Pim Sullivan-Tailyour was six years old when she watched a quarried-out mountain pass by her car window in southern Thailand. The image stuck with her—the exposed orange rock where lush landscape used to be, the river her mother once swam in now running muddy. By the time she was a teenager in the UK, she was the only kid at her school pushing for environmental change. The isolation burned her out before she even got started.
Then she found Force of Nature, a UK-based organization that launched Becoming a Force of Nature in 2021—an informal online group therapy program for young people wrestling with climate anxiety. Logging into her first Zoom session, Sullivan-Tailyour saw dozens of faces from dozens of countries staring back. “I realized that I wasn’t alone,” she says. That moment of connection matters because the numbers suggest she was never actually alone to begin with. A 2021 study of 10,000 children and young people across 10 countries found that 56% agreed with the statement “Humanity is doomed.”
The scale of the problem has outgrown the term “eco-anxiety.” Historians, economists, and policymakers now talk about a “polycrisis”—a tangle of interconnected threats that includes climate change, pandemic risk, armed conflict, nuclear weapons, unaffordable housing, rising health-care costs, authoritarianism, partisan division, a brutal job market, and the looming threat of AI displacement. All of it arrives through a fire hose of algorithmically amplified notifications. Liza Jachens, a psychologist at the University of Nottingham, notes that what many young people describe “is closer to grief. A real sense of loss—not just fear of what is coming but mourning for what has already gone.” Psychiatrist Lise Van Susteren has called it “pre-traumatic” stress—anticipatory trauma before the worst has even happened.
Networks like Force of Nature have gained thousands of participants by treating climate not as a standalone issue but as one thread in a tangled knot of global problems. That’s a meaningful shift from earlier environmental activism, which often operated in silos. But the science on whether these programs actually work is still thin. Researchers like Jachens argue the field needs rigorous evaluation so schools, parents, and kids can figure out which approaches genuinely reduce distress—and which ones just feel good in the moment.
