Talk:Eco-anxiety

Proposed merge of Ecological grief into Eco-anxiety

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section. A summary of the conclusions reached follows.

There is no consensus to merge Ecological grief into Eco-anxiety. 78.28.55.63 (talk) 14:19, 15 September 2020 (UTC)

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It seems like the article "eco-anxiety" article is getting way more pageviews, and is covering essentially the same thing -- I suggest that we merge them, and make sure that anything living in this article finds its way over there @NewsAndEventsGuy, John Cummings, Oliveleaf4, Earnable, Andrew Davidson, and Eunice.AKI: Sadads (talk) 18:01, 8 March 2020 (UTC)

• Support merge Good catch - there's substantial overlap in current content, and arguably near complete overlap in topic. --Elmidae (talk · contribs) 18:30, 8 March 2020 (UTC)
• Oppose Anxiety and grief are not the same thing; they are quite different emotions and one looks to the future while the other is based on current and past events. Ecological grief is notable by that title -- for example, see Nature or The Observer. Conflating the two might cause improper synthesis while the benefits of doing so are unclear. The level of readership seems unimportant as both have significant levels. Andrew🐉(talk) 22:50, 8 March 2020 (UTC)

Man, the concept of combining closely related topics into one sensible treatment really seems to be alien to you. Here are some more terms for you to split out (all noted in this article): climate anxiety, eco-fear, eco-trauma, eco-despair, eco-paralysis, climate grief, eco-angst. The more the merrier! After all, we want MOAR ARTICLES, not sensible overviews... --Elmidae (talk · contribs) 23:43, 8 March 2020 (UTC)

@Elmidae: Though I agree with your opinion, your comments is aggressive, and not WP:Assuming Good Faith -- instead of being derogatory, consider asking questions that help get to the bottom of the problem. For example:

@Andrew Davidson: it doesn't seem like the public conversations or literature sufficiently disambiguate or explore these issues, and it feels like the concept is very emergent at this point: perhaps its better to combine them and do a really good mapping of the different in the entymology or scholarly research section. In my opinion its not worth having multiple pages, when the Google/SEO points everyone at this concept (we are talking a factor of 5x). Besides modern psychology treats cycles of grief, anxiety, despair, and depression are all interconnected issues (i.e. Tripartite Model of Anxiety and Depression) -- it would be disingenious to draw a hard line between them (if you look at the articles on grief, and anxiety both have a hard time clearly seperating these concepts. Do you have evidence that they are sufficiently different concepts? Or is it just the field swirling around similar concepts, and a bunch of folks coining neologisms. Sadads (talk) 16:16, 9 March 2020 (UTC)

Pardon my Andrew fatigue. I could write a script that outputs these things and replicate the majority of his AfD comments for the last half decade. Patience with this shtick wearing a little thin by now. --Elmidae (talk · contribs)

• Support merge. Distinctions between different terms (eco-grief, -anxiety, -despair, -anger, solastalgia etc) can be addressed in the section on Terminology. They are all emotional responses to the impact of global warming and that's what the article is about.Earnable (talk) 04:05, 9 March 2020 (UTC)
• Question I don't know enough about this area of psychology to know how related these sujects are and if it is accurate say they are the same. Can I suggest we don't merge until we get some advice from people with in depth subject knowledge? Who could we ask? Maybe @MartinPoulter: would know or know who to ask? John Cummings (talk) 13:51, 9 March 2020 (UTC)

It is fairly obvious that anxiety, grief, despair, etc are not entirely the same. However, WP does not require people with in-depth knowledge of a subject to make editing decisions. It simply requires editors to quote a RS explaining why a related term is applicable. Earnable (talk) 20:16, 9 March 2020 (UTC)

• Oppose Merge: Ecological grief concerns the issue of loss, while eco-anxiety precedes the realization of such losses (even if they are anticipatory). If we wanted to integrate these, we need to recognize that we are confusing symptoms with dis-ease/order here. The earth is a living organism, of which we are an integral part. The disorder is biospheric, or climate trauma, which is a superordinate form of trauma that is felt by us as integral parts of the larger organism. Anxiety and grief, as well as depression for that matter, are natural symptoms of this larger trauma, felt according to our awareness of that connection. The more eco-aware we are, the more connected to Gaia in other words, the more we feel her trauma as our trauma. So I think it is the confusion and reification of symptoms as pathological disorder which gives rise to the confusion of w/not we should merge these concepts.— Preceding unsigned comment added by 67.183.171.219 (talk • contribs)
• Oppose Merge These are distinct sub topics of the broad field of Environmental psychology, and as the IP points out anxiety is worry about a potential future, whereas grief is the experience after the fact (except for the subset of grief known as "anticipatory grief". Example.... When I was 20 and at college I sometimes felt anxiety for my older parents well being. They were in fact fine and lived full lives 30 more years! But then at their funerals I felt grief for the loss that had occurred. But before that, in the case of my Mother, who authored her own end, I was able to sit with her for a couple months at the hospice and every day friends and family would visit and we'd laugh and tell old stories and I was sometimes overwhelmed with the grief I had not yet experienced, what mental health professional call "Anticipatory grief". As a matter of wiki procedure, these questions should be decide by sources. Neither WP:GOOGLETEST nor wikitraffic are reasonable measures of the distinctiveness of an article's WP:SCOPE, and in any case, they are fleeting. What is sought on google today or what wiki readers view today doesn't tell us anything about what they will look at tomorrow. So this question needs to be presented and debated via reliable sources. RE @Earnable:, I don't think we have sources to limit the articles to the climate change aspect only. Native peoples in Brazil losing their culture as slash and burn moves through the jungle comes to mind. And I know people who are really freaking bonkers over GMOs. I know, I'm opining without sources too. I agree with @Sadads: these ideas are emergent. Possible alternative If the pages do not stand alone, I would merge both into Environmental psychology, and one way to assess if that is a good idea would be to imagne that it had already occurred and decide if there was a basis to Split that article to create one or more sub articles. SO I think I favor merging both into that article. Doing so would prune the waste. And then take stock and maybe start over with sub articles. NewsAndEventsGuy (talk) 08:57, 10 April 2020 (UTC)
• Support merge I don't think there is enough material for 2 articles and they seem related enough to me.Chidgk1 (talk) 14:37, 15 April 2020 (UTC)
• Oppose they are not the same thing, they are different emotional responses to the same issues, one is anxiety and one is grief, another response is Ecophobia (feeling of powerlessness). I think it would be great if we had a secion in each article decribing how they relate to one another, I'll have a look for some references. John Cummings (talk) 12:15, 10 August 2020 (UTC)

  @John Cummings: might be a good use of the WP:Excerpts tool, Sadads (talk) 12:24, 10 August 2020 (UTC)

  Oh I've never seen this before, thanks. John Cummings (talk) 12:27, 10 August 2020 (UTC)

  What you said John, I just ran into it - surprise - at Climate communication. Very interesting looking tool, I wonder how its going to work in practice, long term. Guess we'll find out. NewsAndEventsGuy (talk) 13:28, 10 August 2020 (UTC)

• Oppose Essentially - Anxiety and grief are not the same thing. Environmental psychology does not mix the two distinct terms. Lightburst (talk) 16:21, 2 September 2020 (UTC)
• OPPOSE Articles are not the same thing, keep them separate. Dream Focus 18:15, 2 September 2020 (UTC)
• Oppose merge into Eco-anxiety, since Eco-anxiety and Ecological grief should both be discussed in the same place. That could be in Environmental psychology, or in Psychological effects of climate change (a section of Effects of climate change that could easily be spun off into its own article). The idea that there is a grand distinction between them is belied by the eco-anxiety page continually stressing the theme of grief. Emotions bleed into one another; our imposing a division into separate articles is counterproductive. XOR'easter (talk) 04:59, 3 September 2020 (UTC)

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

Greta Thunberg

Sadads wrote: "A high profile example is Swedish youth activist Greta Thunberg, who has candidly described the impact of this existential anxiety on her mental health." This sentence ignores the reality that her anxiety exacerbated pre-exisitng mental health problems.

Sadads also wrote: "Thunberg has chosen to alleviate these symptoms by taking action, protesting outside the Swedish parliament and becoming the face of a youth protest movement." The source does not say this. Greta did not start demonstrating to alleviate mental health issues. She started demonstrating because of her overwhelming concern about the potential impact of global warming and the fact that, as she sees it, no one was doing anything about it. The improvement in her mental health was a by-product of her activism. Earnable (talk) 20:46, 9 March 2020 (UTC)

Well statedNewsAndEventsGuy (talk) 09:00, 10 April 2020 (UTC)

What happened?

Elmidae I have no idea what just happened. When I stumbled onto this page; there was only a one sentence lede with an image box. I simply changed the quote in that image box. There was nothing else on the page. I have no idea how it blanked out the entire article. There was no other text. Certainly not what is there now. Nor was there any AfD template. Sorry for any confusion or upset. Not my intent at all. Maineartists (talk) 18:43, 2 September 2020 (UTC)

You clicked a link in the AFD discussion to an older version of the article most likely. Dream Focus 18:59, 2 September 2020 (UTC)

@Maineartists: that might explain it. Thought it was a bit of a surprising action to take :) --Elmidae (talk · contribs) 19:24, 2 September 2020 (UTC)

Yes, User:Dream Focus. That's exactly what happened. Thanks for understanding, all. Maineartists (talk) 19:32, 2 September 2020 (UTC)

I propose adding this chart

Global death rate from natural disasters (1900–2022).

What do others here think?

SquirrelHill1971 (talk) 11:40, 17 January 2024 (UTC)

• Chart is too broad and not particularly relevant to the article. LegalSmeagolian (talk) 19:48, 17 January 2024 (UTC)
• I agree, it's hard to see the relevance. Also, the accompanying text that was alongside it when it was added to the article wasn't NPOV.

Are there any reliable sources which discuss this chart in the context of eco-anxiety? JaggedHamster (talk) 10:56, 18 January 2024 (UTC)

• Exclude. Not specifically relevant. —RCraig09 (talk) 17:34, 18 January 2024 (UTC)