Hurricane Helene transformed the timeless, soothing presence of towering pines and gentle streams in the mountains of North Carolina into symbols of destruction. Downed trees smashed bridges, landslides smothered roads, and raging rivers dragged away homes and people.
By Traci White
The Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina are where I fell in love with nature. I grew up on top of, and at the foot of, those mountains. My brother and I trekked up a serpentine gravel road when the school bus dropped us off after school to reach our home in Fairview, off of Garren Creek Road. My family also lived at the base of Mount Pisgah in a town called Candler, where we were snowed in during a legendary blizzard.
Pro-environmental
Seeing the value of nature as a kid made me want to preserve it as a grown up. Research from Nancy M. Wells and Kristi S. Lekies from 2006 confirms that connection: People who engage in nature-based activities before the age of 11 are likelier to behave pro-environmentally as adults.
As I’ve seen videos on social media of the places that are part of my identity violently eroding away in Helene’s flood waters, it’s been a daily struggle not to break down in tears.
Parts of Fairview are still difficult to reach two weeks after the storm, and Garren Creek Road is more creek than road right now. I’ve found myself wondering if the homes where my family lived in the region are even still standing.
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Last week, I reached out to friends who still live in the mountains, and thankfully they’ve gotten back to me when they could find an internet signal to say that they’re safe and their homes are mostly unscathed. But all of them had close calls with trees coming down near their houses and cars, or their driveways and streets either washing away or being blocked by fallen trees. The aftermath of the storm has been linked for many people to the strong scent of fresh pine.
Psychological distance
As the communications officer for the Environmental Psychology research group, it’s my job to stay up to date on the latest environmental psychology research, which is being published at similar rates to increasingly dire reports about climate tipping points. For a year, it’s been my professional responsibility to talk to anyone who will listen about the role of behavior change in stopping the worst case scenarios of climate change coming to pass. But Hurricane Helene still shocked me.
The majority of people globally do not feel psychological distance from the risks of climate change. They recognize it’s impacting them now, not just as something that will harm others in the distant future. I count myself among them, but I was still caught off guard by just how bad it could be in a place that had ironically been identified as a “climate haven”.
Climate grief
My acute personal sense of climate grief and disbelief despite thinking I was prepared for reality was put into words by Adam Smith, a scientist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) who lives in Asheville: “For someone like myself who studies these [disasters] deeply over many years and understands them quite well, they can still surprise and shock us.”
Smith was one of several locals interviewed by The Washington Post on the aftermath of Hurricane Helene. Many residents of Asheville, Fairview, Candler, and so many other communities across the more than 30,000 square kilometers of the Western North Carolina region are in need of material support, as running water, electricity and internet remain unavailable for many, and hundreds of roads are still impassible.
Mental health
But mental health services are needed, too, and are thankfully starting to be offered to residents in the Blue Ridge Mountains. A 2020 paper published in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health found preliminary evidence for the effectiveness of “mental health first aid for treating distress arising from acute and extreme weather events (such as hurricanes, floods, and fires) and sub-acute events (such as droughts and heatwaves).”
A 2024 paper in Cogent Mental Health – ‘There’s no helpline’: how mental health services can support young people with climate distress – acknowledges the specific impact of extreme weather exacerbated by climate change hitting places you personally know and love. “Seeing valued natural environments that one cares about change for the worse is also associated with climate distress.”
As our collegue Anne van Valkengoed has written about in multiple publications (including a 2023 paper in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists) climate anxiety isn’t a mental health issue, but deserves to receive the same treatment as one. Yet as the Cogent Mental Health paper notes, “there is a lack of published research on treatments for distress arising from the awareness of longer-term environmental change and suggested the implementation of various universal mental health approaches for promoting mental health.”
The Cogent Mental Health article also recognizes that there is sense of guilt underlying climate distress in the Global North: “Climate distress among young people in the UK is associated with shame and guilt about one’s personal contribution to the problem and frustration over the lack of political action and individual control over climate change.”
Coping
Anne currently has a manuscript under review about how to figure out which ways we can cope with climate anxiety, both from an emotion-based and problem based perspective. “Taking action to protect the climate and to adapt to climate change are examples of problem-focused coping, and protecting your mental health is emotion-focused coping”, Van Valkengoed explains.
“Emotion-focused coping can happen by means of support from family or friends, forms of creative self-expression, or group gatherings to discuss the emotional side of climate change, such as the Good Grief Network”, she says.
For each type of coping, there’s either collective or individual action, or mitigation or adaptation actions. All are needed, and as many of us should take the actions we can – when we can.
Taking action
My personal climate grief and anxiety triggered by the devastation from Hurricane Helene has felt like going through the stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance.
But when it comes to the climate crisis, acceptance isn’t all we can do. The climate crisis is unacceptable, and our actions to adapt and mitigate – collective, individual, political and personal – make a difference. What we do now can help spare other communities and people from the destruction and despair of climate risks.
Communications officer
