Environmental Anxiety

The ongoing environmental and climate crisis is usually discussed in terms of rising global temperatures, changing weather patterns or loss of biodiversity. What is often overlooked, however, is that global environmental change can also evoke a wide range of emotions. The present study aims to explore the phenomena of environmental anxiety and environmental hope and to outline a theoretical framework through which these emotions can be seen as distinct but closely related forms of existential attunement. This new framework may then allow certain (mild) cases of environmental anxiety to be seen as affective states with an existential transformative potential, rather than simply as psychopathological conditions.

Conceptual Analysis of Environmental Anxiety

Let us begin by defining environmental anxiety.Footnote 1 This in itself is not an easy task, as different and often unrelated terms, such as sadness, fear, depression, or even grief are used to describe this phenomenon. Researchers who use these terms often overlook the subtle but important distinctions between these different emotional responses. This confusion of terms may arise because there is still no fully established and adhered to interdisciplinary, let alone philosophical, definition of environmental anxiety. The first step in our investigation will therefore be to review interdisciplinary research and provide a brief conceptual analysis of environmental anxiety.

It seems most appropriate to start with the three most recent and most comprehensive interdisciplinary taxonomies of environmental emotions developed by Pihkala, Landmann and Böhm (Pihkala, 2022; Landmann, 2020; Böhm, 2003). According to Landmann, environmental anxiety differs from other emotions primarily in that it arises in response to the anticipated negative effects of the environmental crisis that may occur at some unspecified time in the future. This finding is consistent with Böhm’s typology, which also defines anxiety as an emotion triggered by the expectation of future consequences of the ecological crisis. Building on the work of Landmann and Böhm, Pihkala adds that among the most salient features of environmental anxiety are the feelings of “uncontrollability, unpredictability, and uncertainty” that arise in relation to a future—and not always concrete—threat (Pihkala, 2022: 12). This uncertainty then leaves the anxious person feeling “distressed, helpless” and overwhelmed, Pihkala argues (Pihkala, 2022: 13).

This characterisation of environmental anxiety as an uncertain or indeterminate future threat finds resonance in environmental philosophy and eco-phenomenology. Similar definitions of environmental anxiety are offered for example by Albrecht, who sees it as a “non-specific worry about our relationship to support environments” (Albrecht, 2018); Smith, who understands anxiety as a worry about the possible end of all life on Earth (Smith, 2011); McGrath, for whom environmental anxiety is an “unconscious and paralysing anticipation of the end of everything (Abram, 2018); or Abram, who sees it as “an uncanny ‘collective mood’ stirred by the instability of the natural environment and its unpredictable future” (Wardell, 2020: 195).

From the above descriptions, it is clear that environmental anxiety can have a negative impact on an individual’s psychological well-being. However, and this brings us to the central question of our paper, is it justified to consider environmental anxiety to be a psychopathological condition, similar to, for example, generalized anxiety disorder? Some authors caution against such a narrow demarcation of environmental anxiety. Wardell, for example, warns against the tendency of psycho-medical sciences to pathologise mental distress. She suggests that we move beyond ‘illness narratives’ and try to understand environmental distress not as pathology but as a technology diagnosis of the planet; a “way in which the body and mind bear witness to the external realities” of climate change. This view is echoed by a number of psychologists and psychotherapists who refuse to see environmental anxiety as a disease or disorder, preferring to describe it as a “perfectly normal and healthy reaction”Footnote 2 to the challenges posed by global environmental change.Footnote 3

Among these dissenting voices, the work of Maria Ojala stands out as particularly relevant to the argument we wish to present in this paper. She argues for the use of the conceptual framework of existential philosophy and existential therapy, which allows the mood of environmental anxiety to be interpreted as a subset of existential anxiety, thus excluding it from the category of psychological disorders. This then allows Ojala to draw on Tillich’s The Courage to Be and define environmental anxiety as a rational and constructive response to threats to the values that an individual considers important and also as a threat to the subjectively constituted meaning. This leads her to call environmental anxiety a “mature way of facing one’s responsibility as a human” (Ojala, 2021: 39). Understood in this way, anxiety can be a beneficial mood for humans in that it leads them to adopt a more responsible approach to the natural world. Ojala even goes so far as to call it a moral feeling (Ojala, 2005). The inclusion of environmental anxiety in the theoretical framework of existential philosophy is not as surprising as it might seem, given the fact that it was authors such as Kierkegaard, Heidegger, Sartre, and Tillich who brought this mood to the forefront of philosophical inquiry.

Environmental Anxiety Through the Lens of Existential Philosophy and Phenomenology

The cursory conceptual analysis revealed that environmental anxiety is, at its core, a concern about a future unspecified threat and that it can be a natural or even beneficial affective response. This, of course, is not a new discovery made by any of the contemporary scholars mentioned above. That is because most of them draw, directly or indirectly, on insights already made by Søren Kierkegaard almost two centuries ago. In his well-known book The Concept of Anxiety, the Danish (proto)existentialist ascribed very similar attributes to anxiety: he writes that “it is a nothing that can only bring anxiety,” and immediately adds that anxiety is “altogether different from fear and similar concepts that refer to something definite” (Kierkegaard, 1980: 42). It was thanks to Kierkegaard that philosophers realised that anxiety is the only mood that has no object. And it is precisely this indeterminacy or non-intentionality of anxiety — as Heidegger, Tillich, Sartre and other existential-phenomenological thinkers would later note — that makes it not only unique among other moods but also beneficial to human beings. This is because, according to these thinkers, anxiety has a powerful revelatory (in Heidegger’s words ‘disclosing’) potential. In the view of Heidegger, anxiety discloses the innermost structure of Being-in-the-world. For both Kierkegaard and Sartre, anxiety reveals the boundlessness of human freedom, while Tillich argues that anxiety exposes and calls into question the three most fundamental existential domains that are defined by the ways in which non-being poses a threat to being (these are the domains of fate and death, emptiness and meaninglessness, and the moral domain of guilt and condemnation) (Tillich, 1980: 41). Existential philosophy and phenomenology thus take a rather pragmatic view of anxiety, as does existential psychology. The attempt to see anxiety as ‘useful’ can also be found in the writings of authors such as Frankl, May and Yalom.

The question that will interest us now is whether environmental anxiety might have a similar revelatory potential. The following two chapters will argue that it does, in the sense that, at the ontic level, it reveals (i) the intrinsic inhospitality of the natural world beyond human control, and then, at the ontological level, that (ii) it reveals the emptiness and meaninglessness of human life in the face of the environmental crisis. The purpose of the following pages is to clarify these two main existential features of environmental anxiety.

The First Existential Aspect of Environmental Anxiety: the (re)Discovery of the Inhospitality of the Natural World

Let us begin with the first existential aspect of environmental anxiety. This aspect emerges upon the realisation that the experience of anxiety involves a radical reversal of the way in which an individual relates to the natural world, and how the natural world in turn reveals itself to the individual.

Over the past few centuries, people in the global North have grown accustomed to perceiving the natural world in largely aesthetic categories. Both cultivated and wild nature have become places of recreation and leisure that have long since lost their threatening quality. This aestheticization of nature is not a new phenomenon but has deep roots in the past. The natural world became an aesthetic object as early as antiquity, as evidenced by the idealization of rural life in the picturesque countryside preserved in Hellenistic bucolic poetry (Stibral, 2008: 6). Despite this growing sensitivity to the aesthetic qualities of the natural world, many aspects of nature continued to be seen as threatening and dangerous to human survival throughout the ancient, medieval and early modern periods. Until the late Middle Ages, the landscapes of western and central Europe were covered by woodlands, while the non-wooded areas were marshes and swamps.Footnote 4 Villages were surrounded by deep forests that provided food and fuel (Gurevich, 1985: 42), but were also home to wild beasts and all sorts of natural hazards, which often took on mythical guises in the psyche of medieval people.Footnote 5 Nature was something to be revered with awe and trepidation. As Coates eloquently puts it, the forest, and by extension nature itself, is seen by medieval people as a “mysterious place of exile and hardship (Coates, 1998:40). All this is to say that nature was not only viewed through an aesthetic lens but also treated with respect.

We also have to keep in mind that the application of aesthetic categories to nature, and to landscape in particular, is a socially and culturally conditioned phenomenon. Ethnographic research would suggest that not all traditional and indigenous cultures perceive landscape as an aesthetic object. For example, Brzáková mentions that during her ethnographic research, she was told by an Evenk man that “[n]ature and the weather are not to be praised,” that they “are neither beautiful nor good, just as they are neither ugly nor bad” (Brzáková, 2003: 142). The same tendencies - albeit on a much smaller scale - could also be observed in Western society. It is well documented that today’s widespread aesthetic interest in mountains in Europe dates back only to the eighteenth century, and even then, mountainous landscapes were not universally appreciated. Despite the growing interest in the beauty of European wilderness, Diderot wrote in his Philosophical Reflections on the Origin and Nature of Beauty that “forests, mountains, abysses” might appeal to people in paintings, but never in reality.Footnote 6 A medieval peasant would probably have perceived uncultivated nature as a dangerous place that served a purely practical rather than an aesthetic function. The vast expanses of wild nature that covered much of medieval Europe were seen primarily as a source of raw materials or as a hunting ground, not as a place for a peaceful evening stroll.

But this is not to say that humans perceive nature as threatening by default. The idea of ‘nature as threat,’ reinforced in Western culture by Darwin’s theory of natural selection, is arguably as much a social construct as the notion of ‘aesthetically pleasing nature’. Over the millennia, different cultures have perceived nature to varying degrees as both a threat and an aesthetic object. Hesiod’s poetry may have well captured the idyllic beauty of pastoral life, but that does not mean that many of his countrymen were not frightened by nature that lay beyond the city walls. Now, what is interesting is that it was around the time of the Industrial Revolution that the aesthetic view of nature began to dominate in the West (Cooper, 2005: 96; Coates, 1998:110, 134). From the 18th century onwards, with the advance of science and technology, most of these threats were mitigated and Western societies began to perceive nature less as a threat and more as an aesthetic object. Europeans, in particular, were captivated by the romantic idea of “resuming contact with a re-enchanted nature” (Coates, 1998: 125).

We want to argue that environmental anxiety is unique in the sense that it allows for this veil of aestheticism to be lifted from the face of nature so that modern people can once again see its threatening qualities. Environmental anxiety problematises the natural world, allowing it to reveal itself as an inhospitable and hostile environment. This revelation is particularly powerful in Western industrial-technological culture, which, by forgetting this threatening aspect of nature, has lost its reverence for the natural world and has therefore become inconsiderate towards it.

Such an argument may at first seem to go against the grain of the current literature on environmental anxiety. The often-cited research by Cunsolo and Ellis defines environmental distress (which they understand as a broad cluster of emotions that includes environmental anxiety) as the anguish experienced by the person who witnesses the degradation or destruction of a place to which they feel a strong personal connection (Cunsolo & Ellis, 2018). The same sense of bereavement over the loss of one’s home environment is echoed in Albrecht’s widely used notion of solastalgia.Footnote 7 Put simply, contemporary research would suggest that environmental distress in general, and environmental anxiety in particular, arises from the fear of losing a particular natural place to which one feels a kinship, rather than from perceiving that place as threatening. But here it has to be said that these two views are not mutually exclusive. That is because one may mourn the loss of a beloved natural environment and at the same time feel threatened by that very same environment as it is in the course of being significantly altered by climate change or industrial development.Footnote 8

In light of the above, it would be misleading to suggest that environmental anxiety reveals some hitherto hidden, inhospitable side of nature. Rather, it is the case that environmental anxiety allows the modern urban individual to fully recollect or remember this unwelcoming aspect of nature. The natural world reveals itself once again as that which is threatening – it becomes a force that can radically disrupt the course of everyday life. Viewed through the lens of environmental anxiety, a mountain stream is seen not only as a picturesque natural sight but also as an uncontrolled and potentially destructive force of nature. This moment of recollection, it will be argued, has serious existential implications.

To fully understand these implications, we must look back to early modern aesthetic debates surrounding the feeling of the sublime. That is because the human experience of the barren and often unwelcoming and terrifying side of nature is not a new topic for philosophy, but has already been addressed by Burke, Kant, Schopenhauer and many other thinkers. In both the sense of the sublime and the feeling of environmental anxiety, the natural world suddenly appears to the observer as an inhospitable and alien place. But despite this similarity, environmental anxiety differs from the feeling of the sublime in one crucial aspect - and it is this aspect that makes it an existential mood.

So, where do we find this important difference? In Kant’s Critique of Judgment, we read that nature can only appear “dynamically sublime” when it is viewed as an “object of fear,” that is, only if it is experienced as inhospitable (Kant, 1987: 119). In this respect, the feeling of the sublime and environmental anxiety could be seen as identical. Kant adds, however, that unbridled nature, “thunderclouds […], hurricanes with all the devastation they leave behind,” arouse in us a sense of the sublime only if we are aware of the threatening nature of these phenomena, while at the same time knowing that we are independent of nature and have superiority over it (Kant, 1987: 93). Kant’s most faithful disciple, Schopenhauer, takes a similar view when he writes that the inhospitable nature, the “rushing, foaming masses of water, complete desert,” can only evoke a sense of the sublime if one remains “unshaken and unconcerned” in the face of their enormity and frightfulness, i.e., when “personal affliction does not gain the upper hand” (Schopenhauer, 1969: 204). Now, what is crucial to understand here is that it is precisely this sense of calm and a sense of control that a person experiencing environmental anxiety never feels. Instead, an anxious person feels an intense sense of loss of control. The monumentality of nature does not inspire sublime wonder. The confrontation with untamed natural phenomena no longer serves as a Kantian touchstone of the faculties of human reason but rather suggests that reason may be inadequate in dealing with nature. This is where we find the difference. In contrast to the feeling of the sublime, environmental anxiety is accompanied by a strong sense of helplessness.

Where does this sense of loss of control come from? The first reason is obvious: environmental anxiety is a reaction to extreme natural phenomena over which society, let alone the individual, simply has no control. The second reason is more difficult to identify, but it can be uncovered with the help of existential phenomenology. As mentioned earlier, what makes existential anxiety so unique - and what makes it so difficult to endure - is the fact that it is indeterminate or non-specific. The anxious individual does not worry about any one particular thing. In Heidegger’s words, “anxiety does not ‘see’ any definite ‘here’ or ‘yonder’ from which it comes,” the specificity of anxiety is that what threatens us “is nowhere” (Heidegger, 2001: 231). On the other hand, all that is concrete (Heideggerian Zuhandensein and Vorhandensein) loses its meaning. The world “has the character of completely lacking significance” and ceases to be a place in which one can comfortably dwell (Heidegger, 2001: 231). It is in this context that Heidegger speaks of Dasein which, because of anxiety, is removed from its “tranquillized familiarity” and is thrown into “uncanniness”. Dasein, which is beset by anxiety, is no longer comfortable in the world (Heidegger, 2001: 234).

Although environmental anxiety differs in many ways from Heideggerian existential anxiety, it is undeniable that both moods are permeated by the same affective dynamic.Footnote 9 This is because the environmentally anxious individual also finds it impossible to dwell comfortably in tranquil familiarity and instead perceives their environment—be it nature, the biosphere, or the entire ecosystem—as that which is ‘threatening’. Now, one of the main reasons why the anxious individual perceives the environment as inhospitable is because he or she is unable to identify the specific place the threat is coming from. One feels uncomfortable in the environment because the threat can basically come from anywhere (“anxiety attacks us from all sides at once,” to use the words of Rollo May) (May, 1996: 207). For example, if an individual is concerned about a particular adverse natural phenomenon caused by climate change, such as a hurricane or drought, then one could no longer speak of environmental anxiety, simply because the ability to specify that which is ‘threatening’ indicates that one is experiencing environmental fear, not anxiety. However, if one is afraid of a hurricane, one can simply move inland and thus reduce or even eliminate the fear. Environmental anxiety, on the other hand, is not so easy to escape. One participant in a psychological study expressed this very feeling of inescapable and indeterminate worry in the following words: “I can’t explain what happens to me. There is something wrong with life and I can’t really take it anymore” (Bodnar, 2008: 505).

It may now be possible, at last, to answer the question of the origin of this feeling of helplessness. The anxious person feels that they have lost control over the inhospitable natural environment because they are unable to identify the precise source of their worries and therefore are unable to deal with the problem in any constructive way. Environmental anxiety is a feeling of powerlessness in the face of a natural world suddenly stripped of all aesthetic and comforting qualities. This is the first existential characteristic of the mood.

The Second Existential Aspect of Environmental Anxiety Loss of Meaningfulness

We now come to the second existential aspect of environmental anxiety, namely the loss of subjective meaning experienced by the anxious individual. As evidenced in psychological research, environmental anxiety is a widely prevalent mood (Hickman, 2021). As the following paragraphs will show, it is also a mood that is experienced with great intensity, often taking on catastrophic or even apocalyptic proportions. It will be argued that it is precisely this catastrophism that makes environmental anxiety so unique among the other environmental emotions. And because these catastrophic environmental anxieties are vague and persistent, they can often lead to the loss of subjective meaning.

The apocalyptic worries that accompany environmental anxiety are usually not very specific – they tend to manifest themselves as an intense premonition that some unspecified catastrophe of immense proportions will occur in the future. Glenn Albrecht calls this feeling global dread and compares it to the sense of threat and uncertainty experienced by people in war zones (Albrecht, 2019: 80). It should be noted that the apocalyptic aspect of environmental anxiety is not only emphasized by philosophers but also supported by psychological research (Budziszewska, 2021). Soutar and Wand note that in several psychological studies when participants were asked about their feelings about climate change, terms such as “catastrophe” and “apocalypse” were among the most frequently used (Soutar & Wand, 2022).

It goes without saying that apocalyptic worries are not a novel phenomenon; they have plagued humanity for millennia. Of particular importance in the environmental context are the various types of medieval Christian apocalypticism and millennialism, which often manifested themselves in the form of concerns about natural disasters, not unlike the possible effects of the current ecological crisis. The Book of Revelation describes devastating storms, earthquakes, the extinction of aquatic life, great fires and the pollution of waterways.Footnote 10 Such apocalyptic visions are, of course, not unique to Christianity. The apocryphal Hebrew Book of Enoch also links the downfall of humanity with the destruction of the natural world (Deane-Drummond, 2008: 165). Such nature-related apocalyptic concerns have always been present in social discourse to a greater or lesser extent. It is not surprising, then, that the imagery and symbolism contained in both Christian and Jewish apocalyptic narratives often seep into environmental discourse. A well-known example is the Greenpeace protest held during the 2009 UN Climate Change Conference, during which activists dressed up as the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (Skrimshire, 2013).

Despite all this, contemporary environmental apocalypticism remains unique in many respects. Smith stresses that the key difference is that modern individuals fully understand that they have the power to potentially bring about the end of their world (Smith, 2011). Medieval peasants may have feared the events depicted in the Book of Revelation or the Black Plague, but they did not live with the knowledge that the impending global catastrophe was – to a considerable extent – their own fault. Of course, it could be argued that even Christian dogma sees the apocalypse as a punishment for human sin and therefore does not entirely absolve the individual of guilt. However, while Christianity assumes that it is God who punishes people for their sins, the modern individual experiencing environmental anxiety understands that the punishment is actually self-imposed.

The fact that environmental anxiety is accompanied by worries about a possible global catastrophe (for which one feels partly responsible) is not insignificant. On the contrary, the apocalyptic aspect of environmental anxiety makes this mood truly unique and existentially relevant, for it is precisely the threat of a global catastrophe that can deprive an anxious individual of faith in the meaning of their life. Once again, this existential aspect of environmental anxiety can be best seen in contrast to the mood of fear: whereas environmental fear affects people only at the ontic level, environmental anxiety is felt at the deeper ontological level. This can be illustrated with a simple example: if I experience environmental fear and I am afraid of bushfires then I am worried about the negative impact of this natural phenomenon on the particular area in which I am currently located. In this case, I am worried about my own health, the health of my loved ones or about the loss of my material possessions. On the other hand, when I experience environmental anxiety, my concerns are much more profound. This is because apocalyptic environmental anxiety is accompanied by a worry about an unspecified disruption of the external processes that keep society running and give meaning and order to everyday life. It is possible that social institutions and other support structures may fail due to the increasingly severe problems caused by climate change. So why even try, when modern society (which provides the framework for the meaning of modern human life) may not even exist in the next hundred years? I can only perceive my life as meaningful if I am able to project myself into the future. Environmental anxiety, however, lets us know that this future may never arrive. It is a mood that, as Stolorow aptly puts it, “announces the collapse of all meaningfulness” (Stolorow, 2021: 121).

Modern apocalyptic environmental concerns can then take various forms. In popular culture, they often manifest as dystopian visions of a world devoid of fundamental humanistic values. In this context, one can think of McCarthy’s novel The Road, which describes in a very realistic way the collapse of a technologised society as a result of an unspecified cataclysmic event.Footnote 11 The book and its subsequent film adaptation detail the consequences of a fictional social breakdown. In McCarty’s post-apocalyptic world, the social contract no longer holds, and lawlessness gives way to extreme violence. In this respect, popular culture can serve as an ‘incubator’ for catastrophic fictions. In doing so, it substitutes for the role played until recently by religious texts in not only feeding but, to a large extent, shaping the environmental anxieties of modern humans. These anxieties are indefinite: in McCarthy’s novel, the reader is never told when and how the collapse occurred. That is because such details are irrelevant – what matters is conveying to the reader the sense that a catastrophe of similar proportions could happen at any time, more or less, and that it could happen to them in particular. Anxiety then lies in this constant expectation of a disaster. One does not know when the catastrophe will come, nor what form it will take, but one is almost certain that it will occur. It must be clear by now that life, seen from the perspective of these vague catastrophic worries, must naturally appear to the individual as meaningless, as absurd.

In this respect, environmental anxiety comes very close to Tillich’s category of anxiety about ‘emptiness and meaninglessness’. The German existentialist describes this type of anxiety as a mood caused by the loss of an answer to the “question of the meaning of existence, “which can arise from both internal processes and external circumstances (Tillich, 1980: 47). Such a loss of the meaning of existence is deeply felt. It is not as simple as losing one’s joy of life for a brief moment. Tillich writes that the anxious person literally falls into the ‘abyss of meaninglessness’. The absence of meaning is then accompanied by existential apathy and difficulty in finding purpose in everyday activities. This state of utter meaninglessness is nicely described by one of the readers of the popular ecological book The Uninhabitable Earth, who writes: “This book led me down the path to an existential crisis. Why bother to keep on living? Why care about the environment? It’s all going to end with an uninhabitable planet, so recycling aluminium cans and plastic just seems like a big waste”.Footnote 12

What Tillich didn’t anticipate, however, was that the anxiety about emptiness and meaninglessness could become a collective and ubiquitous mood. This is what makes environmental anxiety unique – it makes a significant part of the world’s population reflect on the ontological dimension of human existence. In the face of the ecological crisis, people of all cultures and social classes are beginning to question the meaning of their own lives and even the possibility of their own death. Environmental anxiety is a universal human attunement. It is not only Heidegger and the small circle of his readers who are privileged to dwell in the authentic mode of being-unto-death, but everyone can now become aware of their finitude (at least to a limited extent). However, it is important to note that while environmental anxiety seems to have a similar negative transformative effect on people from all walks of life, all ethnicities and socio-economic backgrounds in both the Global North and the Global South,Footnote 13 the material impacts of the global environmental crisis are not felt equally across the board, with populations in the Global South bearing the brunt of the burden.Footnote 14 But even those in privileged positions, who may not feel the effects of climate change as acutely, feel the urgency of the situation. This is evidenced by the fact that the anxious person often not only problematizes their own existence but also that of future generations, as concerns about the effects of the climate crisis are discouraging more and more people of reproductive age in economically more developed countries from having children (Schneider-Mayerson, 2020).

Now that we have outlined the two most prominent existential characteristics of environmental anxiety, we can shift our focus and consider some of the ways that environmental anxiety can be addressed. First, it has to be said that environmental anxiety is not an easy mood to deal with. This is because it is indeterminate (i.e., not related to any specific threat), which makes it very difficult for the anxious person to confront or escape it. Environmental fear, in Tillich’s words, can be ‘faced with courage’. Anxiety, however, offers no such possibility. One can only face those things that one sees clearly and distinctly.

At the same time, however, the vagueness of anxiety is a blessing in disguise. It is precisely because environmental anxiety is indeterminate, overbearing, and very difficult to escape that the anxious person feels compelled to find ways to alleviate the emotional distress that the anxiety constantly causes. We want to argue that although environmental anxiety cannot be confronted directly like environmental fear, the indeterminate unease that anxiety engenders can be overcome by embracing a specific form of environmental hope. We are by no means suggesting that there is a causal relationship between anxiety and hope, i.e., that the experience of environmental anxiety ‘automatically’ motivates the individual to adopt a hopeful attitude. Research indicates that attempts to motivate pro-environmental action through negative (‘dark’ or ‘maladaptive’) emotions such as fear or guilt are generally ineffective.Footnote 15 Instead, we will argue that experiencing and ‘working through’ environmental anxiety and the hardships that accompany it opens up the possibility of embracing a new, more profound form of hope. We will call this deeper kind of hope radical hope and suggest that if the anxious person chooses to embrace it, it might help them to alleviate the distress caused by environmental anxiety and help to inspire pro-environmental behaviour. In so arguing, we follow Milton’s and Hathaway’s simple but profound observation that people do not actually act out of fear, but mostly “act in order to feel better” (Milton, 2008; Hathaway, 2017). As we will see, radical environmental hope does not necessarily eradicate all traces of environmental anxiety, but is very effective in providing the anxious person with a positive vision of the future that allows him or her to take a proactive approach to addressing the environmental crisis.

Environmental Hope

“So if you feel defeated or disheartened about the climate, I say: Good. Embrace your despair. And then step into the hope of your next move,” reads the final paragraph of David Montgomery’s essay “The Search for Environmental Hope” in The Washington Post (Montgomery, 2021). The aim of the second part of the paper is to show, with the help of Kierkegaard’s proto-existentialist philosophy, that anxiety-induced meaninglessness does not have to be the only response to the climate crisis. For one can also respond with hope, and in hope, one can try to create an entirely new meaning.

We will begin with a brief overview of how environmental hope is discussed in interdisciplinary research, looking closely at three different psychological, theological, and philosophical interpretations of this mood. These, together with Kierkegaard’s Christian Discourses and his other seminal texts, will serve as the basis for introducing an existentially grounded notion of environmental hope capable of motivating pro-environmental behaviour.

Environmental Hope in Contemporary Interdisciplinary Research: Does it Make Sense to Recycle Aluminium Cans?

Much of environmental literature follows a similar scenario: first, the author presents the current alarming situation - often with highly emotive references to the threat of extinction of entire species - in order to paint a grand picture of the future dystopia toward which humanity is inevitably heading.Footnote 16 The final pages then offer the proverbial ‘light at the end of the tunnel’ in the form of hope for new redemptive technologies, conscious politicians, or the will of the governments in the global North.Footnote 17 Environmental theologians tend to anchor their ‘light’ in the heavens, hoping for divine providence or miraculous intervention from above (Moe-Lobeda, 2017). Philosophers typically locate environmental issues in the moral realm, where hope comes in the form of human frugality, the elimination of consumerism, or a radical rethinking of the human relationship to nature (Kohák, 1998). As they see it, humanity is now to be a benevolent steward of the planet, not its owner (Kohák, 2016). We want to argue that hope is more than a moral concept and that it is also possible to understand it in terms of the phenomenology of existence, that is, as an existential attunement that extends to the level of meaning and can change one’s relationship with the natural world. After all, the aforementioned founding figures of existential philosophy and logotherapy, Yalom and Frankl, understand such hope as linked to the meaning of one’s own being. Thus, while environmental anxiety reveals nature’s inhospitality and is simultaneously an anxiety about meaninglessness, environmental hope could be said to (i) connect individuals to the world through participation and (ii) be intimately linked to meaningfulness. The new existential concept of hope will thus be developed with reference to studies that present a different perspective on environmental hope from the moral rhetoric described above.

Let us begin with the psychological approach to environmental hope. In a survey conducted in 2012, Ojala asked children and adolescents how they were coping with climate change, and an average of 16% of the respondents said that they were relying on some kind of hope (Ojala, 2012a: 552). Ojala called this particular form of hope “existential,” describing it as the child’s attempt to “think in an optimistic […] way about the problem” (Ojala, 2012a: 547). Respondents, whose way of coping with climate change included existential hope, were acutely aware of the threat of environmental change, but chose to focus on “positive aspects” emphasizing in their responses that they believed the “problem will probably be solved in the future” (Ojala, 2012a: 552). They described hope as a necessary shift in perspective on the climate crisis, explaining that the reason they feel hope is simply because “they feel hope” (Ojala, 2012a: 552), associating it with the meaning of life and claiming that without hope, they see “no reason to live” (Ojala, 2012a: 552). By hoping for an unspecified - yet qualitatively better - future, existential hope alleviated their worries and allowed them to see the situation in a more positive light. But if we accept such a definition and if we hope that the climate crisis will ‘somehow’ be solved in the future, will such a hope keep us passive instead of motivating us to act? Why should one ‘recycle aluminium cans’ if the future already has a solution? This tentative - and somewhat vague - notion of existential hope as an ‘optimistic vision of a better future’ therefore needs to be fleshed out.

This can be done - it will be argued - by understanding hope for a better future in Kierkegaardian terms as an expectation of the good: “to hope is to expect the possibility of the good, but the possibility of the good is the eternal,” writes Kierkegaard (Kierkegaard, 1998: 250). Hope, in Christian terms, can only relate itself to the Good. The Good that is anchored in eternity. Ruby Guyatt tells us that when our expectation - our hope for a better future - extends to eternity, such hope gives us the strength to strive for the manifestation of infinite goodness in a finite world and one can do this without being deterred by the apparent powerlessness of one’s actions (Guyatt, 2020: 6). The sailor on the ship looks not into the waves, which are constantly changing, but up at the stars, which seem eternal [and by which he orients himself] (Kierkegaard, 1990: 19). The Good we expect is then, according to Kierkegaard, constantly anticipated by our existence, whereby hope becomes a practice, namely, the practice of anticipating the eternal Good by means of our finite existence. Such a practice of hope, through which the Good anchored in eternity is continually being actualized, then refutes the consequentialist view that threatens to demotivate the individual (Guyatt, 2020: 7). Environmental theologians, however, warn of the danger of anchoring such a Good in eternity: for it may, in turn, become the source of a ‘crisis of hope’ (Robinson, 2020: 1).

In contemporary society, nature is stripped of all sacredness and serves humanity as a mere resource, while God and the sacred are placed in the transcendental realm, beyond the boundaries of the natural and human world. The hierarchy thus established has contributed to many of the problems facing modern society. This leads Timothy Robinson to argue (though not very originally) that Christian hope must stop placing God in the transcendental realm and must instead return God to the secular realm and reconnect God with human beings. Any virtuous action in the context of nature conservation is then to be understood as good in itself, not as a means to a desirable end. The Kantian postulate may therefore be crucial in thinking about hope in the context of the climate crisis. One is often overwhelmed by a lack of faith that one’s actions can make a difference in the midst of such a global crisis. In the words of the reader of The Uninhabitable Earth quoted above, that ‘recycling aluminium cans and plastic just seems like a big waste’. But when one stops focusing on the outcome, one can make hope a reality through one’s actions. Robinson builds on Tillich when he argues that we actually engage in socially beneficial behaviour without hoping for its results, thus becoming “more human,” creating “space for the experience of God’s reign in the present” (Robinson, 2020: 10). But to stick with our theme, one could say that by ‘recycling aluminium cans and plastics’ one also creates hope. And even Guyatt has to in the end compromise on eternity if she wants to talk about the pro-environmental practice of hope. She draws attention to one of Kierkegaard’s analogies of hope, which does not place the good in eternity (Guyatt, 2020: 10). In Works of Love, Kierkegaard writes of a doctor who “brings the best gift, better than all his medications and even better than all his care,” – this gift is hope, it is when “people say: The physician has hope” (Kierkegaard, 1998: 259). In other words, the good of non-Christian hope, while still limited to the realm of the finite, can at the same time offer a vision that can give value to human action. And moreover, as Kierkegaard writes, in the “same degree to which [one] hopes for others, [one] hopes for [oneself] (Kierkegaard, 1998: 255). This leads Guyatt to conclude that for young climate activists in particular, such hope represents a shared vision that can empower entire communities to act despite the potential obstacles along the way. A similar sentiment can be observed in Ojala’s research, where hope also emerges as an effective strategy for pro-environmental action (Ojala, 2012a). Moreover, the empowering effect of hope is also reflected in environmental didactics, especially in transgressive teaching or post-critical pedagogy (Ojala, 2016; Schwimmer, 2019). Hope, which both Robinson and Guyatt subordinate to the ethical realm and which, as a practice, becomes an expectation of a universally shared immanent good, thus seems instrumental in addressing the environmental crisis. Such hope makes it possible to ‘recycle cans’ without being discouraged by the poor results of one’s actions.

There is another aspect of hope that may seem somewhat banal but is nonetheless essential for our argument. Robinson briefly mentions this aspect of hope when he encourages the reader to rethink the relationship between humanity, nature, and the sacred. He argues that before doing so, one first has to accept the situation in which one finds oneself, accept the seriousness of the climate crisis and acknowledge that a return to the previous state of affairs is simply not possible (Robinson, 2020: 2). In other words, Robinson is saying that it is necessary to accept hopelessness without hoping for a miracle from above. As will be argued in the final section of our paper, this aspect of hope is equally important for Kierkegaard.

But before going any further, it must first be said that Kierkegaard does not discuss hope systematically in any of his texts, whether pseudonymous or veronymous. Therefore, in order to (re)construct his concept of hope, it is necessary to read between the lines of the Danish philosopher’s writings (Bernier, 2015: 3). Guyatt does this in part, but since the main thrust of her argument comes from the Works of Love chapter “Love Hopes all Things-and yet is Never Put to Shame,” she does not sufficiently emphasize the crucial fact that acceptance of hopelessness is a prerequisite for authentic hope. So, if we want to fully grasp environmental hope as an existential mood, we will have to look to other Kierkegaardian texts than the Works of Love.

The Two Kinds of Environmental Hope in Existential Philosophy

If we are to talk about hope that has the potential to alleviate anxiety and encourage pro-environmental behaviour, we must first make the important distinction between two very different kinds of hope. The first kind can be understood as an optimistic vision of a better future, which serves to diminish one’s worries - it is a hope that turns out to be rather passive and utopian. Of the second kind, Tillich writes that it is an active hope that would be devaluated by being called “wishful thinking or utopian fantasy” (Tillich, 1990: 182).

Following Kant’s question ‚What may I hope for?,’ philosophers have often understood hope as an illusion, a form of self-deception that a person clings to and protects in order to avoid having to accept reality as it is. Camus’ Sisyphus is living proof that hope leaves a human being ignorant of the absurdity of one’s finite existence amidst the meaninglessness of the world, while Sisyphus is to accept his boulder, his fate. Nietzsche, on the other hand, speaks of hope as the greatest of all evils hidden at the bottom of Pandora’s box, which humanity guards like a treasure in order to preserve the last remnants of the desirable worldview (Nietzsche, 1996: 45). Hope keeps Nietzsche’s readers in ‘eternal truths’ of their own making. Environmental hope can also take this form. Such a hope then enables one to hold on to the idea of a world that does not change, an idea of life that is everlasting. Even Kierkegaard knows such hope, speaking of it in Fear and Trembling as being assured in its “childlike naiveté and innocence” (Kierkegaard, 1983: 47). The hope described above as passive or utopian is, according to Kierkegaard (or technically Johannes de Silentio), the hope of “fools and young people,” who “say that everything is possible for a human being,” because of their lack of experience and awareness of reality (Kierkegaard, 1983: 44). The naively hopeful individual hopes because they do not know, do not understand the difficulty of the task before them; they do not understand the terrifying reality in which they find themselves. Elsewhere, in the chapter “The Joy of it” such a hope is considered a dream life, the dream of youth, the hope of sleepwalkers, those whose “innermost being, that which in the deepest sense is the person, is sleeping” (Kierkegaard, 2009: 108). This naïve hope, in the context of the climate crisis, is the hope for all those desirable solutions offered by many environmental researchers – be it new technologies, political will, an all-powerful God or perhaps the self-healing process of Gaia. Certainly, one or the other, or a combination of both, can help to solve the climate crisis, but they can also serve to deepen individual passivity, to deepen irresponsibility. Naïve hope could keep one in the illusion that the situation is not so dire, that it will ‘somehow be solved’. Such a hope, after all, seems to be the one described by Ojala. Note that she also talks about the existential hope of children and young adults, describing it as a hope that alleviates worries and leads to a belief that environmental problems will be solved in the future.

But then there is the other kind of hope. We see it when Jonathan Lear writes of radical hope in the context of the cultural catastrophe of the Crow Indians, who faced the absolute end of their previous way of life. He does not call their hope ‘childishly naïve,’ nor does he see it as the hope of ‘sleepwalkers’ (Lear, 2006). Instead, in Lear’s text we can read an explicit reference to Abraham’s teleological suspension of the ethical (Lippitt, 2015: 134f.). This radical hope transcended any previous knowledge of the good that was to be built on the relics of the good that belonged to the old world. Abraham held on to a paradoxical hope, which he gained after giving up on all other hopes, after the teleological suspension of the ethical. And finally, even Kierkegaard speaks of such a hope, albeit in much less grand terms, in the chapter “The Joy of it”. He writes that one can (but does not have to) be awakened from this dream life, which then brings about the end of the dream, the end of childlike ‘innocence’. But what can awaken a person?

Here we come to the central part of our argument. Kierkegaard’s hope is undeniably an expectation of the good, it is a kind of practice, but at the same time it is also based on a hope that is passive, and above all it is a re-action – a reaction to the catastrophe, the terrible task that must be done in fear and trembling – it is a clairvoyant response (not concealment or evasion) to the situation in which one finds oneself.Footnote 18

Kierkegaard writes that one awakens from the dream life and then comes hardship, which nevertheless “does not take away but procures hope” (Kierkegaard, 2009: 109). While these first hopes are taken away by hardship, the very same hardship leads to the discovery of another kind of hope. The former hopes are idle dreams, they are passive; the latter kind of hope turns out to be an active practice, activated and shaped by a re-action to hardship. Recall Robinson’s study, which suggested that one should not wait for a miracle from above but accept the situation as it is. Rejecting a particular form of hope that might perhaps ‘cure’ the symptoms of environmental anxiety opens up the possibility of embracing a different kind of hope that might help address its causes. Thus, perhaps, our only hope is the hope that “appears when the situation is beyond hope itself, or hopeless” (Gomes, 2000: xvii). The existence of such a causal relationship between hardship and hope is also alluded to by Joanna Macy. In the seminars she led in the late 1970s on issues of planetary survival, where she and her students began to engage in what she called despair work (later also known as ‘honoring pain for the world’), she advocated for an absolute surrender to hopelessness.Footnote 19 One must let go of accustomed assurances and stand “open like a wound to the travail of the world… naked to the terror of the unknown” hopeless future, she writes (Macy, 1995: 7). To put it even more figuratively, it is in this darkness that hope is born.

In Human, all too Human, Nietzsche writes of Pandora’s box, at the bottom of which lies the supposed greatest pleasure – hope. According to Nietzsche, however, hope is the greatest of all miseries, for it keeps one in the comfortable course of everyday life and allows one to ignore the reasons for action that might disturb one’s comfort. Note also that according to Nietzsche, such hope is readily available to everyone. He writes that the ‘box of good fortune’ at the bottom of which lies hope “stands at [one’s] service” and one “reaches for it when [one] desires to do so” (Nietzsche, 1996: 45). This seems to us a fitting characterization of passive environmental hope.

In Christian Discourses, Kierkegaard also writes of a box that contains the most precious treasure of all. But unlike Nietzsche, Kierkegaard does not believe that it is easy to see such a treasure. In this box, there is not only a treasure but also a spring. And in order to get at the treasure, sufficient pressure has to be exerted on the spring: “the spring is concealed, and the pressure must be of a certain force so that an accidental pressure cannot be sufficient” (Kierkegaard, 2009: 111). And that is how the energy of hope is stored in a human being, where only a sufficiently strong pressure can release it. Such a hope is no longer readily at ‘our service’ whenever we reach for it. No, it is only at our disposal when sufficient pressure is exerted in the form of hardship – only then the contents of the chest “appears in all its glory” (Kierkegaard, 2009: 111). So one should remember that “[t]here is a pressure that depresses, but there is also a pressure that elevates” (Kierkegaard, 2009: 113). Pressure, that can lead to environmental anxiety but also pressure that allows one to feel hope, an openness to the good that can perhaps become the shared vision that Guyatt wrote about. A hope, that is constantly realized through pro-environmental action (Head, 2016). A hope that binds one to the world and, as has already been said, is deeply connected to meaning. In other words, a hope that can create a meaningful future for humanity.

A new, meaningful future can come in many forms. Just like in the case of environmental anxiety, environmental hope allows us to look at the natural world with new eyes. And through the lens of hope, nature no longer has to be a threat or simply an aesthetic object, but can become something else entirely - for example, a subject to which we can relate. The intimate relationship (or one might say kinship) of embodied human subjectivity with nature is a major theme in contemporary ecophenomenology, with philosophers such as Abram, Liberman and others drawing on indigenous ecological knowledge to outline the various ways in which humans can relate meaningfully and compassionately to the natural world. All these fascinating but sometimes abstract speculations about future ideal worlds can then take on a more concrete form in the literary genre of green speculative fiction. Garforth’s book Green Utopias describes many different visions of future post-industrial green societies, in which nature is de-objectified and perceived not as a thing but as a companion, something with which people bond and try to create a more equal relationship.Footnote 20 It is not unthinkable that a person could take such a blueprint of an ideal future society and slowly work to transform it into reality with the help of radical hope.

So when one stops trying to console oneself with ideas of some miraculous solution to the climate crisis, one can start taking action. Let us conclude with the words of Timothy Morton, which may be the beginning of a Kierkegaardian-inspired notion of environmental hope: “We’re responsible for global warming. Formally responsible, whether or not we caused it, whether or not we can prove that we caused it. We’re responsible for global warming simply because we’re sentient. No more elaborate reason is required” (Morton, 2010: 98). What is important is to accept this knowledge in all its gravity and allow it to open up the possibility of radical hope.