ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the practice of encountering climate change, focusing on experiences of climate anxiety. To encounter climate change is to be challenged by it to the extent that you become climate-changed. Climate anxiety is outlined as a sense that your world is ending, often accompanied by feelings of overwhelm, frustration, powerlessness, grief and guilt. This experience counters dominant neoliberal understandings of humans as capable individuals entitled to a bright future, and it brings attention to relationships that were previously taken for granted. Climate change can also affect us in less obvious ways, including in ways that are difficult to notice, identify and interpret. This contradicts the belief that humans can fully comprehend climate change. Through these multiple modes of countering conventional understandings of humans as powerful individuals, climate anxiety opens space for new modes of human-climate relations.
