Sometime in the late 2000s, Pim Sullivan-Tailyour was sitting in the back of a car, headed toward her great-grandmother’s tiny town in the south of Thailand. She watched big mountains pass by out the window and sensed that what she was seeing was unnatural. For Sullivan-Tailyour, this marked the first time it occurred to her that humans could alter the world—and that they were doing so for the worse.
In an effort to help young people like Sullivan-Tailyour cope with their worries about climate change and other global issues, organizations such as Force of Nature have emerged. Force of Nature is a UK-based organization that spun up Becoming a Force of Nature in 2021, which aims to help kids and young adults take their worries and turn them into action. The program provides online group therapy sessions for young people experiencing anxiety about the state of the world.
Global surveys have found that most kids are anxious about the state of the world—and not just about whether sea levels and carbon counts will continue to rise. They are growing up in a time of what some historians, policymakers, and economists are calling a “polycrisis”: The planet is warming, yes, but also a pandemic happened and could happen again, conflicts keep erupting, nuclear weapons lurk menacingly in silos, housing is growing impossibly expensive, groceries and gas can feel like luxury purchases, health-care costs are skyrocketing, authoritarianism is on the rise, partisanship splits populations, jobs are hard to get and there’s rampant worry AI will take more and more of them, and pings about all those things (and more!) arrive 24-7 in polarizing digital echo chambers. The goal of these online networks like Force of Nature is to help young people deal with their feelings about the multivariately changing future they are maturing into.
However, the science on the effectiveness of such networks is still nascent, and psychological scholars say it’s time for the field to measure itself. This way, schools, parents, and kids themselves can know which programs to invest their time and resources in to actually help young people feel better. The existential dread that comes with the climate crisis has had an official name for many years: eco-anxiety. A 2021 study measuring climate anxiety found that around 60% of children and young people agreed with the statement “Humanity is doomed.”