Giving Compass' Take:

• Miyo McGinn explores how climate anxiety became the obsession of 2019 through the extensive focus on climate change issues in movies, books, television shows, and more. 

• How does the spread of understanding climate anxiety contribute to cultural shifts? How can funders use this momentum to support solutions? 

• Here are five ways communities are coping with climate anxiety. 

Alright folks, I’m calling it: 2019 was officially the year the climate crisis went mainstream. Think about it. No longer is mention of the warming atmosphere, melting ice sheets, and acidifying oceans — along with the resulting human suffering — limited to the “environment” section of the newspaper. It’s not a niche worry for small pockets of concerned citizens.

Why now? Concern about the crisis has been building for decades, and the combined efforts of activists and scientists around the world surely had something to do with that. You might also point to the uptick of visible, dramatic consequences, like record-breaking heat waves, wildfires, and floods. Or the culture-setting power of young people, who literally made “dying of climate change” into a TikTok meme.

It’s probably all of those things! But the “why” matters a lot less than the “what” — and climate anxiety definitely blew up in 2019, in everything from pop hits to the Impossible Whopper.

Read the full article about climate anxiety by Miyo McGinn at Grist.