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Stop scaring kids witless about climate change

Greenpeace’s warnings about ‘eco-anxiety’ are a cynical ploy to promote its miserable agenda.

Frank Furedi

Frank Furedi

Topics Politics Science & Tech UK

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There is something deeply cynical about the way that professional eco-alarmists target children.

Take Greenpeace UK. On Monday, it released the findings of two separate YouGov surveys – surveys Greenpeace had itself commissioned. One revealed that four out of every five primary-school children say they’re worried about climate change. The other showed that teachers are supposedly finding it hard to tackle this rise in what Greenpeace refers to as ‘eco-anxiety’.

To accompany these findings, Greenpeace has just published a guide to supposedly help parents and teachers discuss climate change with children. Written by psychotherapist Caroline Hickman, these new guides are not offering disinterested advice. They are propagandistic tools, urging adults to cultivate children’s fears about the climate. Hickman even warns parents that any attempt to ‘shelter [children] from scary truths’ about climate change is ‘neither feasible nor helpful’.

Areeba Hamid, Greenpeace UK’s co-executive director, says that children must be prepared emotionally by teachers and parents for the threat posed by climate change. ‘Children hear frightening information about our changing climate from many different sources’, she says, claiming it is a good idea ‘to give them the tools they need to make sense of it’. What she of course omits is that much of this ‘frightening information’ is disseminated, in the main, by organisations like Greenpeace.

The hypocrisy of eco-activists is striking in this regard. They have fed children a diet of doomsday scenarios for years. They have systematically helped to cultivate their fears. Now they’re presenting these fears as if they are a genuine psychological problem that we as a society should be worried about.

Greenpeace UK is not helping our youngsters at all by framing this initiative in terms of mental health. The talk of rising levels of ‘eco-anxiety’ will not only increase their fears of climate change, rather than alleviate them – it will also increase their concerns about their mental health.

Not surprisingly, having effectively been given permission to feel hyper-anxious about the climate, many youngsters are embracing the role of the stressed-out victim of humanity’s eco-crimes. As far as most are concerned, claiming to be suffering from eco-anxiety confers a positive identity upon them. It is a sign that they are righteously aware of the supposedly impending catastrophe.

It should be said that worrying about the future and feeling scared about threats facing society is a normal feature of human existence. But the medicalisation of existential fears about the future is a new phenomenon. It effectively transforms a human problem into a mental-health issue, which Greenpeace and its ilk are calling ‘eco-anxiety’.

The idea of ‘eco-anxiety’ is the invention of a coalition of eco-alarmists and mental-health entrepreneurs. They define it as ‘a chronic fear of environmental doom’. As is the case with most newly invented psychological diagnoses, the symptoms of eco-anxiety are typically diffuse and expansive. They include anxiety, a depressed mood, insomnia and feelings of loss and helplessness. Symptoms in children may also include ‘somatisation’ – that is, physical ailments such as stomach aches and headaches that have no physical explanation. In fact, eco-anxiety is defined so broadly, it’s hardly a surprise so many children are now being ‘diagnosed’ with it.

This condition has not yet been listed in the latest edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the so-called bible of psychiatry. Nevertheless, numerous professional organisations such as the UK Council for Psychotherapy, the American Psychological Association and the Wellcome Trust have warned about it. The Climate Psychology Alliance is campaigning for anxiety specifically caused by fear for the future of the planet to be recognised as a psychological condition.

This attempt to medicalise people’s concern about the future is motivated by activists’ desire to scientifically validate their alarmist rhetoric. They want to claim that climate change does damage not just to the physical environment, but also to people’s and especially children’s mental health.

It is a thoroughly cynical exercise. From eco-alarmists’ perspective, eco-anxiety is not really a condition to be cured at all. It is something to be exploited and weaponised. That the likes of Greenpeace are prepared to cultivate and use children’s fears to promote their miserable cause only exposes their moral bankruptcy.

Frank Furedi is the executive director of the think-tank, MCC-Brussels.

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