Planet Z: Climate anxiety meets Gen Z resolve

I turned 20 this year. Which means I’ve lived every single one of my 7,300-plus days on a planet scientists have warned is in crisis.

For Generation Z in Kalamazoo and beyond, climate change isn’t a distant threat — it’s the backdrop of our childhoods. We grew up on headlines about melting ice caps and rising temperatures. We sat in classrooms learning about ecosystems while watching environmental protections unravel in real time. Now, as we approach adulthood, we’re being asked to inherit both the problem and the responsibility for fixing it.

The result is a quiet but powerful undercurrent shaping our generation: climate anxiety.

Generation Z is on the brink of adulthood, the youngest among us in their early teens, and the oldest is nearly 30. The world has changed immensely during our lives, but the biggest threat looming over us has consistently been the climate crisis. 

For some of us, we’re nearing our time to step into the world, to take a sweet breath and make our mark. For others, we’re already facing the “real-world” problems we’ve been warned about our entire lives — signing first leases in cities choked by wildfire smoke and heat waves, choosing careers in industries destabilized by climate impacts, watching food prices rise as droughts and floods disrupt supply chains. Regardless of our situation, we are bonded by the terrifying truth that if we don’t whip our world into shape, we risk becoming complicit in the climate disaster.

This popular train of thought puts immense pressure on Gen Z to pick up the pieces left for us and figure out a way to permanently mend them.

My life has been marked by the steady drumbeat of climate warnings. Long before I was born, scientists were sounding alarms about the severity of the climate crisis, and every day since has carried that weight. Only recently did I begin piecing together the puzzle in a way that shifted how I understand what it means to grow up in this era — a life lived with climate anxiety as a constant companion, never able to fully trust the future of the planet I call home.

This isn’t just my story — these feelings of disparity belong to my entire generation, and to every generation that will follow. If anything, it’s almost surreal to realize that the one thing I’m promised to share with my children, besides blood, is the same heavy inheritance of climate anxiety.

“When you look at research that we’ve known about since, like, the ‘70s about climate change, and then seeing what’s happening today and the changes that are being made today, it’s like we’re just backtracking,” says Marisa Jewel, a sophomore studying environmental science at Western Michigan University, a fellow Gen-Zer dealing with climate anxiety. 

Many young people, like Jewel, wonder whether or not our concerns about the condition of our planet will be taken seriously, as this is our future in the hands of politicians and lawmakers. 

“That kind of snowballs into, what’s the future going to look like? And is this going to keep going? Is this going to get worse and worse?” 

This uncertainty is a catalyst for climate anxiety among youth because, if the people in the highest positions of power aren’t willing to look after us, who will? As environmental protections are rolled back and climate legislation stalls, for many in my generation, like Jewel, it’s become extremely difficult to have faith in our politicians.

“You’re supposed to be the people that are knowledgeable and pushing us in the right direction, supposed to keep us safe, supposed to do X, Y, and Z, and it’s just like the complete opposite of everything that’s supposed to help us and our environment and the Earth, it’s just so frustrating,” says Jewel. 

That frustration doesn’t stay confined to policy debates. It spills into dorm rooms, family dinners, and friendships. We understand the variation in human interests and passions, but it’s difficult to abide with others who continue to ignore the severity of the climate crisis and the climate anxiety that comes from it. 

Friends, colleagues, and even family relationships can become twisted due to differing climate perspectives, conflicts that can trigger or worsen climate anxiety. Sometimes, we have to make sacrifices because of this— distance ourselves from people we once held close, cut ties with loved ones — all because they view it as a choice to care about the climate crisis, while we see it as a pressing, intrinsic obligation. 

“What’s frustrating about it is I feel so deeply, but it’s hard to make someone care when they just don’t have an interest in it,” says Jewel. 

How do we close the gap in climate awareness and soften the anxiety it fuels? For some students, it begins with conversation — sharing stories with peers, trusting that lived experience can reach people in ways facts alone often can’t.

Jewel says she wishes to influence her friends by showing them small, sustainable lifestyle choices they can make to show them how little impacts create bigger impacts, like carrying a reusable coffee mug instead of using disposables.

“Everything connects, and our everyday lives can hold a lot of impact,” Jewel says. 

It’s true: connection is key, and if we observe the relationships we have with the climate crisis and act on them, we allow a bridge to form.

Expressing one’s concerns can take us a step in the right direction, but it isn’t the exclusive antidote for climate anxiety. 

The harsh realities and effects of climate anxiety are detrimental and worsening as time goes on without the implementation of concrete solutions. Ecological grief and despair can be completely debilitating. I can recall days when my only real activity was sinking into a puddle of doom, absorbing the toxicity around me, waiting — almost pleading — for some scrap of hope to land at my feet. Sometimes it did. When it didn’t, the days only grew darker.

That’s what climate anxiety does best: it chews through the optimism you’ve fought to gather, knocking over the fragile dominoes in your mind one by one. Under its spell, the doom feels endless — as if we’re all trapped beneath a sheet of ice, colliding in the dark, hands outstretched, trying to understand what’s happening before the cold closes in.

“I think about it a lot, and because I think about it a lot and I don’t want to be stressed out about it all the time, I kind of push it to the back of my brain, because you kind of have to, or else it’s hard to be a human being sometimes,” says Joshua Synder, an engineering management in technology student at WMU. 

When the clouds of climate dread pass over, we’re reminded that the sun never went away, and we get back on our two feet. 

For Snyder, this response looks like small but powerful acts of care towards our planet. For example, picking up trash with other WMU students. Every Sunday, the WMU Trash Club meets at 4 o’clock to clean up the grounds nearby. Sunday, Feb. 15th, they tackled the Kalamazoo River, a hot spot for piling litter. 

Little actions like that make Snyder feel better about his climate anxiety, he says, helping him to have a more optimistic view of the climate crisis. 

“If you have a pessimistic view about it, it makes you not want to do anything,” he says.

He encourages others to take a similar approach and fight the attacks that climate anxiety strikes. 

What if the response to climate anxiety isn’t certainty about what comes next — but a willingness to take part anyway?

Dr. Steve Bertman, a professor at WMU’s School of Environment, Geography and Sustainability, has worked with students and educators observing different approaches taken to alleviate climate concern and grief over the years. 

“There are ways that people can cope with the challenges,” says Bertman. “Despair is not a useful emotion.”

Instead, Bertman emphasizes the importance of agency. For him, the key lies in reclaiming a sense of personal control in the face of a global problem that can often feel too large to face.

“I think having a sense of agency, demonstrating to yourself, even, that you can do things in your own life… you know, you feel better when you feel like you’re doing something,” he says.

By taking tangible steps like lifestyle changes (eating less meat, buying fewer single-use plastics, for instance), community involvement (joining groups that value ecology), or advocacy (protesting, writing letters, participating in boycotts), individuals can shift from worry to active participation. That shift, Bertman suggests, can transform anxiety into motivation and restore a sense of purpose when all else seems lost.

And it turns out, this instinct to act isn’t just hopeful thinking — it’s backed by science. That perspective is echoed in research by Sarah Lowe, a clinical psychologist and Associate Professor in the Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences at Yale School of Public Health. 

In an interview with Yale Sustainability, Lowe shares that taking part in collective action is proven to be beneficial for individuals battling climate anxiety. Her research suggests that action may even act as a buffer against grief and dread. 

She explains how taking action can be a strong lead for inner harmony. 

“We know from a large body of literature that social support is one of the strongest predictors of mental well-being. We also thought that individuals who engaged in collective action — particularly if they saw those actions as having an impact  — could have a stronger sense of self-efficacy and hope for the future,” says Lowe.

We feed off of each other’s energy as humans, creating the environment in which we function, thrive, and fail. This positive feedback loop is inevitable and crucial to forming our attitudes toward the climate crisis. And as more supporting research surfaces, it’s vital that we stick to healthy, positive coping mechanisms. 

Staying educated and acting accordingly is one of our most effective tools to help diminish climate anxiety while doing what we can to increase the knowledge of the crowd. 

Hell, us Gen Z-ers lived through a global pandemic as pre-teens. If any generation is equipped to stand up to the climate crisis, it’s us. But we know we won’t get through this by locking ourselves indoors. We need collective action, not quiet panic.

It’s a one-of-a-kind battle fit for a one-of-a-kind generation. Gen Z must strategically push through barriers and obstacles to unite with one another in tackling this tremendous threat to humanity.

Maybe what we hand to the next generation won’t be certainty or safety. Maybe it will be something harder earned: proof that even under immense pressure, we chose engagement over avoidance. That we faced the severity of the crisis without flinching — and still reached for one another.

Hope won’t arrive as reassurance.

It will look like work.

Planet Z: Voices of Youth for a Sustainable Future is a Gen Z–created series sharing unfiltered perspectives on climate change — from eco-anxiety and grief to the urgency, creativity, and resolve shaping their generation. Support for this series is provided by Consumers Energy.