ECO-ANXIETY, TRAGEDY, AND HOPE: PSYCHOLOGICAL AND SPIRITUAL DIMENSIONS OF CLIMATE CHANGE

By P. Pihkala. Zygon: Journal of Religion and Science, 2018

211 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This article addresses the problem of “eco-anxiety” by integrating results from numerous fields of inquiry. While climate change may cause direct psychological and existential impacts, already now vast numbers of people experience indirect impacts in forms of depression, socio-ethical paralysis, and loss of wellbeing. This is not always evident, because people have in response developed psychological and social defenses, including “socially constructed silence.” I argue that this situation causes the need to frame climate change narratives as emphasizing hope in the midst of tragedy. Framing the situation simply as a threat or a possibility does not work. Religious communities and the use of methods which include spirituality have an important role in enabling people to process their deep emotions and existential questions. I draw also from my experiences from Finland in enabling co-operation between natural scientists and theologians in order to address climate issues.

Subfields: Social Psychology, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/4dbd769e1f1f827a65757d32721b5e6c55e3e60e

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Social Psychology

1. P. Pihkala
2. Pihkala Panu
3. A. Cunsolo
4. Jacqueline Middleton
5. C. Ogunbode
6. M. Ojala
7. K. Stevenson
8. Nils Peterson

In Sociology and Political Science

1. P. Pihkala
2. Pihkala Panu
3. Jacqueline Middleton
4. A. Cunsolo
5. C. Ogunbode
6. M. Ojala
7. S. Clayton

Citations in the corpus

• Anxiety, Worry, and Grief in a Time of Environmental and Climate Crisis: A Narrative Review (2021, background): “Another way of looking at anxiety and worry in relation to environmental problems is from an existential perspective, where anxiety and worry are seen as rational, often constructive reactions to threats to important values that people embrace and as a mature way of facing one’s responsibility as a ”
• Anxiety and the Ecological Crisis: An Analysis of Eco-Anxiety and Climate Anxiety (2020, background): “However, eco-anxiety is actually not defined by scholars as an official disorder, although it is pointed out that strong forms of eco-anxiety can require mental health care [8,35,36,81].”
• Eco-Anxiety and Environmental Education (2020, background): “The questions of what is meant by hope, and whether it is good to use hope terms, have often been discussed in recent writings related to eco-anxiety and EE [57,66,98,198,233].”