Who’s Afraid of the Climate Crisis? Fear, Anxiety, Dread, and Pandemic Panic

In January of 2019, Greta Thunberg gave her now-famous speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. “I want you to panic,” she urged. “I want you to feel the fear I feel every day.” I was right there with her. Now, with the spread of COVID-19 around the world, feelings of fear are intensifying for many of us, from small business owners, to health care workers, to nursing home residents, to the suddenly unemployed, to working parents who are now homeschooling their children. The emotional impacts of shelter-in-place orders are hitting home. The other morning, while I was showing our two boys what an exponential rate of spread looks like in one simple graph, compiling a list of virtual field trips for their “school” day, and frantically scribbling a grocery list of nonperishable foods, my husband declared that I “sound like I’m panicking all the time.” He’s not wrong. But is my panic a product of anxiety, fear, dread, or some combination? And why might it matter what I call these feelings?

I’m a stickler for precision when it comes to language about emotions. I want us not only to name our feelings, but also to distinguish carefully between them. When it comes to fear, anxiety, dread, and panic, there are differences in intensity, duration, bodily symptoms, and collective action that deserve our attention. Fear is a basic emotion measurable in the brain’s amygdala and experienced by many animal species, not just humans. The “fight or flight” response sparked by fear makes it evolutionarily useful. Fear is not simply a matter of an external object triggering an individual reaction, though. Fear has cultural dimensions, too. Among humans, it often fuels protective, conservative politics—closed borders, bigger walls—and a lack of compassion for others. Individual fears can accumulate at collective scales and be managed, stoked, even weaponized for political purposes.

Defining Fear, Anxiety, and Global Dread

In my book Memorials Matter I considered how fear and anxiety function at the U.S.–Mexico border. My hike to a border monument deep in the Sonoran Desert helped me differentiate between feelings of anxiety stoked by seeing Border Patrol vehicles and signs warning of “illegal” activity at the trailhead and the instantaneous fear sparked by startling a snake along the trail. Fortunately, we don’t sustain the intensity of an initial fear activation, whether it’s prompted by a surprise snake or a terrifying headline. That heart-pounding bodily response settles down into something else. Here’s where anxiety comes in. Unlike fear, which is processed in the present moment, anxiety is a future-oriented, prospective, anticipatory emotion. Anxiety is a longer lasting but less intense feeling than fear. We use physically evocative language to describe it: we might say we’re jumpy, unsettled, high strung, or on pins and needles. Anxiety is a background feeling or a mood, and it primes the body for more bouts of fear in our day-to-day lives. A kind of feedback loop emerges: greater anxiety leads to more frequent spikes of fear, which in turn accentuate and fuel the anxiety.

What feels like anxiety to one person might register as dread to another. Dread is anticipatory and durable, like anxiety, but heavier and more intense. If anxiety feels like butterflies, dread feels more like a boulder, a sinking feeling, a paralyzing weight in the chest or stomach. Some of us are feeling what Glenn Albrecht calls global dread: “The anticipation of an apocalyptic future state of the world that produces a mixture of terror and sadness in the sufferer for those who will exist in such a state.” Global dread, Albrecht explains, is a “form of hyper-empathy that projects a person in the present into a terrifying vision of an apocalyptic future.” I find his phrase useful for diagnosing my own emotions, but it raises questions. Is this hyper-empathy a concern for self or for others? Is it easier to have empathy for our future selves, for our own children, or for future generations of strangers? And if we feel “terror”—which we might define along with film scholars as dreadful apprehension about unknown horrors that are invisible but imminent—when we imagine the future, then wouldn’t it be natural to want to avoid this empathic projection at all costs?

Many people do avoid it. For instance, some researchers speculate that climate change skepticism is a product of deeply repressed fears, an exaggerated ostrich effect. Meanwhile, ecoanxiety is increasingly common. The American Psychological Association defines ecoanxiety as “a chronic fear of environmental doom” with symptoms ranging from low-grade worries to full-on panic attacks. For some of us, anxiety about climate change has long been a chronic background feeling, and COVID-19 compounds that feeling. What the COVID-19 pandemic has also done, even for the non-ecoanxious, is make it harder to avoid or postpone feelings of fear. The pandemic is here and now. It’s not just out there, in our ghost-town streets and shuttered restaurants; it’s in our homes, at our breakfast tables.

Diagnosing Pandemic Panic

Panic, too, is here and now. As the phrase “panic attack” implies, panic is a present-tense experience of intense fear. A hasty Google search turns up a definition of panic as “sudden uncontrollable fear or anxiety, often causing wildly unthinking behavior.” I’m using the phrase pandemic panic to describe the “wildly unthinking” actions fueled by the overwhelming fear and anxiety sparked (in part) by countless alarming headlines, empty grocery store shelves, plunging stocks, and rising numbers of COVID-19 cases. Psychologists, sociologists, and philosophers warn that fear can exacerbate feelings of helplessness. At best, we protect ourselves and those close to us. At worst, we make desperate moves to control what we can, even at the expense of others. Having a collective panic attack may be understandable, but it isn’t helpful in addressing a pandemic—or climate change.

Accurately naming our individual and collective feelings can be the first step in dealing more effectively and justly with them. As David Kessler says about “anticipatory grief,” “When you name it, you feel it and it moves through you.” Kessler identifies several kinds of anticipatory grief, including the individual and the collectively felt, a grief we can sense “in the air.” He suggests anticipatory grief is “really anxiety” that we haven’t processed effectively. While that may risk oversimplifying things, I appreciate his reminder that emotions are all about movement. In fact, the root of the word “emotion” is the Latin emovere, which implies both movement and agitation. Emotions are by definition irritating. Emotions are always, in a sense, anxious.

For some, fear is motivating. This might be why David Wallace-Wells begins The Uninhabitable Earth with the terrifying words “It is worse, much worse, than you think.” Wallace-Wells applauds the 2018 IPCC report for “embracing fear” and rhetorically signaling to readers that “It is okay, finally, to freak out.” Of course, for those on the frontlines of climate change, and for those feeling the economic and health impacts of COVID-19 most directly, piling on the fear is not helpful. Living in a state of constant anxiety or dread is not just unpleasant; the stress on our bodies can make us sick. Resources such as Sarah Jaquette Ray’s A Field Guide to Climate Anxiety and the Good Grief Network are coming to the rescue to help individuals cope. Collective anxiety seems harder to treat. As we’re seeing in our current pandemic panic, large-scale anxiety can induce negative behaviors, such as hoarding toilet paper, robbing grocery delivery trucks, or shutting doors to those in need.

The best thing about fear in all its forms is that it is diagnostic. The COVID-19 crisis is exposing a “disease” in the form of precarious social systems, from inadequate health care services to a fragile global economy; it’s possible this exposure will motivate us to treat the underlying causes rather than just the symptoms. I’m wondering what we might learn from the COVID-19 panic that might be useful in identifying, unleashing, managing, or deploying our feelings of fear about the climate crisis.

Connecting Coronavirus Fears to the Climate Crisis

We must assess why we are so quick to panic—and take action—when faced with a global pandemic, while our global response to climate change is, comparatively, a collective shoulder shrug. There are many variables in play, including the “short game” of politics, the attention (or lack of) paid by mainstream news sources, and the newness and immediacy of the problems. Connecting the dots between the ecological dimensions of the novel coronavirus and climate change is essential. One of the easiest ways to start doing that is by talking about our feelings—identifying, for instance, what pandemic anxiety and ecoanxiety have in common, or the ways anxiety contributes to grief, or the convergence of climate grief and grief about the pandemic, or whether our own shame over the climate crisis might be a factor in refusing to face it.

As Albrecht rightly notes, in an era of climate crisis “a generalized worry about the future is now commonplace.” Uncertainty and anxiety are our new normal. COVID-19 has brought this fact to the forefront of all our lives. An honest evaluation of the different degrees and kinds of fear circulating at this moment can help explain our uneven responses. As I saw at the U.S.–Mexico border, who is supposed to be afraid and who is identified as the object of fear are political issues. Racist fears of the “Chinese virus,” anxieties about unemployment and income inequality, and global dread about climate change—these are different feelings with different causes and different manifestations. We need a more sophisticated vocabulary for these feelings, one more precisely calibrated to the serious concerns about health, justice, and inequality that the pandemic and the climate crisis are exposing.

Who’s afraid of the climate crisis? I am. Every damn day. But I’m hardly alone. More and more Americans are feeling worried, concerned, and alarmed. In fact, the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication suggests 31% of Americans are now “alarmed” and another 26% are “concerned” about global warming. We must look for ways that this pandemic panic might fuel more concern about the climate emergency, and perhaps a “new normal” that is better than the one we had before. Is there something about our emotional reactions to the pandemic that might inspire more effective responses to the climate crisis? Certainly the speedy response to the pandemic suggests we’re capable of confronting the climate emergency with a similar urgency.

While no one has immunity in this pandemic, at least not yet, its impacts are wildly disproportionate. The sooner we realize the same is true of climate change, the better. We must recover from “the privatization of the human heart” and ensure that our fearful feelings don’t lead us to increasing disparity and violence, but rather to hope, empathy, and collective concern. Our shared future depends, in part, on whether our fears about individual vulnerabilities, including our own mortality, can be scaled to apply more broadly—to neighbors, communities, and citizens of all nations.

Featured image: A transmission electron micrograph of a SARS-CoV-2 virus particle. Image by National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, March 2020.

Jennifer Ladino is the author of Memorials Matter: Emotion, Environment, and Public Memory at American Historical Sites and Reclaiming Nostalgia: Longing for Nature in American Literature. She teaches English at the University of Idaho. Contact.