Navigating Climate Emotions with Dr. Britt Wray
Dr. Britt Wray is a science communicator and the author of two books. Her latest is Generation Dread: Finding Purpose in an Age of Climate Anxiety, which is a national bestseller. Dr. Wray is also the director of CIRCLE (Community-minded Interventions for Resilience, Climate Leadership, and Emotional wellbeing) at Stanford Psychiatry, a research and action initiative in the Stanford School of Medicine. Her first book, the Rise of the Necrofauna: The Science, Ethics, and Risks of De-Extinction was named a best book of 2017 by the New Yorker. She most recently is a top award winner of the Eric and Wendy Schmidt Awards for Excellence in Science Communications, which was bestowed upon her by the National Academies in partnership with Schmidt Futures.
Climate change evokes a myriad of emotions unique to each individual. It can stir outrage in some, sadness in others, a sense of helplessness for some, and dread for the future in others. There is no universally right or wrong reaction, as our responses are shaped by our distinct relationships with the world and the diverse circumstances in which we live. The perception of climate change varies; for some, it may feel abstract, while for others, the impacts are undeniably profound and far-reaching.
But as Dr. Wray points out, we know that climate change as we are experiencing it is anthropogenic, meaning it's the result of human behavior. And yet so little has been studied about the human behavioral response to climate change. How do we individually and collectively feel about climate change, and what do those feelings drive us to do? This is the sweet spot of Britt's work.
Episode recorded on Jan 29, 2024 (Published on Feb 26, 2024)
In this episode, we cover:
An overview of Dr. Wray's research on climate distress
Her work as the Director of CIRCLE (Community-minded Interventions for Resilience, Climate Leadership, and Emotional Wellbeing) at Stanford Psychiatry
An overview of climate anxiety and its impact on people
The concept of solastalgia and broken record, record breaking
The importance of community and social connections in addressing climate anxiety
The need for evaluation and evidence-based interventions for climate anxiety
Including behavioralists and psychologists when addressing climate change
The potential role of guilt in motivating action on climate change
The impact of climate change on reproductive decisions and parenting
Dr. Wray's book and newsletter
The importance of open and vulnerable conversations about climate change
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Cody Simms:
Today on My Climate journey our guest is Dr. Britt Wray and our topic is, Climate Anxiety and what to do about it. Britt is a science communicator and the author of two books. Her latest is Generation Dread: Finding Purpose in an Age of Climate Anxiety, which is a national bestseller. She is the director of CIRCLE at Stanford Psychiatry, which is a research and action initiative in the Stanford School of Medicine, and the CIRCLE acronym stands for Community-minded Interventions for Resilience, Climate Leadership, and Emotional wellbeing. Her first book, the Rise of the Necrofauna: The Science, Ethics, and Risks of De-Extinction was named a best book of 2017 by the New Yorker. She most recently is a top award winner of the Eric and Wendy Schmidt Awards for Excellence in Science Communications, which was bestowed upon her by the National Academies in partnership with Schmidt Futures.
For each of us climate change means something different. For some it provokes outrage. For others it provokes sadness. For some it's a feeling of helplessness and for others it creates dread for the future. There's truly no right or wrong reaction, as each of us have different relationships with the world around us and each of us live in different circumstances. For some climate change may seem more abstract. While for others the effects of climate change may truly have extreme impact. But as Dr. Wray points out, we know that climate change as we are experiencing it is anthropogenic, meaning it's the result of human behavior. And yet so little has been studied about the human behavioral response to climate change. How do we individually and collectively feel about climate change, and what do those feelings drive us to do? This is the sweet spot of Britt's work in an area that I probably haven't spent as much time thinking about as I should. Even though the idea of collectivism is core to us at MCJ Collective and to my work at Climate Changemakers too. But before we start, I'm Cody Simms.
Yin Lu:
I'm Yin Lu.
Jason Jacobs:
And I'm Jason Jacobs, and welcome to My Climate Journey.
Yin Lu:
This show is a growing body of knowledge focused on climate change and potential solutions.
Cody Simms:
In this podcast we traverse disciplines, industries, and opinions to better understand and make sense of the formidable problem of climate change and all the ways people like you and I can help. Dr. Britt Wray, welcome to the show.
Dr. Britt Wray:
Hey, Cody, thanks for having me.
Cody Simms:
I am excited to chat with you. You showed up in my LinkedIn or were referred to me by a bunch of people last fall when I was asking the question of, who should we talk to with respect to education and climate change? Your name came up. Obviously, you've published this book Generation Dread. As I've dug into your work I'm suspecting the reason people suggested you as an expert here, which we don't need to focus on that topic specifically, but it's because you spend a ton of time understanding how youth are feeling about climate change and how they should be engaged, how we should engage them, and what in the world is going on in the minds of people that are recognizing that their lives in front of them are going to look really different than their lives do today.
Dr. Britt Wray:
That all tracks. Yeah, that's probably the connection that was made. The research that I do focuses on climate distress, so ways in which people are psychologically reckoning with climate reality. Sometimes people have built in resilience and they're able to move through that with a really action oriented mindset and community to support them. But sometimes they need a lot of help. And might start to feel chronically insecure because of what the climate crisis is presenting our society and systems with, and wondering whether they are effective to be able to make change themselves. So, Generation Dread the book really focused on yeah, the rise of climate anxiety as we typically call it, but there's much more than just anxiety, which we might unpack the grief and the outrage and a sense of helplessness and so on.
And then I also, outside of being a science communicator, writing books and things like that work at Stanford and the med school and direct something called CIRCLE at Stanford Psychiatry, which stands for Community-minded Interventions for Resilience, Climate Leadership, and Emotional wellbeing. And there we do do a lot around education, so I'm super curious to know what you were digging into there around climate education.
Cody Simms:
We can start there, especially if there is work that you do in your post at Stanford on that regard, and first of all, how cool that the Stanford Medical School has you on board focused on these topics as it relates to mental health and wellbeing. That just seems like an incredibly forward-thinking path for them to have taken. Maybe let's even start there. How did that come together in the first place?
Dr. Britt Wray:
It hasn't been officially named as such, but to my knowledge it's the first higher Ed institutional endeavor focusing on this intersection of climate change and mental health in the United States. Hats off to the chair of our department, Dr. Laura Roberts, for having that insight, she's very progressive. But the way that this came about was that I was doing my postdoc at Stanford studying the psychological impacts of the climate crisis on young people, emerging adults that transition age when we go from being teenagers into adults who are taking on the world. And looking at how profound the impact was becoming and the prevalence all over the world, not just in North America.
One of my mentors had heard that the boss of the psychiatry department had also had her own awakening to the climate crisis and the fact that it means unbelievable amounts of trauma and stress, especially of course for the most impacted populations around the world, and as mental health professionals they didn't yet have a focus on it. They didn't have a faculty member looking at research in this space, and so she hired me off the back of my postdoc to come in and lead this thing with her, which is, I couldn't say no, of course.
Cody Simms:
And maybe unpack for us what the work at Stanford entails for you?
Dr. Britt Wray:
We're a research and action initiative we like to say, which means that yes, we're helping to close evidence gaps, because there are many. Climate and health is starting to take off as a field. People are understanding it is the number one threat to public health today. It affects our exposure to air pollution and new spread of vector and waterborne diseases, for instance. And malnutrition. It becomes harder to grow nutrient-rich crops when the concentration of carbon rises in the atmosphere, and it also impacts mental health across a variety of pathways this can happen. We've got the acute stressors, the hurricanes, the wildfires, the floods and the disruptions that all these things can cause to things we rely on in our everyday food and work and shelter. And all of that disruption has been shown time and again to lead to clinical anxiety and depression, post-traumatic stress disorder, all kinds of complications, sometimes domestic abuse, maladaptive coping with drugs and alcohol.
And then there's this newer construct that people started speaking about in the last few years in a new way, and that's just a chronic sense of insecurity, whether or not you're in the direct line of harm from disasters, but you're simply aware about the climate crisis and lack of effective action to safeguard the future in particular ways. Well, then we have the entrance of climate anxiety. Climate distress is more accurate way to describe it, because it's really an umbrella of negative thoughts and feelings that people can be wrestling with here. And then there's the bidirectional relationship between worsening physical and mental health. When we're not doing so well physically in our bodies, our mental health can suffer. And so all of this is coming together to outline a whole new field that needs resources, needs evidence around what it can help the most impacted communities to inform interventions and help policy makers unleash funds to support communities.
That's where we step in to try and co-design interventions with the most impacted communities. Whether they're historically marginalized folks on the front lines of disaster. We've been working, for instance with people in New Orleans who are experiencing hurricane after hurricane sea level rises and still talk about their lives in terms of there being this really defining event. There was pre-Hurricane Katrina, then there's post-Hurricane Katrina and everything changed. And then there's been so many other incurred harms from climate impact since. What does community resilience building look like and how can we support those formats of helping people prepare for more impacts while also adapting in ways that are protecting mental health even in times of no disaster? Then there's youth, young people around the world. We could maybe just briefly talk about this global study we did in 2021, looking at across 10,000 16 to 25 year olds in 10 countries around the world.
They were in India, Nigeria, the Philippines, the U.S. UK, Finland, France, many diverse settings, and 45% of those young people globally said that their thoughts and feelings about the climate crisis are interfering with daily life tasks, like eating and sleeping and concentrating. That's really high in terms of self-reported functional interference so we were pretty alarmed by that. And then 75% of young people globally say that the future's frightening to them because of climate change. 56% endorse a statement that humanity is doomed. 39% said that they don't, or rather that they feel hesitant to have their own children one day because of the climate crisis. And of course, we don't want any young people walking around feeling this existentially overloaded. We do research with young people to co-design interventions that can help move through this and build a sense of agency, collective efficacy, and undergirding with some gritty and realistic hope.
Cody Simms:
There are so many directions we can go based on everything you just shared. Where I want to start is actually the phrase climate anxiety itself. I've heard you make the remarks that it's widely used, but it's imprecise in that it's not a pathology, it's not a disease that individuals necessarily suffer from. Can you share a bit more about some of the scientific work that's gone into understanding what climate anxiety is, and maybe how the medical community is thinking about categorizing it?
Dr. Britt Wray:
Despite the clinical sounding name, climate anxiety is not a mental illness and you won't find it in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, at least not yet, and it would be very contentious if it does end up there. There's a big debate amongst researchers and clinicians around if it ever should be. Because to feel some distress about the climate crisis is not pathological. It's actually very reasonable. It's appropriate. It shows that you are attached to reality, you're aware of all that's in harm's way, and it's a sign of attachment to things that are being destabilized. And so that kind of anxiety sensor can be adaptive when it causes us to really sit up straight, notice what's going on and then say, "Hey, can I mobilize some resources towards fending off the danger?" And we see this in the literature time and time again, climate anxiety is significantly associated with pro-environmental behavior, climate activism, various forms of leadership in this space, and so that's all good.
However, for some people it can become so overwhelming that it seriously threatens mental health. And we've seen it be associated with panic attacks and sleep problems and eating disorders. For instance, if someone becomes so preoccupied with their personal carbon footprint that they stop consuming food that has a carbon footprint, which is pretty much all food, and then become highly malnourished. Not that that's common, but it's shown up in the clinic many times. And then also suicidal thinking and behavior when people fall into a crevice potentially of so much fatalism and despair. And of course, it's tricky, right? You're like, well, how do you know if it's not just preexisting mental health challenges and it's someone with generalized anxiety disorder or depression? There are studies that have now gone into validating scales for how we measure this, looking at its various presentations within individuals and then cross-referencing that with scales that look at the symptomology of general anxiety and depression.
And it shows that they do not overlap. It's not the same thing. You do not need to have a mental disorder in those ways in order to feel climate anxiety. You can have no preexisting mental health challenge, and this is what the research seems to show many times over, and yet present with climate anxiety that can even be so significant that it becomes functionally impairing. That's interesting, but also not to say that we don't need to also then apply special attention to people who do have preexisting mental health challenges. Because of course, if you're a really anxious rattled person, climate crisis is probably going to make you even more worked up.
Cody Simms:
You have a quote I've heard you give from the medical journal the Lancet. I want to read because I want to hear your view to expound upon the quote further. The quote is, "Recognizing that emotions are what lead people to act. It's possible that feelings of ecological anxiety and grief, although uncomfortable, are in fact the crucible through which humanity must pass in order to harness the energy and conviction that are needed for the lifesaving changes now required." I don't know if that's the exact quote. I think I pulled it from a presentation you gave or you quoted it. It strikes me that everything you're saying here is the fact that people feel this is normal. The world is changing around them. It's not something that's wrong with any one individual. It actually is normal to feel these feelings and that actually feeling them may actually be the thing that kicks humanity into action to do something about it.
The reaction I have when hearing that is also one of a question of justice, whereas many people who feel these things also don't feel responsible for the world being what it is today. And I wonder how much that balance of what caused the challenges we have now and any one person's individual role within that is part of what causes anyone individual to feel anxiety?
Dr. Britt Wray:
You got the quote perfectly, and I love sharing that in my talks. Because it says so much in a few lines about the adaptive capacity of this very uncomfortable experience that many of us are cycling through or toggling in and out of states of depression or anxiety or fear around, while also being motivated to tackle the problem. And to normalize this is huge. I can't tell you how many thousands of people I've spoken with who say, "Oh my gosh, there's a word for it. I'm so glad that people have figured this out and that it's not just me and I'm not deviant for carrying this much in my tiny corner of the world and feeling overwhelmed." And that brings massive relief to say, "This is valid, this is legitimate. You're not alone." All of a sudden a lot of that weight lifts from the shoulders. Because it's the self-judgment and shame which can really trap people in a bad place.
However, yeah, these dynamics that you're pointing to are interesting. One aspect of pain that hasn't been mentioned yet is that it's not just that the environment isn't doing well and therefore people are getting worried in some pretty intense ways. It's also that they're noticing a lack of effective action over decades from power holders who have the best science to guide them.
Cody Simms:
Or intentional obfuscation in some cases, right?
Dr. Britt Wray:
And that. And the intentional obfuscation leads to a profound sense of institutional betrayal. Being let down yes, by leaders in charge who are supposed to uphold their end of the deal and protect those with less power, especially the young, who are often not even old enough to vote, let alone take up positions of power running for office, running large companies and so on, where the needle can really be moved. And yet they're always being told that they're the hope for the future as to why the climate crisis is solvable. Which creates lots of frustration. Many young people say, "Please stop telling my generation that we're the ones to save the future, save the planet."
Cody Simms:
You have a great article on that in your newsletter. We can come back to that topic, because I think that's a really important, we got that feedback on an episode we published at one point, so we felt it here at My Climate Journey as well.
Dr. Britt Wray:
Right. I mean, the intention can be loving, and it's meant to be supportive and in solidarity, but if young people don't feel that that's coming from the mouths of adults who are really doing everything that they can now with the power that they have while they're still alive, the message they're often getting is, "We're actually going to check out of here before it gets really disastrous, so good luck. Here, we'll throw you a lifesaver."
Back to this institutional betrayal. We know from psychological research on institutional betrayal in other areas, it can cause massive mental health problems when people with less power witness that those with more power are actively endangering them through their negligent actions. Or in some cases, yeah, rolling out the red carpet so that fossil fuel actors can engage in corporate malfeasance or pay off people who hold power and so on and so forth.
This moral distress is a big part of it as many people feel caught up in a system that's actively violating their sense of what is right and what is wrong. Which adds to the mental health load. But therefore because there's so much morality packed into this and love, we can't for example, feel climate grief for something that we do not love. Love is the cost of attachment, as they say. And as things are destabilized, our attachments are destabilized, that grief starts to show. And similarly, it's this idea that climate anxiety sounds pathological, gives it a bad rap from the get-go, one what if we called it climate compassion instead or empathy or love because it is about feeling in a way that feels the pain of the Earth and the more than human world and communities who are on the front lines of disaster and losing precious homelands to sea level rise and superstorms and what have you.
It really becomes a channel towards solidarity sense-making, stronger community building, focusing on the problem. And then when you connect with others, you tend to generate the things that we're grateful for on our deathbed. Meaningful relationships, purpose-driven or meaningful work where you devote yourself to something larger than just your own tiny experience. And so, that all comes together in this powerful formula for change that this crucible of distress, that quotation outlines as an invitation to see this moment as an opportunity to do. But yeah, people, as you mentioned, "I'm only one person." That kind of feeling of, "How am I supposed to activate this?" As long as it's done in a collective way, and it's not about identifying an individual as though they're meant to stand up uniquely at this moment. But we're all doing it as many, many millions and billions of droplets in a tidal wave of change I don't hear that anxiety getting heightened, but the messaging is really important.
Cody Simms:
We are going to come back for sure to some of the takeaways and actions and plans that you are promoting in your work at Stanford, in your book, in your research. Before we do that, I want to spend a few more times just on some upfront context setting. We talked about the phrase climate anxiety and the definition or how it should be interpreted. I've heard you talk about a few other words or phrases, one that I had not heard of, and I'd just love for you to define this for all of us, because it sounds relevant and like something any of us working in this field should know. The word is solastalgia.
Dr. Britt Wray:
I would love to. And just before I do, may I just back up and give you a definition of climate anxiety, because I didn't yet?
Cody Simms:
Please.
Dr. Britt Wray:
Just like general descriptions. People use the term climate anxiety in many different ways. The American Psychological Association describes its close cousin eco-anxiety as, "The chronic fear of environmental doom." That's about climate and biodiversity and all the other ecological problems. And I think that it's a good tagline for climate anxiety as it pertains to climate, but it is more accurate to then step back and bring in all the other uncomfortable emotions that often accompany the anxiety like fear, sometimes panic, sometimes terror, sometimes helplessness, sometimes guilt, sometimes shame, grief, and so on. Just really looks differently to different people.
Now, solastalgia is a term to describe a homesickness that we can have when we're still at home after so much environmental change has happen there that it's no longer recognizable to us as home. And therefore we lose the kind of comfort giving quality of home that it used to have. We can't access solace there. That was coined by an Australian philosopher named Glenn Albrecht around 2011. Because he had returned to this wild space, this mountain range that he used to frolic in as a child. And upon returning decades later he saw that it was all turned into open tar pit mines. And he was shook by such a profound sense of grief, but it was place-based, it was site-specific, and language was failing him to really describe what that loss was. And so he came up with this portmanteau of solace and nostalgia to describe that homesickness.
Cody Simms:
I mean, that's an extreme example, but I've heard from many outdoor skiers, for example, "The ski run I used to love, it's not really there anymore." Those kinds of things, that feels like what would trigger that word for someone.
Dr. Britt Wray:
Exactly.
Cody Simms:
I've also heard you use the phrase broken record, record breaking as something that is getting thrown around a lot. Maybe describe that one for us? Maybe that one's a little more obvious, I guess?
Dr. Britt Wray:
Has the definition in the title, but it's such a fun playful word that comes from these artists at The Bureau of Linguistical Reality they call themselves, who are coming up with new terms to describe our changing world. And it is that bizarre feeling we all have when opening up a newspaper, listening to a radio program and hearing that once again, the year, the month, the day has broken the record for the hottest on record. And you notice that linear pattern and then you imagine what lies ahead, and it is just a dreadful feeling, and yet it's normalized. It's that kind of uncanny thing.
Cody Simms:
To me it invokes the idea of a numbness to it to some extent. And I don't know if that's what it's meant to make me feel, but it almost unfortunately, I liken it in the United States to all these horrible mass shooting events, which is the same sort of thing. It's like you open up the newspaper again and it's another story and it's awful, but it's also this feeling of disempowerment and I don't know what I should do.
Dr. Britt Wray:
It's a really understandable response. And many people do go into a numb type of space around confronting the climate crisis generally, headlines are not. We see the ostrich in the sand metaphor used all the time for how we respond to the climate crisis on mass. It's pretty intolerable information a lot of the time, it's painful. And so it's easier to sometimes slide into a space that might look like apathy, might operate as numbness, but as the climate psychologist Renée Lertzman has shown, it's a myth of apathy, it's not that we're walking around in a sea of uncaring humans who don't at all get bothered by this idea of climate breakdown. Many people can't tolerate focusing on it. And so it raises anxiety, but more so it raises ambivalence and mixed feelings about our own roles and how we're living? And what's coming out of our tailpipe and what company we're working for?
And that can also lead to a kind of shutdown, because it's uncomfortable to have certain values, but then also feel tugged in a different direction or seed that maybe you're not living fully in alignment with those values, which can bring up shame, a really difficult emotion to live with. And so it's kind of, "All right, let's just tamper all of this down and keep on moving and not get too distracted."
Cody Simms:
Quick side plug, which is, Renée Lertzman has been a prior guest on the pod, so for any listeners who want to go dive into her work, go look in the archives. Jason talked to her probably a year or two ago. It was a great conversation. On the topic of feeling numb and not sure what to do, a lot of your work, as I understand it, is about actually helping people find community toward taking action in a way that both solves actual environmental problems, even if local. And creates resiliency as part of that, while giving them an outlet. Maybe describe in a much more eloquent way than I just did how that comes together.
Dr. Britt Wray:
We know from decades of research on what helps people in times of acute traumatic stress that people who are in strong community, who have high social capital, which is the ability to achieve shared goals with the people in your midst. Which means that we need to be able to follow and lead and cooperate despite our differences, and then we can set our mind to a task and do something amazing together. That all requires a lot of trust, a sense of belonging, knowing that there are people to turn to in moments of disarray. And that stuff takes time to build, like collaboration moves at the pace of trust. We have to be mindful about trying to forge these connections in our lives. In this time when we've been told by the U.S. Surgeon General that we're living in an epidemic of loneliness and social isolation.
More people are living alone than ever before, and loneliness is a real threat to physical and mental health that can shave a third off of your life expectancy. Its more dramatic than smoking 12 cigarettes a day in terms of its health costs and so on. Bringing all of this to bear on climate resilience is really important right now, because the research shows us that the people with high social capital and connectedness when the wildfires and the floods and the hurricanes hit, they're protected in terms of their mental health. There's less anxiety, depression, post-traumatic stress disorder, maladaptive coping and so on then in the individuals for whom they just don't have those social connections. There we see way more significant rates of PTSD and turning to drugs and alcohol and domestic abuse and clinical levels of anxiety and depression. That's really exciting in terms of what we can all do to create protective infrastructure in our social lives and in the places where we live to develop those relationships, so that when bad things do happen, we have that protection in place.
Cody Simms:
Just a note, mirroring my own life experience. I have worked in tech and working with startups for many years and four plus years ago decided I wanted to understand more about climate change, because I was thinking about it a lot, but I didn't know much about it. Through that many people know my story. I discovered the My Climate Journey podcast. I joined the member community in there. I helped launch a political action community called Climate Changemakers, and in both of these instances it was about engaging and dealing with climate in a community, working and learning alongside other people. And I can tell you, it totally helped me not feel great about where the world is, but at least feel better about the fact that I know there are other people working on solutions and that I can engage with them. And this sense of learning and engaging in community. This is virtual community. This is different than some of the hands-on work I think you're about to talk to that there are programs you're helping to put in place, but it feels similar in that regard.
Dr. Britt Wray:
That's massive and it's so true, Cody, what you're saying. I've gone through my own experience finding the exact same thing, which really alleviates the pointy end of that climate anxiety. There's also research to show that engaging in climate activism can be beneficial for buffering against the worst parts of climate anxiety and distress. Not because the activism leads to the outcomes that activists want, because often it doesn't. But just because it brings you into contact and relationship building opportunities with caring others who feel the same, which brings a lot of ease.
Yin Lu:
Hey everyone, I'm Yin, I'm a partner at MCJ Collective here to take a quick minute to tell you about our MCJ membership community, which was born out of a collective thirst for peer-to-peer learning and doing that goes beyond just listening to the podcast. We started in 2019 and have grown to thousands of members globally. Each week we're inspired by people who join with different backgrounds and points of view. What we all share is a deep curiosity to learn and a bias to action around ways to accelerate solutions to climate change. Some awesome initiatives have come out of the community. A number of founding teams I've met, several nonprofits have been established and a bunch of hiring has been done. Many early stage investments have been made, as well as ongoing events and programming, like monthly Women in Climate meetups, idea jam sessions for early stage founders, climate book club, art workshops and more.
Whether you've been in the climate space for a while or just embarking on your journey, having a community to support you is important. If you want to learn more, head over to mjccollective.com and click on the members tab at the top. Thanks, and enjoy the rest of the show.
Cody Simms:
The word you said, the pointy end is such an important term. I don't know anything about health outcomes, but it seems to me that something's going to hurt instead of feeling like you're getting stabbed if it feels like you're getting kind of uncomfortably pushed. Maybe that's just less painful in general, right? And when it comes to mental health, it would seem that same kind of feeling in your mind if it's less pointy and super sharp and still a dull, blunt pain, but you feel it but you're not impaired because of it, that feels like an important step for people.
Dr. Britt Wray:
That is an important step for people. It can mean the difference between thoughts and feelings and functional impairment where you actually have a hard time getting through the day. Blunting that sharp edge is critical, but we can learn from the distress. This is the thing, if we stop judging ourselves for feeling any, let's say anxiety or grief, then we can actually create some spaciousness where we notice that these emotions have information. They're carrying insights that tell us about things we deeply care about, which can help us navigate where we might go next, what kind of community connections we can forge, what kind of climate action.
Cody Simms:
It strikes me that you ultimately want to be able to drive recommendations from a few different ways. There's recommendations of large scale public health type of funding dollars that need to know what programs they should be trying to look for with their funding dollars. There's also the individual clinicians who have patients and who are coming to them with things that they ultimately presumably would like to be able to direct them toward. Which side of those coins are you focused on today, or maybe neither of them yet?
Dr. Britt Wray:
Well, I appreciate the question. It's all important. I'm putting my eggs in the basket of more inclusive public health approaches that can help get groups and communities activated. In ways that build that extra protective layer of social capital and connectedness, that we know is going to be more effective than trying to go for mental health treatment later down the line. You want to do prevention rather than allow things to happen and then treat case by case. Because we're dealing with incredible scale of psychological stressors. And we need to get around the mental health treatment gap that we see. COVID taught that to us plainly. A lot of folks could not find therapists or psychiatric beds that they needed when they were having a mental health fallout from the pandemic. And that's in a high resource place like the United States, let alone in lower resource countries across the global south where we see the most, obviously the bulwark of climate impacts.
That's not to say that climate aware therapy is not valuable. It's super valuable. We need those therapists helping people and they're in the climate psychology alliances, the climate psychiatry alliances. I took a course on a certification to become a climate aware therapist, so to speak, even though I'm not actually a therapist, just to get the education. It was interesting because so many brilliant people were sharing this from the California Institute for Integral Studies, the only place that offers this so far, so new. But again, the evidence is missing. We actually don't know what to tell clinicians to do. Instead, they're adapting things that they've learned best practices for helping with other mental health challenges. But the interesting point here that makes us different is the non-pathological piece. Because they're not here to help someone necessarily with catastrophic thinking that they want to dismiss that problem of with a pill.
They're actually reckoning with the fact that they too are in the climate crisis. And they might have distress about it. There's a relational aspect to that therapeutic alliance, which is much more like helping people when you're in a war zone, some kind of collective trauma and stress. How do you move through that resiliently together without pathologizing is the stance that they take?
Cody Simms:
I've heard you say that the climate crisis is anthropogenic, meaning it's due to human behavior, but where have the behaviorists been in trying to understand what it's doing to all of us. That strikes me as an incredibly under-discussed point.
Dr. Britt Wray:
I'm glad you think so. Yeah, it's pretty astonishing once you get that idea in your mind. Oh right, it's anthropogenic. We throw that word around all the time. That means it's caused by human behavior and yet we're always going to, and not that these people shouldn't be who we're going to, but in addition to the climate scientists, the economists, policymakers, we need the psychologists, the behavioralists, the psychoanalysts, the people who understand this enormous propensity we have towards all forms of denial, not just the outright kind, but the soft denial that can really trip us up here and so on in order to encourage behavior change at scale to make a difference. There's the mental health side of it, and then there's also the helping to bring about pro-social tipping points that get us into the better climate zone that we're aiming for regenerative futures.
And we have a new nonprofit called Unthinkable, which is coming off the back of this newsletter, Gen Dread, the Substack newsletter I started a number of years ago. Because we started hearing from so many parents, concerned parents who are themselves climate anxious and wondering how to support their climate anxious children, and educators who were in classrooms teaching about global environmental threats and noticing that their students were becoming increasingly despairing and despondent about the future that they're training up to go move into. And instead of their office hours being used to talk about things on the assignment that's due next week, they're basically having therapy sessions and breaking down and saying that they don't have motivation to stay in their program, that it's all too much. And so these educators realizing maybe it's something about the way that I'm teaching is making it worse, like not addressing the emotional component, not bringing in skills for psychological resiliency.
Also hearing from a lot of frontline climate professionals, the folks like you and I and the climate scientists and the climate activists and climate diplomats and anyone who's professionally bearing witness to climate data and forms of inaction and so on, where that can take a psychological toll. Unthinkable is really just coming off the observation that we've had the best thinking in the world on this crisis for decades, and yet our emissions are still going up. And we are off track to meet our targets. We need another approach that brings in what those behavioralists carry but haven't often been invited to the table to offer. And that is, yes, a more emotionally intelligent psychologically wise approach. But also an approach that's more rooted in the body in somatics, form of feminine leadership, all kinds of things that are also valid and needed in order to help bring about that change.
Cody Simms:
I've heard you say it's a luxury to fear the future when so many fear the present. And the word that comes to my mind when I hear you say that is the word guilt. We talk about climate anxiety and how do we avoid the worst mental health outcomes that people feel? For sure. You also cited in data that there is a difference in how people feel based on where they sit in the world. If you've grown up with privilege or maybe you are underserved, or if you are in a population in the world that is dramatically at risk for climate change, you may feel differently about it than if you are in an area of the world that does not. I am curious about guilt as a lever when it comes to action and when it comes to wide scale behavioral change.
Dr. Britt Wray:
The psychiatrist and the psychoanalyst, Robert Jay Lifton, who really studied the atrocities of the 20th century up close, working on issues of the bomb and Hiroshima and Nazi psychology and Chinese thought reform programs, and he had so many fascinating things to say at the end of all that. Including that there's a difference between forms of guilt. There's a kind of static guilt which we can find ourselves navel-gazing, eating ourselves alive and not much productive around it. Then there's animating guilt, which is where we bring ourselves to life around the guilt that we might feel. And take ownership and offer essentially reparations for what we know we've done to cause harm. And that we have a choice in how we activate our guilt. And there's a lot of opportunity. People say, "Don't ever feel guilty about the climate crisis and your carbon footprint because you're all being duped when you think that way." Because it's really the fossil fuel companies and their PR campaigns that try to make you feel that way to take the heat off of them. And of course, there's a lot of validity to that.
And also, what can we do with animating guilt to help bring about reparations in this time of great need for climate reparations across the global north and south? And within our communities and own backyards in terms of who's been living the high-intensive carbon lifestyles that pollute the atmosphere causing the warming? Who's most vulnerable to them? And how can we lend support? And use the distress as a platform of realizing, "Oh gosh, there's some solidarity that I could get involved in here." At Stanford it's interesting, because John Doerr, he created the Doerr School of Sustainability by making the largest ever donation, one point something billion to Stanford a couple of years ago. And he always gets on stage and talks about the origin of that and says that it was his teenage daughter who came to him one day and said, "Your generation caused this mess and I am absolutely terrified. And you would better do something about it."
Which made him shake in his boots and then do something about it. Made him feel on the hook in a way that he hadn't before on this issue. And of course, he's transformed all of his business operations around that and his investments and ways of doing philanthropy. That's a cool example. Not that that's personal guilt necessarily, but generational guilt.
Cody Simms:
My partner at MCJ, David Aronoff, who was on the pod a little while ago, gives the same story, he's a bit older than me, and gives the story that when his adult children were home living with him during COVID, they had lots and lots of conversations. Whereas kids were basically saying, your generation ruined our planet. And that prompted him to lean in, and now he's working full-time on the climate problem as part of MCJ. Similar parallel story there.
Dr. Britt Wray:
It's powerful when faced with the people you love. But what do you think about guilt? You said that you're interested specifically in that construct.
Cody Simms:
I'm curious how taking to its extreme guilt can be crippling, as you mentioned. But guilt also presumably can motivate people like it did with John Doerr or like it did with David to make some changes themselves. The direction I wanted to go with this was, from an individual perspective, I know actually you wrestled with it, you've been very public about this, when you were trying to decide should you have a child?
Dr. Britt Wray:
In my reporting on the rise of reproductive concerns connected to the climate crisis, which really did take over my life. Because I myself was very concerned a number of years ago when wanting to become a parent, not yet a parent, and reading a lot of scary writing about the climate crisis. Like whoa, the gruesome stuff. And it was starting to just create this pregnant pause where I couldn't just rush into it, but I was trying to unpack and understand why I was feeling so distressed. Particularly around this question of do I or do I not try and have a biological child? And I noticed that there were two camps of people out there who were also voicing this concern. There were those who were saying, "Okay, more human footprints on an overburdened planet raising people's legacy carbon footprints, not a good thing that the planet really needs. And so if you want to make family, there's other ways to do it, including by adoption, for instance, to help create love for someone who's already here and not needing to produce more. Humanity that will impact the planet."
There's a few studies that have quantified this and shown how they've argued that it's more environmentally friendly to not have a child than to stop flying, for instance, this sort of thing. Then I noticed a separate and much larger contingent of people who were saying, "I'm not so worried about what a warming planet has to deal with when I put more people into it. I'm worried about what a warming planet does to the safety of my child. This is not a future in which I feel confident that I can protect them, not only from the direct disasters, but the stoking of conflict and war and potential of societal collapse and localized areas and migration crises and on and on and all." You can get into the litany of worries that really raise that anxiety sense or that fear. I was firmly in that camp.
In the years that have passed since I felt really alone for making the connection in the early days, and I'm talking 2017 when this started for me. And I thought, "Okay, well, I'm a science communicator. I can turn my mind in on myself, try to study what's going on and then see if there are other people out there who are experiencing this in more interesting ways." And then that turned into the book Generation Dread, which was me realizing, "Oh wow, so many more psychological impacts than just this reproductive question." But very quickly after I started diving into the writing, there were things like the No Future No Children pledge that was created by students in Canada and signed on to more than 10,000 people around the world. That said to their leaders, "We are refusing to reproduce until you make it safe for us to do so with adequate climate action."
Or smaller outpourings of extinction rebellion called Birth Strike where they had a similar mandate. And then the New York Times and the Guardian and everyone in between started having Op-eds and articles about people feeling this particular pressure in their reproductive lives are choosing to have fewer kids than they would otherwise want because of their climate awareness and so on. And now the data is collecting around that, including the outside vulnerability of pregnant mothers, pregnant women to climate distress. But yeah, I felt it acutely. It motivated my work and the need to find coping tools, coping and acting tools that would help me for the long haul and actually caused me to totally change my career and come over and work on this. I was in a totally different field before. Like you finding the community was really helpful and took away a lot of the pointy end of that distress.
Cody Simms:
Interesting to hear the two camps, and I'm sure there are more than two. But the two main ones that you sort of stumbled into. One being around guilt of the impact that my child will have on the world by bringing more emissions into it. And the other being guilt that I have as a parent bringing a child into the world that is clearly going to be very different in the future than the one I have lived in.
Dr. Britt Wray:
Exactly.
Cody Simms:
This all comes back to me to the title of your recent book, Generation Dread, which obviously evokes two thoughts in my mind. One, that it is a generational change. And two, that there is this feeling of dread, which presumably can be interpreted in many different ways. Dread is this sort of underlying feeling that one has. But it doesn't necessarily define in what direction one is feeling. Maybe share for those who are interested after hearing you, who want to go pick up your book and dig in more what they should expect from it?
Dr. Britt Wray:
Generation Dread is about the rise of climate anxiety, distress, grief, and ways that we can understand it for our own lives, for the people that we love, ways that we can have wiser conversations with each other that bring an aspect of compassion to all of this, as we're trying to navigate all of this change. And then looking towards what are the mental health innovations that are needed in order to protect people. Not just from the climate anxiety, but also the trauma with increasing disasters. It tries to do a lot. I'd say it's a really existential book. It has a gritty kind of radical hope in a time of fear flavor to it. And I didn't know how it was going to be received by people, but I hear all the time that it helps people feel genuinely hopeful, so that makes me feel good.
Cody Simms:
And I've seen you've also launched a newsletter that uses the same title as the book that folks can subscribe to. Maybe share a bit more about what folks could expect to see in there?
Dr. Britt Wray:
Gen Dread is the newsletter about staying sane in the climate crisis. And we share insights about climate change and mental health research, interviews with experts and people with lived experience who share their intimate stories around ways that they've moved through a lot of either distressing experiences or climate disasters or hopeful ways of parenting differently. Or changing the ways that they distribute climate education in the classroom, or working together with their local community in ways that address both the emotional quotient and then actions that they want to see more of. It's really a community has gained ground around this little newsletter, and we'd be delighted to have you, it's free.
Cody Simms:
I saw that you are all calling yourselves dread heads, which I kind of love.
Dr. Britt Wray:
Yeah, we're dread heads.
Cody Simms:
Nothing like bringing humor to a horrible situation, which can actually help people cope with it, I guess. You actually had an article on that in the newsletter that I read this morning. Well, listen, before we go, I do need to satisfy my own curiosity, which was the reason I was introduced to you in the first place, which was to understand how we should be talking to our kids about climate change. What should they be learning in school? How should education be changing, and how should parents engage with kids that are growing up in this generation dread, as you may call it?
Dr. Britt Wray:
We get this question a lot. There are many, many concerned parents out there who are awake to the crisis. And educators trying to alleviate what they're noticing is a lot of distress in their students. Being honest is very important, but doing so of course in age appropriate ways, and if you're looking across the developmental life course, that looks of course very different for a young kid as compared with someone in high school or in a university setting. But generally, there can be this kind of knee-jerk reaction of wanting to protect young people from this information. But they're going to be getting it through osmosis, through friend groups and conversations and through the news, and ideally also through their proper education. Because we're starting to patch those holes and prepare students for the future that they're moving into with this climate reality. That builds resilience, that gives them the skills to address it and make change.
But along the way we need to address the fact that this stuff is pretty heavy to take in. And give permissions, validate, legitimize, help young people know that they're not alone in this and that they're carrying others who feel the same. And so that can look like saying, "Yeah, you're right. It is scary. And I'm not sure that I have all the answers, but we're going to figure it out together. I'm going to be with you in this, and we're going to connect with communities who are also focused on this." And resourcing with ideas and strategies about how to take this on things to get involved in. Whatever the positioning is, it's about not veering towards what could be interpreted as abandonment. But going towards being together, no matter what may come. And that can help people feel psychologically safe.
But also we need, and there's now great guidelines from places like the Climate Psychology Alliance for how to talk about climate emotions in the classroom in ways that help people feel spoken to in their distress and move them beyond to the other more positive and comfortable climate emotions that are also part of this picture, like love and connection.
Cody Simms:
So interesting to hear that the phrase, the young people will save us. While people may say that from a place of positive intentionality, it's actually exclusionary language. It's like, "You're different. You're going to solve this problem, good luck." As opposed to, "We're working on this together. I'm here for you. We're going to engage together to figure out solutions."
Well, listen, I'm so grateful for you for joining. Thank you so much. Any last advice or words for anybody who's listening who wants to learn more?
Dr. Britt Wray:
Please come join the Gen Dread Newsletter, and there's many more resources to be found there. And that's gendered.substack.com. And if anyone out there listening is looking for resources on psychological resiliency in the climate crisis, and especially if they're an educator, or a parent, or a frontline climate professional of some sort, you can check us out at unthinkable.earth. That's our nonprofit where we are specifically creating and sharing resources for those kinds of people.
Cody Simms:
Very exciting. I'm looking forward to checking it out myself. Thank you so much for joining us.
Dr. Britt Wray:
Thank you.
Jason Jacobs:
Thanks again for joining us on My Climate Journey podcast.
Cody Simms:
At MCJ Collective we're all about powering collective innovation for climate solutions by breaking down silos and unleashing problem solving capacity.
Jason Jacobs:
If you'd like to learn more about MCJ Collective, visit us@mcjcollective.com. And if you have a guest suggestion, let us know that via Twitter at mcjpod.
Yin Lu:
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Cody Simms:
Thanks, and see you next episode.
