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Uncharted Territory

Dr. Katharine Wilkinson is an author, strategist, and teacher, working to heal the planet we call home. She addresses the question of “What Could Possibly Go Right?”

From climate collapse to permanent war, our nervous systems are stuck between numbness and panic. A climate scientist argues that surviving the polycrisis means learning to move deliberately between neural states and building smaller, more grounded movements that protect our ability to care without breaking.

We need all hands on deck to ideate new ways to equip the Youth Movement with a holistic, radical approach. To generate systemic change, young activists must be brave in their criticism of capitalism and growth. Unfortunately, they must also get comfortable with doubt, not knowing exactly what tomorrow will look like.

But if we are to continue at all, we have only one choice—to give up the conqueror role; to return to living simply as a small part of an organic whole.

An ecological chaplaincy then might be one that tends to the spiritual care of people of any or no faith who want to connect more deeply with the earth, or who worry about what is happening to the earth.

Journalist and podcaster Rachel Donald (Planet: Critical) interviews Caroline Hickman, a practicing psychotherapist and researcher who focuses on eco-anxiety, especially in young people. Caroline defines eco-anxiety, explains how it’s natural to feel distress if you care about the state of the environment, covers how to communicate with others about eco-anxiety, and suggests ways to move through feelings of anger and despair to achieve emotional resilience.

Journalist and podcaster Rachel Donald (Planet: Critical) interviews Dr. Omnia El Omrani, a medical doctor and Climate and Health Policy Fellow at Imperial College London. Omnia shares reflections on Connecting Climate Minds—a landmark project looking at climate and mental health across the globe, with a specific focus on the lived experiences of youth, Indigenous communities, small farmers and fisher people.

There may be no way to explain how you feel because nobody can inhabit your body with you, and for all the skills of a poet, the mirrored and empty wastelands of fear are a terribly lonely place. We are invisible there, and not being able to find the words makes us feel invisible here.

Individual psychological resilience is valuable for its own sake. But it may also be essential to the bigger and more important project of creating a human world that’s actually sane—i.e., one that serves the long-term survival of our species within a healthy ecosphere.

The need to address mental health in response to the climate crisis (and related calamities) is not new. In his 2007 book Peak Everything, Richard Heinberg described important research findings on how people respond in the aftermath of disasters, such as drought, famine, and societal collapse. The research he presented is all the more relevant today, given how industrial societies have failed to reverse overshoot.