Photo by Tristan Oliff
Andrew joins young environmental leaders from Lawson Foundation’s Youth Action & Environment Pilot Fellowship as they do outdoor yoga together in Quebec City.
Earth Day is traditionally and rightfully focused on carbon reduction targets and policy shifts, but after reflecting on some of our prior evaluation projects focussed on climate change, our team has realized that meaningful environmental sustainability depends on the ability for humans to flourish, on people having the capacity, care, and support needed to take sustained action.
Understanding the Mechanism of Burnout
Burnout is a debilitating, long-term condition characterized by a chronic state of being stressed and out of synchronicity with one’s work. Our own evaluation findings, and some of the new emerging psychological studies that we are reading, confirm that those in environmental leadership roles report significantly high levels of burnout. In this sector, burnout often manifests as a crisis of motivation where work that was once a source of meaning becomes joyless and anxiety-inducing. Environmental leaders are often expected to operate at an unsustainable pace, and they are increasingly caught in a polycrisis where ecological breakdown, economic precarity, and a mental health epidemic collide. In fact, the reliance on free or unpaid labour in the environmental sector is an important cause of burnout. See Albert, 2025 for a critical analysis of how neoliberal capitalism has exploited the emotional and caring capacities of workers, and left a “trail of mental health crises in their wake by creating more precarious or ‘flexible’ forms of labour, blurring the boundaries between work and personal lives.”
Toward Community-Supported Wellness for Environmental Leaders
To ensure the climate movement is truly sustainable, we must move beyond the expectation that leaders handle their mental health in private. Instead, we need a model of community-supported wellness that supports individual leaders in addressing the structural and emotional realities of this work.
We encourage the cultivation of collective spaces for processing and restoration. Rather than working in isolation, environmental leaders need regular group gatherings to discuss mental health, share experiences of eco-anxiety, and build social support networks. These gatherings shift the burden from the individual to the community, fostering a culture of care where mentorship and peer connection serve as the foundation for long-term persistence.
As the movement evolves, we must recognize that a leader’s mental health is inseparable from their structural reality, including their workload management and economic security.
Earth Day as a Renewal of Self
Before we can heal the land, we must ensure that those protecting it are not depleted. This Earth Day, we are reflecting on the need for all of us who work with leaders in the environmental sector to strengthen leadership capacity.
As the saying goes, there is no place for burnout in a burning world. If we are to achieve a sustainable future, we must begin by sustaining the people who are fighting to build it.
References
Albert, M. J. (2026). It’s not just climate: rethinking ‘climate emotions’ in the age of burnout capitalism. Environmental Politics, 35(1), 150-170.
Bird, L. H., Thomas, E. F., Wenzel, M., & Lizzio-Wilson, M. (2024). Thinking about the future: Examining the exacerbating and attenuating factors of despair-induced climate burnout. Journal of Environmental Psychology, 98, 102382.
Heyward, E. (2025). Climate Activism: Who Burns Out and Who Flourishes? (Doctoral dissertation, University of Canterbury).
Lord, G., Reilly, H., & Löffler-Stastka, H. (2025, August). Activist Burnout Among Climate Justice Activists in Austria: An Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis. In Healthcare (Vol. 13, No. 16, p. 2045). MDPI.
Wood, W. (2022). No place for burnout in a burning world. Waging Nonviolence. https://wagingnonviolence.org/2022/08/no-place-for-burnout-in-a-burning-world/