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The Anxiety Lurking Behind COVID-19 for Many Under 30
Pushed to the back of Gen Z anxieties by the COVID-19 pandemic, climate change remains a looming stressor for many people younger than 30, experts say.
“Natural disasters precipitated by climate change, including hurricanes, heatwaves, wildfires, and floods can lead to ... increased rates of depression, anxiety, post-traumatic stress, and other mental health disorders,” according to researchers at the University of British Columbia and Simon Fraser University in Canada, and Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore.
The authors label the fear “eco-anxiety, climate distress, climate change anxiety, or climate anxiety,” writing in the British medical and science journal, The Lancet Planetary Health.
In other words, the future is not looking bright from the perspective of many people under 30.
Xiye Bastida, a student at the University of Pennsylvania, has been fighting the climate crisis since her hometown in Mexico flooded when she was 13. She calls it a pivotal moment in her environmental activism.
“Sometimes we don't realize when we actually start caring about something and acting upon it,” she said.
Mexican-Chilean Bastida is one of the founding members of the New York City chapter of Fridays for Future, a strike movement that pressures public officials about climate change by protesting outside schools and government offices. She is also the co-founder of Re-Earth Initiative, which seeks to educate the public about climate issues.
Bastida’s generation might be more likely than adults to experience climate anxiety, the Lancet Planetary Health paper states.
“They are at a crucial point in their physical and psychological development,” the authors wrote, “when … stress and everyday anxiety elevate their risk of developing depression, anxiety, and substance use disorders.”
Bastida said she has experienced eco-anxiety and burnout from climate activism. She ended up in the hospital with heart palpitations because she was so stressed, she told VOA.
“For me, the way I experienced and dealt with climate anxiety was just by always blaming myself for not doing enough,” Bastida explained.
She continued, “If you don't take care of yourself, if you don't take care of your home, if you don't take care of your well-being, you cannot take care of the world.”
“Climate change is rapidly creating a less safe, less secure [food security, national security], less healthy, and less prosperous world,” Edward Maibach, director of George Mason University’s Center for Climate Change Communication (4C), wrote to VOA.
“Today’s young people will be living in this world, as conditions deteriorate, unless the nations of the world rise to the challenge they currently face.
“In my view, young people who don’t care about climate change are not paying attention,” he wrote.
But many young people are paying attention and trying to effect change. The children and grandchildren of those who planted trees for the creation of Earth Day and the Environmental Protection Agency in 1970, are giving environmental justice a hard push forward.
The movement has been propelled by young people everywhere.
Sweden’s Greta Thunberg riveted global attention as she sat outside a Swedish Parliament meeting, her expression capturing the impatient disgust of her generation with inactivity over climate change.
Other famous young environmentalists include Canadian Autumn Peltier from the First Nations community, Argentinian Bruno Rodriguez, and Helena Gualinga from the Ecuadorian Amazon.
Nikayla Jefferson is a volunteer writer for the Sunrise Movement, co-founder of the San Diego hub, and a doctoral candidate at University of California-Santa Barbara. For her, the scariest part of climate change is basic, she says.
“The total loss of human life and the land that gives us our history and story,” she said. “We understand climate change science and how devastating it is to the Earth, but addressing carbon emissions is not enough,” Jefferson wrote to VOA. “We need to look at climate change through a human lens because climate change is the not the only existential threat people are facing.”
Anxiety about climate change and a desire to act erases political lines, according to research from Pew, Brookings Institution and 4C. In the 2020 presidential election, climate change was among the top three issues to young voters.
And 4C’s Maibach says that youth leadership about climate change has woven generations together on the issue.
“Politicians and CEOs alike have every reason to want to keep young people happy, because they won’t keep their jobs for long if they don’t,” Maibach wrote. As the percentage of younger votes eclipses those of Baby Boomers, born between 1946 and 1964, the Gen Z and millennial vote becomes more powerful.
“CEOs are not directly accountable to the public, but corporations are becoming increasingly sensitive to public opinion, especially that of young people, because they want to attract the best and brightest young people as employees, and they want to earn the loyalty of young customers,” Maibach wrote.
While Bastida said she still worries about the future, she looks on the bright side and believes her generation can have an impact.
“I think that we have to realize that that timeline is already running out,” she said. “And we cannot just keep talking about what we're going to do, we need to actually start doing it. And when I see people actually doing things, when I see initiatives coming up, when I see companies changing their whole business model, that's what makes me optimistic.”
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Survey: Social integration, career prep are important to international students
A recent survey of international students in the United States found that before starting school, they were concerned about personal safety, making friends and feeling homesick.
Inside Higher Ed reports that international students want specialized orientations, peer connections, career preparation and job placement to help make their college experiences successful. (July 2024)
US advisory council ends Nigeria visit, signs student exchange deal
Members of a U.S. presidential advisory council have approved a student exchange deal between an American college and a Nigerian university as part of the council's effort to strengthen collaboration on education, health, entrepreneurship and development between Africa and Africans living abroad.
The council also visited a health facility supported by the United States Agency for International Development in the capital.
Nigerian authorities and visitors chatted with members of the U.S President's Advisory Council on African Diaspora Engagement as they toured a healthcare facility in Karu, a suburb of Abuja, on the last day of the council's three-day visit to Abuja and Lagos.
The facility is one of many supported by the United States Agency for International Development, or USAID, to improve the management of childhood illnesses, family planning, immunization and delivery.
The tour was part of the council's effort to promote African diaspora-led investments in technology entrepreneurship, education and healthcare delivery.
"They're doing a phenomenal job there, it really gave us a sense of what the healthcare system is in Nigeria," said Deniece Laurent-Mantey, executive director of the advisory council. "This is our first trip as a council to the continent and we chose Nigeria for a reason — the diaspora in Nigeria is very active, very influential, and they're really a source of strength when it comes to our U.S.-Africa policy. And so for us coming to Nigeria was very intentional."
The council was created by President Joe Biden in September to improve collaboration between Africa and its diaspora in terms of economic and social development.
Akila Udoji, manager of the Primary Healthcare Centre of Karu, said officials in Nigeria were pleased that the council members were able to visit.
"We're happy that they have seen what the money they have given to us to work with has been used to do, because they have been able to assist us in capacity-building, trainings, equipment supply and the makeover of the facility," Udoji said.
Earlier, the council signed a deal for a student exchange program between Spelman College in the southern U.S. city of Atlanta and Nigeria's University of Lagos.
Laurent-Mantey said education exchanges are one of the council's top priorities.
"In Lagos, we had the president of Spelman College — she's also a member of our council — she signed an agreement with the University of Lagos to further education exchange programs in STEM and creative industries between those two universities," Laurent-Mantey said. "And I think for us it's very important, because Spelman College is a historically Black university, and so here we are promoting the importance of collaboration between African Americans and Africans."
In March, the advisory council adopted its first set of recommendations for the U.S. president, including the student exchange initiative, advocating for more U.S. government support for Africa, climate-focused initiatives, and improving U.S. visa access for Africans.
The council met with Nigerian health and foreign affairs officials during the visit before leaving the country on Wednesday.
American Academy of the Arts College announces closure
The American Academy of Art College in Chicago announced it would be closing after 101 years of preparing students for careers in art and illustration.
WTTW news reported that like other art colleges, the academy saw enrollment drop after the pandemic, and officials made the decision to close the college last month. (July 2024)
5 killed, dozens injured in clashes over Bangladesh jobs quota system
At least 5 people were killed and dozens injured in two separate incidents in Bangladesh as violence continued Tuesday on university campuses in the nation's capital and elsewhere over a government jobs quota system, local media reports said quoting officials.
At least three of the dead were students and one was a pedestrian, the media reports said. Another man who died in Dhaka remained unidentified.
The deaths were reported Tuesday after overnight violence at a public university near Bangladesh's capital, Dhaka. The violence involved members of a pro-government student body and other students, when police fired tear gas and charged the protesters with batons during the clashes, which spread at Jahangir Nagar University in Savar, outside Dhaka, according to students and authorities.
Protesters have been demanding an end to a quota reserved for family members of veterans who fought in Bangladesh's war of independence in 1971, which allows them to take up 30% of governmental jobs.
They argue that quota appointments are discriminatory and should be merit-based. Some said the current system benefits groups supporting Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina. Some Cabinet ministers criticized the protesters, saying they played on students' emotions.
The Bengali-language Prothom Alo daily newspaper reported that one person died in Dhaka and three others, including a pedestrian, were killed after they suffered injuries during violence in Chattogram, a southeastern district, on Tuesday.
Prothom Alo and other media reports also said that a 22-year-old protester died in the northern district of Rangpur.
Details of the casualties could not be confirmed immediately.
While job opportunities have expanded in Bangladesh's private sector, many find government jobs stable and lucrative. Each year, some 3,000 such jobs open up to nearly 400,000 graduates.
Hasina said Tuesday that war veterans — commonly known as "freedom fighters" — should receive the highest respect for their sacrifice in 1971 regardless of their current political ideologies.
"Abandoning the dream of their own life, leaving behind their families, parents and everything, they joined the war with whatever they had," she said during an event at her office in Dhaka.
Protesters gathered in front of the university's official residence of the vice chancellor early Tuesday when violence broke out. Demonstrators accused the Bangladesh Chhatra League, a student wing of Hasina's ruling Awami League party, of attacking their "peaceful protests." According to local media reports, police and the ruling party-backed student wing attacked the protesters.
But Abdullahil Kafi, a senior police official, told the country's leading English-language newspaper Daily Star that they fired tear gas and "blank rounds" as protesters attacked the police. He said up to 15 police officers were injured.
More than 50 people were treated at Enam Medical College Hospital near Jahangir Nagar University as the violence continued for hours, said Ali Bin Solaiman, a medical officer of the hospital. He said at least 30 of them suffered pellet wounds.
On Monday, violence also spread at Dhaka University, the country's leading public university, as clashes gripped the campus in the capital. More than 100 students were injured in the clashes, police said.
On Tuesday, protesters blocked railways and some highways across the country, and in Dhaka, they halted traffic in many areas as they vowed to continue demonstrating until the demands were met.
Local media said police forces were spread across the capital to safeguard the peace.
Swapon, a protester and student at Dhaka University who gave only his first name, said they want the "rational reformation of the quota scheme." He said that after studying for six years, if he can't find a job, "it will cause me and my family to suffer."
Protesters say they are apolitical, but leaders of the ruling parties accused the opposition of using the demonstrations for political gains.
A ruling party-backed student activist, who refused to give his name, told The Associated Press that the protesters with the help of "goons" of the opposition's Bangladesh Nationalist Party and Jamaat-e-Islami party vandalized their rooms at the student dormitories near the Curzon Hall of Dhaka University.
The family-of-the-veterans quota system was halted following a court order after mass student protests in 2018. But last month, Bangladesh's High Court nulled the decision to reinstate the system once more, angering scores of students and triggering protests.
Last week, the Supreme Court suspended the High Court's order for four weeks and the chief justice asked protesting students to return to their classes, saying the court would issue a decision in four weeks.
However, the protests have continued daily, halting traffic in Dhaka.
The quota system also reserves government jobs for women, disabled people and ethnic minority groups, but students have protested against only the veterans system.
Hasina maintained power in an election in January that was again boycotted by the country's main opposition party and its allies due to Hasina's refusal to step down and hand over power to a caretaker government to oversee the election.
Her party favors keeping the quota for the families of the 1971 war heroes after her Awami League party, under the leadership of her father, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, led the independence war with the help of India. Rahman was assassinated along with most of his family members in a military coup in 1975.
Police open hazing investigation after Dartmouth student found dead
Police have opened a hazing investigation after a Dartmouth College student was found dead in a river in early July.
Police received a tip that hazing was involved, and there was evidence that alcohol might have been involved in the death, USA Today reported. (July 2024)
