Climate Anxiety
Developing a Mindset of Hope to Dismantle Doom and Gloom
A new book offers a guide for being hopeful in an era of mounting anxiety.
Posted October 23, 2025 Reviewed by Gary Drevitch
Key points
- A new book explains why hope is not merely a passive feeling but an active choice.
- Hope is not wishful thinking or toxic positivity.
- We can disempower the doom and gloom that crushes hope and impacts our emotional well-being.
Many people are having difficulty coping with what's happening in today's tumultuous world. It feels like many people can use some guidance to inspire and empower them in a time of mounting anxiety. One of my close friends and heroes, Jane Goodall, has always been such a source, and now, in her new timely and important book How to Be Hopeful: Empowering Practices to Overcome Despair and Act for Climate Justice, award-winning writer elin kelsey, Ph.D. [she does not capitalize her name] explains why hope is not merely a passive feeling but an active choice to inspire and empower people in a time of mounting anxiety.1 I'm thrilled she could take the time to answer a few questions about why hope is much needed in a challenging world.
Marc Bekoff: Why did you write How to Be Hopeful?
elin kelsey: I felt compelled to challenge the disempowering narrative of doomism that crushes hope, severely impacts our emotional and mental health, and reduces our agency to tackle climate justice issues and the other very real crises we face.
Hopelessness is a terrible feeling. We lose our ability to trust or to reach out to others for support or help. We can’t think creatively about solutions. We feel skeptical or, more often, cynical. If we are experiencing the direct consequences of the climate justice and biodiversity crises—heat domes, fires, floods, drought, contaminated air and water, loss of livelihoods, and more—anger, frustration, and despair may intertwine with a deep sense of betrayed by governments and other institutions we are supposed to be able to depend upon. We need to feel the very real feelings these betrayals elicit and to find our most empowered stance to meet the enormity of the issues we face.
How to Be Hopeful recognizes that the ways we feel have a tremendous impact on the ways we engage with crises. Our emotions are a direct response to the problems we face and the narratives we are living within. Climate change solutions are happening all over the world. But we’re unlikely to hear about them. Climate change reporting is almost entirely focused on telling us about environmental problems. According to a 2024 analysis of the headlines from 336,000 climate change articles on Google News, less than 1% mention a solution. It is difficult to tackle issues while confronting an endless barrage of terrible news. When we don’t hear evidence of what is working, we naturally assume everything is broken. Constant reports of climate doom hamper our ability to act. That is why hope is a powerful political choice.2
MB: What are some of the topics you consider and what are some of your major messages?
ek: Hope is not merely a passive feeling but an active choice, a stance that must be nurtured and practiced in the midst of the anger, despair, and hopelessness that often accompanies the state of the world. How to Be Hopeful draws on the new science of climate emotions and evidence-based hopeful trends to overcome the disempowering narrative of doomism.
When you take a stance, you embody what you believe is important. How to Be Hopeful approaches hope from the perspective of five key stances. This is necessary because being hopeful isn’t a choice we make once. It’s a repertoire of choices we repeat each time we’re overwhelmed by a particular issue or broader crisis.
Each stance in How to Be Hopeful is supported by practices to bring into daily life. The more often we respond to urgent environmental issues or other crises with hope, the better we become at using our love, motivation, and knowledge to make meaningful change. Operating from stances that engender hope changes our ways of seeing and being in the world. They positively shape our relationships with ourselves, each other, and the planet. They are choices we continue to practice and strengthen in aid of what matters most.
MB: How does your book relate to your background and general areas of interest?
ek: I am a climate emotions and wildlife conservation scholar and practitioner. Climate change disproportionately impacts youth, people living in the global south and other species. I work in intergenerational collaborations with environmental organizations, educators, universities, community groups and climate activists in many different parts of the world. The collective goal of our intersectional networks is to mobilize hope in support of climate justice action. We work to overcome systemic injustice and disempowering narratives of doom by increasing access to trends that are having a meaningful impact and by sharing practices that build and sustain hope within ourselves and our human and beyond-human communities.
MB: How does your work differ from others that are concerned with some of the same general topics?
ek: The kind of hope this book explores is not wishful thinking or toxic positivity. Choosing to hope is not naive. We must stop actively disempowering ourselves. How to Be Hopeful grounds the practice of hope within bodies of evidence from social, nature-based, technological, and other solutions and trends that move us in directions we need to go. Knowing what works enables us to tailor and amplify the impact of these solutions and trends—and strengthens our capacity to hold power accountable to enact solutions that have proven most effective. I’ve come to call this approach evidence-based hope. We need evidence we can count on to overcome profound feelings of betrayal and loss of trust. That is why the evidence part of hope is so essential.
I find hope within the agency and resilience that exists within the greater than human world. How to Be Hopeful centers the individuality, intelligences, creativity, and cultural practices of other species. It is situated within an ecosystem worldview that respects the multitude of ways non-human animals and plants restore, resist, and engage with the crucial issues we collectively face. Hope, for me personally, lies in the capacity of this extraordinary planet of 8.7 million species and the ways in which we act in solidarity with one another.
MB: Are you hopeful that as people learn to retain hope they will be motivated to try to bring this positive attitude to others who need support?
ek: This book is an invitation to recognize global injustice, overcome doomism, and reject the powerful myths of too late, too broken, or too big to change. We deserve a more sophisticated understanding of the circumstances in which we live. We need to face what is being ruined and to share what truly works. Hope enables us to honor our fears and grief and propel ourselves forward in creating more just and equitable relationships across all species.
Emotions are contagious both face-to-face and online. Each time we respond to doomism with evidence of a trend that is having a positive result, we increase the likelihood that a much-needed solution will flourish. That is how we co-create a culture of climate justice action through hope. It is my wish that the stances and practices in How to Be Hopeful will carry people through the times when being hopeful is the hardest thing one can imagine.
References
In conversation with elin kelsey, Ph.D., an award-winning author, speaker, and thought leader. She regularly leads workshops for environmental organizations, youth climate activists, educators, and community groups on hope and the climate crisis and has written numerous bestselling children’s books, including You Are Stardust, and is the author of Hope Matters: Why Changing the Way We Think Is Critical for Solving the Environmental Crisis. elin also has served as a visiting fellow at the Rachel Carson Center for the Environment and Society, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Kone Foundation, the Salish Sea Institute, the Cairns Institute, and Stanford University.
