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Britt Wray, author, felt compelled to confront the climate crisis personally in 2017 when she and her husband started seriously discussing having children. Wray had been studying biology and becoming a science communicator for years, having already been exposed to the grim news about planetary destruction. The decision to bring new life to a world that seemed doomed caused the anger, frustration, and fear that had been simmering beneath the surface to boil.
Image credit: Penguin Random House Canada
A feeling of isolation led to a deep sense grief and despair. This drove her to research if other people were going through similar existential fears. Through research and conversations she discovered that she was not the only one and that there was a growing community of people who could help her find strength and resolve.
Over the last five years, Wray worked her way through this crucible of emotion and forged a new sense of purpose – and a new livelihood. She turned to research to explore the mental and emotional toll exacted by the climate crisis and environmental destruction, using her storytelling skills to relay her findings on “how to stay sane in the climate and broader ecological crisis.”
She was elected to the inaugural class in 2021. Planetary Health Postdoctoral FellowThe Stanford Center for Innovation in Global Healthand the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. She was a leader in a A groundbreaking new studyThe survey included data on climate anxiety in 10,000 youth in more than 10 countries. This highlighted a growing mental crisis. Three-quarters of respondents felt that the “future is frightening,” about half said climate anxiety affected their daily lives, and about a quarter feared having children due to the climate crisis.
She recently published a book. Generation Dread: Finding Purpose In An Age of Climate Crisis explores how we as individuals – and as a community – can build resilience and convert the feelings known as eco-anxiety into a super-fuel to power our efforts to fight for a better world.
“Rather than bury our heads in the sand and suppress our discomfort, we can harness and transform the distress we feel into meaningful actions and forms of connection,” she writes.
Wray shares his hope and insight on how to achieve this goal in the conversation below.
In your book, you describe holding a “balance between hope and fear” without giving in to either extreme. Is this where you are today?
Britt Wray (Image credit: Arden Wray)
I find myself hopeful – in a gritty way. These turbulent times are causing a lot distress for many people. But taking the time to really explore, reflect on, and process one’s difficult, even existential feelings, can cause a personal transformation that brings about resolve, courage, commitment, and moral clarity. This can help you connect with others and push for the change you want in the world.
It’s not a fast process. There’s no guarantee that, if you feel ecological distress, grief, or rage about the injustices of what’s happening, it’s going to be this triumphant path towards personal transformation or resolve to make the world a better place. It can be extremely difficult and depressing. It can have serious negative effects on your mental health. It is impossible to predict the future, but there are ways to get around it.
While people are awakening to climate awareness and feeling really shaken, there is also a rise in literacy, support and research around how to address these challenges. And that is incredible because it wasn’t there before.
You were uncertain whether you should have a baby in the face of the climate crisis, so you started this work. You and your husband welcomed a child into the world last fall. What has your outlook been on your work since having a child?
My outlook had to change in order to have children. Through my research and the connections that I made through interviews with lots of people, participating in various community groups on climate action, as well as processing my climate emotions, this was possible. I was able get out of the isolating, alienating space where I felt like I was the only one experiencing these feelings. All this helped me to move through my feelings and use them in a nourishing way to ask, “Okay, how am I going to be at this time? How do I want to use this one life that I have?”
I was able to be honest with myself about who and what I would be if only the worst, most darkest emotions were my main focus. I was able to see a greater meaning and purpose in all of my distress. I quit my job and began a new career in climate change and mental health. These emotions are valid and still trigger from time to time due to world events. I discovered that I could accept them for what they were and move towards them with joy. Once I made these shifts and devoted my life to working on planetary health issues, then I finally felt like, “OK, all right, now I can have a child.”
This was your process, as you put it, for turning eco-anxiety into a “super-fuel” to power positive change. What can others do to achieve the same?
A lot of the despair becomes as strong as it does because people don’t have another person who can validate and embrace their tough climate emotions and have them know they’re not crazy.
There are many options for starting the emotional processing of such emotions in a supportive environment. That can be a climate cafe, an activist group, friends who simply get it and are ready to talk in an open non-judgmental way, a loved one in your family, or a climate emotions processing program like what’s offered by the Good Grief Network. The idea is that people can be themselves, feel validated, and have honest conversations about what the climate crisis means for their lives. The support that comes from legitimizing emotions can be a huge relief in an instant.
These feelings can change you as you move through them, learn to value them as a sign of care or love for what’s being lost, and can help you see how you can heal the problem with your talents, efforts, and energies. You can come out of a rough climate awakening with a new perspective and a fresh perspective about what you can do to help others. In psychology speak, it’s called meaning-focused coping.
You explore how eco-anxiety can become exacerbated when privilege is involved. It is most acutely felt by those who aren’t facing daily, systemic threats that affect their health and well being. How does race and class affect our experience of climate change?
Everyone is vulnerable to the distressing – and potentially revitalizing – power of eco-anxiety if they recognize that their own health is tied up with the health of their environment. But we don’t all have the same resources, space, or interest to harness eco-anxiety when other existential threats may be more immediate.
As a white, middle-class Canadian woman of color, I have had the luxury to dread the future while others fear the future and have suffered for the treatment they received by dominant power structures in the past. Many see the climate crisis as a double injustice. The most marginalized and poorest people of color are most affected by a warming planet. They also had the least involvement in causing this mess.
Sarah Jaquette Ray, climate writer and climate activist, says that racial inequality is interconnected with the climate crisis. And privileged anxiety about the climate, like mine, must be harnessed and purposefully directed outward for justice-oriented results if it’s going to be of help.
Your research suggests that mental health issues will rise as the climate crisis worsens. How can society prepare for this growing need?
Global health leaders have been studying how to get mental health support in low-resource settings for years.
A very promising model has emerged: Turning specialists into supervisors who train teams of community members interested in helping, but who don’t have any psychological expertise. This is called task shifting. These laypeople are equipped with interventions and go out into the community to work with their neighbors in a trusted social network. They’re in community centers, grocery stores, schools, whatever it might be. Clinical trials have shown that this approach can sometimes be more effective than primary healthcare with a specialist.
This approach could be very effective in dealing the the psychic damage that climate change will cause at an increasing rate. It’s time to be thinking about adapting these kinds of programs and empowering people to take shared ownership over their mental health as we adapt to our warming world.
