’t know if he was aware of climate
change yet. I didn’t want to expose him to something
so scary at such a young age. I wanted to preserve his
blissful ignorance as long as I possibly could.
So it was a surprise when, a few months later,
he came home with a petition he’d created to save
the koalas (or “kwola’s,” as he spelled it). He’d got-
ten his teachers and classmates to sign it. He wanted
me to send it to President Trump, and to the zoo. He
doesn’t watch the news, nor had my husband and
I talked about the fires in Australia in front of him.
But, somehow, some way, the message had gotten
through. And what I realized, standing on the side-
walk beside his bus stop, holding that piece of paper,
is that I was naive to think that I could shield him
from the truth that the world he lives in is changing.
And in my naiveté, I had allowed his introduction to
that concept to come from someone other than me.
When I tell Hickman this story, she’s silent for a
moment. “Often, we have to interpret what children
say to us,” she eventually says. “It would be too trau-
matic and frightening for your six-year-old to say,
‘Mommy, save me.’ But he is asking you to save him.
When children ask us to save koala bears, they’re
asking us to save them. He’s saying, ‘Save me.’ ”
By this time, of course, I’m in tears. Right now, I
don’t know how to save him. I know to recycle, to
try to offset my carbon footprint when I fly, to buy
locally and organically when I can, to compost. I
know how to make decisions that can help us all feel
a little more in control. But I also know that these
things are salves, that while they are important — psy-
chologically and otherwise — the problem of climate
change cannot be solved by these steps alone. And
I know that when my son asks me about this, I will
have to tell him the truth.
In the meantime, I practice what I might say to him
when the time comes. “I am sorry that my generation
and other generations haven’t fixed this for you al-
ready,” I tell Jasper and Kavi the afternoon we meet.
By now, we’ve carried our drinks to the benches out-
side, the January day mild enough for us to sit there
in light jackets.
“Well, yeah,” Kavi agrees. “It’s a lot of pressure.”
Jasper nods. “It’s a lot of stress on us.”
“I just tell myself, ‘Well, we’re going to do some-
thing.’ ” Kavi says. “And hopefully that’s true.”
Jasper looks at his friend uncertainly. “I thought
climate change was going to make its way across like
a storm. But no,” he sighs. “It’s here to stay.”campment, a lot of them fell deep
into a hole of either drugs and alcohol or depression.
We lost a lot of young people when we came back.” It
wasn’t just that the movement had failed, threatening
the ecol ogy of the area and the future of its youth — it
was that, for a time, kids had seen a glimpse of hope
for the natural world. “They killed themselves be-
cause they missed camp,” Charger says. “The younger
people who weren’t there, they felt like they missed
out on something. It took a toll on us mentally.”
F
OR EVERY YOUNG person like Charger, who has
seen a hint of what a world of climate cooper-
ation might look like, there are now far more
kids who’ve witnessed the other extreme. From an
Australia on fire to the sinking Maldives, a growing
number of children and young adults no longer ex-
perience pre-traumatic stress disorder when it comes
to climate change; they know what climate trauma is
firsthand. And they know that they are likely to be
traumatized again.
Madigan Traversi evacuated her Sonoma County,
California, home late one October night in 2017 wear-
ing her pajamas, with the smell of smoke in the air.
She didn’t take the time to change, to pack more
clothes, or to even grab her toothbrush. “We just
grabbed my dog and got in the car,” the 14-year-old
explains. “I took my school backpack, and that was
it.” Two days later, she and her parents were in a
hotel in the San Francisco area when they got a call
from a neighbor and learned that their house had
burned to the ground 20 minutes after they had evac-
uated. As Madigan huddled in the hotel room, crying
with her family, she was in utter disbelief. “It didn’t
seem real — I still don’t feel like it’s real two and a
half years later.”
Weeks afterward, when she finally returned to her
neighborhood, the outlines of where her home had
been were all you could see. She looked for her fa-
vorite tree, the one with the swing she had played
on almost every day, but it was gone — along with
everything she had owned or made as a child. “The
hardest possessions to lose were things like diaries
and artwork from when I was little,” she says. “Of
course, I remember my childhood, but I don’t have
any first artworks. I know my mom was heartbroken
about that.” Now, all throughout fire season, Madi-
gan keeps two laundry baskets packed with every-
thing that she wouldn’t want to lose a second time.
During the Camp Fire of 2018, schools in her area
shut down. In the Kincade Fire of 2019, she had to
evacuate yet again.
“Just in the past two and a half years, our school
has been closed due to four different climate- related
disasters,” says Park Guthrie, a sixth-grade teacher
in Sonoma County, father of three and co- founder of
Schools for Climate Action, who speaks of the “psy-
chological or spiritual destabilization” he sees in
many of his students, some of whom have lost their
homes and all of whom live with the uncertainty
that fire season brings. For these kids who have ex-
perienced climate change acutely, Guthrie thinks cli-
mate inaction is particularly damaging — and under-
mines his role as an educator. “They’re right at that
age where they have one foot in childhood and one
foot in a broader world,” he tells me. “It’s a moment
of revelation in many ways, and as it relates to the
climate crisis, it’s a terrible revelation. Like, ‘If this
is the case, then what about everything else you’ve
been telling us about who we are as a country — that
we value mainstream science, we value solving big
problems, working together, speaking up for justice?’
A healthy classroom culture is embedding these les-
sons, and when you pull back the veil on not just cli-
mate crisis, but our national climate neglect, it’s to-
tally destabilizing. It’s painful cognitive dissonance.”
That cognitive dissonance is what gets to Guth-
rie, that as his students are donning masks to go to
school, members of Congress are denying the ex-
istence of climate change and the National School
Boards Association is refusing to use the term for fear
of alienating some of its members. He calls climate in-
action a “form of neglect/abuse” arguing that “it’s not
just metaphorical: We have collectively abandoned
our children’s generation and future generations.”
Considering this neglect, he’s also frustrated by the
patronizing way adults congratulate kids for being
the ones who will assuredly solve climate change.
“They hate hearing that ‘You’re going to be the ones
that fix this problem that we elders couldn’t fix.’
That’s a terrifying thing to tell a seventh- grader,” says
Guthrie. “It’s not healthy for kids to grow up with
this nagging sense that ‘the adults aren’t in charge.’ ”
In fact, this sentiment was echoed by all the young
people I interviewed. They didn’t want the burden
of saving the planet when some of them couldn’t
even vote, when they had a Spanish test looming,
and when they had come to understand that cli-
mate change is not simply a matter of science but of
classism, racism, capitalism, and the way the global
north indiscriminately dumps on the global south.
The psychological enormity of what they’re up
against has actually helped fuel the Republican ar-
gument that climate change should not be taught
in schools, that reiterating the subject could aug-
ment student distress; and it’s true that among some
young people, there’s a level of alarmism that re-
flects the most dire of all possible outcomes. But it’s
also true that those outcomes could come to pass,
and that eco-anxiety is not necessarily pathological.
“It’s a logical, emotionally healthy response to the
reality of what’s going on,” argues Hickman, who re-
cently had an 11-year-old point out to her that in “the
world in which I am growing up, it is normal not to
have polar bears. And that’s different to the world in
which you grew up.”
In fact, mental-health professionals warn that the
internal inconsistencies created by climate disavowal
— knowing a truth but not acting on it — can be more
psychologically disruptive than confronting that hard
truth repeatedly. “We know that what we try to push
away usually comes back or turns into a symptom in
some other form,” says psychotherapist and Climate
Psychology Alliance North America co- president Eliz-
abeth Allured, who argues that rather than constrain-
ing climate education, we need to train educators on
how to deal with the psychological implications of
what they’re teaching.
Instead, we’re leaving that to kids as well. Just be-
fore the September climate march, Zero Hour’s Mar-
golin was approached by a group of girls who knew
of her activism and wanted her help. “They were
like, ‘I was crying myself to sleep the other night
about this. I’m so scared. Jamie, do you genuinely
think that we’re going to be OK?’ I was trying not to
discourage them, but what could I say? ‘I don’t know,’
I told them. ‘It depends on the action that we take.’ ”
For her part, Margolin has found activism to be the
only way to push back on overwhelming eco- anxiety,
the only way to navigate the precarious line between
existential dread and improbable — but necessary —