16. Climate Grief, Eco-anxiety, and Loving a world in Turmoil – with Dr. Britt Wray 

Written By alexa firmenich

“You know what? No matter how far against the wall you're pushed, there is always something more to fight for. It doesn't ever disappear. And you don't know what you're going to create when you come together in community and fight for your existence. So many possibilities emerge that you could not have foreseen at the moment of being in rock bottom.”

- Dr. Britt Wray

 

SYNOPSIS:

A vitally necessary and beautiful episode on the emotional terrain of climate grief, loss, sadness, anxiety, and all the ways we can cope either maladaptively or adaptively to this challenging moment in time.

This is a deeply intimate conversation that makes the case for allowing ourselves to ‘feel it all’, because from the depth of feeling comes the power of action, hope, resilience, and community. If we ignore the reality of this escalating mental health crisis, we are turning our backs on the vast potential that can emerge on the other side of initiation. We discuss different frameworks for processing climate anxiety – practical resources, approaches, and philosophical underpinnings of a phenomenon that is sweeping the world, especially amongst youth populations.

Dr Britt Wray is arguably one of the world’s most esteemed and loved researchers on this topic, having published the seminal viral newsletter and newly released bookGeneration Dread: Finding Purpose in an Age of Climate Crisis. She is now Director Special Initiative of the Chair on Climate Change and Mental Health in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences of Stanford Medicine advancing pioneering research and approaches in the field with communities facing the stark reality of ecological and social breakdown.

 

GUEST BIO:

Britt Wray, PhD is an author and researcher working at the forefront of climate change and mental health. Her latest book Generation Dread: Finding Purpose in an Age of Climate Crisis, is an impassioned generational perspective on how to stay sane amid climate disruption and was a finalist for the 2022 Governor General’s Award.

Britt is the Lead of the Special Initiative of the Chair on Climate Change and Mental Health in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences of Stanford Medicine. Before launching that initiative, she was a Human and Planetary Health Postdoctoral Fellow at Stanford University's Center for Innovation in Global Health, Woods Institute for the Environment and the London School of Medicine's Centre on Climate Change and Planetary Health. She holds a PhD in science communication from the University of Copenhagen.

Britt has advised Canadian Federal Ministers, the US State Department, and multiple Fortune 500 companies, and is a Canadian Screen Award winner. She started Gen dread, the first newsletter that shares wide ranging ideas for supporting emotional health and psychological resilience in the climate and wider ecological crisis.

QUOTES:

  • There is a deep belittlement of emotions in our culture.

  • When we acknowledge our own complicity, we experience anxiety, ambivalence, shame, guilt. And it's painful. And instead of sitting with those emotions, — earning how to name them, allowing them to be there long enough that their insights can emerge — we thwart them.

  • We really need to be compassionate with ourselves and each other, and create supportive spaces to sit with the discomfort and the uncertainty about how horrific this may become.

  • You know what? No matter how far against the wall you're pushed, there is always something more to fight for. It doesn't ever disappear. And you don't know what you're going to create when you come together in community and fight for your existence. So many possibilities emerge that you could not have foreseen at the moment of being in rock bottom.

  • We also cannot foresee all the beautiful, wonderful potentials in our midst, and ways of creating islands of sanity and resilience.

  • It is our task to create new norms for experiencing grief together. And there is so much inspiring history that can show us how great the co-benefits can be for the movement itself and not just for people's own psycho-spiritual development.

  • It is fluid. You can move quickly. It's not about never being in all joy or never being in all grief, but sometimes you're actually able to, in a very kind of bittersweet sense, touch both simultaneously.

  • If we restrain ourselves out fear of feeling the grief — so much so that we cannot explore it, cannot dive in — then we are also muted on the side of joy and love and connection in almost equal parameter.

  • What does it mean to work with community members who guide a process of co-creating a community-minded healing intervention for climate traumas and distress?

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