Ray wrote a book on what she’s learned: “A Field Guide to Climate Anxiety: How to Keep Your Cool on a Warming Planet,” which came out in 2020.
CNBC is publishing a series of accounts of how climate watchers, leaders and others are facing the emotional toll of climate change and finding a way through their anxiety, and this is a piece in that series.
The following are excerpts of Ray’s comments in a telephone They have been edited for brevity and clarity.
The existential weight that my students were bringing to me personally and into the classrooms to each other was something I had no tools to deal with.
I was seeing a great impatience with doing the work of classes: “Why am I wasting my time in college when this stuff is happening out there?” Very much like what we hear from Greta Thunberg and the youth climate movement. This sense of impatience with the types of activities we do in classes, a real desire for action, a real desire for getting out there, rolling your sleeves up and doing something and fixing these problems. The urgency was totally sunk in. There was a fetishizing of action over thinking or talking or reading.
Economics, politics, law, engineering, science used to be the places where students would go into if they wanted to get into environmental stuff. And they were predominantly white, and they often came in with a nostalgia about wanting to get things back to nature the way it was before “bad stuff happened to it.” And that was the modus operandi of the field.
This new generation is radically different.
Sarah Ray, a professor of environmental studies at Humboldt State University in Arcata, California, with her two kids, ages 10 and seven.
Sarah Ray, a professor of environmental studies at Humboldt State University in Arcata, California, with her two kids, ages 10 and seven.
Photo courtesy Sarah Ray
There is a real awareness of the social justice dimensions and the sort of systems change thinking around climate change. The new generation doesn’t think of this as just something that we need to go into science to fix or technology to fix or engineering to fix or even politics or law. There’s a sense of this being a systemic thing that we need all hands on deck to address. We need all the talents, we need all the skills we from the artists, to the creative types, to the imagination people, to the children’s book writers, to the teachers to the parents — in addition to all of the usual suspects that used to be in sort of thinking about the major leverage points of affecting climate change.
It used to be that climate change was sort of imperceptible, abstract, hard to get your head around hard to deal with. It was a communication conundrum. It evaded all of the risk perception, tick boxes that need to be to create a good villain, for people to perceive as a problem — especially for young people for whom the future feels really far away.
No longer is it abstract, or in the future. It is now, and it’s perceivable. And that has been a huge achievement, because by definition, climate change is the least narratable villain in a story.
And the younger generations don’t even have to shift that. They are thinking in my lifetime, I’m going to be the one who’s going to be beset with the worst of this. And they know from the IPCC reports, and all the successful science communication that’s come out, that the next 10 years is the most important. So they see themselves coming of age, coming onto the political and professional scene of their lives, coming into adulthood, when the most important effects can happen, the most responsibility the most urgency is on them.
They won’t be flying as much. They will refuse things that my generation takes for granted, like plastic and single use containers. They will slowly, hopefully, successfully change how infrastructure works, how their transportation works, how they build their families, how they build their homes, how they live on this planet and walk on this earth. Their lifestyles won’t accept what my generation has accepted as normal.
There’s going to be a real reckoning around reproductive refusal. What’s fascinating about that is environmentalists have long not chosen not to have children as a way to reduce their impact on the planet, but this generation is choosing not to have children because they don’t think their children will have a livable future. That’s a very, very, very different reason to do it.
