*6.2. Pathologizing and Depoliticizing*

Some critics of the idea of eco-anxiety contend that it "medicalizes" and pathologizes what is actually an appropriate response to a crisis in which real harm occurs (Hickman 2020, p. 414). This assessment holds that using clinical terminology such as "complicated grief" to express how children manifest their sadness over the likely extinction of loggerhead sea turtles seems unlikely to contribute to planetary healing or help children. According to those who hold this concern, a focus on eco-emotions individualizes responsibility for ecological destruction and thereby depoliticizes actions for change. That is, talk of climate grief situates action for change on the griever and on internal healing to help them feel better, rather than on collective responses to address the structures and systems that perpetuate climate destruction and serve the needs of the other-than-human species at risk. Climate anxiety, according to its critics, may be little more than a condition of privileged people who have the luxury to "feel bad about polar bears or talk to therapists", because the real problems of the climate crisis are more abstract and distant from their actual lives. Pastoral theologian Ryan LaMothe points to global capitalism as a primary culprit, inviting simultaneous care for the internal worlds of people and the systems and structures of harm, as they are co-implicated in the suffering of all (LaMothe 2020, 2021).<sup>10</sup>

A related critique specifies that eco-anxiety exists as a phenomenon linked to whiteness and other forms of privilege (noted by McCarroll 2020; Ray 2021a), critiquing eco-anxiety discourse with the charge that the primary people who identify with it are not the ones most vulnerable to its effects (Ray 2021a). Such claims that the children displaced by extreme weather events or who experience environmentally-related health effects are not

the ones labeling their difficulties as eco-anxiety call into question the legitimacy of concern for children's eco-anxiety.

Sarah Jaquette Ray, the author of a popular 2020 book entitled *A Field Guide to Climate Anxiety,* studies the effects of climate change on people. A year after her book's publication, she wrote an opinion column in which she described being brought up short, "struck by the fact that those responding to the concept of climate anxiety are overwhelmingly white", while those most concerned about climate change are people of color who experience more negative effects from it. Ray asked, "Is climate anxiety a form of white fragility or even *racial* anxiety? Put another way, is climate anxiety just code for white people wishing to hold onto their way of life or ge<sup>t</sup> 'back to normal', to the comforts of their privilege?"(Ray 2021a, unpaginated text). Ray initially critiqued her own participation in a societal focus on the emotional dimensions of climate change at the expense of seeing it through a social justice lens. Her point was not to invalidate the fact that people have an emotional response to the destruction of the ecosystem. It was, rather, to recognize that "the prospect of an unlivable future has always shaped the emotional terrain for Black and brown people, whether that terrain is racism or climate change. . . What *is* unique [about the present moment of response to climate change] is that people who had been insulated from oppression are now waking up to the prospect of their own unlivable future" (Ray 2021a, unpaginated text).

Such critical appraisals of eco-anxiety are important and legitimate; in many ways, they parallel the historical separation between the mainstream environmental movement with its background in the creation of natural spaces for recreational use primarily by middle-class white people, and the environmental justice movement with its focus on such matters as exposing corporate toxic waste dumping in proximity to communities of color, ending colonial land-use policies on indigenous lands, or ensuring that people living in poverty have access to safe drinking water. A focus on climate anxiety may well be used to divert attention away from both the needs of an imperiled ecosphere and of BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and People of Color) communities who often experience the most direct, negative impacts of climate change upon humans. Some will find in climate anxiety discourse an excuse to expend energy toward alleviating their anxiety and removing their discomfort rather than working to ameliorate its sources through conversion to repair the planet; some will focus on the intrapsychic idea of climate anxiety as a means of avoiding action when existing inequities are only amplified by ecological destruction.

In spite of these legitimate critiques of eco-anxiety discourse, I believe it is important to carve out space for a practical theological focus on children's climate anxiety. I do so critically, aware of the kinds of problems named above, ye<sup>t</sup> equally aware that the search for purity in commitments to justice is a false pathway leading to paralysis. There is no position of innocence from which to address either the subject of the climate crisis' impact on children or the presence of racism in climate change discourse. We need to be concerned about and act to address inequities in which oppressed groups bear the greatest burdens of environmental violence and ecological degradation and to work for justice where environmental racism manifests itself while also attending to the impact of climate anxiety on all children.

It is important to address the question of the relationship between children's ecoanxiety and privilege. It simply is not the case that only privileged children experience eco or climate anxiety (Ballew et al. 2020; Garcia and Sheehan 2016). Children in BIPOC communities and others who disproportionately face the direct impact of climate degradation also experience fear, grief, and worry about the condition of the planet. When this happens, the fact that it adds onto the cumulative impact of existential crises and traumatic stress already present in the historical and contemporary narratives of these communities may mean that climate anxiety takes a less distinct role in their overall experience, not that it is absent. That is, these children too experience climate anxiety which comes as an overlay on top of other forms of struggle with which they must contend (also noted by Ray 2021a).

Seeing eco-anxiety's presence in contexts where it is not always the most salient among multiple stressors has a global dimension. It is important to resist the tendency to attribute mental health effects of the climate crisis only or primarily to children in the West or global north countries while limiting discussions of the material and physical impact of climate change on children in the global south. First, these broadly-bounded designations include children who do not fit the simple descriptor of "privileged" or "not-privileged". These social positions are shaped intersectionally. US- and North American BIPOC children living in poverty and children elsewhere living in poverty may share heightened vulnerability to climate effects related to material conditions of economic and social class, while at the same time, some among them will share certain protections with some affluent children, such as greater access to a community of support and care.

Second, for a child who undergoes extreme material and physical deprivation or experiences existential threat in the context of systemic racism's collective trauma history, these aspects of their life are likely to assume primacy in a child's everyday life, but the children are not thereby made immune from spiritual and mental health effects of ecological harm. In fact, they may be more at risk since living with chronic stress makes children more susceptible to mental health issues and, I would add, spiritual distress (Clayton et al. 2017; Doherty and Clayton 2011; Hickman et al. 2021; Kousky 2016; Macy 2013; Burke et al. 2018). Third, children whose locations make them more subject to multiple harms may also show considerable resilience and should not be identified as persons without agency or singularly constructed as victims (Davenport 2017; Nissen et al. 2021; Ojala 2012a; Ojala and Bengtsson 2019; Stanley et al. 2021; Verlie 2022; Wu et al. 2020). Thus, with Pihkala (2020b), I maintain that those suffering most directly from climate change "also suffer most heavily from the psychological impacts of environmental problems—including eco-anxiety. Thus the struggle for eco-justice and climate justice is also a struggle for more psychic and psychosocial resilience" (Pihkala 2020b, p. 183).

As it turns out, Ray (2021b) revisits her question of whether climate anxiety is found only among privileged white people. In a newer article, she takes into account the global study by Hickman et al. (2021) surveying ten thousand children in ten countries. That study reports that "respondents across all countries were worried about climate change"(p. e863). Ray, noting the study's finding that "communities of color are more worried about climate change than their white counterparts", now offers a more nuanced way of looking at the link between privilege and climate anxiety discourse that aligns with my argumen<sup>t</sup> here. Ray writes that climate anxiety manifests itself differently among people in different contexts, and "just because [BIPOC communities] aren't suffering from climate anxiety as it is currently defined doesn't mean they aren't deeply attuned to what is happening to the world. . . . [I]t is possible to feel climate anxiety even if climate change isn't the first or worst existential threat of our lives. . . . It is possible to have big feelings about other threats that may happen in relation to climate change without ever using the words 'climate change'" (Ray 2021b, pp. 4, 6).

In the long run, all of this suggests to me that one can critique the presence of diversionary tactics and of racism in the discourse on climate anxiety without abstraction from children's lived experiences. It is not helpful to pit one kind of oppression against another in the lives of children. The empathy that climate-anxious children express for other creatures communicates children's distress and has legitimacy as such.<sup>11</sup> So does the reality of the pain some children experience from the mental health impact of being continually bathed in a discourse of impending planetary demise. The recognition of the presence of a continual existential threat for children in BIPOC communities from systemic racism's harms remains in paramount need of transformation even as it does not erase the co-presence of eco-anxiety from the lives of BIPOC children.

Regarding the depoliticizing discourse of eco-emotions, we can generate constructive solutions to the problem of pathologizing or medicalizing what is, in reality, a normal, expectable response to the non-normal event of ecological destruction. For instance, one can add terminology that embraces the generative, life-giving impulses underlying climate anxiety instead of the language of pathology, engaging these motivations in the service of transformation. Several authors have already emphasized that eco-anxiety in-

cludes an adaptive dimension that is linked with motivation and caring (Hickman 2020; Pihkala 2020a; Hickman et al. 2021). However, rather than turning this into a simplistic optimism that ultimately translates into a practice of climate change denial, adults concerned about climate-anxious children can invoke the discursive lens variously termed "critical hope" (Ojala 2016), "active hope" (Verlie et al. 2021, p. 134), or "constructive hope" (Chawla 2020).

All of these terms point to a form of hope grounded in the sense of urgen<sup>t</sup> need for change that is coupled with a vision for change and empowerment to act. In other words, it is not simply a matter of what terms are in use. The framework, cultural or otherwise, that situates *how* they are used also has relevance for the affective experiences of children, which in turn can help to empower their agency in the world.<sup>12</sup>

Christian theology needs to put forward a similarly critical, active, constructive vision of hope—an eschatology that links how humans inhabit God's *oikos* in the present with bold, imaginative visions of what life as creatures among others embedded in a common home might look like for all to flourish. Eschatology, writes feminist biblical theologian Barbara Rossing, "speaks about hope", and as such, is an act of imagination in which we picture a counterworld, an alternative vision to the status quo's ecological destruction. Rossing sees the current planetary crisis not as "primarily a scientific crisis, or even a moral crisis". Instead, she contends, "our crisis is a narrative crisis: it is a crisis of imagination" with very real results (Rossing 2017, pp. 328–29). The imagination Rossing calls for is active, such as the hope it engenders, as it becomes a new narrative directing our steps toward the earth's repair and restoration. It envisions what God's world with all its creatures—the whole *oikos tou Theou*—might be like in an alternative future in which practices of inhabitance promote the flourishing of all. To turn away from children's lived reality of eco-anxiety is an abdication of the Christian responsibility to nurture the eschatological imaginations of children for the sake of the planet and its many inhabitants.

Latina feminist theologian Nancy Pineda-Madrid writes of eschatological hope in an ecological framework, citing the often-repeated Spanish expression, "*somos criaturas de Dios*" (we are creatures of God). It is, for her, a way of properly locating humans within the whole of creation through a "theological anthropology of creatureliness" that puts humanity in perspective. "Our theological anthropology is doomed to distortion if considered in isolation from a healthy biology, ecology, and cosmology", she writes. However, framing human beings as creatures of God "furthers eschatological hope by foregrounding human beings' common fellowship with all other creatures of God" (Pineda-Madrid 2017, p. 312).

Nurturing an eschatological imagination among children who struggle with ecoanxiety means equipping them and all Christians with critical capacities to re-form theological ideas and practices that have "mis-sized" humanity in relation to our earth-kin. Reimagining humans—not as disproportionately significant and special above all others but as "right-sized"—as one among all of God's special and beloved creatures is a theological activity for which adults may need to look to children for leadership. Children's relatively smaller physical size gives them a kind of "epistemological privilege" to see what adults may miss about the disproportionality of human lives within the greater ecology of our inhabitance and the more finely tuned awareness among some children of both their vulnerability and their need for an interconnected, relationally rich place that is their *oikos*, may afford them a clearer view of what can go wrong when humans take an outsized view of themselves in relation to the rest of God's creatures.

Rossing and Pineda-Madrid help to further flesh out the ecofeminist retrieval of concepts of *oikos* and inhabitance found earlier in the works of Jennifer Ayres and Annalet van Schalkwyk. Such theological resources, in turn, constitute a key element within practical theological strategies for supporting children who experience eco-anxiety. The development of such strategies in their concrete forms is future work that can draw on this article's establishment of eco-anxiety among children as an important concern for practical theologians.

#### **7. Limitations and Opportunities for Future Scholarship**

This article offers a preliminary inquiry into children's eco-anxiety from the perspective of ecofeminist practical theology. Although it contributes to the literature of childhood studies and theology with its attention to eco-anxiety in children, there remains a gap in practical theology's empirical research on the subject. Research is needed with children who experience eco-anxiety. In addition, more work is needed from the perspective of pastoral and spiritual care to better understand what might be unique about climate anxiety as a specific form of distress experienced by children. Such work could provide helpful resources for caregivers regarding the most effective pastoral care interventions with ecoanxious children. Emerging self-help literature exists, addressing how to support children with climate anxiety, as does a small body of work focused upon eco-anxiety and pastoral care in general, but to my knowledge, there is no similar literature directly targeting pastoral care with children facing eco-anxiety.<sup>13</sup> Further work in this area would constitute a significant contribution to the field of practical theology.
