Climate emotions or eco-emotions?

 Would it be better to use the formulation “climate emotion” or “eco-emotion”? This question surfaced again in relation to the Ecopsychepedia project, which is led by some very insightful Climate Psychology people. The ‘Pedia is a very promising project and I’m glad to participate in it.

The question at hand is a complex one and I have been thinking about it a lot (see e.g. my recent article about climate emotions). I think that both kinds of words are needed, and I’ll try here to explain my view.

My broad definition of eco-emotions (sometimes called environmental emotions, and see also the Earth Emotions framework by Glenn Albrecht) is that they are emotions / feelings / affects which have been significantly evoked by ecological issues. There’s bound to be many factors which affect people’s emotions at any given moment, but it is very important to notice that ecological issues do cause and shape emotions. I define climate emotions as eco-emotions which are significantly related to climate change / the climate crisis / the climate catastrophe.

Could climate emotion words, such as climate anxiety, climate guilt etc., be used as general terms for eco-emotions? Some people think that they can. Climate change is affecting so many ecological issues, if not all of them soon. And in people’s minds, the climate crisis is often the most prevalent ecological issue (and a threat to human well-being, which makes it pressing also for people who don’t have a strong environmental identity). I have met numerous people who equate climate anxiety and eco-anxiety, and many scholars do the same. But, sometimes rather desperately and inadequately, I try to keep these terms both separate and partly connected. Why?

The major reason for me is the fact that also other ecological issues than climate change cause emotions. For a person who is anxious or sad or outraged about the damage to a local ecosystem, a climate-oriented word is not always the best description. Especially in Finnish, I’ve championed the use of more particular words in addition to general-level words; for example, “forest grief” (cf. the “reef grief” research in Australia) or “bird grief” (many possible definitions there, including some posthumanistic ones, but often referring to grief that people feel because of the loss of birds due to ecological issues). See my brief essay about climate grief for the BBC for discussion of some of these dynamics.

The use of eco-emotions as the broadest category may give recognition for some emotions which the climate emotion words do not capture. This is even more so because climate matters are among the most socially contested ecological issues around. A person who feels reluctance to admitting that he/she feels any climate anxiety may still admit feeling ecological sadness.

That been said, there is definitely a need for many articulations of climate emotions; that’s why I worked for months to produce my Taxonomy of Climate Emotions article, for example. But it’s a tricky question what to do with this issue in projects like Ecopsychepedia. Just having “climate grief” and no search word for “eco-grief” seems inadequate for me. But a solution of having two entries for each emotion word does not seem very reasonable, either. Perhaps just having the emotion word would serve for a title, because the whole encyclopedia is framed around ecological issues? And then in the text, writers could expand on both the climate-related aspects and other major aspects of the emotion, perhaps partly via sub-pages. What do you think? Please feel free to comment this post or drop me an email, or contact the Ecopsychepedia team.

To summarize certain other points: I think that it would be important that a growing number of people would ... 

• realize that many kinds of ecological issues can spark emotions
• realize that the climate crisis is affecting in an increasing manner all kinds of ecological issues, including the emotional impacts of them
• learn more about the wide array of possible eco-emotions and climate emotions (we often discuss this also in our podcast with Thomas Doherty)
• be careful in evaluations of these emotions: it's not so easy to distinguish "positive" and "negative" here, and many so-called negative emotions such as sadness and anger can be very much needed

I believe that the Ecopsychepedia can help in this regard; let us all stay tuned during the months when the Pedia grows!