Notes ahead of the Summit: Britt Wray
Notes ahead of the Summit: Britt Wray
The Generation Dread author on alchemizing climate anxiety into action.
This is the second in a series of posts reflecting on interviews I’ve conducted for the Collective Trauma Summit 2023, which runs from September 26-October 4. You can register to watch the interviews for free during the 48 hours after they go online. Packages are available for lifetime access to talks by more than 60 speakers, along with poetry, music, guided practices and more. Please do join us for this incredibly inspiring, diverse and potent event.
Resonant World #43
Take a quick look online, and you’ll find a slew of stories about the handful of pilot projects in Europe and North America designed to suck planet-heating carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.
These energy-intensive machines are as yet only capable of capturing a few second’s worth of the world’s annual emissions, but the preponderance of coverage reinforces the idea that the climate crisis can be solved with a technological silver bullet.
Far fewer articles are devoted to exploring Canadian science communicator Britt Wray’s contention that we should focus on harvesting something even less tangible: our climate dread.
“Dread is a resource floating freely in the air, and it’s this generation’s job to capture it,” Wray writes in her book Generation Dread: Finding Purpose in an Age of Climate Anxiety, which was published last year. “In order to do that, the first thing we must do is find a container for our overwhelming emotions.”
“Communities of Care”
One of the great things about the Collective Trauma Summit 2023 is the opportunity to forge new connections between practitioners, writers and facilitators working in very different fields — and develop new avenues for collaboration.
That felt like a very real prospect after my conversation with Wray, which will be available to watch free for 48 hours after it goes online on September 28.
Wray concludes Generation Dread by championing precisely the kinds of “communities of care” that so many people watching the summit are already engaged in building — whether directly in response to the climate crisis, or other massive trauma fields, from structural racism to the legacy of war and genocide.
Wray explained in our interview that these communities can support us to escape the “soft denial” that so many of us understandably use to insulate ourselves from the overwhelming reality of the climate crisis, and begin the deeper work of responding in more resourceful ways. (As I confessed to Wray, I’d noticed this “soft denial” operating in myself — having spent a year procrastinating over reading Generation Dread, despite its obvious relevance to Resonant World. I only finally dived in when I felt our impending interview had left me no choice, and I was very glad I did).
As Wray told me:
“We have a choice in how we respond. We don’t just need to be funneled into a deepening case of despair that fuels a sense of fatalism that then creates a self-fulfilling prophecy of doom that will just convince everyone that nothing can be done…We’re in a situation where every tenth of a degree that we can prevent of warming translates into supporting millions of lives. So how do we strengthen ourselves to do that difficult work of preventing tenths of degrees of warming, when to be honest about it, we’re going down no matter what? It’s a downward trajectory: It’s just ‘how hard do we fall’? How bumpy is our arrival at each stage along the way, and how can we infuse our lives with enough joy and happiness that it’s meaningful to have this experience on the earth, with each other? So this is why dread [is] a resource floating freely in the air.”
She continued:
“We can help each other not feel shame for feeling [climate anxiety]; understand its appropriateness; find ways of sitting with the uncertainty of how bad this crisis is going to get; point ourselves towards our values; live in alignment with those values through our actions; and then create communities of care that can increase all kinds of resilience to the difficult emotions, but also strategies for taking action and helping to prevent those degrees of warming.”
Good Grief
One example we talked about was the Good Grief Network, whose 10-step approach to climate anxiety Wray documents in Generation Dread. There are now many other similar initiatives springing up organically as the reality of the crisis becomes ever more tangible, especially after this terrifying summer of heat, fire and flood.
What I appreciated about our conversation was that I could feel that Wray was speaking from the authority of her own hard-won experience: She was sharing truths that she’d discovered after an intense period of grappling with a level of anxiety over the climate crisis that had increasingly coloured her everyday life.
As Wray explained at the start of our conversation, the inquiry that inspired Generation Dread had been a very personal one: Attempting to reconcile her concerns about bringing a child into a world of climate-fuelled suffering with her desire to become a mother.
By naming this dilemma, and discovering how widely but silently it had been shared, I felt Wray had turned writing into medicine in a similar way to Helen Epstein, whose 1979 book Children of the Holocaust catalyzed an understanding of the legacy carried by the “second generation,” and who I’d interviewed for the summit some months earlier. (Resonant World #42).
Wray spoke for people affected by all kinds of individual, trans-generational and collective trauma when she told me:
“A key part of all this is that many people find a lot of relief for hearing that there’s terms to describe what they’re going through, that other folks have also been experiencing this. They’re not alone. It’s no longer this shameful, alienating, isolating cloud of dread that they have to exist in apart from others.”
Bridging Divides
As a climate journalist, I’ve been watching many people committed to climate action engaged in sometimes polarised debate over how to respond to the psychological dimensions of the crisis. Broadly, there are two camps: The “stubborn optimists” who fear that too much emphasis on distress and anxiety will lead to disengagement and paralysis; and those who argue that consciously embracing the despair can ultimately prove a transformative process that unlocks untapped energy to act.
In my view, Wray has done a great service by harnessing her own visceral experience of climate anxiety to foster a more nuanced, global conversation that is now much better placed to reconcile this apparent divide.
And on a personal note, I was also delighted to see that Generation Dread had referenced the visionary work on climate trauma by quantum ecopsychologist Zhiwa Woodbury, a great friend of Resonant World. (Resonant World #1). (For readers who enjoyed the inaugural post of Zhiwa’s Dharma Beat newsletter shared in Resonant World #37, do check out this more recent edition — where he reprises his experience of what happens when we die — courtesy of the psychedelic compound 5MEO-DMT. I read it as an antidote to anxiety of any kind).
Finally, I loved the clarity of Wray’s call at the close of our conversation for a “cultural and spiritual” revolution to tackle the climate crisis — a position precisely aligned with the spirit of the Collective Trauma Summit 2023.
As Wray told me:
“We need a cultural and spiritual revolution. That’s the only thing that's going to get us through this. We need people to recognize their humanity and the fact that they have bodies and nervous systems and feel things in a heart when they are our elected officials, when they’re running companies. We can’t continue to have this sanitized way of cutting our heads off from our bodies and just being these throbbing rationalists, talking with our graphs as the world around us burns. Greed has gotten us into this mess, and we need to be able to feel our way through it together in new ways, which require creating new norms and permissions to deal with that on a much deeper existential level than what we’ve been doing.”
And that is exactly the mission of Resonant World.
Please do join us on September 28 by registering for the summit here. And for more on Wray’s work, here is a link to her website and Gen Dread newsletter:
Britt Wray Biography
Britt Wray, PhD is the Director of the Chair’s Special Initiative on Climate and Mental Health in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences of Stanford University School of Medicine. She is the author of two books, including Generation Dread: Finding Purpose in an Age of Climate Crisis, and is the founding creator of the weekly Gen Dread newsletter which shares insights and expert advice for coping and acting in the climate crisis.
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