How storytelling can help articulate emotions that evolve as the climate changes

Source: The Conversation – UK

As the smell of smoke and burning drifts around my neighbourhood from wildfires in nearby north Wales and Manchester, I worry that the consequences of this climate crisis are getting closer.

The decline of our planet is no longer just a physical threat; it is a mental health emergency. The Climate Cares Centre – the world’s first research hub dedicated to climate change and mental health – warns that the climate crisis is affecting the mental wellbeing of hundreds of millions of people around the world.

So navigating tricky emotions in the age of rapid climate change is a significant challenge.

According to 2024 survey by the independent research tracker Climate Barometer, worry (43%) and sadness (20%) are the most frequently felt emotions linked to climate change by the British public. Many people also stated: “I feel no emotion about climate change.” In a world full of competing crises, feelings linked to the climate crisis can be hard to put into words.

Herein lies the problem: some of these feelings are so profoundly new or still emerging that we do not possess the language to articulate them. And if we can’t name a feeling, how are we supposed to process it?

Linguist Helen Bromhead notes in her studies on environmental discourse that “new words can go from specialist areas into wider public spheres. Existing meanings of emotion words shape new coinages”. In effect, we reshape the words we already know to fit our new reality.

In his 2019 book Earth Emotions, environmental philosopher Glenn Albrecht argues that we have lost our emotional bearings. In response, he created a psychoterratic (psyche-earth) vocabulary to help give us a map. His most famous coinage is the term solastalgia which he defines as “the homesickness you feel when you are still at home”. It is that kind of specific, localised grief you might feel when, for instance, a familiar beach is eroded by rising seas.

Today, the term solastalgia is used everywhere from the World Health Organization to global climate policy.

This growing struggle – across the arts, politics, and academia – to describe our climate emotions shows we urgently need a new vocabulary to express the unprecedented times we’re going through.

During my PhD, I researched how writers could use creative writing to show the real-world impact of our emotional ties to environment as the climate shifts.

There is no one story in the story of the climate crisis; instead, there is a collection of stories which can be told from multiple perspectives and across different species. To describe this, I coined the term “emotional elasticity”. This refers to the inherent flexibility of short stories as a medium to explore how we feel about ecological disruption.

Our feelings are not static. They can be elastic, bouncing back and forth, pinging in different directions, with variable tensions. My research showed that the short story is a powerful tool to build bridges between people’s different emotional experiences of the climate crisis.

Mental instruction manuals

Creative works can represent emotions emerging so quickly that our brains can’t quite catch up with them. In my short story collection, Birds Are Liars (2025), I created “feeling arcs” whereby a reader witnesses a character going through a journey of emotions in response to the climate crisis. I also focused on portraying physical sensations in an effort to connect with emotions that readers may already be experiencing, but might not yet have the language to describe or fully comprehend and process.

Emotions can be consciously interpreted, but they often start as physical reactions. In my short story, Twitcher, an avid birdwatcher’s emotions are unnamed, the reader is shown his physical anxiety – twitching and restlessness. This is how the reader senses and may also relate to his unspoken dread.

New climate-related lexicons and stories can give readers and writers the language needed to answer the enduring question, which is also the title of one of my short stories, often posed in psychotherapy: “And how did that make you feel?”

As global temperatures soar and climate progress stalls, our emotional wellbeing is also at stake. If left unchecked, this mental health crisis will burn us out faster than the planet itself. We need new words, metaphors and ways to understand the meaning of the climate crisis. By acting as our mental instruction manuals, these stories and images can help us navigate, survive and somehow emotionally process an irrevocably changing Earth.

Bernadette McBride does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

Original source: https://analysis1.mil-osi.com/2026/07/27/how-storytelling-can-help-articulate-emotions-that-evolve-as-the-climate-changes/