I have always associated moments of existential dread with having entirely too much free time. Thankfully, as a university student, I have very little free time, meaning that this is something, especially during the beginning of my degree, that I had little to worry about. It wasn’t until the beginning of my second year, in 2018, where I was met with a feeling of grief regarding the effects of climate change that I had been suppressing for most of my life, and I have the 2018 UN climate report to thank for that.

Admittedly, climate news was not something that I was closely following at the time, and I originally only came across the details of the report due to a series of extremely bleak social media headlines; one’s that stated the now well-known warning of only having 12 years left to mitigate the disastrous effects of man-made climate change (about 10 and ½ now).

So, what do you do?

So, what do you, as a 20 something-year-old college student, do when met with information claiming the imminent deterioration of life on earth? That’s a fantastic question and one that I believe there is no definite answer for. You could do what I did at the time, which had me going through the steps of reading the UN report, every subsequent article and opinion piece afterward, and being met with a feeling of immense dread; a feeling that I had tucked away with the preconceived notion that climate change was an issue that I would never have to deal with in my lifetime.

If that last sentence is turning you away from reading the rest of this piece, I want to make it abundantly clear that this is very poor advice! Staying informed is important but dwelling on negative news coverage is absolutely not something you should be making a habit of. This is something that I still struggle with, especially with the current state of global affairs. However, the goal of this blog post isn’t for me to drone on and on about what not to do when dealing with climate grief, but to share my experience on how I was able to turn my feelings of grief into something beneficial.

Turn your feelings of grief into something beneficial

The website that you’re reading this on has most likely made this obvious, but I am a volunteer for Embark Sustainability! This is important for me to mention because, first of all, it has been an extremely rewarding experience that everyone reading this should sign up for, but also because it has been my most formative in dealing with climate grief. When I first joined Embark in late 2018, I was still extremely disillusioned when it came to the issue of climate change. Having read the UN climate report a couple of weeks prior, I had become a part of the organization primarily because I thought of it as a potential coping mechanism, a way to make myself feel better about climate change because – hey – at least I’m not a part of the problem.

I look back at this perspective now believing that I was being somewhat selfish. In my opinion, while volunteering does absolutely reward a sense of fulfillment, it shouldn’t solely be about how one can make themselves feel better. Thankfully, this was something that I quickly learned as a climate action volunteer. Before being able to even consciously consider how Embark was personally affecting myself, I was in the midst of multiple collaborative projects; from planning for events such as the Zero Waste Festival, to assisting with policy proposals that focused on increasing sustainable practices across SFU, my main goal as a climate action volunteer quickly shifted from how I could help myself to how I could best represent my university as a promoter of sustainability.

Through my experience with Embark, I was able to use the negativity surrounding my outlook on climate change and convert that into something much more productive. To state that volunteering for Embark completely erased my climate grief would be a blatant lie. However, working with others who shared values similar to my own helped me realize that no one is truly alone in their feelings of climate grief, and while there is no single cure to these feelings, contributing towards sustainable solutions with others who feel similarly is definitely not a bad way to cope.

Get out there

If this blog post, which is supposed to be about how you can channel climate grief into climate activism, feels awfully anecdotal and self-referential, that’s because – well – it is. I can’t provide any statistics on the personal benefits of volunteering, or present concrete evidence on the steps one needs to take to combat their climate grief; all I can do is share what has worked for me, with the hopes that you, the reader, can get something out of it. So, get out there, try to volunteer, to protest for causes that are important to you; I can, at the very least, guarantee that it will be more fulfilling than doing nothing at all.

written by – Daniel Nesvaderani