Sophie Nicholls introduces the Feeling Planet framework and its creative tools for exploring and harnessing climate emotions.
When you think about climate change, what do you feel? Where do you notice these feelings in your body? How do you feel about the future?
Recent severe weather events – wildfires, floods and storms – together with news about oceans filling with plastic, or rising global temperatures, mean that many of us are now either experiencing the immediate effects of climate change or watching them on our screens.
For a growing number of us, negative climate emotions such as fear and anxiety are a very real part of our everyday experience. Panu Pihkala, an interdisciplinary scholar of emotions and environmental issues, defines climate emotions as ‘affective phenomena which are significantly related to the climate crisis,’ but notes that our emotional responses at any one time will also be influenced by many other factors: ‘the general situation in one’s life, one’s temperament, daily events, social dynamics, and climate change impacts’ (Pihkala 2022).
Although the predominant discourse around climate emotions tends to focus on anxiety, there are a wide range of emotional responses that each of us might experience when faced with indications of a changing climate, including feelings of fear, dread, anger, grief, uncertainty, loss and shame, as well as hope. However, we do not know how ‘universal’ this language of climate emotions might be. Pihkala suggests ‘a preliminary taxonomy of climate emotions’ (Pihkala 2022), an attempt to scope, capture and discuss many of the words used for climate-related feelings. Though noting the impossibility of comparing studies of the language of emotions across different personal emotional literacies and cultural and social norms, Pihkala hopes his taxonomy may highlight the breadth of possible experiences in response to climate change, foster personal insight, and inform future development of both therapeutic interventions and public health policy.
Closely connected to this growing mental health challenge is the key role that climate emotions play in shaping and influencing our climate behaviours. Strong climate emotions such as guilt or anxiety may motivate some of us to take firm pro-environmental action such as changing our lifestyle or campaigning for clean energy policies. However, it may cause some of us to feel overwhelmed, depressed or powerless.
Psychologist and economist Per Espen Stoknes suggests five psychological defences (‘the five D’s) that form barriers to climate action: Distance, Doom, Dissonance, Denial and iDentity (Stoknes 2015). Philosopher Glen Albrecht goes further, suggesting that the emotion he calls Global Dread (terror or extreme anxiety) may even motivate people to seek relief through ‘Armageddon-like rapture’ and over-consumption; or alternatively, might trigger an ecoparalysis, since nothing we could do individually (selling our car, retro-fitting our home) appears to be sufficient in the face of a global crisis (Albrecht 2019).
Reflecting on this, Megan Kennedy-Woodward and Patrick Kennedy-Williams write:
‘Setting down strong emotional foundations can make the difference between a successful attempt at action and one that leaves us feeling dejected, with lower self-efficacy and a self-perpetuating sense of hopelessness and powerlessness’ (2022, 119).
Over the past two years, I have been developing and testing a set of creative materials, which I call the Feeling Planet toolkit, to offer practical ways of working with climate emotions. The toolkit began to take shape when I carried out a rapid scoping of the climate change literature, conducted interviews and facilitated workshops with scientists, technologists, and policy-makers immersed in developing climate solutions in the UK, US and Canada. This research helped me to develop a framework and set of processes that can be used both in private reflective work and in group workshops (Nicholls, 2023).
The Feeling Planet framework is comprised of three dimensions:
1. Acknowledging and expressing feelings
Acknowledging difficult emotions with self-compassion and curiosity towards ourselves, rather than judgement. Cultivating positive climate emotions. Developing emotional differentiation and reflexivity.
2. Creating connection, community and dialogue
Connecting or reconnecting with both place and one another. Finding shared language for emotions, places and technologies. Sharing our stories and amplifying marginalised or silenced voices.
3. Taking Action
Finding a shared sense of purpose and vision. Agreeing timelines and contributions. Taking steps together to achieve change.
Whether in a group workshop or individually, Feeling Planet participants are invited to explore the three areas through a series of creative ‘experiments’ using writing, doodling, and drawing. The approach is based on a model of integrative writing, something I have been developing over the past twenty-five years through my work using writing as a tool for wellbeing and personal and professional development in a range of settings, including in universities, corporations ,and health care (Nicholls 2009). My approach seeks to extend and deepen established models for writing in health and wellbeing settings, such as James Pennebaker’s ‘expressive writing’ paradigm (Pennebaker and Smythe 2016), in which participants are asked simply to write about their thoughts and feelings without pausing or editing.
The Feeling Planet toolkit integrates a range of creative writing techniques and practices, such as exploring personal stories and metaphors, writing dialogues, and taking a more embodied approach to finding words for our feelings. Some of these are briefly described below. In this approach, writing can have benefits to health and wellbeing by creating opportunities to slow down and reflect on our increasingly busy lives, whilst increasing reflexivity through personal and collective inquiry.
In the Acknowledging and Expressing Feelings dimension, the toolkit activities focus on helping people to surface and name their feelings around climate change and its proposed solutions. Developing greater differentiation and granularity in the way we experience and then find words for our emotions can help us to understand, regulate, and respond to these emotions (Kashdan et al 2015; Feldman Barrett, L. 2017), and protect against anxiety and overwhelm. This process of becoming more aware of, and then naming, our climate emotions is particularly important since, very often, it is not easy for us to find the words to describe these new, complex and multi-layered experiences. In fact, we may need to develop new words for them.
Finding new language for climate emotions
Glenn Albrecht is an environmental philosopher best known for his typology of ‘earth emotions’ (Albrecht 2019), an ambitious project that seeks to create new language for what Albrecht calls the ‘psychoterratic’ states people experience in relation to the earth. One ‘earth emotion’ now widely used is Albrecht’s solastalgia, a neologism he first coined in 2003 to describe a feeling of distress and desolation at negative changes in the environment we consider our home. Solastalgia is ‘the homesickness you have when you are still at home’ (Albrecht 2005).). Other Albrecht neologisms include meteoranxiety, anxiety connected to climate-related changes in weather such as extreme heat, drought or flooding; and mermerosity, anticipatory mourning related to future loss of landscapes that are familiar and beloved to us (Albrecht, 2019).
Another language-based project that seeks to expand our climate emotion vocabulary is The Bureau of Linguistical Reality, a participatory artwork by artists Heidi Quante and Alicia Escott, which invites people to invent new words to express and understand the world around them and gathers them in a playful online dictionary. One example, contributed by Sarah, a 2016 participant, illustrates the tensions inherent in our climate experiences:
‘Agualation: a conflicted feeling when you see people, especially children, enjoying water liberally i.e. playing in water fountains, swimming pools, or sprinklers. A sense of fear and frustration that they are wasting a resource that is dwindling, paired with a desire for others – especially the youth – to enjoy the experiences, frivolities and resources that you have had or enjoyed access to as a child.’
Creative experiments in the Feeling Planet toolkit invite participants to write, doodle or draw their emotions on a specially developed feeling wheel in response to a series of prompts. There are options to use colour and relative position to express the inner texture and intensity of these feelings. Our evaluations so far show that participants welcome the opportunity to notice and become more aware of their bodily, felt experience (interoception); and to find or invent language that feels like the right fit. There is an emphasis on cultivating curiosity, self-compassion (Neff 2011) and hope (Macey and Johnstone, 2012) during this process.
In Dimension 2 of the framework, Creating Connection, Community and Dialogue, participants are invited to write or draw their own stories of place, landscape, and personal history in relation to climate change. This creative process of remembering and reconnecting can help us to restore our own wellbeing, as well as motivating us to meaningful action. There is emerging evidence thatconnection to nature (CTN) (Seers et al, 2022), or what Albrecht calls a sense of belonging or oneness with the earth (eutierria), can play an important role in engaging people in climate action. However, here again, we see the way in which the words we use to express our experiences are crucial. For example, a growing number of people do not recognise the otherness or distancing from the world around us implied by the notion of ‘nature’. The phrase ‘more than human’ coined by philosopher David Abrams (Abrams 1996) offers an alternative way of describing the world of rocks, plants, oceans and creatures of which we humans are a mere part. Aboriginal scholar Tyson Yunkaporta points out that in the home language of his family ‘there is no word for culture’ but instead a phrase that translates roughly as ‘being like our place.’ He suggests that, beginning from this view, ‘The patterns of your language will change as you find ways to express the places you come into relation with’ (Yunkaporta 2021:255).
Other experiments in the toolkit encourage further exploration of this entanglement with the more than human world; for example, by writing and envisioning creative dialogues with significant beings – plants, creatures, places and people. Writing to these beings, entrusting them with our hopes for the future as well as our sorrows, and then having them reply to us through words, feelings and images is a way of cultivating respect and wonder, as well as deepening our sense of belonging with one another.
Our evaluation of these materials in workshop settings continues to demonstrate the value many of us find in opportunities to slow down and take time out of our pressured lives to notice and acknowledge our emotions. Over the past year, people have repeatedly told me how much they feel they benefit from gathering together to share the stories that have shaped them and the emotions that trouble them. However, most importantly of all, these tools help participants to envision personal, achievable actions –however small – that enable them to cultivate agency and hope in the face of climate change.
Over time, it is my hope that the Feeling Planet toolkit of approaches and techniques might help us to broaden research in climate emotions, enabling a wider group of people to explore and share their feelings and use them as a basis for community-building and purposeful action.
If you would like to participate in the study, we would love to hear from you. Please go to feelingplanet.org to find out more.
About the author:
Sophie Nicholls is a novelist and poet and Associate Professor at Teesside University where she teaches Creative Writing and researches the connections between writing, health and wellbeing. The Feeling Planet project is funded by a grant from the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT) of the UK Government.
References:
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Albrecht, G. (2005). Solastalgia: a new concept in human health and identity. PAN Partners.
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