Rise of the climate crisis cafes: Anxious Americans are meeting up to sip kombucha and share their...
Groups of therapists, climate activists and citizens worried about the heating planet are coming together in so-called climate cafes to discuss the mental health effects of the environmental crisis. Eco-anxiety, is a rising form of mental health condition and has been cited in a number of in recent years. Climate cafes have popped up across America from to City, Boston and Brooklyn in coffee shops and host's living rooms as a means of confronting this rising mental health crisis. Group leaders, sometimes trained therapists, help worried Americans talk through and process their feelings about ecological breakdown and climate injustice. While not all fall under a formal network, Rebecca Nestor of the non-profit Climate Psychology Alliance that trains leaders, the number has exploded in the last three years. The alliance's aim is to study how environmental issues such as weather disasters and dangerous air pollution affects people's mental health. The organization 'addresses the urgent psychological dimensions of the climate and ecological crisis and promotes cultural shifts toward human resilience, regeneration, and equity' according to its website. The group proposes seeing mental health as intrinsically linked to the environment. 'The ecosystem guides circadian rhythms and seasonal affects, and includes the local landscapes and climate systems that we are embedded in' it states. The climate cafe groups it facilitates are meant to be a 'space for exploration of thoughts, feelings and experiences' rather than discussion of activism. Putting theory into action Nestor hosted her first climate cafe in the UK back in 2018. She modeled it on the Swiss creation of the death cafe, in which people come together to confront the taboo of dying. Climate cafes, now spread around the world, are usually free and accessible to the general public. However, there are special sessions aimed at librarians, therapists and others with a professional link to others' climate anxieties. Psychologists told the Times that these groups are having a positive impact on those trying to face the realities of a changing planet. A weekly group in Kansas City, run by non-profit the Resilient Activist meetings begins with spiritual meetings and guided meditations. The group also discusses topics such as the ethics of having children in an overpopulated planet with dwindling resources. Sami Aron, 71, a retired software developer, founded the Resilient Activist after her son, a student at Berkeley, died by suicide citing hopelessness over climate change. Three quarters of 16 to 25-year-olds feel anxiety about , . A 1C increase in air temperature has been associated with a 1.12.3 percent increase in suicides, according to the study. 'The dread, the hopelessness is getting exiled in all of us, and that's why we're not talking about it, because it's too painful,' Bondy told the Times. Adding: 'If we can't heal what we're all feeling, we can't heal our planet either.' In a climate cafe in Lower Manhattan anxious New Yorkers drank kombucha and discussed their fears for the planet, the outlet reported. The event was hosted by Olivia Ferraro, 24, who has run more than 20 other climate cafes since June 2023. Her meetings usually have between five and twenty attendees, and she also trains others online who wish to host similar meetings in their own communities. 'I can't buy into the narrative anymore that there's no choice in how this ends and that major corporations have complete control over my future,' one attendee, Sheila McMenamin, told the New York Times. 'They do not have total control, and I refuse to cede that,' the 32-year-old added. Other participants spoke of their fears for their future children and future generations inheriting a dangerous earth. 'I'm enraged about the fact that more Black and brown people are not in these rooms,' said Sarah Scott, a first time attendee, the Times reported. 'They don't have the money to be concerned about these things,' she explained. A group of psychotherapists in Champaign, helps those who work in easing others anxieties confront their own difficult feelings about the climate. 'I find myself struggling to enjoy the outdoors because of the constant reminders' of environmental degradation Kate Mauer told the online group, according to the Times. 'Appreciating the beauty of it, but also appreciating the rarity and the loss, we're holding it all' Lauren Bondy a therapist from Chicago agreed.