"Just Like Me" - Connecting Students for Climate Resilience

National Public Radio (NPR) has a new special series "Stress Less" that this week focuses on climate anxiety in college students and exercises that professors developed to help them cope, described in the episode titled "Here's how to turn climate change anxiety into action." It looks like this episode might be the inaugural episode of the series. The journalist behind it is Allison Aubrey, from the food & health beat.

The story talks about a UC Santa Barbara student studying a coral reef only to come back a year later and find it apparently dead. This is a story I've heard before coming from career scientists studying reefs, glaciers, endangered species, and other natural resources that don't stand much of a chance in the face of climate change: finding out the thing you study (and consequently love) might be unable to survive climate change creates climate anxiety. In response to this, the University of California created a curriculum called Climate Resilience, co-directed by Drs. Jyoti Mishra of UCSD, Elissa Epel of UCSF (of the UCSF Center for Climate, Health and Equity's Mental Health Initiative), and Philippe Goldin of UCD. It looks like the course was launched in spring 2024. I was struck how "Just Like Me," one of the class exercises described in the NPR story, sounds a lot like the loving-kindness meditation ("metta") practiced by Buddhists, where you picture people you know and people you don't know - all individuals with whom you have different kinds of relationships - and send them good will. In "Just Like Me," students sit in pairs and try to imagine the other person as a baby, as a child, as someone who has gone through pain and joy the same as they have. The meditation ends with "I know you want to be happy, just like me."

In addition to being reminded of the Buddhist mettta practice, this meditation reminds me of the Transformational Resilience framework, which describes the two things necessary for resilience as "presencing" and "purposing," the first necessary to feel OK in your body, to manage cortisol, and the other to feel connected to a larger collective purpose. The "Just Like Me" meditation seems intended to build both a sense of well-being and connection.

We can't slow climate change through stress reduction, but techniques like these can help students not lose hope on the path forward into a climate-changed future. The student described in the story as feeling hopeless facing the degraded state of the coral reef she had studied, Jada Alexander, graduated and created a San Diego-based initiative to foster environmental stewardship among children and adults through yoga and surfing, Daybreak Beach Club, "Connecting to Nature, Healing Through the Ocean."