College students get emotional about climate change. Some are finding help in class
Source: NPR
December 22, 2024 5:00 AM ET
More than 50% of youth in the United States are very or extremely worried about climate change, according to a recent survey in the scientific journal The Lancet. The researchers, who surveyed over 15,000 people aged 16–25, also found that more than one in three young people said their feelings about climate change negatively affect their daily lives. The study adds to a growing area of research that finds that climate change, which is brought on primarily by the burning of fossil fuels, is making young people distressed.
Yet experts say there are proven ways to help young people cope with those feelings — and college classrooms could play a key role. "When any of us talk about climate with students, we can't just talk about what's happening in the atmosphere and oceans," says Jennifer Atkinson, a professor at the University of Washington. "We have to acknowledge and make space for them to talk openly about what's happening in their own lives and be sensitive and compassionate about that."
Atkinson studies the emotional and psychological toll of climate change. She also teaches a class on climate grief and eco-anxiety, during which students examine the feelings they have around climate change with their peers. The first time the class was offered in 2017, registration filled overnight, Atkinson says.
While teaching, Atkinson says she keeps in mind that many of her students have lived through floods or escaped wildfires — disasters that have increased in intensity as the world warms — before they even start college, yet often have had few places to find support. In the classroom, students come together, frequently finding solace and understanding in one another, she says.
Read more: https://www.npr.org/2024/12/22/nx-s1-5235404/college-students-struggle-climate-anxiety-find-help-class
Link to PUBLICATION - Climate emotions, thoughts, and plans among US adolescents and young adults: a cross-sectional descriptive survey and analysis by political party identification and self-reported exposure to severe weather events
= new reply since forum marked as read
who live in urban areas that are literally a personification of the Joni Mitchell song "Big Yellow Taxi" - "Pave paradise and put up a parking lot". The gentrification going on here in Philly is a case in point.
These young urban dwellers have few parks and whatever parks they might be exposed to are often in disrepair, so they don't have that same sense of a "climate change" perspective that a suburbanite on a 1/3rd of an acre with detached houses or a rural youngster on a farm might have... except that they soon realize they live in an urban heat sink and might not have AC (or can't afford to run it).
One of the most disheartening things that I recall was when taking a work training trip to San Francisco just over 20 years ago and looking out the plane window as we circled over the area. I was completely awestruck at the almost TOTAL lack of trees (outside of Golden Gate Park). Literally every piece of space around the city including up into the hills, was covered with buildings, some that had some streets with trees that barely broke up the monotony of buildings (housing).
This is San Francisco I'm talking about - the purported "bastion of liberalism". 
So I wouldn't expect "100%" out of anyone who is born and raised in that environment.