This interview was conducted and transcribed by HPR Community Engagement Director and Staff Writer Chinyere Obasi and has been edited for length and clarity.
Sarah Jaquette Ray is a Professor of Environmental Studies and the Program Leader of the Environmental Studies Program at California State Polytechnic University, Humboldt. Her work focuses on modern climate justice advocacy and trauma studies in reference to environmental issues. Her book A Field Guide to Climate Anxiety, based on her work as a professor at Humboldt, explored the reasons why young climate activists experience such heavy emotions while advocating for climate justice, as well as the methods by which activists can deal with those emotions. Her essays have been published in Scientific American, Edge Effects, and the Cairo Review of Global Affairs, as well as numerous academic journals.
HPR: You are best known for your work on climate anxiety. But in our correspondence, you chose to use the phrase “climate emotion” instead. How did you get to a point where you felt compelled to write your book on climate anxiety? What has changed since the publication of that work that compelled your language change from “climate anxiety” to “climate emotion”?
Ray: My previous professorial work was in the environmental humanities with a bent towards justice, but I found I didn’t have time outside the classroom to do research. I remember griping about it with a colleague of mine who was in the process of writing a book on emotion and the environment. I explained to her that I was basically spending most of my time being a therapist to my students who were just really struggling with the content, and that it was so demanding on me, I had no time to do research. But as I was complaining about this arrangement, she said, “Why don’t you turn your research into this topic? Why don’t you study emotions in the environmental classroom?” And that just totally changed everything.
The nice thing about being in an interdisciplinary field like environmental studies is that you can study whatever the heck you think is the most pressing problem at the time and just go find new tools. So I went and studied social movements. I started assigning these things, everything I could get my hands on, in my classes so I could learn them at the same time I was working on them with my students. I told myself, “Okay, y’all need emotional help. Let’s do it. Let’s do the emotional stuff we’ve been doing during my off time in the classroom instead.” And it was really lovely because they could look to each other. They could be not alone. The effects of doing that were manifold; it was like a revelation. And that is how the research for the book came to be.
Then, the 2016 presidential election happened, and I thought, “What does an environmental humanist have to offer this moment? We’re all so low; how am I going to pick up these students and keep going?” So I came to the conclusion that I would write this book to help this generation, and I tried to translate what I had into something really useful and not just esoteric or academic. I wanted to be useful to my students.
And then, in the middle of writing, the 2019 Youth Climate movement happened, and everything sort of took off. “Climate anxiety” was sort of a new term at the time but had taken on its own meaning. It felt at first like the right description for what I was writing about, but I think of anxiety as just one of the many sensations that my research touches. I hope whatever I can offer opens up conversation about a broad category of emotions.
I’ve been using this term, the “mental-healthification” of climate emotions. I don’t want to “mental-healthify” or limit this discussion to just something that happens in a therapy room — I feel like a recent cover story in the New York Times has done that and it’s something I want to avoid. To me, pulling it out of the therapy room, pulling it out of spaces of privilege, pulling it out of the individual scale, politicizing it, keeping it as part of a political critique, as a generative force of resistance, all of that, to me, is more possible when I use a more capacious term like emotion rather than anxiety.
HPR: You mentioned not wanting to “mental-healthify” your work? Can you talk about what you consider to be the downside of this phenomenon?
Ray: First of all, I want to make sure that anybody who feels big climate emotions knows that this is a legitimate response to being in this world. There’s no shame or stigma attached to that. Glen Albert says this beautifully. He says something like, “The solace we can find is not self-care. It’s not another glass of wine. It’s not time off. The solace we can find is in making sure the systems that are ruining our mental health stop and they change.” And that doesn’t mean that we only focus on external stuff and never own internal stuff. That’s not at all what I mean. But to lose the political edge to the mental health story is possible with mental-healthification. It can turn into something you need to cope with, something that is your burden to bear individually, something that can be medicated to accommodate you to the realities that you live in. Part of the problem with the mental health field, in general, has been this kind of apolitical stigma around negative or uncomfortable emotions. And so I’m trying to push against that too.
I was just talking with Jennifer Uchendu, who is a young Nigerian sustainability and climate justice activist, and she said something I completely agree with: She really wants us to get rid of the negative story around climate anxiety. Climate anxiety is very generative. We should harness the energy it gives us to engage with each other, find community and collectively build the world we want, instead of giving all this attention to the apocalypse. I think the mental-healthification, the pathologizing, of it can run the risk of putting these superficial band-aids on the problem.
HPR: You recently published in Scientific American discussing the overwhelming Whiteness of climate anxiety broadly. In it, you contrast new, whitewashed climate stresses with the constant existential threat experienced by Black and Brown people throughout history. How have academic and activist communities responded to this indictment of this phenomenon?
Ray: I can’t say I would say there’s a uniform response. There’s a wide range of responses, none of which make me think I have any regrets about publishing. It kind of raised the alarm, and that’s exactly what I was hoping it would do.
There is a line we need to walk. On the one hand, “climate anxiety” is a strategic term that raises attention to something because privileged kids are raising attention to it. They’re calling for solidarity. They’re calling for this recognition around justice movements and its intersection with the climate movement. That’s fantastic. Jennifer Uchendu actually says, “I don’t really want us to parse out who can feel climate anxiety and who can’t.” She says, instead, “Let’s talk about solidarity and eco-emotions, right? All of us are feeling climate emotions.”
What I’m concerned about is the ways that sometimes climate as a concept might overshadow other problems going on. I am concerned that, if we fail to make the connection between climate and those other things, climate movements can take resources away from them. Climate issues compound and exacerbate existing ongoing existential threats to lots of vulnerable people. And that ought to be front and center, not this new existential threat of Prince Charles worried about his grandchildren having more heat waves.
The fact is that big White emotions (because we all as humans make decisions based on emotions more than reason)have often generated some very dangerous, harmful policies, actions and words. Big environmental emotions are no different. Big environmental movements of the past have justified very strong anti-immigration policies. They have built border walls and caused the 2019 Christ Church and El Paso mass shootings. Big environmental emotions use environmental science as an excuse to justify existing biases or aversions to people. There are eco-fascism directions that climate anxiety could take, and unfortunately, we’re seeing this in all kinds of places.
On top of that, we need to make sure that we see how climate is intersecting with all these other problems, that we see injustice as part of the climate story. It’s not just about polar bears. As people are getting worked up about climate, let’s make sure that we get them worked up in the direction of collective liberation. People are gonna make decisions about where resources go all the time, and whoever is getting the biggest airtime is going to get the most resources. If the climate crisis, as narrated by White voices, becomes the center of people’s risk perception, and it’s not connected to other sources of injustice, it could be actually doing more harm than good.
HPR: As someone who has both taught students who have experienced this kind of emotion and who has done extensive research and public work on the subject, what does climate-emotion-conscious policy look like for both governments and institutions like universities?
Ray: The kind of emotional and psychological capacity that people need in order to create a future we can thrive in, is going to be pretty extraordinary. It’s gonna take a lot of energy. It’s gonna take a lot of creativity, collaboration, negotiation. It’s going to be epic. It already is epic. And we need to be resourced for that.
That said, there’s a negative feedback loop that happens where climate change depletes our mental, physical and emotional resources, and if we’re not resourced, we can’t mitigate it. So climate change gets worse and depletes us more, further preventing us from taking the necessary action. But if we are to improve the future, we actually have to be really well resourced and healthy to do it.
This recognition — that human capital is required to do this work — has huge ramifications for policy. It means we need to be working less so we can do more in our lives that is climate-friendly. We need to be able to build relationships more. We need to prioritize relationships more. We need to prioritize caretaking of our own immediate family more, which we do not reinforce policy-wise. We also need to institute and support mutual aid. If the powers that be can’t respond to what’s happening, then communities take things into their own hands. Policies need to facilitate that and make it easier for people to do this work themselves, especially because the biggest disconnect people have is that they believe the problem is so big, and the issues are so urgent, and they think, “Who am I? I can’t do anything about it.”
This cognitive dissonance is such a constant stressor for so many people that it ultimately results in denial. The vast majority of people who are dealing with these emotions about the climate care a lot about it, but they feel like they can’t do anything. If that huge swath of Americans could make their choices in a way that was more climate-friendly, they would. It’s just that they don’t see the way out of it, and they’re so swamped by all the other stuff that’s in their faces, and so climate becomes a lower priority. Policies need to make climate-friendly choices the default for individuals, and they need to enable, facilitate and incentivize the possibility for people to make climate-informed decisions at the local scale.
The right policy answers are those that take human-thriving to be the center objective. The precautionary principle is something I’d love to see more of in policy. We also definitely want more mental resources so that we’re all equipped to do this work, and reducing climate harm and climate injustice is a part of that.
There is a recent Lancet report that documents the feelings of 10,000 young people on climate change that is being used in the Court of Human Rights Law to litigate claims about moral injury and to change policy. I’d love to see more of that. How can we leverage the impact climate change is having on people mentally and physically for good? Climate harm can be moral injury or even trauma. If we can frame it in those ways, we might have some legal purchase for making changes that we didn’t have before.
HPR: Speaking of that Lancet article, when it was published, there was a lot of focus on the 59% of respondents who were either extremely worried or very worried about climate change. There were, however, 16% who said they were either not worried at all or were only a little worried, and 32% who were optimistic. Are those figures a reflection of the number of people who just don’t care or don’t see climate as a problem, or could they be people who are working towards better climate justice but who aren’t worried about the present? Is there room in the climate emotions framework for the concept of climate indifference?
Ray: I’m going to have to think about that. My brain is going to all of these excuses for why there’s no such thing as climate indifference.
HPR: I’d love to hear why.
Dr. Ray: I haven’t done a deep dive into that population, and I haven’t asked the authors of that review, although they’re my colleagues. But my instinct is to say that there’s a certain number who are privileged and just in total denial. Their lives are insulated from it. That could be some percentage of that 16%, but I don’t know how much.
Additionally, I think you’ve got two other things at work. Some people have gone through the “climate wisdom tunnel,” as I call it. They’ve gone through the journey, they’ve come out the other side, and for all the reasons I write about in my book, they refuse to let despair, concern or worry be their defining emotion. I don’t blame them. I don’t want to be there forever, either. They come out the other side and maybe have optimism, as you said, or something more complex than a survey can measure. If I got that survey, I’d say, “I don’t really like any of these terms. I’m not indifferent, but I’m definitely not optimistic or concerned or worried.” I would, for the sake of the survey, put myself in the “very worried” category, but I also would have a problem with that. So the terms of the survey itself could just not capture what’s going on.
I think that the question of how people become concerned about the climate is riddled with all kinds of assumptions about positionality that may also influence people’s answers to such surveys. It would be foolish of us to just say, “Oh, they’re not concerned, they’re indifferent.” We worry about the 16% who seem to not care, but why don’t they care? I think it’s maybe more complicated than that.
We also have to consider the questions of who gets to determine what the biggest problems are and who gets to determine what different feelings mean in different cultural contexts. Is climate our biggest worry? Is worry our predominant emotion? Your answers to those questions have to do with your power, your privilege, your race, your geography, your sexuality, or other concerns that are going on for you. Maybe you’re Indigenous, and you’re trying to get attention to land sovereignty, and climate worry feels like a distraction. Maybe that’s when you say you’re indifferent.
There are just so many reasons why people might not register climate anxiety or worry on their radar. That doesn’t mean they’re indifferent, or in denial, or just idiots.
HPR: Thank you for your time.
Dr. Ray: Thank you.
