**1. Introduction**

Children today know the earth and all its creatures are in trouble. They are born into life on a dying planet and increasingly demonstrate their awareness of this travesty through heightened levels of anxiety. Their "eco-anxiety" is a global phenomenon, not restricted to a single population of children, although intersectional identities and oppressions may amplify or blunt its effects among particular groups of children as well as its conscious articulation by them (Hickman et al. 2021, p. 106, ital. in original). This paper considers the phenomenon of children experiencing eco and climate anxiety through an ecofeminist practical theological lens. Recent attention to the differential effects of climate change on children calls for a recentering of ecological attention within theologies prioritizing the wellbeing of children.

Climate anxiety and eco-anxiety1, as used here, refer not only to the self-conscious articulation of angs<sup>t</sup> about the demise of the planet by children of affluence and privilege— children who are genuinely disturbed ye<sup>t</sup> protected from many of the direct effects of climate change. Eco-anxiety also stands as a descriptive category for the lived experiences of precarity faced by children bearing the brunt of climate change in the here-and-now of their lives. Ecofeminist theology brings the liberatory concerns of feminist theologies into engagemen<sup>t</sup> with those focused on the life of the planet, meaning that advocacy for children and for planetary solidarity both fit within its purposes.

Feminist practical theologies of childhood must take seriously children's lived realities of increased anxiety and precarity amid ecological changes that endanger all life. Such

**Citation:** Mercer, Joyce Ann. 2022. Children and Climate Anxiety: An Ecofeminist Practical Theological Perspective. *Religions* 13: 302. https://doi.org/10.3390/ rel13040302

Academic Editors: Pamela R. McCarroll and HyeRan Kim-Cragg

Received: 18 February 2022 Accepted: 29 March 2022 Published: 31 March 2022

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**Copyright:** © 2022 by the author. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ 4.0/).

theologies must bear witness to the particular suffering of children caused both by presentday ecological harms and by the erasure of a sustainable future for the earth caused by ecological degradation. My goals in this essay are modest: I first critique the absence of attention to the non-human creation in practical theologies of childhood. I then build on the work of two practical theologians, Jennifer Ayers and Annalet van Schalkwyk, to retrieve *oikos* as a particularly fruitful frame for ecological awareness and for addressing eco-anxiety in theological reflections concerned with the wellbeing of children. I then make a case for attending to children and eco-anxiety, first by identifying the particular vulnerabilities of children to the harmful effects of climate change and then by addressing a few common critiques. I conclude by calling upon practical theologians to take seriously children's experiences of eco-anxiety, and invite us to turn to the work of developing concrete, practical theological strategies to transform it in solidarity with the whole of God's creation.

#### **2. Treating Children as Extra-Terrestrial Beings**

Attention to the climate crisis and to children's lived realities of coping with it constitute critical elements for any contemporary theology of childhood. With some recent notable exceptions (see Hearlson 2021), a focus on children and climate change has been missing from many of these theological accounts, including my own (Mercer 2005a).<sup>2</sup> Collectively, those of us working at the intersections of childhood studies and Christian theology have confronted significant concerns in the lives of children, from violence against children to childhood poverty. We seem to have addressed these important matters, however, while inadvertently treating children as extra-terrestrial beings—creatures who reside in families and participate in faith communities that somehow stand outside of the realities impacting the wellbeing of the earth. As Bonnie Miller-McLemore exclaims about her changing consciousness, "Years ago, I argued for the 'living *human* web' as a better metaphor for pastoral theology's subject matter than the 'living *human* document'. . . But I seldom imagined its *nonhuman* extension. How did I miss this?"(Miller-McLemore 2020, p. 434, ital. in original).

To think theologically about childhood today requires recognition of this extended web. While I have argued elsewhere for theological anthropology formed around the "interrelatedness, interreliance, and contingency" of human beings with the non-human creation (Mercer 2017, p. 306), I have not brought these ecotheological interests into conversation with childhood. Pamela McCarroll (2020) critiques practical theology for its silence in the face of the climate crisis. She follows Panu Pihkala's (2020a) work on the dynamics of climate anxiety—which include denial and avoidance—to help explain this silence. In an effort to break through practical theological silence about children and the climate crisis, I first draw upon the work of Jennifer Ayres.

## **3. Making an** *Oikos* **for Children**

Ayres, a religious educator, makes a compelling case for combatting climate despair through religious education toward what she terms inhabitance. "An inhabitant is a creature who lives well within the context and bounds of its habitation. . . . An inhabitant desires and cultivates the wisdom necessary to live in God's world well" (Ayres 2019, pp. 2, 4). She notes that the root words for ecology, *oikos* (household, home, or habitation) and *logos* (logic or knowledge) render ecology as "the knowledge. . . of inhabiting" (Ayres 2019, p. 9). This "oikos" theme has been engaged by many in general discussions of ecotheology.<sup>3</sup> Inhabitance is a way of life conscious of human embeddedness within the non-human extension of the web proposed by Miller-McLemore. Ayres puts forward a vision of an "ecological theological anthropology" that understands the human vocation as "the work of inhabiting God's world well" (Ayres 2019, p. 9). Children have a "central role in awakening of the whole community to the gifts and responsibilities of inhabitance", writes Ayres (2019, pp. 120–21). Although she does not develop this point about children, her comment is a recognition that children can manifest ecological awareness inviting adult commitments that might otherwise be absent.

The *oikos* imaged by Ayres is one in which "together, human and nonhuman creatures are members of a household, a site of nurture and a site of obligation" (Ayres 2019, p. 8). Her description evokes constitutive notions of home—nurture and obligation (or responsibility)—that are central to children's lives. From an ecological standpoint, making a home for children situates them beyond what is generally understood to be a solely human web of connection, to recognize the presence and significance of those others making up the household—not only non-human creatures and plant life but also water, land, and air. These too participate in the nurture of children. Human household inhabitants (including children) have responsibilities to live well with the non-humans constituting their *oikos*. It is insufficient to view a child's development apart from this wider ecology. Accounting theologically for such expanded anthropology, then, requires adopting an "ecological faith [that] looks for patterns, relationships, and effects from the standpoint of an *embedded member* of the habitat" (Ayres 2019, p. 9).

I find Ayres' engagemen<sup>t</sup> of *oikos* and inhabitance as a theological description of an ecological way of life to be a helpful framework for thinking theologically about children. These guiding metaphors have special significance when brought to bear on childhood because of the power of "home" to so strongly define a child's world. Inhabitance makes clear that our ways of defining home have been too narrow, causing us to raise up children who think of home as an autonomously human habitation, unaware of their radical interdependence with non-human animals and the rest of the creation, and this ecology's role in constituting their very being.

Problematically, however, home- and household- metaphors contain historical, patriarchal associations with the subordination of women and children. Ecofeminism's theorizing of the connections between gender oppression and ecological harm is well known, analyzing the gendering of "nature" as feminine, with both women and nature treated as objects to be subdued and brought under control (Merchant 1980; Plumwood 1993). Under conditions of patriarchy, households become primarily consumer units ruled by the paterfamilias to whom other household members are subordinated. In the context of a discussion about ecology, household and home images risk reinscribing such oppressive meanings. Reimagining the *oikos* inhabited by children together with other non-human creatures thus necessitates a feminist retrieval of alternative meanings of *oikos* apart from such patriarchal and capitalist appropriations. In order to be of use in a liberatory ecological theology of childhood, the *oikos* must be reconfigured as an intentional connectional ecology that is life-giving for all.<sup>4</sup>

Feminist theologian Letty Russell pre-figured this contemporary ecological discussion more than three decades ago in an earlier work on feminist theology and authority in which she addressed the Greco-Roman *oikos*, "the arena of wives, slaves, and children ruled over by 'free' men" as "a household of bondage" (Russell 1987, p. 26). In place of such associations, Russell invokes "the biblical understanding of God's *oikonomia,* or householding of the whole earth" for which she uses the metaphor of a "household of freedom" as an "alternative translation of the phrase 'kingdom of God'" (Russell 1987, p. 26).<sup>5</sup> In the household of God, the logic of the *oikos* is not the logic of domination. An ecotheological perspective on childhood, drawn from this alternative, divine *oikonomia*, understands children and nurtures children's understanding of themselves as creatures situated within an *oikos*—par<sup>t</sup> of a much larger ecology of God's making and delight. This *oikos tou Theou* as a "household of freedom" cannot be freedom for its human inhabitants alone. In fact, one lesson embodied in children's more obvious creaturely vulnerability is the embedded status of human beings within an ecology (both human and non-human) that is home. Embeddedness means the wellbeing of all oikos-dwellers is contingent upon one another's welfare. Harm or oppression of members of the *oikos* limits the freedom and flourishing of all who dwell therein.

South African ecofeminist theologian Annalet Van Schalkwyk (2012) also draws upon the relationship between oikos and ecology in her work, describing the earth as the *oikos* of God. Her "Oikos Cycle of Care" transposes the Deep Ecology cycle of Arne Naess (1990) onto the familiar "Pastoral Circle" of pastoral and practical theology

(Henriot 2000; Wijsen et al. 2005). In the pastoral circle (which can constitute both a template for action in ministry and for the reflective work of practical theology), one moves from experience to questioning, then to commitment, and finally to action. The Deep Ecology movement's cycle describes a process of conversion that "alters one's life orientation from anthropocentric to biocentric"(Van Schalkwyk 2012, p. 106).

Van Schalkwyk connects "experience" in the pastoral circle to the Deep Ecology cycle's initial step of immersion in nature, through which one can experience "God's creative love and God's revelation in and through nature", with the subsequent realization of "coming to understand nature and how humanity is a part of nature" (Van Schalkwyk 2012, p. 108) The immersive experience and the awareness it engenders leads to *ecophilia* (loving nature). Mapping the Deep Ecology Cycle onto the second moment in the pastoral circle, questioning, Van Schalkwyk sees this as a place from which one's *ecophilia* generates a critical interrogation of human disregard for the wider ecology, raising questions such as, "If the ecology works in this wonderful way, they why does humanity ignore it, disregard and exploit it, and live in unsustainable ways? What is wrong with our understanding of our faith, if this is the way in which we relate to the ecology? What can be the solutions to these destructive ways? What are the theological alternatives?" (Van Schalkwyk 2012, p. 108).

These two movements issue into a third one that van Schalkwyk names as a "deep commitment to protect and heal the ecology. . . This is also a deep commitment of faith, because one's understanding of the place of the ecology—of which humanity is part— transforms the way one believes in the creator-Saviour God" (Van Schalkwyk 2012, p. 108). Such commitments involve the formation of eco-values, and an "understanding the wisdom of nature", or *ecosophia*. Deep commitments ultimately lead to an ethic of care and ecojustice, "the willingness to change one's actions, and to act with care and justice, so as to alter the way in which humanity relates to the ecology and to the *oikos*. Thus, it leads to a transformation of values and ethics" (Van Schalkwyk 2012, p. 108). Together, then, the experience, wisdom, and questioning bring about a conversion: a profound commitment to the created world that becomes embodied in actions of love toward the earth.

Feminist interpretations of the earth as the *oikos tou theou* resonate with the priority that home has in the lives of children and the need to reconstruct how human adults and children understand their relationship to this *oikos*. Both Ayres and van Schalkwyk offer clues toward the kind of conversion needed from a household of human domination and disregard of the non-human ecology to one of aware embeddedness.<sup>6</sup> Children are not extra-planetary creatures. They "live and move, and have their being " (Acts 17:28) within a living web of relationships, human and non-human, held within the lands and waters of the earth.
