Can climate cafes help alleviate fears of a planetary crisis?
In a small room in lower Manhattan, a group of eight New Yorkers sat in a circle drinking kombucha and sharing their fears about the climate against the backdrop of pounding rain and blaring sirens.
In Champaign, Illinois, a psychotherapist facilitating a meeting for other therapists held up a branch of goldenrod and asked the six participants online to think about their connection to nature.
And in Kansas City, Missouri, a nonprofit that hosts a weekly discussion on Zoom began its session with a spiritual reading and a guided meditation before breaking into groups to discuss topics like the ethics of having children amid a rapidly growing world population and concerns of resource scarcity.
These were all examples of a new grassroots movement called climate cafes. These in-person and online groups are places where people can discuss their sadness, fears, anxieties, and other emotions about the climate crisis.
They’re popping up in cities across the United States — including Los Angeles, Seattle and Boston — and around the world. It’s not clear how many there are, but Rebecca Nestor of the Climate Psychology Alliance, a nonprofit that trains facilitators, said the number of cafes has increased dramatically in the past three years. The group has trained about 350 people to run climate cafes in the US, Canada and Europe, and its North American branch includes 300 doctors in its roster of climate-conscious therapists.
The alliance explores how mental health is affected by ecosystems: extreme weather and disasters; polluted air and water – and how that intersects with other forces, such as racism and income inequality. Psychologists say such groups help people confront the disturbing reality of the climate crisis.
Ms Nestor first organized a climate café in Oxford, Great Britain, in 2018. She said the idea was modeled after the death café, a concept created by a Swiss sociologist, where people gather to talk openly about death to better appreciate their lives. .
Many of the climate cafes are free and open to the public, but some are organized specifically for librarians, therapists and other professionals.
“I can’t follow the story anymore that there is no choice in how this ends.”
Since June 2023, 24-year-old Olivia Ferraro, who works in finance, has organized more than 20 intimate climate cafes in New York City, with between five and 20 attendees. She has also trained online people from around the US and the world – Puerto Rico, Vancouver, England and Australia – who want to facilitate such gatherings in their own communities.
On a recent drizzly, unseasonably warm evening in January — the temperature was 51 degrees and the high was 56 degrees — Ms. Ferraro was preparing for her meeting. She lit her Brooklyn Candle Company Fern + Moss candle, which she has lit before every gathering, and turned on Khruangbin’s chill melodies.
She arranged ten chairs in a circle near a brick wall, placed grapes, sparkling water, plantain chips and other snacks on a table and brought out reusable cups from her mother’s 2016 wedding.
People slowly trickled in from all parts of the city. The crowd was made up of young people, with a few older adults in the mix. Everyone went to a climate café for the first time.
After some small talk, Ms. Ferraro shared the rules for the evening. She explained that it was not intended as a substitute for inpatient care.
Over the course of an hour, attendees described their concerns about their future children and future generations more broadly. They described feeling overwhelmed not only by climate change, but also by the political climate. They described moving back and forth between a sense of hopelessness and a sense of empowerment about the future of the planet.
Sometimes the comments were interrupted by long pauses as attendees absorbed what was being said, just staring at each other or into their laps.
“I can’t stand the narrative anymore that there is no choice about how this ends and that big corporations have complete control over my future,” said Sheila McMenamin, 32, who lives in Brooklyn.
“They don’t have full control, and I refuse to relinquish that,” she said, as other participants hummed in agreement.
A Black woman cried and said it was hard knowing that people of color would be disproportionately affected by climate change, but many didn’t have the time to participate in groups like this.
“I’m outraged that there aren’t more black and brown people in these rooms,” said the woman, Syrah Scott, a mother in her 40s who lives in Queens. She said many people of color were just focused on surviving. “They don’t have the money to worry about this,” she said.
‘I notice that I have difficulty enjoying the outdoors.’
The online climate café for therapists in Illinois started when Kate Mauer rubbed the dried goldenrod stem she picked from her backyard into her hand. The object connected her to the climate crisis, she said, because it was one of many native Illinois flowers she had planted in an effort to restore the natural environment.
But being in her garden began to stir up complex emotions, she said. Although nature had always brought her comfort, now it also made her sad.
“I find myself struggling to enjoy the outdoors because of the constant reminders” of environmental degradation, she said.
That paradox reminded Lauren Bondy, a café participant, of that morning’s fresh snow, and of a black rhino. Mrs Bondy and her son, then 19, had glimpsed one of the last critically endangered species during a holiday in Tanzania years ago.
“I appreciate the beauty of it, but also the rarity and the loss,” said Ms. Bondy, a therapist on Chicago’s North Shore. “We’re all holding it.”
This was not psychotherapy, the counselors at the climate café had said, but rather group catharsis.
Colleen Aziz, a therapist who runs a virtual practice throughout Illinois, said she felt a responsibility to put her professional training into practice, but few patients brought climate issues to their sessions.
“It’s really great to meet clients who are so stable that they are ready and able to look directly at the climate,” Ms. Aziz said after the cafe, “but most of the time it comes down to a privilege.”
‘It’s a battle between generations.’
Other groups are more focused on action.
Around the same time, Ms. Ferraro’s group was formed by Jonathan Kirsch, 32, who works in law and lives in Brooklyn. founded his climate café in November 2022. His group started as a private, informal gathering in his apartment, but is now open to the public, and the group is more focused on translating feelings into action.
On another recent rainy day in January, more than 30 people gathered at Mr. Kirsch’s home apartment in Brooklyn for a climate café. The doorbell rang almost continuously as people plodded up the stairs to the apartment, taking off their wet coats and stacking their umbrellas.
Many at the meeting worked in the climate field, including one man who worked for Extinction Rebellion, the group that disrupted both the US Open and the Met Opera in an effort to shed more light on the climate crisis.
Those present broke into small groups. Although they were frustrated with local, state and national policies, they felt hopeful. They had ideas about how to channel their energy: composting, gardening, propagandizing, clothing swaps and repair circles, pushing for certain legislation, joining book clubs and writing groups, and even going back to school to further their education.
“The truth is this is such a long fight, it’s a fight between generations,” one participant in the large group told me after the smaller discussion groups reconvened. “We must come with a resilient mindset, where we are willing to lose many battles and just know that our presence in the biggest battle will be worth it.”
Do climate cafes work?
Meeting to share climate concerns is not new. Environmentalists have been organizing meetings since the 1970s to discuss how to respond to climate threats. According to Sherrie Bedonie, a social worker and co-founder of the American Indian Community, Native American communities have long come together to lament the loss of land. Native American Counseling and Healing Collective.
Participants have said that coming together to talk openly about their fears offers a kind of lightness.
Sami Aron, 71, a retired software developer, founded Resilient Activist in Kansas City after her son, a climate activist and urban studies graduate student at Berkeley, died by suicide, citing feelings of hopelessness about the changing climate.
Her group’s cafes try to inspire hope, she said.
“The fear, the hopelessness becomes banished in all of us, and that’s why we don’t talk about it because it’s too painful,” Ms Bondy said. “If we can’t heal what we’re all feeling,” she added, “we can’t heal our planet.”
If you are having thoughts of suicide, call or text 988 to reach the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline or visit SpeakingOfSuicide.com/resources for a list of additional resources.