Categories: NATURE

Got climate anxiety? Write a letter to the future

If you’re feeling a bit of climate doom — and who isn’t these days — a recent column in The Washington Post could offer some relief.

Research suggests that writing letters to the future “may be one of the most powerful ways to inspire support for climate action — and among the few to work across the political divide,” Michael J. Coren writes in The Washington Post.

Coren chronicles the experience of Trisha Shrum, a PhD student who about a decade ago found herself writing a letter to her daughter in the future as a way to help herself grapple with climate dread. Something clicked.

Inspired by her experience, she changed her PhD dissertation to find out if others could be similarly inspired — and, Coren writes, “help social scientists crack the code on what inspires people to take climate action”:

To test her theories, Shrum asked nearly 2,000 people from all 50 states to write either an essay or letter to a family member in the future about the risks of climate change. A third control group wrote about their daily routines. Participants could then donate any amount from a potential $20 bonus to a tree-planting charity focused on global warming.

The results, published in the peer-reviewed journal Climatic Change in 2021, and supported in follow-up experiments, showed that while writing about climate risk didn’t change anyone’s perception of climate risk, it did change their willingness to act on it. Donations among letter and essay writers increased 11 percent relative to the control group, a relatively large effect in social sciences.

Now, Shrum leads a nonprofit called DearTomorrow, which has inspired thousands to create letters, poems and illustrations aimed at dealing with their anxiety and motivating them to take action.

Environmentalists and eco-conscious people have long struggled with the weight of climate change and environmental destruction. Many prominent conservationists have acknowledged that it can be difficult to stay optimistic — and that, echoing Shrum, anxiety can be a powerful impulse to act.

“I think that today’s current drive in environmentalism is really out of a sense of real despair — particularly among young people, because those young people will have to deal with the worst,” said Conservation International CEO M. Sanjayan, in a 2019 interview with C-SPAN. “The opportunities for doing something about [the problem] are rapidly shrinking.”

While it’s difficult to stay optimistic, Sanjayan says, it’s imperative to not give in to despair.

“Of course, there are times I feel despair, he told PBS in 2023. “But despair did not eradicate the scourge of smallpox, and it did not develop a coronavirus vaccine in mere months. Despair did not build railroads that span entire continents, or harness electricity from the wind, the sun, and the water. Hope, ingenuity, and perseverance did those things. We know exactly what we need to do — the only thing that can hold us back is ourselves.