"Doing Hope": Ecofeminist Spirituality Provides Emotional Sustenance to Confront the Climate Crisis

Environmental crises caused by our changing global environment evoke intense and difficult emotions, particularly the paralysis that often results from despair. Understanding how people who are deeply engaged in environmental activism deal with their emotions can help in emotionally equipping people to address the climate crisis. Ecofeminist spirituality directly addresses these issues through an environmental stewardship that offers hope and healing for the world. This study includes 14 interviews with workers at an ecojustice center founded by an order of Catholic sisters in the United States. We used thematic analysis to identify three main themes that collectively describe the participants' perspectives on (a) experiences of difficult feelings, (b) strategies for coping with those feelings, and (c) perspectives on cultivating hope. Participants shared how they were able to cope with difficult emotions and cultivate hope that the work they are doing matters, which was essential to sustaining their ecojustice work. As social workers respond to the changing environment, understanding how to sustain environmental work at the macro-level is essential to addressing largescale problems while also attending to difficult emotions at the microlevel. Further implications for social work practice include the importance of intergenerational organizing, living in "right relationship," incorporating spirituality, and reinhabiting the profession.