Your Anger About the Planet Is Not the Problem
This week, the U.S. Senate voted 50–49 to strip protections from the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness — America's most visited wilderness area — clearing the way for a copper sulfide mine that experts say will irreversibly pollute the watershed. This decision overrode 675,000 public comments, 95% of which favored protection.
Two weeks ago, the IUCN — the global authority on threatened species — moved the emperor penguin from Near Threatened to Endangered on its Red List. Sea ice has been at record lows since 2016. The population is projected to halve by the 2080s. Scientists describe them as a sentinel species: their fate tells us how well we're managing the emissions that are reshaping the planet.
And earlier this week, two new studies confirmed that the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation — the ocean current system that regulates climate across the entire Northern Hemisphere — has been weakening at four measured latitudes over the past two decades, with one study projecting it could pass an irreversible tipping point by mid-century.
So if you're sitting with a feeling that is bigger than anxiety, heavier than worry, and angrier than frustration — that's not an overreaction. That's a reasonable response to what is actually happening.
Eco-Anxiety Is Clinically Recognized — And Growing
Eco-anxiety has an official definition. The American Psychological Association describes it as "a chronic fear of environmental doom." The American Psychiatric Association's 2025 Healthy Minds poll found that 55% of American adults believe climate change is impacting mental health, more than 40% report personal mental health effects, and one-third worry about it on a weekly basis.
That poll also found that about six in ten adults are anxious about how the government is handling climate change — a number that feels unsurprising given the news cycle of the past several months.
Eco-anxiety shows up differently in different people. For some, it looks like doomscrolling they can't stop. For others, it's a creeping dread that settles in during quiet moments — the kind that's hard to name when someone asks how you're doing. For parents, it can take the shape of grief about the future their children will inherit. For perinatal clients especially, the question of bringing new life into this world carries a weight that isn't acknowledged nearly enough.
What's important to understand is this: eco-anxiety is not a disorder. It is a rational psychological response to a real and documented threat. As climate psychologist Susan Clayton, lead author of the APA's landmark report on climate and mental health, has written: climate anxiety is not fundamentally a problem to be solved. It is a sign that you are paying attention.
Your Anger Is Appropriate — And It's Not the Same as Anxiety
Much of the mental health conversation around climate focuses on anxiety, which can inadvertently frame the emotional response as something to manage, reduce, or contain. But a lot of what people are experiencing right now isn't only anxiety. It's anger.
Anger at watching a wilderness that took thousands of years to form become a bargaining chip. Anger at a vote that overrode the expressed wishes of hundreds of thousands of people. Anger at watching a species edge toward extinction in real time and being told to go for a walk.
Anger is a grief response. In the context of loss — and environmental losses are real losses — anger is part of how the nervous system processes the gap between what should be and what is. It is not a sign that you're catastrophizing. It is not something to redirect into productivity. It doesn't need to be metabolized into activism to be valid.
There is a particular harm in the well-meaning impulse to respond to climate grief with calls to action. Anger that keeps getting channeled outward, without ever being witnessed, without ever being allowed to just exist, tends to either calcify into despair or exhaust itself into numbness. Neither of those is what we're aiming for.
You are allowed to be angry. You are allowed to grieve the Boundary Waters you haven't visited yet. You are allowed to feel the weight of a world that is changing faster than our institutions seem willing to respond to. That isn't pathology. That's the cost of being a person who is paying attention.
What Staying Present With This Actually Looks Like
We're not going to tell you to limit your news consumption or practice gratitude. Those things have their place, but they aren't the whole story — and offering them as the primary response to something of this scale can feel dismissive.
What we do think is worth saying: carrying this kind of grief alone is harder than it needs to be. Eco-anxiety and climate grief are collective experiences — they are responses to collective losses — and they are eased, at least somewhat, by collective witness. That means people in your life who will let you name it without rushing to fix it. It can also mean therapeutic support.
At Roots & Branches, our therapists work with grief, anxiety, and the kind of weight that doesn't fit neatly into a diagnosis. We work with IFS (Internal Family Systems), EMDR, ACT, and Lifespan Integration — modalities designed to help people process difficult emotions at depth, not just manage them on the surface. If the state of the world is showing up in your body, your sleep, your relationships, or your sense of the future, that's worth bringing into a room with someone who knows how to hold it.
Ready to talk? Roots & Branches Wellness offers in-person therapy in Utah County and telehealth across Utah. Our therapists work with grief, anxiety, and life transitions — including the kind that feel planetary in scale. Request a consultation here.
Sources
American Psychiatric Association (2025). One-third of Americans worry about climate change weekly. Healthy Minds Poll. psychiatry.org
Clayton, S., Manning, C., et al. (2017). Mental Health and Our Changing Climate: Impacts, Implications, and Guidance. APA & ecoAmerica. doi.apa.org
Earthjustice (April 16, 2026). Senate votes to strip Minnesota's Boundary Waters of protection from mining pollution. earthjustice.org
IUCN (April 9, 2026). Emperor penguin and Antarctic fur seal now Endangered due to climate change — IUCN Red List. iucn.org
Portmann, V., et al. (April 2026). AMOC projected to slow by more than 50% by end of century. Science Advances. CNN coverage
Elipot, S., et al. (April 2026). University of Miami study. AMOC has been weakening at four latitudes over the past two decades. CNN coverage
