Transcript:

As the climate warms, floods, heat waves, hurricanes, and wildfires are all becoming more extreme.

For many people, this daunting reality brings up a lot of emotions.

Shepard: “Hopelessness, anxiety, overwhelm. Isolation is a really big one, too. But I think despair is really the biggest one that I hear the most.”

Kirk Shepard is a counselor and a facilitator with the Good Grief Network, a nonprofit that helps people work through their emotions about environmental harm.

Shepard: “Your grief and despair and anxiety is a healthy, functioning response to the destruction of our planet. …. We are all feeling it, but we’re not talking about it.”

So the network runs online and in-person support groups, where people work through a 10-step program.

Together, participants take actions like accepting the severity of climate change, sitting with uncertainty, and practicing gratitude.

Shepard: “It’s so much of people saying, like, ‘Wow, I felt so alone, and I didn’t know that other people felt this way.’”

And in the final step of the program, people find ways to take action – using their new energy and resilience to get out and do their part to limit climate change.

Reporting credit: Ethan Freedman / ChavoBart Digital Media