“We have to learn to have emotionally intelligent conversations with each other about action and climate activism.”
As part of the Wellbeing Team’s project on eco-grief and eco-anxiety, Be the Change members are carrying out a series of interviews with an array of individuals working in the field of climate change, eco-grief and ecoactivism. We are inviting interviewees to share their tips on how to cope with climate anxiety and their own experiences of dealing with eco-grief, considering the many stresses a career in the field of climate change can pose.
Our first interview was with Dr Britt Wray, a broadcaster and author researching the social and ethical interconnections of science and technology, with a focus on the “planetary health crisis”. Wray is currently writing a book about the impacts of mental health and climate change, has a weekly newsletter called Gen Dread on “staying sane in the climate crisis”, was a TED Resident in 2019 and presents the BBC Tomorrow’s World podcast fortnightly with Ellie Cosgrave.
We asked her the following questions to get an insight into her understanding of eco-grief and how to cope with our own anxieties about the future of our planet:
Could you give us your own definition of eco-grief?
Ecogrief is the emotional cascade of feelings we experience when we reckon with things that we love about the natural world that are being lost, and grapple with the likelihood of future ecological losses. When we grieve for the 3 billion animals that perished in the Australian bushfires, or coastlines that we know are going to disappear, or a family tradition that was tied to a landscape that is irreversibly changing, we are feeling ecogrief.
“Ecogrief is the emotional cascade of feelings we experience when we reckon with things that we love about the natural world that are being lost, and grapple with the likelihood of future ecological losses.”
When was the moment you realised you had eco-grief, or first learnt about eco-grief?
I realized I had it when I started thinking about trying to get pregnant with my partner and a deluge of difficult emotions wound their way into my life as I thought about what it would mean to raise a child in a world on fire. The words of Joanna Macy really helped me connect with my eco-grief and learn to explore it.
How common do you think eco-grief is? Is it more common amongst young people?
I think it is very common, though most often people are not conscious of the fact that they’re experiencing it. We’ve seen a huge emergence of ecogrief in the last few years, where more and more people are starting to realize they feel it. This makes perfect sense, since climate-linked disasters have been getting more ferocious and frequent, and millions of students have hit the streets around the world to tell us how anxious and terrified they feel about the world that they’re inheriting. I think young people are more commonly explicitly aware of their ecogrief, while it dwells less consciously in older generations (but is still there).
How do you transform your eco-anxiety into action? How do you stay motivated in the long run?
I have learned to try and take action for the present moment rightness of it, without attachment to outcome. If you focus on the outcome too tightly, you’ll burnout, because the challenges we face are so overwhelming and we don’t often see big wins. The trick is to connect with what feels meaningful, and do that for the own intrinsic importance of doing that, not because you’re expecting your actions will save the world. It is a good in itself, and over time, when lots of people do that, it genuinely helps.
“The trick is to connect with what feels meaningful, and do that for the own intrinsic importance of doing that, not because you’re expecting your actions will save the world.”
Do you have any tips for younger people experiencing eco-grief or climate anxiety?
The most important first step you can take to dealing with your ecogrief and climate anxiety is to find a community of people, or even just a couple of friends, who give permission to your feelings and allow you to express them, without interrupting you to say “don’t be so dire, you’re fine” or rushing straight ahead to solutions. We need to find spaces that allow us to be in these feelings and process them in a supportive setting. So often though, people feel they have to carry the weight of the world on their shoulders all alone, and they self-impose a kind of silence out of shame and fear that others will judge them. That only makes it feel 100 times worse. So the first thing is to talk about the feelings with a supportive group of others. It will make the feelings tolerable.
How can you engage more people who aren’t already taking part in climate activism? How do you start that conversation?
A key insight that doesn’t get talked about enough is that we have to learn to have emotionally intelligent conversations with each other about action and climate activism. This is a practice that takes serious consideration and thoughtful attention. It doesn’t come naturally to most of us. Usually we try to hit people over the head with facts and moral arguments, only for that to backfire. The climate psychologist Renee Lertzman has done a lot of great work around this. Check out this piece I wrote about a key tactic she uses for emotionally intelligent conversations called motivational interviewing: https://gendread.substack.com/p/the-trick-to-helping-people-process
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By Beth Lewis and Alice Tait