Eco Anxiety Reshapes How We Grieve for a Changing Planet

The Grief We Didn't Know We Were Feeling

In 2022, the Finnish environmental scholar Panu Pihkala published something unusual in the journal Sustainability: a map of a feeling that almost everyone on Earth has experienced but almost no one knows how to name. The feeling is not quite sadness, not quite fear, not quite guilt. It is the sensation of watching something beautiful disappear and knowing you are part of the reason. Pihkala called it the process of eco-anxiety and ecological grief.

His central claim is counterintuitive. Eco-anxiety, he argues, is not a disorder. It is not a pathology. It is a healthy reaction to a real threat. The problem is not that we feel it. The problem is that we have no cultural script for what to do with it. We know how to grieve a person. We do not know how to grieve a glacier.

Pihkala's paper, which has already accumulated 156 citations in two years, proposes something that sounds simple but is actually radical: a model of how people move through eco-anxiety that does not pretend the process is linear, neat, or ever complete. The model has phases, but they loop. They overlap. They stall. And the whole thing is built on a single unnerving premise: there is no end. The crisis is not going away. The question is not how to get over it. The question is how to live with it.

The Model That Does Not Promise a Cure

Pihkala's model has six phases, but the first thing to understand is that he hates stage models. Stage models, the kind popularized by Kubler Ross for grief, imply that you move through denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance in a clean sequence. They give people the impression that if they just wait long enough, they will arrive somewhere better.

Pihkala rejects this outright. His model is "simple enough" to be useful but "more nuanced than stage models which may give a false impression of linearity" (Pihkala, 2022). He wants something that reflects what actually happens when people confront the ecological crisis: they cycle back. They get stuck. They pretend not to know.

The model begins in a phase he calls Unknowing. This is not ignorance. This is the active, effortful state of not letting yourself know what you already know. You see the headlines about Arctic sea ice. You scroll past. That is Unknowing. It requires energy.

The next phase is Semi-consciousness. You know something is wrong, but you have not let it land. It sits at the edge of your awareness like a noise you cannot quite identify. Pihkala describes this as a kind of pre anxiety, a vague unease that has not yet found its object.

Then comes Awakening. Something breaks through. A wildfire season. A heat wave. A report. A child asking a question you cannot answer. The knowledge lands, and it lands hard.

What Happens When You Actually See It

The Awakening phase, Pihkala writes, is often accompanied by Shock. This is not metaphorical. People report physiological symptoms. Difficulty sleeping. Loss of appetite. A sense that the ground has shifted beneath them. For some, the shock is traumatic. The author notes that "the possibility of stronger eco-anxiety and/or eco-depression is always present" (Pihkala, 2022), and that includes the danger of burnout.

But here is where the model gets interesting. After the shock, you do not move on. You enter what Pihkala calls Coping and Changing, and this is not a single phase. It is a three part system. Imagine a triangle. At each corner is a different way of responding.

The first corner is Action. You change your behavior. You stop flying. You start composting. You join a protest. You install solar panels. Action feels good because it is visible and measurable. It gives you something to do with your hands.

The second corner is Grieving. You let yourself feel the loss. You cry about the birds that are gone. You mourn the forests you will never walk through. You sit with the sadness instead of trying to fix it.

The third corner is Distancing. You take a break. You watch a show that has nothing to do with climate. You go for a walk without checking the carbon footprint. You protect your mental health by stepping back.

Pihkala's core insight is that these three dimensions must all be present. If you only act, you burn out. If you only grieve, you drown. If you only distance, you disavow. The model "predicts that if there is trouble in any of these three dimensions, adjusting will be more difficult" (Pihkala, 2022).

The Trap of Pure Action

This is where the model becomes useful for people who are already trying to do something. The environmental movement has historically privileged Action above all else. The message has been: do more. Fly less. Eat less meat. Buy less stuff. Call your senator. The implicit promise is that if you do enough, you will feel better.

Pihkala's model suggests this is exactly wrong. Action without Grieving is a form of avoidance. You keep moving because if you stop, you will have to feel it. And Action without Distancing leads to burnout, which the author identifies as a real danger for environmental activists and professionals.

The paper draws on a growing body of research showing that people who work on ecological issues have high rates of depression, anxiety, and exhaustion. They are not failing to cope. They are coping in only one dimension. The model offers a structural explanation for why that does not work.

Why We Do Not Know How to Grieve a Forest

The Grieving dimension is the one most people struggle with. We have rituals for personal loss. We have funerals. We have sympathy cards. We have a whole vocabulary for the death of a person. But we have almost nothing for the death of a species, the collapse of an ecosystem, the slow disappearance of a way of life.

Pihkala calls this ecological grief, and he argues that it is a real, valid form of grief. It is not metaphorical. It is not "like" grief. It is grief. The object of the grief is something that was loved and is now lost or threatened. The difference is that ecological grief has no endpoint. The losses keep coming.

This creates a psychological problem that the model tries to address. In the phase Pihkala calls Adjustment and Transformation, the goal is not to stop grieving. The goal is to find meaning in the midst of the grief. To accept that the crisis is ongoing. To build a life that includes both the sadness and the action and the rest.

The author writes that this phase includes "elements of, e.g., meaning-finding and acceptance" (Pihkala, 2022). It is not a destination. It is a practice. You do not arrive at Adjustment and Transformation. You keep returning to it.

Living With It, Not Getting Over It

The final phase of the model is called Living with the Ecological Crisis. This is not the same as acceptance in the Kubler Ross sense. Kubler Ross acceptance implies that you have made peace with something that is over. Living with the Ecological Crisis means you have made peace with something that is not over. It is still happening. It will keep happening. The question is whether you can stay present to it without being destroyed by it.

In this phase, the three dimensions of coping are still there, but their relationship shifts. Pihkala writes that "the titles and subtitles of the three dimensions of coping are switched" (Pihkala, 2022). The emphasis changes. Action becomes more sustainable. Grieving becomes more integrated. Distancing becomes less about disavowal and more about genuine self care.

The model does not promise that you will stop feeling eco-anxiety. It promises that you can learn to hold it without it breaking you.

What the Research Does Not Prove

It is important to be precise about what Pihkala's paper is and is not. This is a narrative review, not an empirical study. The author synthesizes existing research and proposes a new conceptual model. He does not test the model on a sample of participants. He does not provide effect sizes or statistical significance. The paper is a theoretical contribution, not an experimental one.

This means the model is a hypothesis. It is an informed, carefully constructed hypothesis based on a wide reading of the literature, but it has not been validated in a controlled setting. The author is open about this. The paper is presented as a proposal, not a proof.

What the paper does offer is a framework that can be tested. Future researchers could design studies to see whether people who engage all three coping dimensions actually show better mental health outcomes. They could examine whether the model predicts burnout rates among environmental professionals. They could develop interventions based on the model and measure their effectiveness.

The model also raises interesting questions that it does not answer. Does the order of the phases matter? Can someone skip Awakening and go straight from Unknowing to Action? What about people who never experience Shock? The model is flexible enough to accommodate variation, but it does not specify which variations are most common or most adaptive.

The Uncomfortable Truth at the Center

There is something quietly radical about Pihkala's model, and it is this: it refuses to offer hope in the conventional sense. Most writing about eco-anxiety tries to reassure people. It says the situation is bad but we can fix it. It says individual actions matter. It says do not despair.

Pihkala does not say any of that. He says the grief is real. The anxiety is appropriate. The crisis is ongoing. The goal is not to feel better. The goal is to stay functional and find meaning in a world that is falling apart.

This is not a comforting message. But it might be an honest one. And for people who have been told to "stay positive" while the planet burns, honesty might be exactly what they need.

What This Actually Means

• ▸If you feel eco-anxiety, do not pathologize it. Pihkala's model suggests the feeling is a sign that you are paying attention, not that you are broken. The goal is not to eliminate the anxiety. The goal is to learn how to carry it without it crushing you.

• ▸If you are only acting, you are avoiding grief. People who throw themselves into environmental action without processing their emotions are at high risk for burnout. The model predicts that action without grieving is unsustainable. You need to let yourself feel the loss, even if it hurts.

• ▸If you are only grieving, you are avoiding action. The other side of the same coin. Grief without action can become despair. The model requires all three dimensions. You need to do something, even if it feels small.

• ▸Self care is not a luxury. Distancing, in Pihkala's model, is one of the three essential coping dimensions. Taking a break from the crisis is not a sign of weakness. It is a necessary part of staying in the fight. The author explicitly warns that "the possibility of stronger eco-anxiety and/or eco-depression is always present, including the danger of burnout" (Pihkala, 2022). Rest is strategy.

• ▸There is no end point. The model does not promise that you will one day be "over" the ecological crisis. It promises that you can learn to live with it. The final phase is not resolution. It is ongoing, flexible, aware coping. That is the best we can do. And according to Pihkala, it is enough.