The Brief

“I feel hopeless.”

“I feel helpless.”

“How do I cope with constant sadness, grief, anger, anxiety, or fear when I’m just trying to get through a normal day?”

“How do I plan for retirement?”

“How do I plan for my thirties?”

“What kind of world will my children grow up in?” “Should I even have children?”

“Am I doing enough? Am I enough?”

These are the types of worries that came up at a recent "Climate Cafe LA,” a free, virtual support group that aims to provide an informal, confidential space for people to connect with each other about the painful emotions that come with living in the climate emergency.

A dozen or so people popped into the Zoom “Climate Cafe” being held on this Sunday morning. About half of them left their cameras off (that’s totally OK, though cameras on is preferred). After setting ground rules — only “I” statements, no advice or judging allowed — the conversation began. People shared about their favorite landscapes, their worries for their own futures or their children’s, the sense of sadness, anxiety, anger and cognitive dissonance they feel all too often, even in the most mundane moments like watching a neighbor mow a lush lawn or idle their car for too long.

With ceaseless headlines of climate disasters around the world and the escalating impacts to our own backyards here in the Southland, there’s a growing movement to address the intertwined crises of mental health and the climate emergency. The efforts range from community-based support groups such as Climate Cafes, to the practice of “ecotherapy,” to boosting training for therapists, psychologists and other public health professionals to better recognize the physical symptoms of climate-related psychological distress.

“The most widespread public health impacts of climate change are actually mental impacts,” said Wael Al-Delaimy, a public health professor at UC San Diego.

Holding space for climate emotions … and finding community

Maksim Batuyev first started experiencing depression when he was about 13 years old, growing up in Michigan.

“This was before climate change was even on my radar,” said Batuyev, who is now 25.

His depression improved with therapy and mindfulness practices, but once he got to college and started pursuing environmental studies, Batuyev said that progress was reversed.

“I went on to spend four years learning about all the different ways that humans were irreparably damaging the planet and poisoning communities,” Batuyev said.

Maksim Batuyev, 25, is the director of the Climate Cafe LA Initiative and a Gen Z advisor for global nonprofit Climate Mental Health Network.

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Courtesy of Maksim Batuyev

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By his senior year, his depression and anxiety were once again overwhelming.

“I realized I'd never been told how to navigate the grief that was coming with this,” Batuyev said. “The climate crisis was just this, like, intense backdrop to what was supposed to be a normal college experience in young adult life … and the normal hardships of growing up.”

After graduating, he moved to Los Angeles to work for a sustainable fashion startup. Now, he’s a Gen Z advisor for the global nonprofit Climate Mental Health Network and the director of Climate Cafe LA.

There’s no brick and mortar cafe, it’s simply people getting together in person or online for free, informal, 90-minute conversations about coping with climate-related emotions.

Batuyev initially piloted the conversations with student groups at UCLA and is now offering Zoom Climate Cafes he co-hosts with other Gen Z facilitators. Such gatherings are a growing trend worldwide.

“It's really about creating a container for us to bring these difficult emotions to the surface,” said Batuyev. “Because all too often we have to stuff them down just to get through our day-to-day lives. We're trying to put food on the table, we're trying to get to work on time. We're stuck processing those emotions in isolation.”

Younger people are particularly impacted — they wonder how much of the Earth will be habitable by the time they’re in their 40s and 50s. In the largest study of its kind, a 2021 survey of 10,000 young people across the world found the vast majority experience emotional distress over the climate crisis on a daily basis, while more than half feel humanity is doomed.

Climate Cafes are mostly geared towards Gen Z, but they've proven to be needed spaces for people of all ages and walks of life.

At the recent virtual Climate Cafe LA, folks from all over the world joined — from Canada to India to the U.K. to New Jersey to right here in Los Angeles. The attendees encompassed a range of ages and professions: activists, therapists, a veteran, scientists and a faith worker. Though a small sample, the group exemplified the diversity of who is struggling with climate-related emotional distress.

Feeling our feelings … without the need to act 

Batuyev said one of the most important — and perhaps surprising — parts of the Climate Cafe is that it explicitly pushes back against the action-oriented narrative that’s common in most climate spaces.

“I think a lot of times when people think about climate, they imagine saving the polar bears, they imagine protesters, they imagine people yelling at each other or demanding that others sign petitions, and it's kind of easy to understand why not everyone's comfortable starting to engage in that way,” Batuyev said.

But providing a space simply to feel emotions, and not act on them, can allow people to build community and find ways to engage with the climate crisis in their own way, Batuyev said. 

“When we're able to help people connect with these intense emotions of grief or despair or anxiety around these issues, what we're really doing is also helping them connect with a place of love,” Batuyev said. “These emotions themselves are very often transformative and what drive us to act and get involved, but I think our problem is that we lack a community around us that enables us to express ourselves and experience these emotions in a safe and comfortable way.”

An accessible support model

Though Climate Cafes are not meant to replace professional help, therapy itself can be out of reach for many people, so these groups can provide support for those who otherwise may not be able to access it, said Isaias Hernandez, 27, who grew up in Sylmar and is the creator of environmental education platform Queer Brown Vegan.

Isaias Hernandez, 27, is the founder of education platform Queer Brown Vegan. He created a Climate Emotions Scale to help people name the feelings they're experiencing around climate change.

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Courtesy of Isaias Hernandez

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Additionally, he said this kind of grassroots peer-to-peer model can be replicated to fit the needs of many different communities.

“Mental health services are expensive. It's a privilege to afford it,” Hernandez said. “Creating grassroots models that center a need for community and a safe space is important.”

Hernandez created a climate emotion scale to help people find the language to describe their climate-related emotions. 

“When someone else validates another person about what they're feeling,” Hernandez said, “I think that allows them to say 'It's not just in my head, it's not a disorder, it's a natural response to what I'm experiencing.'”

How to cope with climate emotions

Recognizing and acknowledging the emotions that are driving our internal narratives around climate change is an important first step to coping and building mental resilience, said Long Beach-based therapist Carol Bartels, who specializes in “ecotherapy,” where clients process their emotions outside in a natural setting.

Coping with those feelings comes down to a lot of well-researched strategies in trauma recovery, she said.

“That is finding a sense of safety, finding the resources inside of our own bodies to relax and to feel a sense of some control and ability to regulate our own emotions,” Bartels said.

Carol Bartels is an ecotherapist based in Long Beach. Here she is at DeForest Wetlands in Long Beach, one of her favorite places to take clients.

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Courtesy of Carol Bartels

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Using breathing exercises or other forms of “grounding” to return to the present moment can help us alleviate panic and find safety and calm within our own bodies, said Bartels. To help her clients get there, Bartels often takes them outside — what’s called “ecotherapy.”

“Getting grounded in one's own body, feeling what's really going on inside of us — nature has a way of helping us tune into that and bringing us right into the present moment,” Bartels said. “Nature does half of the healing.”

Taking action … when you’re ready

Bartels said once you can recognize and hold space for your own climate-related emotions — whether it be grief, anxiety, anger, fear, despair or all of them at once — taking action can play an important role in further building mental resilience.

“It doesn't have to be some grand action of changing the world, but maybe getting involved at a more local level of sustainable projects, or even just within one's own home,” Bartels said. “We can channel these emotions into something that we do have control over, because the feeling of lack of control is such a big problem with this issue.”

To cope with her own overwhelming climate emotions, Bartels grew a permaculture food forest in her backyard. She emphasized that choosing actions rooted in one’s own personal passions and interests — not “shoulds” — is essential to building true emotional resilience.

“As we move forward, we're going to need educators and healers and artists and musicians,” Bartels said.

The next global mental health crisis?

The UC San Diego public health professor, Wael Al-Delaimy, has firsthand experience of the impacts of war and displacement on mental health. Originally from Iraq, Al-Delaimy spent most of his career as an epidemiologist working with refugees in the Middle East and here in Southern California.

Today, he sees the mental health impacts of the climate crisis on people all over the world as the next major public health challenge. He's currently researching how climate disasters are affecting the mental health of people in the Middle East.

Wael Al-Delaimy is a public health professor at UCSD who's researching how the climate crisis is impacting the mental health of people in the Middle East.

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Courtesy of Wael Al-Delaimy

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“The physical impacts are limited to people who are injured, who may die from extreme weather events,” Al-Delaimy said. “And this is small compared to the much more widespread mental illnesses, psychological impacts, which can become chronic. People become traumatized.”

For example, he said, people who have survived a wildfire or serious flooding may be triggered every time they smell fire, or every time it rains. He pointed to how research has found that violence and suicides increase during extreme heat events. There’s also the concept of solastalgia, the emotions that come with watching beloved landscapes change and disappear, upending livelihoods and cultural traditions — something Indigenous communities around the world have coped with for generations.

“The health care system is not prepared for either the acute nor for the chronic [mental health] conditions from climate change,” Al-Delaimy said.

He said physicians and mental health professionals alike need to be trained in talking to their patients about climate-related mental health concerns. And that training needs to be culturally aware, particularly in longtime landing spots for refugees and immigrants such as southern California.

“The mental health crisis is there without climate change,” Al-Delaimy said. “Climate change is just going to make it worse.”

But Al-Delaimy said he sees a lot of promise in the peer-to-peer support model, such as Climate Cafes. For example, his research on community health workers doing outreach with Somali, Iraqi and Syrian refugees in San Diego during COVID found communities were far more likely to trust and engage with workers from their own communities.

“Mental illnesses are hidden. There's denial about them. There's a stigma about it,” Al-Delaimy said. “But they're like any other chronic disease …They need attention. Without that, our society will continue to suffer.”

Resources for people seeking help with climate emotions

Resources for health professionals 

Demonstrations against this week’s deadly ICE shooting in Minneapolis are planned this weekend across Los Angeles. The protests are being organized by the “ICE Out For Good Coalition” — a network of several groups including the ACLU and 50501.

Here are a some of the planned actions across the city:

Saturday

• Pasadena: Noon to 2 p.m. at Garfield and Colorado Boulevard, across from the Paseo Mall
• Eagle Rock: 1 to 2 p.m. at Colorado and Eagle Rock boulevards
• City of Los Angeles: 2 to 4:30 p.m. in Pershing Square

Sunday

• West Hollywood: 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. at 647 N. San Vicente Blvd., across from the Pacific Design Center.
• City of Los Angeles: Noon to 2 p.m. at The Home Depot on 2055 N. Figueroa St.
• Beverly Hills: 2 and 4 p.m. at 9439 Santa Monica Blvd., between Beverly and Canon drives

Jennifer Cacicio didn’t set out to move across the country.

Like thousands of others who fled the L.A. fires a year ago this week, Cacicio and her family left their Altadena home thinking they would be gone a night, maybe two.

But in the year since the Eaton Fire erased their house and neighborhood overnight, home has become somewhere entirely new.

Cacicio, a television writer, and her husband and 8-year-old daughter now live nearly 3,000 miles from L.A. — in Cold Spring, a village in New York’s Hudson Valley they’d never visited until this year.

Starting over somewhere completely new, Cacicio said, felt easier than rebuilding their lives in high-cost L.A. with the foothills of Altadena casting a long shadow.

“What we had in Altadena was so wonderful that anywhere else but Altadena feels like you're settling for less,” Cacicio said.

Jennifer Cacicio poses for a photo with her husband Matt Shallenberger and their daughter, Bruna.

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Matt Shallenberger

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Cacicio is part of a growing fire diaspora — Altadenans scattered across the country and the world, searching for versions of the natural beauty and close-knit and artistic community they enjoyed in the San Gabriels.

Cacicio said she knows of three other Altadena families who’ve relocated to the Hudson Valley. Neighborhoods still edge up against the wilderness, but wooded slopes and river cliffs now define the landscape for them where canyons and ridgelines once did.

I also spoke with two other Altadena households who left post-fire, one for the Netherlands and the other for Asheville, North Carolina. Each family described decisions shaped by financial realities and the wrenching calculus of raising young children after a fire.

From Altadena to the Netherlands

The Sporcks left the Netherlands for L.A. over seven years ago, setting off on their American adventure.

Joep, a film composer, saw career opportunities in L.A, and his wife Sarah, was eager to try life in a new country.

Friends in Altadena introduced them to the San Gabriels, and eventually they found their own house in the west part of Altadena near the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

Joep composed film scores and trailer music in a converted garage and Sarah commuted to her job as an education specialist at a school in Lincoln Heights. Three years ago, they welcomed their first child.

In the back yard, they planted fruit trees and raised chickens, and hiked along trails to favorite spots like Millard Falls.

“We loved it, and we never meant to leave,” Joep said.

This time last year, Sarah was pregnant with their second son and had just finished her first trimester when on Jan. 7 the couple saw flames shooting from the foothills.

The fire came within several blocks, but their house was ultimately spared.

In the month after the fire, Joep worked to remediate their home alongside professional crews, as Sarah looked after their toddler, whose daycare, Altadena Children’s Center, had burned down.

“With Sarah pregnant, it was really scary, even afterwards,” Joep said.

Added Sarah: “And with a toddler that wants to play outside.”

As they prepared for their second child, the fire forced questions: How long would it take for Altadena to recover and what would that look like?

“I'm sure there will be a new Altadena in a couple of years,” Joep said. “But it felt like it wasn't going to be the same ever again.”

Once-vague thoughts moved to the foreground. In the Netherlands, they would have more family support and a stronger social safety net, like lower-cost childcare.

And Joep had reached a point in his career that he could work remotely.

This past summer, after their baby was born, a listing landed in Joep’s inbox for a three-story brick villa in the southern part of the Netherlands where Joep is from — hilly just like Altadena. The couple made an offer for the house in Epen without seeing it in person.

The Sporcks have moved back to the Netherlands, to the village of Epen in the southern part of the country.

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Gerlach Delissen

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“We made some lists like pros and cons of staying or leaving, and it was just we couldn't deny it anymore,” Joep said.

They put their house on the market — and after some price cuts — sold it to another Altadena family that had lost their home in the fire.

In November, the Sporcks moved to their Epen home, where they are still unpacking — and grieving.

“I’m really sad to be leaving America and Los Angeles,” Joep said. “It feels a little bit like giving up this dream.”

But he said the ties to the area are strong. Their children are dual-citizens. Joep will return to L.A. regularly for work.

“Part of us is now like American, Altadenan forever, I guess,” Joep said.

It's something, he said, that will always set them apart from their friends and family in the Netherlands.

From Eaton Canyon to the Blue Ridge Mountains

Altadena wasn’t their first stop in Southern California. There was Sherman Oaks and Highland Park.

But for Carson Dougherty and Chris Gower, their Altadena cottage rental within walking distance of Eaton Canyon was the first place that felt like home in L.A.

Pushing their daughters in strollers to Altadena Beverage and Market and Prime Pizza, they would stop to speak with neighbors along the way.

“I would walk around and just be like, ‘Oh my God, I can’t believe we live here,'" Carson said. “I've just never loved a place more or felt more welcome.”

Carson, a spiritual coach, had moved from New York to L.A. about nine years ago when she was an actor, accompanied by Chris who works in tech sales.

Carson is originally from northern Virginia, while Chris grew up in Surrey, England. The call of family always beckoned, but the allure of life in Altadena kept it at bay.

Carson Dougherty and her family moved to Asheville, North Carolina.

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Courtesy Carson Dougherty

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They had months earlier re-upped their lease for another two years, when the Eaton Fire happened.

The next day, they returned to find their rental standing — but coated in soot.

With no clear remediation plan being offered by the landlord and worried about their children’s health, the couple broke their lease and forfeited their full deposit.

As they planned their next move, Carson and Chris began rethinking what it meant to raise a family in California — from pre-school to housing.

“Life here is very hard,” Carson said. “We're obsessed with it, but it's not easy.”

Carson flew with the girls out to Virginia, and stayed with her parents. When Chris rejoined them, they discussed where they could live.

Using A.I., they researched cities within 500 miles of Carson’s parents that met their criteria for schools and property taxes. Starting with more than 50 places, Carson winnowed down the list by watching online walking tours of cities and asking for advice on social media.

Asheville, North Carolina — where she had once attended a wedding — kept coming up.

“But we were like, ‘We're not going to move to a place that just had a hurricane,” Carson said, recalling the devastation of Hurricane Helene in 2024.

After taking road trips to Pennsylvania, New York and New Jersey and feeling nothing was clicking, the couple traveled to Asheville. They were drawn to the Blue Ridge Mountains that ring the city and the artistic community that reminded them of Altadena’s.

“I was like, ‘OK, this is it,’” Carson said. “I don't know. It was just a feeling.”

Two months into living in their current spot in Asheville, they’re still adjusting.

“I can see this was the right move for us,” Carson said. “But it doesn't feel like home yet.”

“It still feels like a consolation prize,” Chris said. “Whereas Altadena was the one that we were like ‘Holy crap, we found it.'"

Giving her daughter home

In Cold Spring, New York, Jennifer Cacicio is also going through a range of emotions.

“I love Altadena so much, and there's so much grief in letting go of it,” she said.

She mourns her street of identical mid-century homes designed by the architect Gregory Ain. When neighborhood kids visited each other, they knew the exact layout of each others’ homes.

Jennifer estimates of the 28 houses in the neighborhood, about three-quarters are gone.

After struggling with the cost of renting or buying in L.A., she and her husband — a landscape photographer — began thinking about moving East, where she’s from.

During their daughter’s spring break, the family flew out for an expedition.

“We tried to frame it with my daughter, like, ‘You know what this terrible thing happened, and we're going to try to turn it into a family adventure and live closer to cousins and explore a new part of the world,'" Jennifer said.

Jennifer Cacicio's 8-year-old daughter surveys her new environs in Cold Spring, N.Y.

They looked at towns within an hour or so of New York City, located in the suburbs of New York and Connecticut. In New York’s Hudson Valley, they visited an open house for a school that their daughter instantly took a shine to.

“We were like, ‘Great, let's just build it around that — like one thing felt right,’” Cacicio said.

Another sign came when Jennifer, who was the showrunner for this year’s Paramount+ drama Happy Face, got an offer to work on a show based in New York.

“It kind of felt like the universe confirming the decision in a way,” Jennifer said.

In September, they moved into their new home in Cold Spring. Cacicio puts aside her sadness when she thinks about her daughter.

After an event as traumatic as a fire, she wants her childhood to feel stable again. Altadena will recover over the next decade, Cacicio said, but later than she would hope for her daughter.

Being in a new place has brought unknowns, but also a sense of excitement.

"That was kind of what it came down to," Cacicio said. "It didn't feel like settling. It just felt different."

Los Angeles lost a piece of history when the Hollywood Center Motel burned down earlier this week.

The vacant property on Sunset Boulevard had a reputation as a sleazy, dilapidated inn, but the Hollywood Center Motel actually had multiple previous lives.

The building, one of the oldest in the neighborhood, was from a time before urbanization. It was also nominated for historic protection, in part because of its first era as a house.

A symbol of early Hollywood

Before the fire, the Hollywood Center Motel had seven buildings, a kidney-shaped pool, and a mid-century modern breeze block wall with a neon sign.

But the motel property actually started out as a three-story, Shingle-style home built in 1905, which is an American take on Victorian design known for broad gables.

That was built when Hollywood was an independent city, before it joined the city of L.A. Brian Curran, who co-chairs Hollywood Heritage’s preservation committee, says that during this period, Hollywood was known as a place for retirees to settle down.

“ [It was] marketed as a dry town,” he said. “So it was like, come in, retire among the orange groves and just enjoy life in sunny California.”

The Hollywood Center Motel in 1985.

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Ed Ruscha

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Courtesy Hollywood Heritage

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Hollywood was also changing from agricultural to real estate haven. If you were very well off, you’d live in a lavish Hollywood Hills estate, like Wattles Mansion. If you were more moderate, you’d live in the flat areas to the south, in upper-middle class homes just like the Shingle home.

Changing with the times

The home was first owned by William and Sarah Avery, according to Hollywood Heritage’s nomination petition, who called the home “El Nido” (the nest). They didn’t live there long, but the couple’s luncheon made it into the local paper.

The home changed hands multiple times. When Edmund Schultz, a retired drugstore owner, and his family bought the property in 1921, they decided to turn it into an old English bungalow court with over a dozen units around the main home. This was part of a shift in Hollywood to create low-scale apartments as people flocked to Southern California, according to city records.

“It physically evolved with the evolution of Hollywood,” Curran said, “but also tells a story about the economic and cultural evolution of Hollywood.”

The motel conversion didn’t happen until the mid-1950s, when a different owner enclosed the front porch and divided rooms. It was put up for auction as a 23-unit motel, with a full apartment and family-style spaces.

The Hollywood Center Motel opened shortly after in 1956. As TV’s popularity grew, it quickly became a backdrop for crime dramas. It’s been a filming location for Perry Mason, The Rockford Files, T.J. Hooker and L.A. Confidential. As the decades passed, its run-down appearance worked even better for those who wanted a seedy setting.

A still of the motel in the TV cop drama "T.J. Hooker." The episode, titled "Sweet Sixteen...and Dead," aired in February 1983.

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Screenshot via Tubi

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The damaged neon sign in 2024.

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Darya Sannikova

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Pexels

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The music industry also got a piece of it. In the 70s, musician Neil Young stayed there because he wanted to sleep in the “sleaziest motel” on Sunset Boulevard.

This was the Hollywood Center Motel’s life for decades — a little bit of stardom while it slowly deteriorated. In 2015, the breeze block was damaged in a car crash and not repaired, according to the nomination petition. The motel stopped operating three years later.

What the fire means for historic status

Only a handful of buildings in Hollywood have this kind of history, which is why Curran says they began fighting for it to be protected once it became vacant last year.

The site was eligible for local and state historic status. The city of L.A.’s Cultural Heritage Commission had just voted a few weeks ago to consider that.

But they couldn’t stay ahead of issues. The home was vandalized. A small blaze broke out on the second floor in September. Another fire damaged one of the bungalows the following month.

The home was demolished in the process of stopping the flames.

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Courtesy Hollywood Heritage

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Curran says losing the home in this last fire— the most significant element of the complex — makes the nomination process more challenging, but they’re still pushing for it. He wants protections for the neon sign and breeze block wall. Moving forward, Curran says Hollywood Heritage  will be talking with policymakers about preventing other important sites from the same fate.

“ We know from experience that when you don’t use a building, when there aren’t people inside, they are vulnerable and then they burn,” Curran said. “ We need to do something because this continues to happen.”

Sorry, folks. The bluefin tuna that's worth the price of a decent Hollywood Hills home is now sold out in L.A.

What, you say?

It all started with an age-old tradition

Every Jan. 5, the world's largest wholesale seafood market in Tokyo holds a special auction to ring in the new year.

This week, a 535-pound bluefin tuna was sold at Toyosu Fish Market for a record-setting 510.3 million yen — or around $3.2 million in U.S. dollars. That's about $6,000 a pound.

The winning bidder was Kiyoshi Kimura — the country's titular "Tuna King" who operates the Sushi Zanmai chain of restaurants in Japan that’s known for its quality but affordable sushi.

So what does it have to do with L.A.

After the auction, about 30 pounds of that hunk of a tuna was flown to the chain's only stateside outpost at Chapman Plaza in Koreatown.

"One of the staff from headquarters brought it by plane," said Tiger Nakawake, the general manager of Sushi Zanmai LA. He added that the fish was kept fresh with temperature control packaging and ice.

Nakawake said that the L.A. location always gets their bluefin from its Tokyo mothership. The other fish they get from companies in Japan and locally.

For him, there's a lot of pride that this New Year symbol of good fortune and tradition has come to this neck of the woods.

"All the staff were super happy, because we're the only restaurant in the United States who has 'World Record Blue Fin Tuna,'” Nakawake said in an email.

The giant bluefin that's worth $3.2 million.

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Courtesy Tiger Nakawake

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What makes bluefin special is its "sweetness and acidity" that is both "refined and perfectly balanced," he added.

But the 535-pound giant is next league.

"Truly the most elegant and delicious tuna I have ever tasted in the last 50 years," he said.

While supply lasts

Nakawake estimated their share yielded about 1,000 sushi slices, which the restaurant started serving Thursday. In keeping with the chain's mission to offer good sushi without breaking the bank, Zanmai L.A. is keeping prices low — from $4 to $7 a piece, depending on the cut.

"This tuna is a New Year gift and appreciation to all the people in L.A. from Tuna King," Nakawake said.

The limit was one piece per person. Late last night, Nakawake updated LAist to say that the fish was, "unfortunately, all sold out."

But not to worry, this isn't the Tuna King's first rodeo at going big at the annual new year's auction. According to the BBC, Kimura also submitted historic winning bids in 2012, 2013, and 2019.

So yes, there's always next year.