Across Earth Day and beyond, some climate activists and mental-health experts are pushing back against the idea that doom and sacrifice are the only fuel for action. Instead, they are promoting approaches they say can help people cope with stress and eco-anxiety while staying engaged in efforts to reduce human-caused climate change.
The theme showed up in an example from a retreat center in New York’s Hudson Valley, where team-building groups shared space and one group’s participants were marked by constant laughter. Organizers said the noticeable mood came from activists who were meeting with the goal of improving how people respond to worsening climate change, which is often framed as a cycle of failure, sacrifice and doom.
Wilkinson, an activist who led the Hudson Valley seminar, described joy as something people can practice even when the world is “lurch[ing].” She said, “I believe that joy is all the more necessary and maybe all the more holy in difficult times,” and added, “Joy is like, how do we take part in the shimmy and the shimmer even as the world lurches?” Her seminars emphasize psychological tools and community, and they seek to alter how people approach climate change by focusing more on what works psychologically than on deprivation.
Speakers linked the approach to Earth Day, founded in 1970, which organizers say has become a mix of protest and celebration. They described seminars, books and college classes designed to change climate messaging and behavior by putting community and happiness alongside urgent climate realities, rather than relying only on fear-driven motivation.
Several psychologists and researchers argued that joy and laughter have measurable benefits while also supporting connection. University of British Columbia psychology professor Jiaying Zhao said, “Joy is what made our species survive in the first place,” describing how joy can spread and help persuade more people to join in. Julia Kim-Cohen, a clinical psychology professor at the University of Illinois-Chicago, said laughter supports coping with stress and can reduce blood pressure and relax people’s nervous systems, adding that shared laughter helps people “open” to one another.
Christiana Figueres, the United Nations climate chief in 2015 who helped shepherd the Paris climate deal, said joy does not come from denying difficult emotions. She said, “We cannot turn our back to the suffering and the grief and the eco-anxiety and all that family of emotions because they are very there,” and she urged people to start with acknowledging the challenge rather than turning away. Figueres later founded Global Optimism and runs seminars that combine joy, dancing and reality, describing a method of anchoring in pain and converting it into something that supports action.
Figueres said the key is “to anchor ourselves precisely in the pain and the suffering, embrace the pain, and the suffer” and then turn it into agency. She compared the process to converting unpleasant kitchen waste into compost and fertilizer for a garden, describing how participants can take difficult feelings and use them to find momentum for climate work.
Other seminar leaders also argued that messaging centered on sacrifice can backfire on behavior change. Elizabeth Dunn, a psychology professor at the University of British Columbia, said, “If we have to win the fight against climate change by getting people to give up the things they enjoy, I don’t think we’re going to win the fight.” Dunn and Zhao, who teamed to write the book “Leave the Lights On,” said an alternative is to encourage people to keep doing what brings pleasure while also lowering their carbon footprint.
Zhao said the approach is “the missing ingredient here,” and she described it as a way to keep people motivated to act: “Instead of asking people to sacrifice the things that bring them joy, our book is making the exact opposite claim: Do more of the stuff that brings you pleasure but also have a low carbon footprint.” Dunn added an example using biking, saying, “If we enjoy doing something, it is a lot easier to stick with it.”
In the seminars described by Kim-Cohen, the change in tone also reflects a shift away from what she called “eco pooper” behavior—bringing bad news in a way that shuts others down. She said she used to be the person at a cocktail party raising “the latest wildfire” or “the flood in Spain,” calling herself “such a pooper,” and she said people would just “shut down.” But she linked a turning point to Wilkinson’s seminar, saying, “I came out with my heart filled with love,” and described a class student who joined expecting it to be a downer but instead said she left “feeling empowered to do something,” with “a smile on my face.”
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