Art, Equity and Climate Change: Therapeutic Counterpoints to Climate Anxiety

Understanding the impacts that the climate crisis is having and will continue to have on all of our futures in challenging. But it is particularly challenging to learn that these impacts have been, and will continue to be disproportionate for your community.  Climate anxiety often prevents deeper engagement with the subject of climate change, particularly in newcomer communities who have already survived existential challenges and view the climate as something much more benign. Our goal was to design a series of climate workshops that simultaneously reduced anxiety and allowed people to deeply explore the impacts of the climate crisis now and in the future. 

For five consecutive Saturdays over the summer of 2023, five Pakistani artists in Thorncliffe Park held workshops that explored the climate crisis through each of their unique practices. Before the park-based workshops, each artist participated in training on ways that art is being used to address climate change and climate justice.

Over the course of the five workshops we learned that the co-benefits of being in nature, being with community and making art, foster an opening that allows for a gentler acknowledgement of a future challenged by climate crisis. Because if we can connect with the earth, if we can connect with each other, and if we can use art as a form of transcendence, perhaps we can find other ways to adapt and live well.