Climate change ‘burnout’ is taking its toll

This story was originally published by Inside Climate News and appears here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration

Heather McTeer Toney is no stranger to being the underdog. Toney was only 27 in 2004 when she was sworn in as the first woman, first African American and youngest ever mayor of Greenville, Mississippi. 

Even still, the 2024 election has been weighing heavily on her. On the Monday after, as she waited on Zoom for yet another of the countless meetings she attends, as the executive director of Beyond Petrochemicals, she took a moment to rearrange her bookshelf. “I needed to make sure it was very clear where I am right now, and that’s always reflected for me in what you see on my bookshelf,” said Toney, as she shuffled her books to place the ones with “serious energy” front and center. 

Though she knows the fight will go on, for now, Toney is giving herself a moment to catch her breath. “Burnout is so real, and you can’t do this work if you’re dead,” she said. “So you have to share the burden, share the load.”

Based on her years of experience, trauma therapist Rebecca Mangasarian knows taking time to rest and regroup is not just good advice, but absolutely necessary. And people working on climate change—activists, policy wonks, first responders, scientists—may be especially prone to burnout, she said, given the all-encompassing nature of the climate crisis. 

More and more environmental and climate organizations, she and other therapists say, now get that they must recognize the emotional impact experienced by their employees, whose work makes them vulnerable to both pre-traumatic anxiety—something bad is coming—to post-traumatic stress disorder, in the aftermath of hurricanes and wildfires. 

“It’s really about finding the balance, and understanding that burnout is an experience, but it doesn’t have to be the end of the thing,” said Mangasarian. 

This is nothing new for Toney, who grew up watching her father, civil rights attorney Victor McTeer, one of Fannie Lou Hamer’s last lawyers, ride out countless cycles of progress and backlash. 

During her tenure as mayor of Greenville, Toney worked to protect her constituents from the industrial pollution that is ubiquitous throughout her area of the Mississippi River Delta, only to watch much of her work be rolled back by the deeply conservative administration that was elected when she left office. 

While her father’s career was focused on civil rights, arguing cases on everything from voting rights to housing discrimination, Toney’s early experience in office led her to realize that many people saw a healthy environment as superfluous, whereas Toney saw it as a foundational right denied to many Americans. 

“I felt strongly that if we didn’t understand the connections between the environment, climate change and our own economic stability and viability as a community, then we were being done a disservice,” said Toney. “It became a point of justice and equity, but also economic stability for our community.”

In 2009, Toney became the chairwoman for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Local Government Advisory Committee. She has been fighting for a cleaner and more equitable environment ever since, first as administrator of EPA Region 4, the agency’s historically troubled southeastern district, then as a climate and environmental justice activist after leaving the EPA at the start of the first Trump administration.

Even though Toney, now 47, has been through this before, the prospect of a second Trump administration was overwhelming. So she called her dad the day after the election, to seek help and inspiration. “When I called my dad, the first thing he said was, ‘OK, you’ve been through this before, and this is part of the fight.” 

Toney has learned this the hard way. “I’m from Mississippi. So you know, the rest of the world is waking up to what we call Wednesday. This is what we do every single day,” she said. “Welcome to our world. It’s nice of you all to join us. Let us help you find a seat and let us take you through the onboarding manual.”

Toney has a contagious laugh and relies on humor to see her through. Even so, she doesn’t make light of burnout. She recommends “taking notes from the people who have been experiencing this for years.”

Now at Beyond Petrochemicals, Toney is gearing up to be “aggravating as hell to this industry” for the next four years. But first, she said, “I, like many Black women in this space, am going to sit down for a second and take a breather, because that’s what we know we have to do.”

Knowing Your Threshold

Burnout is often an issue of perspective. Its acute stage often comes when highly motivated people become so involved in what they are doing that they simply don’t stop to rest, said Mangasarian, the therapist who has specialized in counseling trauma patients for the last four years, first in North Carolina, near Chapel Hill, where she trained, and now in St. Petersburg, Florida.

Mangasarian is using her expertise to help survivors and first responders from Hurricanes Helene and Milton. The same wisdom applies, said Mangasarian, whether you’re an activist, a first responder or something else entirely. “If you don’t take time to rest, your body will demand it at some point. Burnout is the demand. Your body is saying, we’re done. We need to rest,” she said. 

People often get so caught up on making a difference in the big picture, she said, that they lose sight of the small-scale impacts of their actions. “We all have a threshold of tolerance, and if you are constantly working outside of that threshold, you’re going to burn out,” she said. 

The first step to both preventing and recovering from burnout is recognizing where your threshold is. Mangasarian said that where many activists go wrong is in thinking that their threshold is a static thing. As you are worn down and accumulate an ever-growing “rest debt,” your threshold will shrink. 

Many young activists are like first-time marathon runners who have been thrown into a race after only a few weeks of training. They start at a sprint and expect to be able to maintain that pace for the long haul, then are shocked to find they are injured and unable to keep running, explained Mangasarian. 

Just as you can recover from a running injury, she said, “you can re-expand your threshold. It’s just, you have to start back at the beginning. You’re not starting over, because you still have those skills. You just have to keep reminding yourself that it’s OK to rest.” 

The Resilient Activist

Sami Aaron, a 71-year-old Kansas City native and founder of The Resilient Activist, is intimately familiar with how devastating the consequences of burnout can be. On May 10, 2003, Aaron lost her eldest son, Kevin, at the age of 27, to suicide after a year-long battle with burnout and depression. 

Kevin began his work as an environmental activist while still attending high school in Shawnee, Kansas. He went on to study sociology and environmental studies at the University of Oregon, then on to a dual-degree program for urban and regional planning and law at the University of California, Berkeley. He continued his activism and environmental justice work the entire time. 

But, said Aaron, “while he was in law school, he really just got knocked down. I mean, he was a community gatherer, and that law school’s so competitive, there was no opportunity for collaboration … and it broke him.”

In early 2002, Aaron discovered just how bad things had gotten for her son when she got a call from a San Francisco hospital. Kevin was in the psych ward after he had been picked up, drunk, from the Golden Gate Bridge. He had decided to kill himself while his fianceé was out of town for the weekend, but had been found by the police and agreed to go to the hospital. 

That call marked the beginning of a year-long battle for Aaron to try to help her son. “After he’d left that first suicide note, anytime his fiance … had to leave town, I would go stay with him,” said Aaron. 

One of the conversations Aaron had while waiting with Kevin at the Oakland Airport sticks out to her. The airport had a “huge” map of the Bay Area on the wall, so while they waited, “he was telling me the whole environmental history of that place, historical, financial, corporate governance, Indigenous, like going into every detail and with depth and understanding of the social injustices. … He had this broad understanding,” she said. “And then there was this moment three weeks later where he’s like, ‘There’s nothing I can do now. There’s nothing I could possibly do to make any dent in this problem.’”

Kevin stayed in his master’s program but decided to drop out of law school. His days were overtaken by a steady stream of appointments with psychiatrists and psychologists, said Aaron. “He was on antidepressants and all kinds of anti-anxiety meds, and gained 40 pounds that year.”

In the end, nothing helped. “He had just kind of had enough, and he journaled a lot. And in his journal, one of his statements was, ‘I know all about sustainability, but I don’t know how to sustain myself.’ And we lost him to suicide in May of 2003,” said Aaron.

At the time of Kevin’s death, Aaron was 50, and busy grieving her son while running her software company. Though her son’s death had an immediate and profound effect on her life, pushing her to develop mindfulness, yoga and community care practices for herself as she processed her grief, it wasn’t until 2018, as Aaron prepared to retire, that she decided to use that grief to build something. 

At Kevin’s funeral, Aaron was struck by the stark divide between Kevin’s life as an activist and how his doctors saw him. The mayor of Oakland spoke at Kevin’s funeral and presented his family with a citation for the work Kevin had done in the inner city neighborhoods of Oakland. While the mayor was speaking, “one of the psychiatrists he had seen for over a year leaned over to the woman sitting next to her and said, ‘I had no idea he was involved in all these environmental and social justice things.’ She had no idea. She’s a psychiatrist. She gave him enough meds to have him hallucinate. And she didn’t have a clue about what was in his heart,” Aaron said.

Aaron kept thinking about what Kevin needed that was not available to him within the mental health community. By necessity, Aaron had developed a library of coping techniques in the wake of her son’s death. Aaron kept coming back to the idea that these strategies might have been helpful to her son. 

That was the idea behind The Resilient Activist, a nonprofit Aaron founded with the hope that she can pass on the coping skills she has collected over the years. “The world needs inspired and visionary activists that have the resilience to see us through these difficult times,” said Aaron, quoting what has become a guiding statement for the nonprofit. “It’s that second piece. There’s a lot of inspired and visionary activists, and he was one, but he didn’t have the resilience to see himself through.”

Aaron has seen a real shift in how environmental organizations think about the mental health of their members over the last five years. At first, said Aaron, The Resilient Activist couldn’t get any environmental organizations to engage with them. “They didn’t want to go there, right? It’s just not what you do when you’re an environmentalist. You just keep working, because there’s so much to be done.”

Aaron is thrilled with the transition she has seen among the environmental community in the last few years. There’s more awareness now that it’s OK, and even necessary, said Aaron, to recognize the emotional impact of the work that these people do. They are often first responders and almost universally inundated by pre-traumatic stress.

Pre-traumatic stress is the product of knowing something horrible is coming, but not knowing when it will happen. “There’s this occupational identity with the work that these people do that keeps them on alert. People are living in fight-or-flight mode constantly,” explained Aaron.

A Supportive Environment for Climate Work

At the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences in Colorado, Becca Edwards is working to create a community that not only recognizes the pressures leading to climate burnout, but also offers a safe and supportive environment to the scientists studying the climate crisis at CIRES.

As the director of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion for CIRES, Edwards’ job is to facilitate collaborative, effective and inclusive working relationships across institute employees, and create space for people to work through differences, whether informed by culture or lived experience. Given what CIRES’ work centers on, the climate crisis is front of mind for many researchers. 

“I do my job in lots of different ways, but typically I’m waiting to hear from what people need,” Edwards said. “When I first started this job, I definitely heard a need for climate wellness and support.”

At first Edwards tried holding climate cafes, but found there was a desire for more consistent programming. She brought in climate psychology expert Leslie Davenport to help figure out how to best meet faculty needs across the institute. 

The greatest concern and highest levels of burnout were being seen at the NOAA facility CIRES supports, but when CIRES leadership did a wellness survey across all employees, more than 30 percent of respondents reported struggling with climate-related burnout. 

Edwards quickly began to implement the lessons from Davenport’s seminar, from creating community-building opportunities, like a mindfulness-focused book club, to empowering CIRES researchers to set meaningful boundaries. “It’s important to recognize there’s not one solution. It’s really important to say, ‘OK, some people need this, some people need that,’” she said.

Edwards has even had colleagues tell her, “I feel like my data is making a difference. It’s highlighting a problem so we can develop a solution, and we can adapt to the coming changes, and that makes me feel good. So I dig into the data when I feel like I’m not doing well, or I’m feeling burned out.” 

Her community isn’t just dealing with climate change in the abstract. In 2021 Boulder was heavily impacted by the Marshall Fire. Several CIRES researchers and staff lost their homes. 

“I think we all feel that anxiety when it’s a windy day, when it’s gotten really dry—it takes you right back to that day. … We have all been through a really recent trauma,” Edwards said, “and I think that understanding that when it’s a windy day, people might struggle to be at work, is a really important context to have.”

Some of the affected researchers couldn’t even take a day off to regroup. “That immediacy of when the Marshall Fire happened, for a lot of our researchers, it was like, now’s the time, right? If we want to understand what happens after a wildfire, how it affects the air. Are these things in our houses? Is it affecting our health? They had to go full force and right in the middle of a crisis, be studying that very crisis,” said Edwards.

Knowing that she is working with a population constantly steeped in terrifying climate realities, and fresh off a climate trauma, helps her better serve her community. 

“If we don’t want a culture that encourages burnout, we need to tell people it’s OK to take time during the workday to take care of themselves,” Edwards said. “You can’t just tell people to take care of themselves, right? You have to give them the resources to do it, instead of assuming that they have those resources.”