Eco-anxiety is Action

More Americans than ever fear that global warming will affect them personally. That's giving rise to a new field of study of what's called eco-anxiety-and a new sense of urgency to do something about it.

- By Ben Court

Dave Finocchio, the cofounder of Bleacher Report, describes himself as fairly moderate politically and says he assumed climate change was something he wouldn't have to deal with in his lifetime. Finocchio, 39, lived in San Francisco when he sold Bleacher Report for $214 million in 2012, and soon afterward his attitude toward climate started to shift, as California wildfires caused an extended smoke season in the Bay Area.

It happened again in 2016 and in 2018 when Finocchio and his wife welcomed their first and second daughters onto the planet. "What was previously the nicest time of year was all of a sudden a new reality-living in smoke," he says. "It made climate change real for me in a different way to hurricanes in Florida. I started paying more attention to what was going on and listening to climate-technology podcasts like My Climate Journey." He expected it to be a chore but found the innovation and science around climate change fascinating. "There were all these interesting technologies that can transform our lives, but 95 percent of the climate content out there was aimed at an intellectual audience or was very doom-and-gloom, end-of-the-world-type stuff."

Finocchio's climate-change awakening mirrors what many feel: Sixty percent of American adults now say that they are concerned that global climate change will harm them personally; what's more, 74 percent of Americans are willing to make a lot of or some changes in their lifestyle to deal with climate change, according to data from the Pew Research Center. We're scared and want to do something.