Short abstract

If navigating changing climates affects our everyday lives, what are these “affects”, made–and capable–of? This paper offers a reconceptualization of ecoanxiety and climate feelings as practices of knowing, sensing, and caring for liveable futures on the frontlines of planetary exhaustion.

Long abstract

Ecoanxiety, defined by the APA as chronic fear of ecological doom, is experienced by over 50% of youth across countries – epitomising a growing concern with the interplay between the climate emergency and the global crisis in mental health. This intersection poses fundamental questions about how climate change affects our everyday social, private, and psychic lives, and how these "affects" become, in turn, catalysts of knowledge, action, and care for habitable futures (Cox 2024, Bargués et al. 2024, Masco et al. 2025). Through an interdisciplinary account of these questions, this paper charts the cultural histories of eco-anxiety, and its expression in climate psychology, youth climate activism, and climate-change science and communication, which are conceptualized in this paper as three key frontlines of planetary exhaustion. Drawing on discourse analysis and interviews, I propose to reimagine both terms––“eco” and “anxiety”––by thinking through and outside their respective “environmental climate” and “mental health diagnostic” framings. Instead, I propose a novel conceptual framework for understating climate anxiety and feelings as collective, albeit unequal, registers of what it means, feels, and takes to navigate multiple adverse climates (scientific, professional, political) that evoke moral injury and ontological vulnerability, all the while making conditions and horizons of possibility concrete.