Growing Little Roots
Words by Shanti Mathias | She/Her
Our natural environments soothe the mental illnesses their destruction causes. When I am afraid or anxious, I go for a walk and try to look for the sea. Some undulating waves; the shimmer of a fresh spider web; a fragile skeleton leaf; two kaka, creaking their beaks around their silvan food; the muddy footprint of a person who has been here before me. Intellectually, I know wholesale environmental destruction is happening here and elsewhere, but I am restored in these details regardless.
Research backs this up: spending 30 minutes in green space a day is supposed to increase your quality of sleep. Controlling for other factors, those who can see the sea regularly are happier than those who can not. 90% of people with depression have a higher self-esteem after going for a walk. They’ve done studies: new numbers, whenever we want them, telling us that nature is good for us.
Young people in Aotearoa have increasing rates of diagnosed mental illnesses, which are disproportionately high for Māori and Pasifika. The climate crisis is occurring alongside a youth mental health crisis. Our environment is in jeopardy: so are our minds and our futures.
“It’s not just climate change, it’s interconnected with colonisation, racism, […]classism. This is something that affects my mental health,” says Hannah*, a Māori and Pasifika student and climate activist. The psychological effects of climate change can be difficult for everyone, but for Indigenous people, the effects are compounded by dispossession, discrimination, and disconnection from
their land.
Climate change does not just affect the natural world. Nature is not separate from people: social, political, and economic systems are tangled with the climate. It makes sense, then, that climate change is not experienced abstractly. Our minds respond to this great uncertainty, and it is our minds that help us to act.
The climate crisis is both alarming and unknown. This is difficult for human minds to reconcile, according to Dr Wokje Abrahamse, a senior lecturer in Environmental Studies with a specialisation in environmental psychology. Recognition of the interconnected systems involved can be overwhelming: as she told me, “a lot of environmental problems are social problems.” Yet there are still ways to act.
Climate change activism tends to focus on action in the streets, making demands of people with little inclination to listen. “There’s an invitation to see the climate as an interconnected thing,” says Raven Maeder, a law and environmental studies student who has been involved in activism and organising. To accept this invitation is to recognise the diverse forms of activism. “Activism [in the streets] is just one thing, but there are so many ways to contribute beyond that.”
Lindi Louw, an Anthropology honours student doing research on the climate crisis, says her research has shown that despair can lead to solutions. “What are the possibilities, how can we deal with this anxiety but also do something positive for the environment? We don’t have to ignore the conversation.”
Noticing the interconnectedness between self and system and climate is instinctual before we develop language for it, especially for Indigenous people. “When I first learnt about [climate change], how it affects our community made sense to me. I felt like the environment, it is my base,” said Hannah. “I feel a connection [to the land] but because of colonisation I think being away from my homeland, not knowing 100% where I came from—there’s a lot of intergenerational trauma and pain.”
The English language has developed various neologisms attempting to capture the knit-together desire to relate to the environment. Eco-anxiety is a manifestation of “people grieving over the land because of climate change,” says Lindi, noting that Indigenous people have experienced this long before white people named it. Solastalgia means our tendency to find that a place we thought was home cannot come back, because of environmental change. Biophilia theorises our innate tendency to seek out natural places. Of course, Indigenous people have expressed this for generations, and it is only recently that non-Indigenous officials and institutions have recognised how our minds and matter are intertwined.
The Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Psychiatrists (RANZCP) acknowledged eco-anxiety in a December 2019 press release. “[Climate change] can lead to a wide range of direct and indirect negative health effects including mental health problems and mental disorders, health risk behaviours and effects on other social and lifestyle opportunities, health perceptions and physical health.” They added that young people and those with “close emotional and ancestral ties to the land” are particularly vulnerable.
“There needs to be a backbone of Indigenous voices, pulling up other people [to talk about climate],” Hannah says. There are Indigenous climate spaces, although they can be hard to find. One example of this is the Pacific Climate Warriors (PCW), “a youth led grassroots network working with communities to fight climate change from the Pacific Islands,” according to their website. Finding indigenous climate spaces can be transformative for indigenous activists.
Activism—broad activism, beyond marches—is a way to respond to the climate crisis. “People have a sense that they have no control. When people start to do small things, it gives people a sense of control that they’re starting to work on a solution,” says Dr Abrahamse.
There are 413 parts of carbon per million molecules in the atmosphere. The sea level could rise 1.5 metres by 2100. 46% of the world’s forests have been lost since industrial felling began. Every day, there are new numbers declaring that the climate is changing and everything we know could be destroyed.
The reduction of the complex social, cultural, and biological relationships which construct an environment to a set of doomsday numbers serves to further alienate people from the land and ocean, and makes them feel helpless. Small, perceptible actions can change that feeling.
Climate advocacy tends to “treat the environment as a detached thing,” says Raven, seeing climate change as “ppm [parts per million] of greenhouse gases... Tangibly as an individual person, what am I going to do to change that?”
“The environmental science stuff, I thought it was interesting but I didn’t think I was good enough [to contribute]—like I know nothing about the environment,” says Hannah. The mainstream environmental movement often makes Indigenous activists feel sidelined and tokenised. It took time for Hannah to recognise that their social and cultural position was vital to respond to the climate crisis. The work of PCW, as well as other Indigenous activists around the world, has been vital in broadening the view of what activism means—and how it begins with decolonisation.
Part of the struggle of activism is that it is difficult to quantify. “It’s hard to measure tangible change,” Raven says. “If we mobilized 40,000 people [for the School Strikes for Climate], tangibly what has that done?”
Dr Abrahamse, as a researcher, sees the complicated factors that go into change. “It’s hard to say for sure…but the climate strikes changed the conversation,” she says. “The school strikes [showed] that it is possible to act collectively.”
Knowing intellectually that your action has made a small difference can be frustrating, even if it is true. “I know that [the strikes] contributed to the social environment which allowed the Zero Carbon Act to pass, but it’s just so incremental,” says Raven.
Legislation such as the plastic bag ban can change norms overnight, Dr Abrahamse says. “Small and tangible” behaviours are easy to change, and a good place for environmental action to start, as well as sweeping policy and societal transformation.
Physical things are easier to notice. Raven namechecks art and gardening as a way to act against the climate crisis. Most important, she says, is to “build the kind of community where if you take the issue away the community is still there and it’s something you want to be a part of.” Lindi and Hannah agree with this: it is a sense of collectivity that inspires action, as well as an ideological commitment to the issues.
Dr Abrahamse’s research has looked at how environmentally-motivated behaviour and emotion is experienced socially, meaning that communities are even more vital. “Social [action] gives a sense that everyone is doing their part,” she says. Small, perceptible actions are much more meaningful and transformative if they are done collectively.
The social aspect of activism makes it particularly difficult for climate activists whose communities do not share their goals. Lindi’s research has shown that for isolated activists “there’s definitely more negative impacts [to mental wellbeing] there because it doesn’t feel like you can do anything, even if you try if you’re the only one trying in your community.” Isolated activists are particularly at risk of negative mental health outcomes.
I walked in a SS4C march, because climate change matters to me. I had a sign I’d made; it felt like I was participating in a bigger thing, like something was possible. And yet the event itself was exhausting. I lost the people I was with and my energy with them, clutching my sign with fading conviction: this flood of people, nauseous, overwhelming. I listened to people talk. I ate my lunch on Parliament lawn. There were many people with me, many of them feeling the same way I did. But I had no friend beside me to talk to, just thousands of worried, happy strangers. And then I went home, and everything was the same, with a sign leaning against my wall, reminding me that my earth is in anguish.
Is it easier, then, not to think about climate change; to go about life, as Lindi says she used to, not paying attention to the climate and thinking “lah-di-dah, everything is fine?” I think, uneasily, of my own dreams: topsoil loss, barren ground, waterfalls rushing where I don’t expect them. Even when we try not to think about climate change, it creeps in.
The reason that the climate crisis is impossible to avoid is because we are connected. One of the determining factors in if someone takes climate action, Wokje says, is how connected they feel to nature. Connection is built from memories, from having parts of the natural world that feel like home: recognizing plants and skies, returning to natural landscapes that feel familiar to you. Lindi has found in her research that youth climate activists are often building on memories of the environment they grew up in. Seeing that environment be destroyed—experiencing solastalgia—is often what spurs them into action.
If action can come from fear, it creates hope. These two are entangled: Lindi’s research with young activists has shown that people take action before they talk about hope. It starts small; intangible, individual. But if that difference is real then “there’s hope that maybe I can do something more, maybe our whole generation can do something.” Activism—like hope—grows.
I ask Hannah what gives them hope. “Decolonisation. Bringing our communities together and having these conversations.” Talking about climate change, how we live with fear, is difficult, especially for dispossessed people. But it is also vitally important, because it demonstrates that these feelings are experienced with other’s.
“Climate change affects [Indigenous people] more through generations through colonialism, our lands, our oceans, our people,” says Lori. As the effects of the climate crisis worsen, perhaps more people will understand the devastation of dispossession, the complex web between land and air and people.
It is no coincidence that the climate crisis is happening at the same time as a youth mental health crisis—but it is possible to respond to both at once. “Connection to nature is [also] about connecting to other people,” says Wokje. We can hold each other through the shared fear, reaching towards a shared conviction that things can get better.
I long to be connected to this place where I am, this place I am learning to love: a place ruined, a place thriving, where kawakawa leaves feel supple against my fingers, and the winters are warmer than they used to be. I am learning to love the people around me: perplexing, frustrating, courageous, our futures shared. I am learning to be curious about the possibilities of change: not the kind of change that waits on politicians, but change that makes the present resilient against every kind of future. We—together, stronger, every true cliché—are learning to hope.
Raven tells me about the slogan of the Climate Justice Alliance, an Indigenous activism group: “It Takes Roots.” It speaks, she says, to the connection that we long for, to the people and environments we all live beside and within: this nested, tangled system. “You need to be connected to something to drive what you’re doing, otherwise you’re easily going to be swept away by some wind. For some people that’s intergenerational but—we can put down little roots.”
*name changed.