[Narrator] Knowing that you love the Earth changes you.
Activates you to defend and protect and celebrate.
But when you feel the Earth loves you in return.
That feeling transforms the relationship from a one way
into a sacred bond.
This is really why I made my daughters learn to garden,
so they would always have a mother to love them
long after I'm gone.
[Sabrina] two months ago, this l so parched, it was so terrible.
These walls were so thin,
it was it was like like, you could hear them scream.
It was terrible,
I really did not enjoy living he at that time, just because natu
was looking so terribly, terribly parched. It was painfu
In psychology or in the literatu
you see a term that's called Sol which talks about the sadness
that results from seeing one's natural environment deteriorate
or maybe just change and not feeling at home anymore
in that environment, feeling absolutely helpless abo
If the saguaros around us perish and vanish,
there's very little we feel we can do about that
so that that can indeed lead to intense feelings of grief an
I have been teaching marketing c consumer behavior classes,
all my professional life, and it's just doing a
a systematic analysis of these t and just seeing that
there's really nothing in there about climate change
nor critical assessment of the r
of marketing, production.
All that and overconsumption that this zero linkage in there
You're left to wonder how our st who come with a critical mindse
and they come to the classroom and they read this,
and now they're left to make sense of that.
That can be, you know, a lost op
It requires change that is very and needs to start early on
in consumer socialization, how w how we talk about these issues,
how we can address materialism a a consumption culture that does
necessarily require greenhouse g emissions to the extent that it
I have got more involved in that field of climate anxiet
mainly because of teaching about sustainable consumption and and
because I notice in my in my stu there's a general sense of anxi
and that made me sad, and it mad more about what mental health e
climate change is going to bring pretty much about everybody.
And then on top of all of that, I had a child and that really g
to wonder what would happen in h
If you think about young childre education,
you cannot worry them too much.
You will imprint them with thoug that they should not have.
On the other hand, you have to start early on to enable them
to make changes in life that will really have an impact
And so it's a bit being torn between those two and then
step back and I'm like, I'm just in that case, I don't have to.
I just need to figure out how to educate young children.
But I'm very, very happy when I that's actually done in schools
and meanwhile, even in preschool in a very careful manner.
We conducted interviews and we have done some research
into the question of how the fear of climate chan
may affect people's decision to have or not have children.
And we spoke to a number of youn
people were very, very torn about this issue.
And so it was very interesting t these different kinds of perspe
Not having children is a decisio
which has a huge impact on the climate, of course,
but it is not a viable solution
to do any kind of climate change mitigation
because that's in the environmen or in the in the societies we l
It's not likely to be something that can be prescribed.
It's not aligned with so many th that hold together our society
We look at that phenomenon again more from a mental health persp
because if climate change
worries me so much that even
when thinking about these most p
and from most people, probably p
and cherished kind of decisions that I can make in my life.
If climate change even enters th that tells me a lot about the p
and the impact of climate change has on our psyche today.
So in our research, we have been looking at differe
of psychological coping
with these ecological stressors that we perceive, and they agai
they range , they range from for which we sometimes call maladap
They just help us to not have to constantly mentally deal with i
you know, form such as denial or of one's own role in all of tha
It's it's a coping mechanism.
It works well psychologically to remove some of the stress,
but the stressor remains.
So we're still confronted with news about climate change.
And then there are those
which we would say are proactive ways of coping
and getting more information, actually engaging in behaviors
that try to reduce the effects of climate change.
And we generally know that people who feel empowered
and committed to do something have positive mental health out
We are embedded in in systems.
I mean, everything is interrelat
Just trying to figure out cause can be very difficult in this c
There is this entire linkage bet what's happening in the environ
what's happening in social inter aggression and so forth.
What's happening in mental healt
And there's this phenomenon of psychological distance.
So so it's going to happen, but it's going to happen in the
This place is going to look like Death Valley at some point,
but will I really be around to e that or it's happening
in places of the world that are so far away from what
my lived experience is that I ca to change my own behavior.
So we we need to navigate that s
As somebody who who who's consci making an effort,
but if you blow this up into this ideological realm,
it's much more difficult to go and find our way into that jung
something about it.