It’s the despair

At the start of the semester, I opened it up for students to ask me questions. One of the questions was what is the hardest thing about teaching sustainability. Without missing a beat, I responded, “the despair.” I kind of joked about it afterwards, but the despair people feel is really serious and, as Bird and colleagues recently found, linked with climate burnout.

Burnout is a huge issue among sustainability professionals, and one of the reasons that intrapersonal skills, those relating to self-awareness and self-management, are gaining more traction and focus in the field of sustainability education. But, how can you engage with developing these skills and do they make a difference?

Bird and colleagues (2024) explored how utopian thinking and pragmatic thinking could impact the relationships between climate despair and exhaustion and between despair and disengagement. They found that climate despair makes exhaustion worse but it wasn’t really connected with disengagement. So how do we combat these impacts?

The results are somewhat mixed and clearly more research is necessary but pragmatism, where participants came up with actions they could do to combat climate change, decreased disengagement and potentially reduced the impacts of the despair-exhaustion relationship as well. Anecdotally, this makes sense to me because I know how my ability to take concrete actions through my teaching work contributes to being able to stay hopeful and keep fighting. I’d like to see this explored further for sure.

Utopian thinking on the other hand were more ambiguous. Utopian thinking helped with both despair-disengagement and despair-exhaustion but only in one study each, the other study which also looked at this failed to replicate the finding. Thus, it seems that utopian thinking alone isn’t enough for everyone.

Climate change is impacting people’s mental health, but how to deal with it is still a challenge (besides actually addressing climate change as quickly as possible, that is). This research shows that helping people identify concrete steps and actions is important but there has to be agency. This means that people need to be able to identify steps that they can personally take.

So, what actions can you add into your climate change response?