How to Calm Your Climate Anxiety

Three years ago, after the Woolsey Fire, 53-year-old Greg Kochanowski returned to the Santa Monica Mountains and drove past his own street without recognizing it.

The most destructive wildfire in Los Angeles County history had torn through his Seminole Springs neighborhood, burning more than half of the area’s homes to the ground, including his. What remained was “a moonscape,” he said — ash and char, black and gray.

Losing his home was traumatic. But losing his bearings in his own neighborhood “scared the hell out of” him, Mr. Kochanowski remembered, and triggered new existential concerns about climate change.

Now he agonizes over his 14-year-old daughter’s future. “What kind of a world will Ava grow up in?” he said. “Will Southern California be uninhabitable when she is my age?”

Mr. Kochanowski’s sense of dread fits into an array of sentiments often called climate anxiety, a term that includes anger, worry and insecurity stemming from an awareness of a warming planet.

“I actually think many people have been experiencing this silently and privately for a number of years,” said Renee Lertzman, a climate psychologist and consultant to businesses and nonprofits. But “the conversation is no longer marginal. It really has burst through.”