Emotional Life of the Climate Justice Movement

About This Event

What will it take to imagine, desire, and thrive in a climate-changed world? If we already know the technological, scientific, and economic tools to address the climate crisis, what are the emotional and cultural resources needed to put those tools into action? How can we live our best lives in the face of so much degradation and injustice? In this talk, Dr. Sarah Jaquette Ray will explore these questions drawing on her recent book, A Field Guide to Climate Anxiety: How to Keep Your Cool on a Warming Planet. The book brings together the environmental humanities, social movement theory, environmental justice, climate psychology, mindfulness, and affect theory to outline strategies for coping with anxiety, grief, and despair in service of climate justice. Ray will talk about how a new generation of young activists is changing the climate movement and why it’s so important for them and for the planet that we know how to cultivate intellectual and existential skillfulness in our advocacy, no matter what type of work we do.

About the speaker:
Dr. Sarah Jaquette Ray is chair of the Environmental Studies Department at Humboldt State University. Her first book, The Ecological Other: Environmental Exclusion in American Culture (Arizona, 2013) explores the ways that environmental discourse often reinforces existing social hierarchies, drawing on a legacy of nativist, racial, and ableist exclusion in environmental history. She has co-edited three volumes on environmental justice and the environmental humanities, has her writing on emotions in the climate justice movement has been published in the LA Times, Scientific American, The Cairo Review of Global Affairs, Edge Effects, and Zocalo Public Square. Her second book, A Field Guide to Climate Anxiety: How to Keep Your Cool on a Warming Planet (California, 2020) is an existential toolkit for the climate generation. Dr. Ray is currently working on an edited book collection, An Existential Toolkit for Climate Justice Educators and a professional development workshop for higher education, the Climate Wisdom Lab.