I’ve long felt America, particularly the south, where I grew up, is in the “denial” stage of grief when it comes to our psychological response to climate change.

The sixth mass extinction has begun, our oceans are warming 40% faster than scientists anticipated, and the US’s carbon dioxide emissions rose 3.4% in 2018. How, I wonder, is everyone so calm? So business-as-usual?

The field of ecopsychology explores our connection to nature, and the way it affects our state of mind. Many of us fail to realize how essential that connection is.

Given that southern Florida – with its billions of dollars of vulnerable real estate on exposed coastline – is considered by many scientists as ground zero for climate change, I started my listening tour there. Floridians receive a constant stream of bad climate news. I was curious: does the state of the environment – specifically, the pending losses of biodiversity, tourism and property, and the prediction of category 6 hurricanes – keep people up at night?

After a long morning of driving through the Everglades, I stopped at Joanie’s Blue Crab Cafe, a vibrant red shack on the side of Highway 41 in Ochopee. “Sit anywhere you like, baby,” Lisa, the waitress, said.

I grabbed a bottle of Coors from the cooler, and sat on the sun-soaked back deck overlooking a stretch of water lined with sawgrass and frequented by alligators. Over a few hours I saw cypress swamps, mangrove forests, osprey, bald eagles, roseate spoonbills and sandhill cranes. Even though there has been a 90% loss of wading birds in the Everglades this century, there is still so much left to lose.

“You’re having the blackened grouper sandwich,” Lisa said. “So good it will make you cry.”

Lisa was right – the grouper was incredible. And crying wasn’t out of the question. The government shutdown had given my trip a raw feeling. That morning signs were posted at the national park sites: “Enter at your own risk.” The Everglades – the largest subtropical wilderness left in the United States – is an environmental treasure imperiled by pollution, toxic algae blooms, disrupted water flow and politicians who favor big industries like sugar.

Climate change denial and avoidance are prevalent here. The new governor of Florida, Ron DeSantis, announced surprising plans for big environmental reforms earlier this month, without mentioning climate change (a term his predecessor, Rick Scott, also refused to use).

Many people I spoke to in the Everglades didn’t want to talk about climate change. They considered it too political.

After I got home, I reached out to Erica Henry, a biologist who studies at-risk butterfly populations in the Florida Keys and Everglades, for her take. “You could be fatalistic about the fact that the news is bad, or that particular species seem doomed,” she said. “You could be paralyzed. But I’ve picked off my little piece, the problem I can help solve.”

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I drove north, through Florida’s panhandle, witnessing miles of extensive tree damage from Hurricane Michael. I thought I’d hear tales of increasing environmental anxiety over rising seas, and the misery of enduring hurricane seasons in the era of climate change. But in nearly all of my conversations, I encountered more resolve than anxiety.

I booked a charter boat out of Ocean Springs, near Biloxi, to see Mississippi’s barrier islands. My captain was Matthew Mayfield, a chef, restaurateur and fisherman with an infamous smoked tuna dip. As we pointed the skiff away from the Gulf Coast, he recalled how his wife’s dresses were caught in the branches of the oak trees after Hurricane Katrina, just waving around.

We found a pelican skull and tail tracks of a small gator as we walked the white sand beaches of Horn Island, made famous by artist and conservationist Walter Anderson, who notoriously rode out Hurricane Betsy tethered to a tree. Mayfield told me about the clouds of monarchs that pass through in the fall. Generations from now, Horn Island may be gone.

On the way home, I worked up the courage to ask Matthew why he rebuilt his life on the coast. “Why do you stay?” I asked. He said he needed time to think about it.

In the days that followed, he sent me reasons and pictures of the family property, colorful sunsets, local food, and a tame fox. “People that live here realize that the reward greatly outweighs the risk and pain of a storm,” he explained. “No one really cares how much you make or what you do for a living. Maybe we have a bond that storms intensify.”

“Don’t you worry about the future?” I asked.

“I can’t live my life like that,” he said.

A few days later, I stood across the street from the Saint Louis Cathedral in New Orleans, where 13 years ago Hurricane Katrina took down massive oak trees, ornamental fencing, a portion of roof and the marble hands of a statue of Jesus Christ.

Cammie Hill-Prewitt, who coordinates residencies for artists focused on the environment for Tulane University, agreed to talk to me about the spiritual tax of living on the coast in the era of climate change. She evacuated for Katrina, but stayed through Isaac, pregnant and with three house guests.

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“I grind my teeth during hurricane season,” Hill-Prewitt admitted. “But I have a 30-year mortgage. My partner owns restaurants. It’s not easy to leave.”

“We’re not exactly zen about it,” she clarified. “If you came back in September, when it’s hot, and there are four tropical depressions looming in the Atlantic, you’d get different responses. Incredible how short our memory is.”

While waiting for the annual Joan of Arc parade to start, we talked about a kid she knew who processed the trauma of Katrina through his Lego play for years, building houses then smashing them to pieces.

Thousands of people had lined the street, drinking, wearing sequined dresses and feathered hats. The drums started. A green paper mache dragon was hoisted into the air, followed by angels, then Joan of Arc on a well-trained horse.

Hill-Prewitt leaned over to me. “This is why we stay,” she said.

Later, I met Anna and Cam working at The Little Toy Shop near the bustling Cafe du Monde. They were in elementary school when Katrina hit. When I ask if they were anxious about climate change forecasts, Anna shrugged. “Maybe for a year or two after Katrina,” she said. Then she said something quietly profound. “You just learn not to get too attached to things.”

From New Orleans, I drove through Mississippi, from Natchez, to Piney-Woods, and finally Oxford, where I joined Heather McTeer Toney for coffee. She was the first African American mayor of Greenville, Mississippi, and a former Obama appointee, overseeing the south-east region of the Environmental Protection Agency. I wanted to hear about her experience with frontline communities, people living near levees and in flood zones.

“Our story of climate change and the south has always been about attachment to land,” Heather explained. “It’s generational. Cultural. This is our home and we’re as intertwined as flesh and blood.”

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Heather agreed with me that the south – particularly communities of color – is often unfairly painted as uniformly oblivious, and disinterested, when in fact the conversation is just taking place in a different language.

“We talk about climate concerns daily, but express our fears through the changes we see in hunting, fishing and farming instead of carbon emissions and PM2 standards,” she said. “We understand it quite well and are fearful for the future of our homes and children.”

During my trip, I thought that I might observe more of a cultural tipping point, an urgency in places that need it most. But I found that many members of coastal communities have built up psychological resilience after living through years of extreme weather.

Avoidance and denial are proven coping mechanisms. And, frankly, most people are just trying to work and get through the day, and express concern for the future differently, from off-record conversations to outright advocacy. But continuing to reckon with a science-based reality – as painful and worry-inducing as it might be – is an important step toward informing meaningful, individual action.

Home is an emotional commitment. We’re an adaptable species, but also habitual and sentimental; that’s one reason we’re stuck in denial. It’s the reason change is going to hurt so much.