The politics of eco-anxiety: Anthropocene dread from depoliticisation to repoliticisation

Abstract

Eco-anxiety has become increasingly widespread in recent years. Many people are suffering from intense feelings of distress in the face of the horrors of life in the Anthropocene. This article explores the political implications of eco-anxiety. For some commentators, eco-anxiety contributes to the depoliticisation of the climate crisis. It produces fearful subjects who are unable to discern alternative socioenvironmental pathways and distracts attention from the structural forces contributing to the unfolding ecological catastrophe. I contend that this critique of eco-anxiety is mistaken. It is argued that eco-anxiety has the potential to heighten political consciousness on the climate crisis. Drawing on Jean-Paul Sartre’s account of anguish and Karl Marx’s account of alienation, I suggest that eco-anxiety, first, highlights the contingency of political life in the Anthropocene by demonstrating the variety of possible climate futures and, second, articulates a longing for a collective subject that can exercise effective political agency.

With the wild weather, scorching temperatures and forest fires of recent years, the reality of life in the Anthropocene is becoming increasingly clear. The remainder of the 21st century seems to promise, at best, a succession of increasingly serious climatic catastrophes and, at worst, the collapse of society as presently constituted. In this context, it is unsurprising that people are worried; a blasé attitude is no longer sustainable. However, for some people, the ongoing climate crisis triggers not only diffuse concern but intense anxiety. As an American Psychological Association report states, a new condition, termed eco-anxiety, has emerged in which people suffer from a ‘chronic fear of environmental doom’ (Clayton et al., 2017: 68). According to psychologists who have studied eco-anxiety, symptoms include insomnia, panic attacks, obsessive thinking, depressive episodes, loss of appetite and self-harm (Brophy et al., 2023; Crandon et al., 2022; Hickman, 2020; Wray, 2022). ¹ In other words, consciousness of the horrors of the Anthropocene undercuts the ability of people to carry on their everyday lives.

There is nothing new about the association between climate change and feelings of anxiety. Indeed, the term eco-anxiety began to circulate in the early 2010s (Albrecht, 2011). However, in the last half decade, there has been burgeoning interest in eco-anxiety. For instance, Oxford Languages (2019) recorded a 4290% increase in the use of the term eco-anxiety in English-language media sources in 2019. Alongside countless media articles exploring the phenomenon of eco-anxiety in high-profile venues (see, e.g. Barry, 2022; Ostrander, 2022), several self-help books have been published – including Anouchka Grose’s A Guide to Eco-Anxiety (2020), Sarah Jaquette Ray’s A Field Guide to Eco-Anxiety (2020) and Britt Wray’s Generation Dread (2022) – that provide practical advice for people suffering from eco-anxiety. Moreover, psychologists have completed a range of studies examining eco-anxiety, exploring issues like which populations are most likely to be affected by the condition and possible treatments for it (for overviews, see Boluda-Verdú et al., 2022; Brophy et al., 2023; Coffey et al., 2021).

There is empirical evidence to support the idea that many people suffer from eco-anxiety. Dread concerning the future of the climate is particularly prevalent amongst young people. For example, one recent study surveyed 10,000 children and young people aged between 16 and 25 in 10 countries (including Australia, Brazil and the Philippines), with 59% reporting that they were very or extremely worried about climate change and 45% reporting that their concern about climate change had negatively impacted their everyday life (Hickman et al., 2021; see also Ogunbode et al., 2022). Significantly, this study highlights that eco-anxiety is experienced by people in both the Global North and the Global South (Young, 2023). Despite the understandable focus on young people, there is some evidence that people of all ages are anxious about climate change, with one study finding that 29% of adults in the United States are very worried about the unfolding ecological disaster (Leiserowitz et al., 2019) and a survey of adults in the United Kingdom finding that 78% of people experience some level of eco-anxiety (Davis et al., 2021). The evidence from studies of young people and adults suggests that eco-anxiety is a widespread issue that impacts many people around the world, though more research is needed on its prevalence amongst adults in the Global South.

Some have voiced disquiet about the deleterious political consequences of the prevalence of anxiety on the climate crisis. On the right, conservative commentator Quill Robinson (2021) warns that: ‘Rather than educating and empowering the first generation confronting the effects of climate change, some climate activists have crippled them with fear and anxiety’ (see also Lomborg, 2022; Shellenberger, 2020). On this reading, eco-anxiety paralyses action on the climate crisis; it creates subjects who are immobilised by their fear of the catastrophes of the Anthropocene. On the left, ecosocialist Matthew Huber (2022: 39) suggests that eco-anxiety is ‘rooted in “carbon guilt”, which assumes that middle-class consumers are both largely responsible for and central to solutions to the climate crisis’. Being ‘wracked by anxiety over excessive lifestyles’ obscures the real causes of the environmental catastrophe, which reside not in the decisions of individual consumers but instead capitalism as a global system (Huber, 2022: 112). Even some of the authors of books on eco-anxiety have recognised that the psychologisation of the climate crisis risks obfuscating its structural causes, with Ray (2021) noting the lack of attention to racism, and specifically whiteness’s role in producing and reproducing the climate crisis, in discourses on eco-anxiety (see also Wray, 2022).

On this understanding, eco-anxiety depoliticises the Anthropocene. As many green political theorists argue, one of the ways in which decisive action on the climate crisis is undermined is through depoliticisation, which involves presenting climate change as an area of consensus that is outside the domain of social conflict and sidelining the different possible pathways on climate futures, each of which represents distinct interests and social groups (Goeminne, 2012; Kenis, 2019; Pepermans and Maeseele, 2016; Swyngedouw, 2010, 2022). As I elaborate further below, eco-anxiety risks contributing to this process in two ways. First, in line with the conservative critique, eco-anxiety reduces the political options open to people on the climate crisis. Rather than being confronted with a range of trajectories, the fear associated with eco-anxiety makes it appear that the only possible scenarios are the apocalypse or its prevention, thus undercutting a sense of the pluralism of climate futures. Second, in line with the leftist critique, eco-anxiety presents the climate crisis as an individual problem and prevents the formation of a collective subject of political change. Rather than offering a range of political choices, each of which involves shifts in social relations, eco-anxiety posits climate change as an issue of personal behaviour, thus again undercutting the possibility of democratic debate over different collective futures.

That commentators are suspicious of the politics of eco-anxiety is unsurprising. Broader studies often focus on the deleterious consequences of anxiety for political action. Governments and movements often provoke anxiety over matters of war, immigration and crime to reinforce structures of inequality and pacify populations (Bourke, 2006; Robin, 2004). For instance, nationalist projects mobilise anxiety about racialised others, portraying them as a threat to society, to construct an image of an endangered polity that requires defending, often violently (Hirvonen, 2017). In this way, as Martha Nussbaum (2012: 58) notes, anxiety promotes ‘an intense focus on the self that casts others into darkness’, in which a privileged group is painted as threatened by a less privileged group. Others have also highlighted how anxiety risks presenting matters of public concern, which require collective action and structural change, as individual issues of managing emotions and controlling responses. The condition of anxiety is thus closely related to neoliberal subjectivity, in which it is the role of individuals to manage risks and respond to dangers, whether that be in the realms of employment, health or security (Cossman, 2013; Wilson, 2017). Neoliberalism thus produces ‘anxious subjects’ who are exhorted to ‘undertake a range of self-governing projects in order to manage, mitigate, and reduce the unpleasant emotion’ (Cossman, 2013: 899).

Yet, it would be wrong to say that anxiety only has deleterious political effects. Corey Robin (2004: 16) usefully comments that anxiety is a ‘political tool [. . .] created and sustained by political leaders or activists who stand to gain something from it’. This suggests that anxiety can be utilised for a wide variety of different purposes, including emancipatory and liberatory ends. As Andreja Zevnik (2023: 2) argues in the context of the Covid-19 pandemic, the experience of anxiety can be ‘immobilising’, but it can also be ‘mobilising’; it both closes down and opens up ‘different, transformative socio-political relations and actions’. The cultivation of anxiety can have a range of beneficial effects, including encouraging people to seek further information about the issue in question and cooperate with other concerned people to address collective crises, as well as pushing governments to pursue protective policies (Albertson and Gadarian, 2015). Indeed, just as there are political dangers inherent in anxiety, there are also political dangers in denying anxiety. The ‘attempt in today’s society to find a cure for anxiety’ ignores the fact that anxiety is the ‘very condition through which people relate to the world’ (Salecl, 2004: 9). There is no way to ultimately overcome the uncertain and undetermined nature of politics, which will always provoke some degree of anxiety. Instead, the task is to channel anxiety towards political movements that promise emancipation rather than oppression, liberation not violence.

This article examines whether eco-anxiety has politically beneficial effects. More specifically, against the charge that eco-anxiety depoliticises the climate crisis, I argue that it has the potential to repoliticise it. The experience of eco-anxiety clarifies the challenges of political action in the Anthropocene in two ways. First, by utilising the existentialist account of anguish proposed by Jean-Paul Sartre, it is argued that eco-anxiety is closely related to the problem of freedom. Rather than inducing a state of paralysis in which political action appears impossible, it reminds subjects of the fact that the future is not pre-determined. There are different political pathways that can be pursued in the face of climate change; decisions have to be made about the future of the world. Second, drawing on Karl Marx’s notion of alienation, I argue that eco-anxiety is provoked by the difficulties of forming a political subject in the face of climate change. That is, the anxiety is not so much about the impacts of the changing climate as about the inability of humanity to collectively coordinate its actions in response to these changes. Eco-anxiety is defined by the tension between the sense that political action can be taken and the sense that it is impossible to take such action.

To make this argument, I begin with some comments on terminology, methodology and intended audience in the first section. In the second section, I consider the possible depoliticising effects of eco-anxiety. Drawing on political theoretical accounts of the climate crisis, I suggest that eco-anxiety has depoliticising effects insofar that it, first, paralyses action on the climate by closing possibilities for alternative socioenvironmental futures and, second, individualises responsibility for the crisis by preventing the formation of a collective subject. The remainder of the article is then concerned with addressing this critique via a conceptual reconstruction of eco-anxiety. In the third section, I suggest that feelings of anxiety are not only connected to a sense of powerlessness and immobilisation. Instead, anxiety reveals freedom in the situation; it demonstrates that there are different political pathways ahead of the subject. In the fourth section, it is argued that anxiety need not be an individualising emotion. Instead, the feeling of eco-anxiety discloses a desire for a connection with others in the form of a collective political subject. Eco-anxiety articulates a worry about the absence of this subject and a longing for its formation. By way of conclusion, I use the idea of the prepolitical to consider eco-anxiety’s status vis-à-vis depoliticisation, on the one hand and repoliticisation, on the other.

Terminology, methodology and audience

Before moving to this argument, a few preliminary points should be made. In terms of terminology, I primarily use the term eco-anxiety in this article. It is worth noting that a number of other terms have been proposed to describe the emotional distress caused by the climate crisis, including ‘eco-distress, climate anxiety, solastalgia, eco-grief, ecological grief, existential anxiety, eco-trauma, [and] geo-trauma’ (Hickman, 2020: 421). Nevertheless, ‘most people nowadays use eco-anxiety’, something reflected by the increased prevalence of the term in recent years in both academic research and popular culture (Pihkala, 2020a: 1). From the perspective of this article, it is significant that eco-anxiety, which suggests a psychological disposition distinct from grief, trauma or nostalgia, has become the dominant term. As we will see, anxiety, as an affective state, has political properties, both positive and negative, that make it of particular interest to those concerned with the depoliticisation and repoliticisation of the Anthropocene.

I draw my methodology from the tradition of critical theory. As Nancy Fraser (2013: 19) puts it, critical theory develops ‘its conceptual framework with an eye to the aims and activities of those oppositional social movements with which it has a partisan – though not uncritical – identification’. In the case of eco-anxiety, this process of developing theory in conjunction with political actors involves a doubled movement. On the one hand, the knowledge, ideas and desires of the eco-anxious are a valuable resource, offering a productive perspective for understanding the distinct challenges of the Anthropocene. In the following, I use a range of texts that describe the experience of eco-anxiety – including psychological studies, self-help books, and media commentary – to ground my account of its political potentiality. The argument of the article emerges out of the understanding of eco-anxiety that already exists in broader consciousness, taking the latter as its basis and source.

On the other hand, the article also probes the limitations and tensions of eco-anxiety as currently understood with a view to demonstrating its capacity to contribute to the struggle for climate justice. By considering the ways in which eco-anxiety risks depoliticising the environmental movement, I focus on those dimensions of Anthropocene dread that are most relevant to the political struggle over climate change. To this end, I bring eco-anxiety into confrontation with surprising resources, including Sartre’s notion of anguish and Marx’s notion of alienation, with the latter offering a means to elucidate previously repressed qualities of the former. An apt term for what I am attempting, then, is conceptual reconstruction, which suggests a respect for the understanding of eco-anxiety already developed by activists and citizens as well as a desire to hone and refine the concept in the face of challenge and critique (on reconstruction as a method, see Jaeggi, 2014).

This methodological approach also offers a clue for my desired audience. The article has two primary readers in mind: those who are experiencing eco-anxiety and those who are sceptical about its political potential. For the former, it aims to affirm the value and power of their dread regarding the Anthropocene while also asking them to reflect on the aspects of their anxiety that might inform the struggle for emancipatory climate futures. For the latter, I affirm their desire to see an effective green movement that can challenge the forces (including capitalism, racism, patriarchy and colonialism) producing the climate crisis while also asking them to consider how eco-anxiety can contribute to this task. In Hans-Georg Gadamer’s (2004: 390) terms, I aim for a ‘fusion of horizons’ between the eco-anxious and their critics, such that the preconceptions of each are reformed by virtue of an exchange with the other.

Eco-anxiety as a depoliticising force

Many political theorists have used the notion of depoliticisation to explicate contemporary political discourses on the climate crisis (Goeminne, 2012; Kenis, 2019; Pepermans and Maeseele, 2016; Swyngedouw, 2010, 2022). For these thinkers, there is a need to make a distinction between politics and the political (Mouffe, 2005). Politics refers to the everyday functioning of the political sphere, such as the cycle of elections, votes in parliament, administrative manoeuvres and so on. By contrast, the political refers to moments of dissensus or agonism whereby different social actors with distinct interests come into conflict with one another over the direction of the polity. Discourses are depoliticised when they repress or conceal the political, or the fact that there are a variety of contrasting and conflicting positions on the climate crisis. Depoliticisation occurs when ‘the dominant approach to climate change is continuously represented as “the” scientific or social consensus [. . .] and dissenting actors are excluded as “skeptic”, “alarmist”, or “radical”’ (Pepermans and Maeseele, 2016: 480). This consensual approach ‘papers over the heterogeneities of often conflicting and antagonistic (inter-)human relations and human/non-human interactions’ and ‘forecloses democratic conflicts about possible different socio-ecological configurations’ (Swyngedouw, 2022: 910).

Given this, how might discourses of eco-anxiety contribute to the depoliticisation of the climate crisis? To answer this question, we can return to the critiques of eco-anxiety discussed in the introduction. The conservative critique implies that eco-anxiety produces a feeling of paralysis on the climate crisis. The eco-anxious often feel that doom is likely and there are a host of horrors on the horizon, hence the intense feelings of fear and distress associated with the condition. This is an anti-political gesture because it takes the climate crisis from the ‘realm of contingency’ to the ‘realm of necessity’ (Hällmark, 2023: 49). The future feared by the eco-anxious, the fact that they believe that disaster is likely to be our fate, radically reduces the possible pathways available to political actors. Eco-anxiety fosters a pessimistic worldview in which the only options open to humanity are the climate apocalypse or its constant deferral. This produces a ‘thoroughly depolitized imaginary [. . .] that does not revolve around choosing one trajectory rather than another, one that is not articulated with specific political programs’ (Swyngedouw, 2010: 219). The array of different political choices available on the climate crisis, including those proposed by ecosocialists, ecomodernists, ecofascists and so on, is thus sidestepped in favour of an apocalyptic horizon of expectation.

If the critique from the right focuses on the apathy produced by eco-anxiety, the critique from the left focuses on its obfuscation of the structural nature of the climate crisis. One of the hallmarks of depoliticisation is the repression of antagonistic conflicts between social groups with distinct interests. Society is not understood in terms of a ‘political struggle between differing and opposing socioenvironmental visions’, with structural cleavages of class, race, gender, sexuality and so on repressed in favour of a focus on individual action (Goeminne, 2012: 4). This is echoed by the critique of eco-anxiety from the left. The psychologisation of climate politics, with its focus on individual responses to the Anthropocene, contributes to the broader marginalisation of collective action. In discourses on eco-anxiety, it appears that individual behaviour, most particularly through the adoption of green consumption habits (see Desbiolles, 2020; Grose, 2020), is central to both the causes of and solutions to the unfolding environmental disaster. Attention is thus diverted from the structural forces, collective agents, and intra-species inequalities that underpin the Anthropocene. Eco-anxiety thus has a disempowering effect, offering an inadequate analysis of the causes of the crisis and ineffectual measures for addressing it.

At this point, a question can be posed: Are the psychologists, self-help writers and media commentators concerned with eco-anxiety entirely oblivious to the problem of depoliticisation? Certainly, it would be wrong to say those engaged with eco-anxiety are explicitly concerned about its potentially depoliticising effects. For instance, the psychologists working on the condition are unfamiliar with the debates about depoliticisation occurring in green political theory. Nevertheless, a careful analysis of discourses on eco-anxiety reveals a strong degree of concern about the relationship between individual mental health and collective social change. As Britt Wray (2022: 117) writes: ‘Unfortunately, the common knee-jerk reaction is still to ask, “Why should we turn inward now to process our emotions when we urgently need societal change?” Let’s finally put that false binary to rest’. The aim of the remainder of this section is to consider the implicit responses to the depoliticising critique already articulated in discourses on eco-anxiety. Ultimately, these responses are not entirely sufficient. Nevertheless, they provide a preliminary step for my reconstruction of the concept in the remainder of the article.

The first point to stress here is that, contra the conservative claim that eco-anxiety produces passivity, many psychologists resist the idea that eco-anxiety necessarily results in apathy. Psychological studies often make the distinction between adaptive and maladaptive levels of eco-anxiety (Clayton, 2020; Crandon et al., 2022; Kurth and Pihkala, 2022; Verplanken et al., 2020). Maladaptive anxiety refers to states where a person is incapacitated by their fear of climate change, while adaptive anxiety is more productive, referring to ‘a future-oriented stance that can signal the approach of a threat and motivate people to prepare appropriately’ (Clayton, 2020: 3). Anxiety about the climate crisis might trigger behavioural change, including participating in activism and cultivating personal resilience (Ray, 2020). Green activist groups, such as Extinction Rebellion, often use apocalyptic visions of climate-changed futures to shock people into protest, suggesting that they recognise the power of anxiety in political mobilisation (Walter, 2022). ² Those who are eco-anxious are not necessarily incapacitated by their concern about the climate crisis. Given this, there is no contradiction between the experience of anxiety and the possibility of being an active subject.

Similarly, a careful analysis of discourses on eco-anxiety also reveals some of the limitations of the leftist critique. As we have seen, the suspicion for those on the left is that eco-anxiety individualises the climate crisis and obscures the structural forces shaping the Anthropocene. However, psychologists engaged with eco-anxiety are aware of the dangers of reducing climate change to a matter of individual responsibility. Most particularly, they stress that eco-anxiety, in contrast to other forms of anxiety, is not something that can be resolved by individual action alone. As overviews of the literature assert, psychologists agree that eco-anxiety should not be treated as pathological (Brophy et al., 2023; Crandon et al., 2022). It is a rational fear of climate-related calamities and, ultimately, its resolution is out of the hands of the individual. In contrast to, for example, arachnophobia, a change in perspective will not resolve the problem. Eco-anxiety involves an appreciation of the collective nature of the crisis; the fact that one’s fears of climate change can only be assuaged by large-scale changes in the structure of society (Rao and Powell, 2021; Wray, 2022; Young, 2023).

As this suggests, the experience of eco-anxiety and an appreciation of the fundamental causes of the climate crisis are not necessarily in tension with one another. At the same time, these responses to the critiques of eco-anxiety, while promising, do not fully respond to the claim that Anthropocene dread fosters depoliticising processes. Two key points should be made here.

First, repoliticisation involves more than people taking action on the climate crisis (Kenis, 2019; Machin, 2020; Marquardt, 2020). There are forms of environmental activism that, despite involving active subjects campaigning for political change, continue to promote depoliticised narratives. For instance, Jens Marquardt (2020) argues that the Fridays for the Future campaign, which mobilises thousands of young people across the globe, is caught between two tendencies. On the one hand, it repoliticises the climate crisis by proposing ‘competing visions of a future society in times of climate change’ and, on the other, ‘the protestors’ strong focus on science-driven politics’ fosters a depoliticised ‘techno-centric, apolitical and market-driven’ approach (Marquardt, 2020: 1; see also Kenis, 2023; Swyngedouw, 2022). The point to stress here is that simply because eco-anxiety does not produce entirely passive subjects who are unable to take action does not mean that it encourages repoliticised forms of action on the climate crisis; action should not be mistaken for political action. It may simply produce modes of activism that reinforce the consensual approach to climate politics, thus ignoring the range of different and conflicting pathways that could be pursued by the environmental movement.

Second, the recognition by psychologists and self-help writers that climate change is a structural problem is an important first step in the repoliticisation of the ecological crisis. It is clear that the only way in which eco-anxiety can ultimately be resolved is through large-scale transformations of the social and political system. However, depoliticising processes refer not only to the displacement of a structural analysis of the contemporary crisis but also to the absence of a collective subject of change. Whereas other social movements have been centred on a particular social group – whether that be workers in the case of labour movements, women in the case of feminist movements, or people of colour in the case of anti-racist movements – environmental movements are ‘often not framed as emancipatory struggles of a particular subject’ (Kenis and Lievens, 2014: 539; see also Swyngedouw, 2010). Instead of a conflict between collective subjects with distinct interests, movements on climate change frequently speak in universalistic terms, claiming to represent humanity as a whole against the calamities associated with the ecological crisis. The point to emphasise here is that acknowledging that individual change alone is insufficient does not address the lack of a political subject. ³ In fact, there is a tension in discourses on eco-anxiety between the recognition that climate change is a structural problem, which implies the need for a collective subject of change, and the forms of treatment proposed for the condition, which often focus on either individual changes to lifestyle or ambiguous calls to take part in forms of climate activism.

At this point, two sets of questions can be posed regarding the politics of eco-anxiety. The first set concerns the relationship between eco-anxiety, freedom and contingency: Does eco-anxiety contribute to a consensual approach that obscures the variety of climate futures available to political actors? Alternatively, does it reveal a diversity of perspectives and disclose social antagonisms? The second set concerns the relationship between eco-anxiety and subject formation: Does eco-anxiety, by focusing on the individual psychological stresses caused by the climate crisis, forestall the formation of a collective political subject? Alternatively, does it lay the groundwork for the development of an antagonistic subject that is capable of providing a point of mobilisation for climate politics and an agent for structural transformation? In the remainder of this article, I articulate a response to these questions, with the next section focusing on the first set of concerns and the subsequent section focusing on the second set of concerns.

Before considering these questions, a final comment should be made. I am concerned with diagnosing some of the potential political problems with eco-anxiety. This should not be taken as an attempt to collapse the legitimacy of eco-anxiety with the question of depoliticisation. Certainly, some conservative commentators critique the politics of eco-anxiety only to dismiss it as misguided and inappropriate (see Lomborg, 2022; Robinson, 2021; Shellenberger, 2020). This is not my aim, not least because eco-anxiety cannot be wished away. It is clear that, even if eco-anxiety were to have some of the deleterious effects highlighted above, it would remain a prevalent, indeed unavoidable, response to the climate crisis. The current trajectory of climate change, which looks likely to produce a range of catastrophic outcomes, will continue to produce anxiety. It is precisely because eco-anxiety is an inexorable presence, in some respects the precondition for any engagement with plausible climate futures, that it is important to reflect on its relationship with different forms of political action. My purpose in the following is to draw out some aspects of eco-anxiety that might be missed without the provocation provided by the critique offered by scholars concerned with depoliticisation, working to reform, not reject, the former through an engagement with the latter.

Climate vertigo: Political action, contingency and freedom

The first challenge to eco-anxiety concerns its relationship to the politics of necessity and the politics of contingency (Hällmark, 2023). That is to say, does eco-anxiety present the climate crisis as a fait accompli, in which all important decisions have already been made, or as an open situation, in which political action can change the course of history? There are grounds for thinking that the experience of eco-anxiety can aid appreciation of the contingent possibilities for the future. Importantly, many accounts of eco-anxiety stress that the condition is not grounded in concrete fears of disaster but instead a strong sense of uncertainty (Clayton, 2020; Grose, 2020; Hickman, 2020; Kurth and Pihkala, 2022; Wray, 2022). Whereas fear is ‘related to a more concrete threat’, eco-anxiety is ‘borne of a troubling situation which includes more uncertainty’, such that those experiencing it are unsure about exactly what is threatening about the situation and unclear about what the best way to respond to it is (Pihkala, 2020b: 4). The Anthropocene is a strange and unfamiliar world for humanity, but it is not one where everything is determined. This has important implications for the relationship between the psychology of eco-anxiety and the politics of contingency. The eco-anxious, in acknowledging the undetermined nature of the future, are open to the possibility of different pathways. The uncertainty associated with eco-anxiety, as Anouchka Grose (2020: 146) stresses, opens possibilities: ‘We have every reason to feel anxious. But this also means we have the option to face our uncertain future with courage and with hope’.

Sartre’s (1956) account of anguish in Being and Nothingness, which builds on a long existentialist concern with anxiety (Micali, 2022), offers a useful framework for elaborating this relationship between uncertainty and eco-anxiety. Of particular importance, for our purposes, is the emphasis that Sartre puts on the entwinement of anguish and freedom. For Sartre, there is nothing determined about humanity. We are free to make and remake ourselves in new ways; it is only by existing, by acting, that we come to define ourselves. However, Sartre stresses that this freedom, the fact that existence precedes essence, triggers a feeling of anxiety. In contrast to fear, which is centred on threatening ‘beings in the world’, anxiety is ‘anguish before myself’, occurring when we realise that our actions are not predetermined or scripted (Sartre, 1956: 29). To illustrate this, Sartre (1956: 29) gives the example of a person walking along a narrow mountain path: ‘Vertigo is anguish to the extent that I am afraid not of falling over the precipice, but of throwing myself over’. That is, people in this situation feel fear insofar that they appreciate the risk that they might accidentally fall into the abyss. However, they feel anguish insofar that they appreciate that it is partly their choice whether to jump into the abyss or to stay on the mountain path. Anxiety stems from the contingency of the future and, in particular, the fact that it can be actively shaped and reshaped by our actions. ⁴

Sartre’s account of anxiety is relevant to the political status of the dread associated with the Anthropocene. Anxiety is a ‘possibility-disclosing practice’ aimed at keeping ‘the possibility of a different future open, resisting resignation and accommodation to what is’ (Kompridis, 2006: 263). The climate crisis provokes anxiety because it is not yet determined. The direction of the crisis depends, at least in part, on the actions taken in the present, with a range of different pathways open to humanity. Indeed, anxiety, as opposed to fear alone, is triggered by the climate crisis because the situation involves choices. This provokes dread because at least one of the pathways, to borrow the terms of Sartre’s example, is to throw ourselves over the precipice by continuing the destructive social processes that have produced the unfolding environmental disaster. For instance, young people’s eco-anxiety is associated with the feeling that governments and other powerful agents are ‘failing to acknowledge or act on the crisis in a coherent, urgent way’, despite having the capacity to do so (Hickman et al., 2021: 871). At the same time, the fact that, for the eco-anxious, the climate crisis is recognised as a choice rather than a necessity opens up a range of possibilities for how it can be addressed.

With the association with contingency, eco-anxiety helps repoliticise the climate crisis. The feeling of anxiety suggests that prevailing socio-political institutions are dispensable and malleable. There is nothing necessary about either the climate crisis or the social forces that have produced it. Anxiety’s relationship with a heightened sense of uncertainty, a feeling that is both unnerving and inspiring, allows those experiencing Anthropocene dread to imagine a multitude of pathways emerging out of the present. Eco-anxiety, insofar that it is concatenated with choice and freedom, represents the existing social order as ‘contingent and therefore changeable’, thus revealing ‘the political choices, inequalities, and oppositions which are concealed in apparently neutral scientific, economic or technical representations’ of the crisis (Pepermans and Maeseele, 2016: 481). Climate futures, insofar that they are undetermined, remain amenable to political action, with subjects free to propose radically different environmental visions that resonate with the interests of conflicting social groups.

Yet, emphasising the contingency of the climate crisis might raise a concern. A number of tendencies in the environmental movement, including the Dark Mountain collective in the United Kingdom and the collapsology movement in France, have declared that it is too late to prevent catastrophic climate change (Cassegård and Thörn, 2022; Davidson, 2023). The slow progress on mitigating carbon emissions means that a disastrous future is now locked in. An aspect of contemporary eco-anxiety is that it might be too late to prevent certain forms of climate change. Accounts of eco-anxiety stress a sense of frustration with the slow progress on the crisis and a feeling of being betrayed by the failure of governments to act decades ago (Hickman et al., 2021; Rao and Powell, 2021). However, it is important to stress that there is still a significant degree of uncertainty regarding climate futures. While it is possible that catastrophic climate change will occur, it is far from inevitable, and much hinges on actions taken in the coming years. This suggests that the association between eco-anxiety and contingency is not a fantastical one. Indeed, the capacity of anxiety to disclose possibilities becomes particularly important in pessimistic times, offering a wedge that keeps open social hope when everything appears to tend towards its opposite.

Finally, a problem can also be highlighted with Sartre’s account of anguish. The individualism of Sartre’s philosophy, at least in Being and Nothingness, is difficult to reconcile with the collective nature of climate change. For Sartre, anguish is closely connected to the individual’s project, drawing out both the uncertainty and the freedom inherent in making and remaking one’s life. He is less concerned, however, with how this individual feeling of anxiety relates to relationships with other people. How can individuals aware of the openness of the future collaborate with others to realise a collective project, such as securing a just and sustainable climate future? In the next section, I address this question by turning to the early Marx, whose notion of alienation offers a basis for thinking about the problem of forming a collective subject predicated on the experience of anxiety.

Anxious people unite: Alienation and subject formation

Bringing eco-anxiety into dialogue with Sartre’s philosophy highlights the importance of anxiety in disclosing political possibilities. However, the bare fact of possibilities, that there are different pathways on the climate crisis, has little meaning in the absence of collective agents engaged in the struggle for the realisation of one pathway over another. If one side of the depoliticisation of the climate crisis is the denial of genuine political choices, then the other side concerns the formation of a political subject that is capable of collective and antagonistic action. In this regard, it is striking that accounts of eco-anxiety express a longing for political subjectivity. The experience of eco-anxiety is defined by ‘strong feelings of helplessness or powerlessness in the face of the vast global ecological problems’ (Pihkala, 2020a: 6). It appears that, despite the possibilities for political change, there are no agents capable of carrying out the transformations required. Governments, the traditional vehicle for coordinating the collective will of the people, have proved inadequate to the task, leading to feelings of ‘betrayal and abandonment’ amongst the eco-anxious (Rao and Powell, 2021). The failure of others to act on the environmental crisis brings home the difficulty of enacting decisive political change.

The feeling of loneliness and helplessness described in these accounts of eco-anxiety can be understood as a form of alienation, a concept most famously articulated by Karl Marx in his ‘Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844’. In a capitalist society, Marx suggests that workers feel a strong sense of powerlessness. The world confronts them as an alien object that is capricious and uncontrollable. They are positioned as a passive object at the mercy of outside forces. However, Marx (2010: 272, emphasis in original) stresses that these forces, while appearing outside of the control of humanity, are in fact the product of humanity: ‘This fact expresses merely that the object which labour produces [. . .] confronts it as something alien, as a power independent of the producer’. In this way, alienation occurs when people feel estranged from a world that they should have control over, such that ‘man creates a world in which he is a stranger, a world dominated by economic powers that he has created, but that he does not recognise as his own’ (MacIntyre, 1953: 51). In order to be alienated, one must have some prior relationship with the world; it cannot be something entirely new, but instead something that was once familiar but has now become strange. Rahel Jaeggi (2014: 25) clarifies this point: ‘Being alienated from something means having become distanced from something in which one is in fact involved or to which one is in fact related’.

The notion of alienation clarifies the distinctive form of political subjectivity at stake in eco-anxiety. On the one hand, it captures the feeling of helplessness that defines Anthropocene dread. The social forces that have created the ecological catastrophe appear uncontrollable, with no agent existing that can respond to the climate crisis in an organised and effective manner. As such, the world, including both human and non-human forces, is alien to the eco-anxious person; it appears entirely impervious, an immovable force that is invulnerable to political action. On the other hand, eco-anxiety, understood as a form of alienation, also recognises the wrongness of this situation. The Anthropocene, like the workers’ products in Marx’s account of alienation, has been created by humanity; the unfolding environmental disasters bear the mark of human action. Eco-anxiety recognises that the climate crisis, as something produced through social action, is not uncontrollable, while also lamenting the absence of a collective political subject that can offer directionality and purpose. Eco-anxiety expresses both the experience of alienation in the Anthropocene, the fact we are strangers in the age of humans, and the desire to overcome this condition by reasserting collective control.

Eco-anxiety thus provides a critique of processes of depoliticisation. It recognises the need for a political subject; it is only through the formation of the latter that collective control can be asserted over the future and the alienation associated with the crisis addressed. As Grose (2020: 22, emphasis in original) sloganises in her self-help book on eco-anxiety: ‘Anxious people unite!’ Eco-anxiety, the simultaneous feeling of helplessness and the recognition that the situation is potentially controllable, is a productive starting point for political mobilisation and coalition-building. Or, as Laure Noualhat (2020: 80, my translation) wryly declares: ‘I would design a programme around a good big collective depression, because without it no transformation is possible’. The anxious subject begins to see the world not as a force entirely outside of themselves but instead as something that collective political subjects have a role in making and remaking. In the past, these subjects – whether that be capitalists (Malm, 2016), plantation owners (Davis et al., 2019) or others – have contributed to processes of environmental destruction. However, eco-anxiety suggests the possibility of new subjects that will exert different and better forms of influence over the Anthropocene, even if these subjects cannot yet be explicitly named or positively described.

A clarification is required here. The need for collective control over environmental futures should not be taken to imply the desire for mastery over nature. For example, grand plans for geo-engineering projects in which humanity assumes a leading role in the functioning of the earth system are symptomatic of depoliticisation in that they posit techno-fixes that sidestep the need for structural transformation (Hällmark, 2023). Moreover, as many eco-socialists assert, appealing to Marx is not akin to desiring a return to twentieth-century productivist socialism, where nature was posited as a mere means for meeting human needs. ⁵ To borrow Walter Benjamin’s (1996: 487) words, the task is not ‘mastery of nature’ but rather mastery ‘of the relation between nature and man’. The formation of a collective subject promises control not over nature as such but rather over the decisions that are made about climate futures, offering a means of debating different trajectories on the crisis in an open fashion. Eco-anxiety, in this sense, can be understood as a desire for democratic influence over the policies formulated to prevent catastrophes on the horizon.

Eco-anxiety: Depolitical, repolitical or prepolitical?

In the preceding analysis, I have defended discourses of eco-anxiety from the charge that they depoliticise the climate crisis. Critics from both the right and the left have argued that eco-anxiety, first, radically reduces the pathways open to the environmental movement and, second, undercuts the formation of a collective political subject. These claims, while partially justified by certain aspects of discourses on eco-anxiety, are ultimately misguided. My reconstruction of eco-anxiety in terms of Sartre’s account of anguish and Marx’s conception of alienation suggests that eco-anxiety contests the depoliticisation of the Anthropocene. First, eco-anxiety, understood as a form of anguish, involves a feeling of uncertainty. The future is not defined by a predetermined set of options but instead by a feeling of possibility, with eco-anxiety provoked partly by the difficulty involved in making a choice of one path over another. Second, eco-anxiety, understood as a form of alienation, is caught between the feeling of helplessness in the face of inaction on the climate crisis and a desire for a collective subject that can fundamentally shape the Anthropocene. It involves the recognition that the planetary crises of the present have been shaped by acts of human sociality and can, in turn, be reshaped by collective political agents. Anxiety is provoked by the lack of these agents, the result of which is a persistent nonfulfilment of the possibilities for alternative climate futures.

Given this, eco-anxiety resists processes of depoliticisation. At the same time, it is less clear that eco-anxiety, in and of itself, repoliticises the climate crisis. If the latter is understood to involve ‘the creation of spaces where the issue can be reframed as a democratic debate between competing socioenvironmental trajectories’, then eco-anxiety is insufficient (Pepermans and Maeseele, 2016: 481). While eco-anxiety may disclose that there are possibilities available, it does not provide guidance on which of these choices should be pursued, how the different pathways relate to the interests of different social groups, or what the alternative socioenvironmental futures would look like. Similarly, while eco-anxiety gives voice to the need for a collective political subject, it does not positively describe how this subject should be constituted, with issues like who should be included and who should be excluded remaining unaddressed. Like Theodor Adorno’s (1973) Bilderverbot (ban on images), which affirms the necessity of utopian desire without delivering a positive articulation of the new and better society, eco-anxiety has an apophatic character, holding open a space for repoliticisation while, at the same time, leaving this space blank and unfilled.

In this way, eco-anxiety is neither fully depoliticised nor fully repoliticised. Instead, a more appropriate term to describe the distinctive political orientation of eco-anxiety is prepolitical. Eric Hobsbawm (1959: 2), in his iconic Primitive Rebels, refers to the millenarian movements studied as ‘pre-political’ because they ‘had not yet found, or only begun to find, a specific language in which to express their aspirations about the world’. In particular, the millenarian movements used the language of religion as a means of laying the groundwork for a full political engagement with the world, masking their demands for radical change in the desire to bring heaven down to earth. Something similar is at stake in discourses on eco-anxiety. Many accounts of eco-anxiety stress that working through one’s feelings about the climate crisis is a first step to political action (Grose, 2020; Wray, 2022; Young, 2023). The question of the self is thus a crucial stage in the fight for climate justice; there is no way of leaping over feelings of anxiety to the realisation of an alternative socioenvironmental world. Understanding eco-anxiety as a form of prepolitics draws out its preparatory function. It opens the way for full political engagement by emphasising the contingency of the present and articulating a longing for a collective subject of change. Just as Hobsbawm’s millenarian movements greased the path for the modern labour movement, eco-anxiety has the potential to contribute to the repoliticisation of the environmental movement. Far from an individualistic indulgence or panicked reaction, dread in the face of the climate crisis intimates towards the latent conflicts and repressed desires that define political life in the Anthropocene.