Episode 17 - Generation Dread’s Search for Emotional Resilience

How do we courageously face our eco anxiety and grief, and find the resources we need to cope with the climate crisis? How do we cultivate the emotional resilience that we need to weather ecological crises? How do we take care of our own mental health, so we can take care of each other and our Earth? 

Britt Wray joins Reseed for a conversation about climate change, emotions, and mental health. Britt is an acclaimed researcher, science communicator, author and TED speaker. Her Gen Dread newsletter, TED Talk with 2.4 million views, and writing in outlets like TIME and the New York Times all share wide-ranging ideas for supporting emotional health and psychological resilience in ecological crises. Her forthcoming second book Generation Dread merges scientific knowledge with emotional insight to show how these intense feelings are a healthy response to the troubled state of the world. 

Experiences of anxiety and grief can cause us to give up. They can interrupt our ability to cope with the breakdown of the natural world, and limit our ability to protect and save all that we can. Learning to feel, acknowledge, understand, and express our climate emotions will allow us to be more whole as human beings, and more able to be the stewards of this planet that we need to be. This conversation invites emotion into science, climate activism, and the halls of power. 

Embracing our climate emotions - in all of their messy, human complexity - can free us to move out of an anthropocentric frame, navigate the vast uncertainty of it all, and rediscover enchantment with the interconnected web of life that is our home.