Listen to the Interview:

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Transcript:

Jennifer Follstad Shah
Eco anxiety or eco grief is a form of existential anxiety that can be manifested in a number of emotions, but it usually relates to a worry over environmental change or the loss of a particular species of concern, or even the loss or threat to how one perceives one future one’s future, or the future for one’s family members. Those are some examples, but it all relates to rapid environmental change and the uncertainty about that change and how it affects the future.

Ross Chambless
And so let’s lay out the just kind of going chronological, you wanted to conduct a study with University of Utah undergraduate students. How did you go about that? What kind of framing of this study did you use?

Jennifer Shah
Sure. First, let me start with a bit of the motivation. We recognize that students are learning a lot about environmental change and climate change throughout our degree program in the Environmental and Sustainability Studies program. And just heard anecdotes from students about how emotionally taxing that can be at times, and that there is little opportunity to discuss how they feel about these topics that we’re exploring in various classes. Some students have even dropped out of the major just because it’s too there’s too much of a mental toll that it takes.

And so, we wanted to quantify the extent to which this phenomenon exists for undergraduate students, in particular, those who are majoring in degree programs that have a focus on climate change, but also being able to compare those responses to students who are majoring in other fields that might not hear about climate change as frequently.

Ross Chambless
And I understand there was other there’s been other surveys, other studies on this topic, but not necessarily one focused specifically on the U of U campus?

Jennifer Shah
That’s correct. There’s been a global study of adolescents and young adults that distributed surveys to… they had a sample size of 10,000 respondents from 100 countries. I if I get the numbers correct.  And there was an overwhelming sense of anxiety amongst young people in all of the countries that were surveyed.

Ross Chambless
And how did you go about framing or drafting the questions to be asked? And how did you distribute the survey?

Jennifer Shah
We utilized a number of studies that have distributed similar surveys so that we could be able to compare responses from our study to those. But we also tailored them to some extent as well for students here. So, we had a number of questions to try and calculate or quantify climate anxiety. We had a number of we used the general anxiety diagnosis scale, which is utilized in the health professions pervasively. So, everyone’s familiar with these questions.

And then we asked them questions about emotion specifically as well as coping mechanisms. So, some of the questions, particularly with regards to climate anxiety and how one feels about climate change, was really developed, building on the shoulders of previous studies where the coping mechanisms and open ended responses were more based on previous studies on affective state, as well as what we hear as needs from our students.

Ross Chambless
And also just the time frame of this study. This was 2023, 2024?

Jennifer Shah
We conducted the study over the last academic year. So, for Fall of 2023 to spring of 2024.

Ross Chambless
And what were your results? What did you find?

Jennifer Shah
Well, we found that climate anxiety scales with generalized anxiety. So, the more anxiety one has, the more climate anxiety one typically has as well. We found, however, though, that students majoring in environmental and sustainability studies have greater climate anxiety than non-majors, and that this was also more prevalent for females relative to males.

Ross Chambless
Interesting. And so, and how did you distinguish sort of the general anxiety that most of us probably feel versus those, you know, who may be specifically experiencing forms of climate anxiety? Was this sort of distinguished through questions that the respondents gave or answers they gave?

Jennifer Shah
Yeah. So, there were three questions in there are three sets of questions in our survey, one that was related to quantifying climate anxiety. There was a series of ten questions, all of which when we ran a factor analysis fall on one factor which allowed us to summarize the answers to each question, which all of which were on a Likert scale. We were able to sum those responses to get one number that represented the degree of climate anxiety. The generalized anxiety scale is already a set of seven questions that can also be summed in form another index. So, you can regress those two numbers to see if they relate to one another, which we find that they did.

And then we asked students to rank their top three concerns to get a sense of whether climate change was within those top three, and not too surprisingly, amongst this particular demographic, it typically is not a top three concern. Things like finances, personal relationships, and academic performance, or future career possibilities ranked higher than climate change.

However, for environmental and sustainability studies students, actually a quarter of them ranked climate change in their top three, whereas non majors, only 9% of them ranked climate change as a top three concern. So again, there’s a difference between those who are really focusing on climate change in their coursework and want to then have climate change be a focus of their careers versus those who have other interests. We also found that women were more likely to rank climate change as a top three concern relative to males. So that was a difference of 18% versus 11%.

Ross Chambless
Okay. Very interesting. So, I want to unpack a little bit of that data. So you found that significantly more climate anxiety is being experienced by students in the environmental studies fields versus those who are not. Why do you think that is?

Jennifer Shah
I think well, we ran a multiple regression, which also indicated that climate or the sources where you get your information about climate change have an influence.  So, online sources, which include social media as well as streaming sources like videos and blogs or even news in digital form play a role. But we found that on or classroom exposure also plays a major role. And our students hear about climate change in multiple core classes throughout their trajectory.

Ross Chambless
I wanted to mention that you thanks for sharing the presentation you gave on the study recently. And there was a wonderful quote by Aldo Leopold from 1953 to the great philosopher and conservationist. I wanted to read that because I thought it was very spot on:

“One of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds…   An ecologist must either harden his shell and make believe that the consequences of science are none of his business, or he must be the doctor who sees the marks of death in a community that believes itself well & does not want to be told otherwise.”

~ Aldo Leopold (1953)

I found that really fascinating. But I think there’s a lot of truth in that, in the fact that environmental studies students are the ones who are really focused and paying attention to this topic, whereas other students, other disciplines may not necessarily be as aware or as informed.

Jennifer Shah
I think that’s a very valid point, and I think that our students, because they’re concerned and they’re aware, are also more observant about what’s going on in the world around them.

I think it’s interesting that that quote from Aldo Leopold also had the essence of eco anxiety already embedded within it as early as 1950s. So, people at that time also already recognizing the major changes that were occurring. So, this is not necessarily a new phenomenon. It’s just one that is becoming more widely recognized, raised and hopefully addressed.

Ross Chambless
And the other finding that is very interesting from your research is finding that female students tend to experience it more than male students. So, what are some theories as to why that is?

Jennifer Shah
There are studies in clinical psychology of which I’m not an expert, but that show that women are typically more prone to anxiety in general and also more sensitive to uncertainty, especially with regards to risk that might be to self or to loved ones.

So, that quote by Aldo Leopold also has embedded within it this, in a sense, call to action with that metaphor of the doctor.  We are finding that there may be a sweet spot to anxiety, meaning that if there’s too little one is not motivated to effect change, one might not see the problem.  If there’s too much, and there’s also not information about what one can do about it, humans tend to turn away and shut down and not want to engage with a topic.

Whereas if you find that sweet spot where there’s enough anxiety to not be debilitating but to be a motivator, that people can transform that anxiety into action and that really helps to mitigate the anxiety and turn it into optimism.

We even have preliminary evidence that the more students engage in what we call high impact teaching practices like community engaged, learning, internships, research, etc., the better they feel about the prospects of climate change.

Ross Chambless
Well, I like the quote a lot also because it references sort of a doctor. As someone who’s married to a medical professional and has and I do not have the stomach for certain ailments, or blood, or when people are dealing with a medical emergency. But my partner does. And I find that that sometimes it takes that certain sort of personality to kind of just, you know, move into action, see a problem, but not be too emotionally overwhelmed by it. And perhaps that’s training. Perhaps it’s just sort of one’s, I don’t know, personality, but I do like that analogy, too, because sometimes that’s what it takes to be really involved in this space and to be persistent and to be resilient to it as well. And it’s a mental thing.

Andrea Brunelle
That ties in really well with how I got involved in the Good Grief Network. I’ve been teaching climate change for, I don’t know, 30 years or something. And the news, as we know, is not improving. It’s getting worse. And it’s sort of like my mind held that at bay for a certain amount of time. And then, you know, it’s like cracks in the facade, right? And it started leaking in and I started really suffering from the climate grief myself and was seeking out a way to help myself so that I could keep teaching climate change.  Because it gets really rough telling students every semester multiple times how terrible things are going.

And so that’s when I did My Good Grief ten Step program, it was basically related to exactly what you just said, that sort of breakdown.  From this isn’t affecting me, to this is not good. I can’t hold all this by myself anymore.

Ross Chambless
Right. But being engaged with it and feeling yourself, working towards an ultimate solution, I guess we’ll get there. And I guess when you get to it, we’re discussing coping strategies and sort of emerging from this research. But yeah, I think that’s absolutely seems to be aligned with that.

So, when we’re looking at a broader array of sort of everyday concerns of undergraduates, you mentioned that climate is not necessarily at the top of a going concern for many students. But what I have observed, and why this seems very important, is that at least at least within the U, there has been a very rapidly growing increase in interest in environmental studies as a as a major with undergraduate students, certainly here on the U. Campus. So given that, it’s it seems reasonable to assume that eco anxiety prevalence may be also increasing within the student body because just given what they’re focusing on, what they’re majoring in.

Jennifer Shah
I would say yes. And I think that holds for all students, to be honest with you, because we also found in our model an interaction between major and exposure to climate news. And there was a steeper response for non-majors, meaning the more they heard about climate change, the more rapidly they experience climate anxiety.

Whereas students who come to the Environmental and sustainable Studies program already have an awareness and a concern about climate change. And so, as we give them more news, their climate anxiety increases, but they’re already at a certain level, so it doesn’t increase as much. So, the point being is that more that students see what’s going on, for example, locally with the Great Salt Lake or wildfires, it’s hard to ignore that change is happening and it’s affecting everyone’s day to day life.

Ross Chambless
Yeah, and just taking in the context, it is discussed commonly with news media and other sources of information that young people today are experiencing higher rates of anxiety or depression than earlier generations. And things like social media are sometimes pointed out as being a cause. But so seldomly, I feel like this topic of eco anxiety or climate grief is brought up as possibly contributing to that or overlapping with that.  I’m just wondering if you have noticed that.  Or if you if you have any thoughts on that as far as maybe this is an area that is not given as much attention as it ought to get?

Jennifer Shah
I know there are some studies on the effect of social media on anxiety specifically and to some extent climate anxiety. I can’t point to the general results of that. I think there’s more room to understand the relationships between consumption of social media.

But we do hear from students that they feel more anxiety after they’ve been on social media, especially if a lot of the articles that they read about have the effect of doomscrolling.

And some have mentioned that they explicitly try to find stories about positive action to effect climate change in terms of mitigation and adaptation. And then when they find those, they feel better about it. And thankfully, the algorithm of the social media helps to funnel more of the stories towards them. So, individuals have some power to control what they’re getting via social media. But I do think the vast majority of stories are invoke anxiety.

Ross Chambless
Well, let’s shift to coping strategies, because I thought that it’s an important but also a big part of what your findings revealed. And I noticed that in terms of how students are coping, you listed a number of those that they indicated. I noticed recreation is very high, so going out into the outdoors seems to be a coping strategy?

Jennifer Shah
Yes, absolutely. Far and away. That was the major coping strategy, which is not surprising because so many students are attracted to the University of Utah because of all the outdoor amenities we have available to us. Other coping strategies related to what we call self-coping. So, recreation is one, but also things like yoga, meditation, playing music, doing art, talking to a friend, those sorts of things.

Ross Chambless
Yeah, interesting. I noticed that your findings seem to indicate that few students are seeking help from therapists individually. And that’s kind of surprising, I think, too.

Jennifer Shah
I agree. But I’m not sure what the frequency is of students on campus that seek therapy in general. So that low number that seek it out with regards to climate anxiety specifically might track with the overall tendency of students to seek out therapy for any mental health issue. However, I think in part it’s because the research courses don’t necessarily exist on campus for students to get help with climate anxiety specifically.

Ross Chambless
I see. And so perhaps what your findings are revealing is that there is an opportunity there to provide those services which we can get to with the good grief groups.

I wanted to hone-in a little bit on some of the most common strategies for coping. So, for example, doing something to help or contribute to the issue being part of a solution after learning and knowing about the current social injustices surrounding climate change or fixing it, just working on your own habits, right. And supporting, you know, as a consumer, supporting good companies or bringing awareness to certain issues. So, things like that. You found that your data revealed some of those strategies?

Jennifer Shah
Yes, absolutely. We and some other academics have termed that type of coping, meaning focused coping where one might change one’s own behavior or encourage others to change their behavior or engage in things like advocacy and volunteerism. And what we find is that when our students do that through things like community engage learning and internships or capstone projects that they recognize their own self agency.  And that sort of empowerment helps is a positive feedback and wants them to engage in more of those types of activities. And then as I mentioned, we do have some preliminary evidence that that helps to mitigate the anxiety they feel because they recognize that they can do something about it.

Ross Chambless
Well, in another takeaway that I saw from the data is that We as instructors and mental health professionals, must do a better job in offering resources to young adults, especially females, that both direct creative action and avoid debilitating mental health outcomes… And in fact, I think I’m pulling that from a quote from your presentation. But it seemed like a very important takeaway specifically for campus administrators, educators, to learn from this.

Jennifer Shah
Yes, absolutely. So, we challenge faculty to provide opportunities in their classrooms, especially if you are engaged in the topic of climate change to give students time to talk about their concerns or other emotions that they may have, in addition to learning about the science and policy and different mitigation and adaptation strategies. We also need various programs on campus, whether it be through the counseling center or other entities where students have some type of option to process these things, either individually or in group settings.

Ross Chambless
Okay. let’s talk about one of the let’s talk about the Good Grief Network. How often do these groups meet? Where did this network originate from? Who is participating?

Andrea Brunelle
So, the Good Grief Network is a product of actually one of our former Environmental Humanities students. Laura Schmidt was working on her thesis about climate change and really found herself starting to despair, and realized that there was a need, a gap

 

in providing that type of support for people who know what’s going on and are really stressed out about it.

So, she modeled this program after, you know, like Alcoholics Anonymous is a ten step program. And the idea is with the formal ten step program through, Good Grief, it’s a ten-week series where you meet once a week for 2 hours and they’re guided sessions that work on each of the steps.

Like, number one is accept the severity of the situation, which, you know, I think that’s why a lot of us were there, because we already know that it’s pretty bad. But then each week you work through them, some being on beauty and gratitude. And they vary in the intensity to, I think, keep it even.

The organization has reached over 2,500 people. 80 plus ten-step programs have been facilitated. These are the formal numbers from the Good Grief Network themselves. Nineteen countries. And some of their data indicate that 87% are empowered to take action.

Ross Chambless
So just to clarify, this group started here at the U, but it’s actually gone international? Or was it existing before that?

Andrea Brunelle
Yeah. No, it did not exist before. So, she did her thesis here and then when she left, she created a nonprofit and started this good grief network where these ten step programs have been offered for people who need help managing their climate grief, which is what I mentioned earlier. I’d known about the Good Grief Network for a long time, but kind of hit a critical threshold where I was feeling like I needed some coping tools and I could see the weight of what I was teaching my students, and just hoping to have a or gain a toolkit to help them cope as well.

Jennifer Shah
So, through the Good Grief Network, one can either join a group and participate in these circles to process one’s feelings. Or one can get trained and be a facilitator of a group.

Andrea Brunelle
So I found my experience to be very positive and helpful. So, I first did the affiliate training, which allowed me to bring the circles to campus. It gives a little latitude in how it’s offered. It doesn’t have to be every week. It can just be…  you work on something. One of the steps in whatever order you want. And so that’s what we started doing. But again, I found it to be so powerful. I did go back and do the full training, and I have facilitated a couple of the ten step programs for the Good Grief Network.

Ross Chambless
I mean, it’s really remarkable that it’s been so successful as a program to support and help so many people across the world now. And it sort of has its origins here at the U. Which I think is really a wonderful service.

So, it has a website? If people want to find out about local networks in their area, they can just go to there and get more information.

Andrea Brunelle
So, there aren’t really specifically local networks after the pandemic, a lot of the circles, a lot of the ten step programs really went online. So, it’s very common to have a ten-step group that has people from all over the world. And, the Good Grief circles that we offer here on campus are really the only local resource that we know of for students. And we invited alumni and faculty to participate as well.

Ross Chambless
Very interesting. We’ll certainly put a link to that in the transcript for this podcast for people who want to learn more about that.

I wanted to just ask a few questions because I think it was important about sort of how this could influence or impact education policy for educators nationally, internationally, but perhaps locally as well.

I know that it seems like this the findings for this are also very important for educators and parents, but also policymakers to understand how climate anxiety and grief is impacting youth. I don’t know. What are your thoughts on that?

Jennifer Shah
So, some of our collaborators on this project are psychologists and educational psychologists, and they have conducted a study within our study to come to Andrea’s climate change class and see how climate change instruction is delivered and then how students respond to that.  The results of that study are still being processed and summarized.

We also have done focus groups with students to really drill a bit deeper into how they perceive of pedagogy, and what they would like changed about it, to particularly address this issue of climate anxiety. So, stay tuned on that. Once we have more of those results, I think we’ll be able to put together some guidelines of what we would suggest, at least in higher education, but that is also an open area for our collaborators in education psychology to think about how that might then translate to other grade levels in Utah and elsewhere.

Ross Chambless
Well, and I know the subject of climate change has made some parents in the state uncomfortable going back several years. And, you know, it’s resulted in some resistance in getting to engage in the topic in the school setting. And certainly, at the state level. But it was interesting to see that you highlighted some research that showed that a majority of adults in Utah counties worry about climate change harming future generations. So, it definitely seems like there is interest and there’s a demand for it for better information being taught in our schools. And this seems like an important fact, or piece of information that would be hopefully guiding public policymakers also?

Jennifer Shah
I agree. And that would be a great avenue to take this research and communicate it more broadly to our legislators and superintendents.

Ross Chambless
Just some closing thoughts. I mean, I certainly want to bring up those sort of policy overlaps there, certainly because, you know, we are the Center for Climate Science and Policy, so the goal being that what’s being worked on is sort of in the in the fields of science across the campus can also inform policymakers in a responsible way going forward.

And I also just say, on a personal level, I think this has been a very interesting topic for me. I can just say that certainly climate grief is something that I’ve dealt with, probably just like anyone who works in this space. Certainly, going back to when I was doing environmental stories for radio or for podcasts.

But also finding ways to cope has been very informative for me too. And I think this what you’ve found with the study aligns very much with that. As far as the fact of taking action and being engaged with something. I feel like right now I’m feeling much actually, I don’t want to say content necessarily, but in my mind, my position right now with the Wilkes Center and even though it’s very much top of mind all the time, but being immersed in an environment where so many people care about this topic and are doing remarkable things that I do think will have some positive impacts on our future going forward, to be around that is actually very uplifting.

Another thought I had is that I think all of us are a product of our own attention, where our attention is put. And, I know that we as we as a society are learning more about mental health and the impact that can have on all of us, I guess one positive thing is society’s taking that more seriously now and accepting that, and trying to provide resources for folks.

For example, first responders often deal with mental health challenges because of just what they have to deal with every day, and what they see that most of us actually don’t have to see or engage with. So, it really is comes down to where your attention is. But finding those coping mechanisms, and also recognizing there’s a community there to be supportive seems very helpful.

Jennifer Shah
Absolutely, I’d have to agree. One of the main advantages of the Good Grief circles is recognizing that you’re not alone and that you have a community. The University of Utah has also recognized that anxiety is pervasive among students, and there’s a number of support groups on or at least two different anxiety-based groups that students can participate in through the counseling center. And so, I think some of those groups could even more for have certain sessions that are focused on crime and anxiety.

And I think you hit the nail on the head when you said that when we communicate not only what is going on with climate change, but what folks can do about it, and stop pointing fingers, but rather focusing on like how we are more powerful together in trying to effect change it. It definitely makes people feel better and more optimistic.

So, I encourage everyone to talk more about it, try to find the common ground. We don’t have to talk about climate change, but clearly, I would argue everything in your life can be related to climate change in some way. Let’s say you care about water, you talk about water issues, you’re still talking about climate change, but you can find that common ground with whoever you’re talking with. As long as we hold that space for respect of the other person and try to understand where they’re coming from and what they value.

Ross Chambless
I don’t know any of the closing thoughts. I mean, I just want to also express my appreciation to both of you again for engaging this very difficult topic. It can be triggering, But at the same time, I’m hopeful that by engaging with it, certainly in the way that you have with the study, providing more information about how pervasive the feelings are, but also how folks are finding different innovative ways to successfully cope with it can be very empowering and hopefully supportive for our community. And yeah, so I don’t know any of the closing thoughts?

Jennifer Shah
If folks hear this podcast and are interested in collaborating on providing more resources or trying to communicate the need for addressing climate anxiety more broadly in our community, both Dr. Brunelle and I are happy to talk to you.

Ross Chambless
Well, thank you so much for talking.

Andrea Brunelle
Yeah, thank you.

Jennifer Shah
Thanks.