At 22, this young activist has found ways to channel her eco-anxiety into action

With many people describing Cop26, the United Nations climate conference that has just begun in Glasgow, as the “last chance” to save the planet, it's no wonder that many of us are struggling with eco-anxiety in some shape or form right now.

It's a phenomenon that's become increasingly common in recent years, particularly among young people. “Eco-anxiety relates to all of those difficult feelings that can bubble up in the face of the climate crisis and in particular, perceived inaction,” Clover Hogan, the 22-year-old founder of Force of Nature and a researcher on eco-anxiety, tells Vogue over the phone. “Young people are looking to the people in positions of power who have been entrusted to safeguard our future, and not seeing action with the kind of urgency and scale that this crisis requires.”

For Hogan, who moved from Australia to Indonesia as a child, and now lives in the UK, it was watching climate and wildlife documentaries like An Inconvenient Truth and The Cove aged 11 that first led to an “overwhelming feeling” of grief, frustration and anger. But it was the catastrophic wildfires that hit her home country of Australia in late 2019 and early 2020 that led to the most severe feelings of eco-anxiety she's experienced to date.

“I started spontaneously crying: I would cry in the shower; I would cry on my way to work; I'd cry in the middle of meetings,” the activist describes. “Every time I looked at my phone, I saw the images rolling in of what was happening in Australia, my country in flames; reading the headlines of billions of animals being incinerated by these wildfires. I was going through grief. I think until that point, in a bubble of relative climate privilege, climate change was something that I've read about in articles; that I watched as a long-term threat in documentaries.”

Although eco-anxiety can be overwhelming at times, Hogan advises not running away from these feelings. “The first thing I would say is really to give space to those feelings that will inevitably surface,” she says. “Eco-anxiety is proof that we have empathy; that we have humanity; and that we are awake to the issues rather than sleepwalking towards this cliff of climate collapse. Every climate psychologist I've spoken to has said that the problem isn't that more and more young people are experiencing eco-anxiety but that more people in positions of power are not. These feelings are what ring the internal alarm bells and tell us, ‘We need to do something about this.’”

Hogan notes that not taking action is a privilege that those already on the frontlines of climate change, predominantly in the Global South, can't afford. “If you're living in a frontline community, your eco-anxiety is not something you can simply switch off,” she continues. “We've talked to students who have lost their homes due to flooding in Jakarta, students in Kenya who have been impacted by food-system collapse first hand. They don't have the privilege of falling into climate doomism, because this is an issue that's already on their doorstep.”

That's why Hogan set up Force of Nature, an organisation working to empower young people in schools and universities to turn their eco-anxiety into action. “To keep those feelings from tipping into paralysis, we need to connect those feelings to a real sense of agency,” the activist explains. 
“We need to think, ‘How can those feelings be the driving force behind my activism?’”

Despite her young years, Hogan is already a shining example of the influence one person can have, not only through her non-profit, but also sitting at the boardroom table with the likes of P&G, Pepsico and Unilever and delivering a TED Talk that's had over a million views. “I've shifted from a place of feeling that my age [is] a barrier to realising that's exactly why I need to be in the room, not only because these challenges are the ones that we're going to inherit, but also because my youthfulness brought a radically different perspective,” she explains.

So, how can we, too, channel our eco-anxiety into climate action? Focusing on just one problem you can help with is the key to not feeling overwhelmed or powerless. “We don't need to solve all the problems as one person but we need lots and lots of individuals stepping up and saying: 'That's the thing that I'm going to take on; that's the problem that I want to solve',” Hogan concludes. “'Can I do something about fashion and rethink our relationship to clothes, or how do we change the fact that a third of the world's food is wasted every single day?' There's no shortage of problems—but there is a shortage of people who are stepping up and taking ownership of them.”

This article originally appeared on Vogue.co.uk

Also read:

Sexual violence is a hidden impact of the climate crisis that’s not discussed enough

“We must treat a crisis like a crisis”: what 2020 has taught us about the climate emergency