Climate activists sometimes have a tough time mentally. They are so concerned regarding the fate of the planet that they experience stress, insomnia and anxiety. Help sessions now support them.
Everyone has brought a bottle or jar of water. Not from the tap, but from nature. From a ditch around the corner, or from the sea. Twenty people, each with his or her own little water, form a circle. In the middle is an empty bowl. They look at it.
“I stepped up to it and poured the water into the bowl,” says Felix van Vugt (45). “There I shed tears for my son, Willem, who is four years old.” A perfectly healthy and cheerful child, but Van Vugt is sad regarding his situation. “As a boy of one and a half, he might imitate the sounds of many animals. What strikes me is that he will never see many of those animals in real life, because they will become extinct,” says Van Vugt, visibly touched.
Marianna van der Stel (33) was also there, in that circle. She did not step forward. It was allowed. Nothing had to. Others have already stepped to the water bowl. They called it “The Teat Bowl”. “I recognized so much of what they said,” says Van der Stel. “The stress and the sad feeling they have regarding the climate crisis and the ecological decline. I find it almost impossible to enjoy a warm spring day.”
Or take sprouting buds from trees, a beautiful sight in fact. “I feel bad regarding it because I know they are running out way too early. Nature is confused.” Had she indeed stepped to the tear scale, what would Van der Stel have wanted to share? “My hesitations regarding whether I would want to put a child on this earth, while we are on the verge of a climate catastrophe.”
A help session every season
The circle around the water bowl is part of four help sessions, one each season, organized by the Humanist Association. It’s called the Climate Free Zone. The sessions are intended for climate activists, who are so committed to the climate crisis that they are in danger of heading for a ‘climate burnout’. Shortly following the first help session, Statistics Netherlands (CBS) decides to abolish the term ‘burnout’ when it comes to employees who are exhausted.
“The same is increasingly true for activists who, day in and day out, fully face the climate crisis,” says director Robbert Bodegraven of the Humanist Association. He is not attached to the term ‘burnout’, but is concerned with the complaints that this term should summarize. “Gloom, fears, psychological complaints, exhaustion.” The help sessions (emphatically no treatments) are intended as a helping hand, for more ‘resilience’. The tears are followed by sessions to continue campaigning with newfound strength and energy.
The Humanist Association cannot give hard figures, but on the basis of research from mental health care, Bodegraven dares to state that ‘more and more’ climate activists are suffering mentally from the crisis they want to put on the agenda and fight. “We notice a clear need for mental support.”
Reading a newspaper report regarding the climate crisis now and then, or watching a news item regarding extinct animals, according to the director, people can live with that. “But activists look the monster in the mouth. They fight once morest polluting companies and failing governments. That is not easy.”
Worrying at night
Van Vugt, lecturer at Hogeschool Utrecht and active in Extinction Rebellion (XR), can relate. He starts to list: feelings of gloom, being irritable, not being able to make small talk at a party, lying at night worrying regarding the climate. It’s bothering him. “I’m not a psychologist, but I summarize it as climate stress,” he says.
The week before the interview he lay awake almost every night because of global warming and its harmful effects. He opted out of one of the many climate working groups he is involved in. “I felt guilty regarding that…”, he sighs. Supportive responses from fellow XR activists were comforting. Mental well-being is a point of attention in that citizen movement.
“Before we start a climate action, we check in,” describes Van der Stel, who is active both professionally and privately for Fossielvrij NL. Checking in means saying how you feel. That is a short moment, then the preparations for the protest begin with banners or blockades.
“If you don’t look the pain in the eye, you have unfinished mourning,” says Van Vugt. He also experiences the check-in moments at XR as valuable, but fleeting. There, too, there is more and more room for sharing the emotions experienced by climate activists.
Climate mourning
The ‘tear bowl ceremony’ that the Humanist Association applies stems from the ideas of the American Joanna Macy, an ‘ecophilosopher’ who herself fears that the climate crisis can never be stopped. Her view on climate grief, also known in XR circles, is not that different from the advice specialists give following a person’s death: allow feelings, don’t hide them away. Then once more as good and evil as it continues.
This is exactly the case with climate mourning, say the participants of the Climate Free Place. “Talking honestly regarding the pain you feel helps,” says Maarten Frijlink (56), who works as a biotechnologist and is an active member of XR and Kappen met Kolen. He describes the climate sadness he feels as a blanket that he, over a period of years, pulled a little further over himself.
“In the 1980s, climate change was a fairly neutral concept. I was studying at the Agricultural University at the time. We joked there. Canada would become a great agricultural country due to warming, we said. And the Netherlands had little to fear. We laughed: just raise the dikes a bit.”
Under the skin
Little by little, the seriousness of the climate crisis dawned on him. Until it got under his skin. “I started reading more and more regarding it. I became a study room type. I let in the disastrous effects of global warming. I allowed that.” After a failed attempt to look away, stress, anger and depressed feelings set in.
Sometimes he can still laugh regarding the climate, like at the Agricultural School. “If it’s socially desirable, I’ll do it.” If, following the weekend, someone asks him jokingly if he still stuck to something on Saturday, for example. Or if someone jokes regarding their love for the barbecue.
“At a good moment I draw a line. This is no longer funny,” says Frijlink. He considers himself a ‘reasonable and sensible person’. He also sees the sadness that he sees himself forced to glue himself to the A12. “I don’t do that for fun. I have children, a lovely family, a band that I play in. Of course I would rather invest all my time in that.”
He can’t. Frijlink feels called upon to continue campaigning. “The path we are now taking, with pollution and fossil energy, leads to collective suicide”, is his conviction. “Or as we say at XR: we are beyond fucked.” The bobbin squared can serve as an edited translation. The image that Frijlink uses on WhatsApp depicts that desperate feeling. It is an hourglass, the global symbol of Extinction Rebellion. In the version that Frijlink uses, the hourglass bursts.
Also bright spots
Of course there are bright spots, or even outright successes. All participants in the Climate Free Zone of the Humanistische Verbond – which has a tradition of providing mental support to relatively vulnerable groups – can name a few. “When ABP, my own pension fund, decided to withdraw its billions from fossil investments,” says Van Vugt with a gleaming eye. That announcement was partly due to the protest of activists, including himself. “It still gives me goosebumps.”
The severing of ties with oil giant Shell, a step taken by various universities and museums, also offers the activists some hope. Just like the fact that XR is seen as less radical by their environment, also because actors and public figures express their support for ‘civil disobedience’, such as stopping private jets at airports or blocking a highway.
What returns following boosts and moments of euphoria is the realization: the world is still on a collision course. That is not an opinion, but a fact. Climate science is clear on this. The global Paris goals, which were devised to keep the world livable, are out of reach. Countries, companies and citizens together continue to use too much oil, coal and gas.
“The climate stress I feel is rational,” Van Vugt therefore wants to underline. He does not want the impression that he has a disorder or that he is exaggerating. Nor does he think in terms such as ‘the world is going to die’. “The question is how bad we let it get as humanity. Every tenth of a degree less warming counts.” For himself, Van Vugt sees the task of continuing to make every effort to improve the climate, as an activist and through education regarding sustainability and climate at the Hogeschool Utrecht, without being defeated by it.
Not a hobby
“I have to keep the balance between campaigning and charging,” he says to himself. He does not see this task for a few months or years, but for the rest of his life. “Even if we move in the right direction: the climate problem will remain, the greenhouse gases in the air will continue to have an effect for many decades.” He and the other activists see it this way: climate activism is not a hobby that you stop when you run out of time or energy. “You almost always think regarding it, it doesn’t stop you,” says Van der Stel of Fossielvrij.
Director Bodegraven of the Humanistische Verbond himself wrote a book regarding the climate: Radicaal Anders. In it he describes how a sustainable world might be feasible. That sounds cheerful, stress-free. “Nevertheless, I recognize the feelings that participants in the Climate Free Place can express. The despair. They can grab you by the throat. We are knowingly destroying our living environment.”
According to Bodegraven, anyone who sees this will be faced with a crossroads. “Do you think: it will be okay, following us the deluge? Then you become part of the problem. Or do you think: I’m going to try to be part of the solution? That is, I think, the only decent option.”
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