This paper intends to address, from a mainly socio-cultural point of view, the issue of eco-anxiety. With this term, coined only recently by psychology, we mean the state of agitation and arousal caused in the individual by global and personal threats related to climate change and environmental disasters in general. This phenomenon will be reread here both from the point of view of the relationship between the individual and society, i.e. how the first perceives it differently from the second, and from the cultural and generational point of view, in order to understand its motivations, removals and collective effects. We will first proceed with the analysis of the issue in qualitative and quantitative terms, also in relation to the public diffusion of the problem relating to mental health, up to extreme cases of suicides, and then proceed to contextualize eco-anxiety in the socio-political scenario as much as more contemporary, outlined by crisis, pandemic and war. At the end, a reflection will be proposed which, although not conclusive, will try to understand the phenomenon in cultural and at times existential terms, through the question of “arousal”.
