If you have a teenager or an early twenty-something in your life, you know the work it takes to get time together away from screens. To actually talk. To be present in the same place at the same time.

One of my favorite new rituals is a walk with our 20-year-old daughter, Paloma, around our neighborhood in Brooklyn. Usually without a destination. Usually with an intention to notice something we haven’t seen before in a place we’ve lived for years.

A few weeks ago we were out on our afternoon walk. Golden hour. The light makes the Brooklyn brownstones look warm and welcoming, and from the piers at Brooklyn Bridge Park, you can watch the sunset spread pastel light and shadow behind the Manhattan skyline.

Standing in the middle of all that beauty, Paloma told me she had never felt more hopeless. That the things that usually bring her joy weren’t reaching her.

In moments like that, I try not to respond too quickly. Not to offer an insight or a solution. Just to be present and quiet, and to let her know with the touch of a hand or an arm around her shoulder that I’m here and I love her.

Like Paloma, most young people today are remarkably aware. Empathetic, sharp, creative, resourceful in ways that humble me. They’ve grown up fluent in complexity. And, a lot of them are running on empty — overwhelmed, anxious, disillusioned, and sometimes something closer to despair.

Both things are true at once. You can see that both/and everywhere right now, in our economy and our politics and our culture. But nowhere is it sharper than in the story we tell about the environment.

As heat records rise and fires and floods arrive with a regularity that should alarm us more than it does, many in the generation with the most at stake in a livable future are concluding that nothing they do will matter.

That’s the question my colleague Emmy Scott of Earth Guardians and I couldn’t stop thinking about, and the one we brought to a room at the Sun Valley Forum in June. “Why are so many young people who care the most also the least likely to act? And more importantly, what’s already helping them find their way back?”

The writer Charles Eisenstein says, “we are living in the space between stories.” The old story — that we can take from the earth forever, that nature is scenery for human life — doesn’t make sense. The new one hasn’t fully arrived. Gen Z is standing right in that gap.

Our job this year wasn’t to invent a new story for them. It was to listen for the one already trying to be told.

So we teamed up with Earth Guardians, GlobeScan, Culturas, and Guru Media to look at this from three angles: global polling to see the scale of where this generation stands, long-form conversations with Earth Guardians’ youth leaders to understand how it feels from the inside, and a CultureAI scan of more than 50,000 user-generated videos to catch the language young people are actually using right now.

Here’s what we found.

The Gen Z Dilemma

The numbers lay out a real paradox.

In GlobeScan’s poll of 30,000 people across 30 countries, 76% of Gen Z say climate change has greatly or moderately affected them, compared with 68% of Boomers. Eighty-eight percent call it a serious or very serious global problem.

And this isn’t a distant concern about the future. Nearly half say climate change has made their personal health worse. Four in ten say the same about their emotional state of mind.

By every measure of concern, this is the most affected, most worried generation we’ve ever polled.

Yet 63% of them are disengaging from sustainable behavior. The data reveals they are “Anxious Inactives” (32%) and “Indifferents” (31%). The Indifferents grew by nine points in a single year. The Enthusiasts shrank by six.

High concern. Stalled action. And the gap is widening.

They care. They’re not acting on it. That’s the dilemma our work set out to understand — and I want to be clear that the explanation isn’t apathy.

The Surprise: Hope, not Fear

When you ask young people what they actually feel when they think about nature and the environment, fear isn’t the top answer.

Hope is. It tops the list at 44, ahead of fear and anxiety at 34, with optimism and faith right behind — all of them ranking above hopelessness, guilt, and grief.

That helps reframe the whole problem. We’ve been treating this as an emotional deficit to be corrected with more urgency, better facts, sharper warnings. But the feeling is already there. What’s missing is a path.

Two Very Different Emotional Contracts

One of the clearest signals in the CultureGraph was the split between how people experience the word “climate” and how they experience the word “nature.” We use them interchangeably. Culture doesn’t.

Climate, in the content we scanned, shows up as stress, urgency, overwhelm, fatigue, movement elitism, and a finger pointed at the viewer.

Nature shows up as connection, awe, calm. A nervous system reset.

Same audience. Two entirely different emotional experiences, depending on which word you lead with. If “climate” is landing as an indictment, it’s worth asking what happens when “nature” lands as an invitation.

What We Heard Directly

Our in-depth interviews put faces on the numbers.

Macey, an Earth Guardian in Oklahoma, described carrying blame for a crisis she didn’t create. “We’re taking the blame as individuals,” she told us — individuals absorbing the emotional, financial, and physical cost of decisions made in boardrooms.

Tupá, in Brazil, said that for a lot of young people there’s simply no room to think about climate at all. “We’re just trying to survive.”

Neither of them is indifferent. One is carrying weight that was never hers. The other doesn’t have the bandwidth. In both cases the barrier isn’t apathy. It’s not knowing where to put your hands.

Five Signals from the Culture

The Culturas scan surfaced five recurring patterns in how young people are actually talking about nature online. Each is a shift worth paying attention to.

1. Love First: Connection before obligation. People meet the living world through love — the duck pond, the osprey, the smell of tall grass — long before they meet “climate,” which tends to arrive as dread and an accusation. “Nature maxxing” is a real and growing hashtag; climate guilt is not. Culture is keeping the love and quietly dropping the obligation. The shift is from indictment to invitation: enter through what people already adore, and earn the ask from there.

2. Absurdist Humor: Irony as honesty. A meme about sipping through a soggy paper straw to save the planet, cut against footage of world leaders doing nothing, isn’t flippancy. It’s a defense mechanism that makes an unbearable truth bearable. It’s also a flare sent up to peers: “you’re seeing this too, right?” The shift is from earnest to honest. Humor is often the entry ticket — meet the absurdity first, then give the doom somewhere to land.

3. Radical Pragmatism: Doable wins, done imperfectly. This generation is hungry for bounded, achievable wins. Hope here is something you can see and repeat, not something you’re asked to take on faith. Watch a Melbourne “permablitz” — neighbors turning a backyard into a garden over a single afternoon — and the logic is right there. Sustainability becomes a craft practiced imperfectly, and belonging gets built through shared imperfection rather than purity. The shift is from perfection to practice: do one thing, feel it work, do the next.

4. Restorative Awe: Nature as self-care. Time in nature has become something close to a nervous-system reset protocol for this generation. Young people are finding calm watching livestreams of rivers and creeks. It lowers the volume and rebuilds the capacity to care. Depleted people retreat. Restored people act. The shift is from emotional exhaustion to nervous system restoration, and it carries an essential insight for anyone building campaigns: we can’t ask people to act on behalf of something they’re too depleted to feel connected to. Design the restorative experience first.

5. Competent Hands: Regeneration as craft, not claims. Regeneration is a verb, and audiences can tell the difference between a claim and an action. We love “how to” videos, and there’s a rising appetite for what you might call competency content — the tactile labor of the land, the granular work of soil, the felt sense of repair. The shift is from claims to craft. Show the doing, and let competence be the credential.

The ‘Nature Loop’

When we put these signals together, a clear pattern emerges. We’re calling it The Nature Loop, and it moves in three steps.

Reconnect.
Time in nature quiets the nervous system. Restored people act; depleted people retreat.

Act.
That restoration provides the energy to do one small, local, visible thing — and to watch it work.

Belong.
Each action and each relationship builds on the last, until you’re part of a community caring for a place together.

Reconnect, act, belong. Nature isn’t just the ultimate goal for our actions. Nature is the source, the healer and the path. We are part of nature and nature is part of us. It’s the oldest story we have. It just needs telling again, for this generation, in the language they’re already using.

What This Means for the Work

If you’re doing environmental communications for a nonprofit, a foundation, or a brand trying to do right by all this, here’s the practical takeaway.

A new story of nature doesn’t have to begin with climate data or a call to urgent action. It can begin with the stream, the trees, the birds, the quiet — with protecting what’s closest to people and what they already love.

Awareness without agency breaks people down. It doesn’t mobilize them. Connection is what puts people back together, and it’s also what gives them the capacity to act.

Which means sequence matters more than volume. Restore before you recruit. Invite before you indict. Show craft instead of claims. And make the first ask small enough to finish and visible enough to feel.

The Invitation

The invitation Emmy and I left the room with at Sun Valley is a simple one: let’s help a new generation fall in love with the living world again.

And here’s the thing I’d want any parent, teacher, aunt, uncle, or friend to hear. You don’t need a global movement to start this loop. You need a walk. A creek. A Saturday morning with your hands in the dirt next to someone you love. That isn’t a lesser version of the work. According to the data, that’s where the work begins.

Paloma and I are still walking. Golden hour, no destination, Red Hook. I’m not going to tell you the walks fix anything — that isn’t how this works, and she’d call me out for saying so. But something happens out there that doesn’t happen on a screen or in a conversation about the state of the world. She notices things. She points them out to me. Some evenings she brings her sketchbook.

It’s small, and it’s ours. And according to everything we found, small and shared is exactly where this begins.

They’re ready. The culture is already writing this story. Our job is to listen for it, and to help tell it well.