Grappling with the realities of the climate crisis can be incredibly discouraging—especially when we feel powerless, paralyzed, or don’t know where to start. In light of the potentially dark future on our horizon, here’s a list of resources we’ve compiled for existing—and resisting—in the face of impending climate disruption.
DIRECT ACTION
How to Reduce Your Carbon Footprint
In this guide, the New York Times breaks down the choices we all make everyday to help readers see how they can minimize their personal impact on the environment.
How You Can Stop Global Warming
From the Natural Resources Defense Council, “a dozen easy, effective ways each one of us can make a difference.”
Climate Change Cause Area Report
In this 174 page report, last updated in 2018, Founders Pledge researcher John Halstead examines the most effective charities for climate philanthropists—where each dollar stretches furthest. The research ultimately recommends donating to the Coalition for Rainforest Nations and the Clean Air Task Force.
How To Talk To Kids About Climate Change
For NPR’s Life Kit, education reporter Anya Kamentz shares tips on how to speak to children about climate change, drawing from personal experience.
How to Stop Freaking Out and Tackle Climate Change
Environmental writer Emma Marris offers a five-step plan to tackle climate stress and “become part of the solution.” We were particularly compelled by her second point—to think about the climate crisis in terms of systems, not individuals.
How peer pressure can help stop climate change
In The Washington Post, Cornell economics professor argues that peer pressure through “conscious consumption” can help stop climate change.
Democratizing power in rural America through electric co-ops
Some people might not realize the level of influence they can have over their local utilities. This podcast by The Next System Project explores that.
MANAGING ECO-ANXIETY
Apocalypse Got You Down? Maybe This Will Help
New York Times reporter Cara Buckley documents her search for a “prescription for handling climate grief.”
What If We Stopped Pretending?
“If you care about the planet, and about the people and animals who live on it, there are two ways to think about this,” argues Jonathan Franzen in the New Yorker. “You can keep on hoping that catastrophe is preventable, and feel ever more frustrated or enraged by the world’s inaction. Or you can accept that disaster is coming, and begin to rethink what it means to have hope.”
This Is How We Live Now: A year’s diary of reckoning with climate anxiety, conversation by conversation
For a year, Emily Raboteau documented her conversations on climate change: “I would break climate silence as a woman of color, as a mother raising black children in a global city, as a professor at a public university, and as a travel writer — in all of those places, as all of those people.”
MENTAL HEALTH AND OUR CHANGING CLIMATE: IMPACTS, IMPLICATIONS, AND GUIDANCE
This American Psychological Association study from 2017 investigates “the mental health effects on individuals, both short and long term” of climate change. The research finds that “gradual impacts of climate change, like changes in weather patterns and rising sea levels, will cause some of the most resounding chronic psychological consequences.”
