Navigating eco-anxiety and eco-detachment: educators’ strategies for raising environmental awareness given students’ disconnection from nature

Abstract

Awareness of environmental problems such as climate change can motivate action, but educators debate whether to raise students’ awareness given that it may provoke eco-anxiety. We have even less understanding of how these relationships are affected by young people’s growing disconnection from nature. Through 28 semi-structured interviews in Canada and the United Kingdom, we explore how educators perceive students’ nature connection and eco-anxiety and how they introduce discussion of environmental problems. Educators frequently observed experiential, cognitive, and emotional indicators of nature disconnection and eco-anxiety, although many (39%) reported rarely, if ever, witnessing such environmentally related distress. Educators prioritised improving nature connection over raising awareness of environmental problems. When they discuss these issues with students, they emphasise hope and encourage pro-environmental behaviours to avoid eliciting eco-anxiety for those not currently experiencing it, a strategy that is partially inconsistent with literature suggesting some eco-anxiety can nurture pro-environmental behaviour. Our findings provide new insights into the challenges that educators face in helping their students navigate current environmental trends.

Keywords:

• SDG 13: Climate action
• constructive hope
• coping
• pro-environmental behaviour
• nature disconnection
• youth

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank all participants for donating their time and energy to this project. The manuscript benefitted greatly from the input of the Editor and three anonymous referees. Funding for the research reported in this paper was provided by the Dean’s Doctoral Initiative, Faculty of Environment, University of Waterloo.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Data availability statement

Due to the qualitative nature of this research, participants of this study did not agree for their data to be shared publicly, so supporting data is not available.

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Faculty of Environment, University of Waterloo (Dean’s Doctoral Initiative).

Notes on contributors

Rachael C. Edwards

Rachael C. Edwards is a Senior Research Fellow in the Institute of Education at University College London. Her research lies at the intersection of sustainability and public health. She is interested in how evidence linking nature interaction to wellbeing can be harnessed in policy and practice to reduce health inequalities. She also explores mechanisms of bridging the research-implementation gap and promoting evidence use in public health settings. Rachael attained a PhD in Planning from the University of Waterloo, Canada (2021), where she focused on evaluating and improving equity of access to nature for underrepresented communities.

Brendon M. H. Larson

Brendon M. H. Larson is a Professor in the School of Environment, Resources and Sustainability in the Faculty of Environment at the University of Waterloo. His research concerns the social dimensions of biodiversity conservation, for example regarding how people perceive and evaluate conservation options in the current era of dramatic global change. He has published over 70 refereed journal articles and book chapters, as well as the book Metaphors for Environmental Sustainability: Redefining Our Relationship with Nature (Yale University Press, 2011). He has served as President of Ontario Nature and on the editorial board of the journal Diversity and Distributions, and he is currently the Domain Editor for ‘Climate, Ecology and Conservation’ for WIREs Climate Change.

Susan Clayton

Susan Clayton is the Whitmore-Williams Professor of Psychology at the College of Wooster in Ohio. Dr. Clayton’s research examines people’s relationship with the natural environment, how it is socially constructed, and how a healthy relationship with nature can be promoted. She developed the Environmental Identity Scale to assess individual differences in perceived interdependence with nature. She has written about the effects of climate change on mental health and has developed a scale to assess climate anxiety. She is author or editor of six books, including Identity and the Natural Environment, Conservation Psychology, and Psychology and Climate Change, and is currently the editor of the Cambridge Elements series in Applied Social Psychology. She was a lead author on the Sixth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.