LAURA: Professor Ray, thank you  so much for joining me today.

SARAH: Thanks for having me.

LAURA: So, even people who aren't being   evacuated for a fire or facing  water shortages this year,   we all have emotional responses to what's  happening in the world right now.

What is climate   anxiety, that you write about in your book?

SARAH: Yeah, so there's people who are   experiencing immediate climate or environmental  traumas like sea level rise or natural disaster,   various kinds of immediate things.

And, arguably,  many scientists would say something like COVID   is an immediate climate disaster, too, that we're  all experiencing some more intimately than others.

But, that's one set of climate anxieties,  forms of, sort of, immediate distress.

Immediate threat to life, livelihood and  life.

But, another kind of climate anxiety   that also sort of took me by surprise a  little bit, when I first discovered it,   is the sort of anticipatory anxiety about what  could be happening in the future.

And this comes   from all of the forecasts coming from scientists  like the intergovernmental panel on climate   change, the IPCC reports that come out every  couple years and various different models coming   out from scientists and actually reported of the  great the sixth great extinction as Elizabeth   Colbert calls it.

So, there's a sense of, what's  life going to be like in the next 15-20, 50 years?

That's going to be in my lifetime.

Many young  people in particular are thinking about this.

Will the planet be inhabitable?

Will we have  food?

Will the ecosystem, services that,   that the entire economic system we live on, you  know, be, you know, functioning?

And the thought   of those things all falling apart creates climate  anxiety, the sense of, you know, the way the life,   as we know it, the conditions for health and  thriving and for eating and breathing and drinking   fresh water and having our houses, you know,  not fall apart or not burn down.

That kind of   uncertainty, what Glenn Albrecht calls global  dread, is really what climate anxiety is.

The   APA defines eco-anxiety as a chronic fear of  environmental doom, but I would say climate   anxiety is more specific around the ways that  people are responding to news around what's   happening with climate change, particularly.

LAURA: Yeah and you write about the climate   generation and I'm curious, how is this  climate generation different from someone   like me, say, who was in college in the 90s?

SARAH: Yeah, so I was in college in the 90s too,   so that's close to home for me.

So, yeah, the  climate generation is the largest generation, if   we think about in the U.S. context, in particular,  although we can talk about a more international   context if you like.

But, in the U.S. context, in  particular, the climate generation is the largest   generation that the U.S. has ever seen.

They're  going to be the least economically well-off.

They'll be the first generation to be less  well-off than their parents’ generation.

They're saddled with an extraordinary  amount of student debt.

Most of them,   they also are more ethnically diverse than any  other generation that the U.S. has ever seen   and there are a couple other qualities about this  generation that particularly unique.

Recent data,   especially in the last year has shown that this  generation also experiences climate anxiety   and emotions related to fears about the future of  the planet.

More than other generations.

And so,   there's a sense of the actions of previous  generations are going to come to roost on this   generation.

And, this generation is going to be  the one who gets experienced the worst of that,   so there's an awareness of that and  that, that awareness, that concern is,   distributes across race and class in  pretty interesting ways.

In the U.S.,   if you are a young woman of color, you're  more likely to experience climate anxiety   than you are if you're a white male young person.

So, there's different and of course politics   matters here too.

So, the demographics of climate  anxiety are particularly interesting as well.

LAURA: So, I think there's this tendency  still for older generations to look at this   sort of climate generation, younger generations,  as like coddled or apathetic and you as a   professor who's around these people all the  time, you have a very different take that you   write about in your book.

Can you talk about that?

SARAH: Yeah, I think there was, there are times,   there have been times when I have  been tempted to think the same thing,   you know.

I remember having an experience with  my students about five or six years ago where I   walked them through a visualization exercise,  where I asked them to imagine a future they   were living in the future, the cast forward  a few years, imagine everything that you've   worked for coming to pass.

Everything that  you and your community desires manifested.

All the justice and all the, you know, environment  is utopic.

Everything's great.

What are you being   thanked for and all that kind of thing and  my students couldn't even imagine a future   that they would desire.

And I realized that they  did… if they didn't have the imagination for what   that would even look like what would be the ideal,  then how are they ever gonna start working on it,   you know?

You have to backward design your goals.

I mean anybody knows you have to know you want,   so you know where to start.

And this was a  real failure on their imagination side.

And I,   at first, I thought it was because they had been  sort of, you know, unable to deal with difficulty,   you know… that there was a sort of maybe a snow  flakiness about them, right?

This sort of coddled,   of coddling of the American mind that you  just mentioned.

But then, I actually realized,   as I started to tap into more of a space of  compassion and knowing these students, I realized   that this was in fact more of a matter of really  being let down by fee, by previous generations   and being handed a problem that is unsolvable,  and learning, as we all want them to learn about   climate change, right, everybody is starting to  learn about climate change even in the k through   12 system now.

And they were coming into college  already knowing that things were really bad   and it is, “Oh, it is simply a sign of our  engagement with what's happening in the world   that we might feel some dread and uncertainty and  trepidation about what's happening in the future.”   And so, this lack of imagination just seemed to  be the natural response to how bad the news is.

And I really felt a deep heartbreak for them.

LAURA: Yeah, also in your book, which is great   and I loved it and I appreciated it, you  write about existential grief and how the   root of it is the fear of loss, or the terror  of loneliness.

And you write that there are   far more effective ways to address our existential  grief than extinguishing ourselves under the   weight of it all.

What are some of those ways?

SARAH: Oh there so many times I think the   automatic knee-jerk reaction to climate grief and  to climate anxiety is action, right?

Okay, let's   transform our anxiety into action and I think that  that's really great and I don't, I don't reject   that.

I think that's an important thing we really  need a lot of action but unfortunately, if people   do not have the existential capacity for action,  because they're burned out, they're despairing,   they're apathetic, they think that what they're  gonna do doesn't matter, which is the main thing,   the problem is too big and they're too small that  kind of thing.

If they believe that, they're not   even likely, turns out psychologists show this  really interesting experiment psychologists have   done, that I researched for the book, that people  are less likely to even try to solve the problem   if they don't think that it can ever be solved.

That they can make no difference to it and so,   that is where the kind of core of the problem  lies in my mind, not so much and what actions   do we need to do.

They don't even, can't even get  to action then.

No matter, no matter how you lay   out the list of great things to do, they're not  going to do it.

They can't even come to class.

So depressed, so there was a sense to me that  there was something beneath even those actions   that had to happen and then when I started to do  a lot of the research on it really a lot of that   is existential.

That's existential work that,  that wisdom, traditions spiritual traditions,   different types of community action or social  movements have long had some knowledge about   and been able to do.

But, the climate movement so  far hadn't really done a lot of that reckoning and   I tried to turn some of the attention in the  book to some of that interior work of reminding   of ourselves of our connection to each other,  our connection to the more than human world and   the… it's the denial of those connections  that's at the root of many of our problems   and so the repair has to happen at that kind of  existential level as much as all of these other   external actions also.

But, they're interconnected  you can't really, you know, embolden a movement   to take on the challenges as we need to without  that kind of interior resilience and energy.

LAURA: Yeah, along those lines, you write about  how seeing ourselves as part of a collective   and acting collectively versus trying to do  things individually is so important?

And it   made me think of like Joanna Macy.

And she  talks about group action and group work.

What are the benefits of this collective action,  this group work, this relationship building.

SARAH: Yeah, that's a really great  question.

There's many facets to that.

So, some people say that at the root, the root  cause of our social crises are the same as the   root cause of the climate change crisis, which is  disconnection, lack of community and many people,   if you look at Robert Putnam's bowling alone and  you look at the sort of crisis of civil society   and the crisis of community that's been sort of  almost engineered by the ways that we've designed,   you know, not just architecture and cities and  our automobiles and highways, but also, we've,   you sort of create a culture of individualism  in American society that you're on your own   and go off and set free yourself free  from all of the fetters of your family   and others.

And there's a real fetish of that in  American culture and there's a lot of benefits   to that and I'm not denying entirely that there's  some value to that, but it has had the unfortunate   effect of making us think that we are alone in  our action for the planet.

So, that's one way   that it makes us, it disempowers us.

It help, it  helps us not able to see, makes us not able to   see the ways that we our actions are in concert  already with a huge community of people.

What Paul Hawking calls the blessed unrest or some  groundswell.

Rebecca Solnit beautifully writes   about this and also it makes us not able to take,  take a break when we need to build our resources.

Many people, young people in particular, feel like  they need to sort of burn the midnight oil and   not sleep in order to do the amount of work  that's necessary, because the problem is so   urgent, right?

This urgency of the problem, this  next 10 years matters so much.

We often hear.

Makes people feel like, “Okay, I'll just work my  tail off until the problem is solved and then I'll   be able to maybe relax.” There's no time for  rest and individualism comes, shows up also in   activism too, in a way that undermines our ability  to keep engaged in these issues for the long term   of our lives.

This the problem is not going to be  resolved in 10 years.

It's going to be ongoing on   for the rest of our lives and so seeing ourselves  in the collective is partly a sort of critical   thinking tool to keep us energized, right?

Let's  focus on the fact that we are amplified in all   these ways.

I do a network mapping exercise with  my students sometimes where I help them see all   the things that support them and that they support  and ask them how can they enhance those supports   and also there's some really interesting  neuroscience about this, that there's   sort of the mirror neurons that happens the  things that happens hormonally and chemically,   when we're actually in space with other people  and when we're doing things with other people.

And I find it's really fascinating that there's  things that happen, like, if you did an MRI, if   you could take a picture of people's brains when  they're with people versus when they're on Zoom,   or when they're on Zoom when they're versus, when  they're alone ,just the sheer act of being with   people, doing something collectively enhances  all of the good feels that we might need to have   chemically in our body.

So, there's some, some  really cool stuff that happens there, just even   just the neuroscience of it is really important.

LAURA: So, you mentioned earlier, too, like these   issues are so big.

They seem so vast and they  are that, whether it's climate change or the   social justice aspects of climate change and even  just here in our own state, especially right now.

It just seems like the issues are so big  and there's so much that needs to be done   and then you kind of have social media,  where you're being assaulted all the time by,   you know, taking action on this or being outraged  about that.

I'm interested in what advice   you might have on how to navigate all these front  lines that everyone's dealing with all the time?

SARAH: Yeah, that's a great question because  that's something I battle every day myself.

So,   I'm really sympathetic and I think this is  where wisdom is really helpful, wisdom of   discernment is really helpful and something that  the earlier we can teach that in our kids.

The   better college students for sure, but even earlier  than college students.

So, if we, if we are aware,   we just understand that most media gravitates  towards negative information.

This is called   the negativity bias in media.

But, we also,  that negativity bias is only merely responding   because we live in capitalism, responding to the  negativity biases that are in our own brains,   right?

We have this reptilian residual brain  thing that focuses on the next threat that's   on the horizon and so we tend to pay attention to  the negative information.

The scariest of news,   the most outraged information and we know this,  if we just do a simple study of the algorithms   around social media that negative emotions like  outrage, I should say uncomfortable emotions,   huge, you know, big emotive words are the ones  that get distributed the most and pass around,   get the most eyeballs as they call it in social  media.

And so, the negativity bias in ourselves   perpetuates the negativity bias in the news  media.

It becomes this vicious cycle.

And so,   what kind of story do we live in?

We live in  what Joanna Macy calls the great unraveling,   right, where everything is unraveling, you know.

There's some, the coming anarchy as Robert Kaplan   put it in the 80s, right, so there's a sort  of the world is descending into apocalypse.

If we look… if we only took the media that we  consume on a daily basis as evidence of truth,   that would be the story we lived in.

But this,  in fact, creates a self-fulfilling prophecy   in most people, which is that the world is so  terrible.

There's nothing I can do to stop it.

It's inevitable.

So, I might as well just put my  head in the sand and carry on business as usual.

So, we don't even, we won't even begin to  tackle the problem if we live in that story   and simply put, you know, if the planet has any  hope at all if any of these, you know, situations   have any hope at all, we have to give, we have  to show up as much energy for it as possible.

And the most energy, the way to do that is to come  from a place of living in a very different story.

We must simply choose to consume and seek out and  distribute stories of solutions of people who are   doing this, so that we'll become more aware  of all those people out there doing it, more   aware of the collectivity, more aware of how many  solutions are already happening, success stories.

Those are the kinds of things that actually bring  people back for more and make people want to keep   being involved and again this is neuroscience.

I mean, simply, the hormones and the chemicals   around positive news keeps us coming  back from more like dopamine, right?

So,   there's, and also those stories model how to  do it.

So, if we learn how to do it, you know,   where you are, the story you just told me before  we started filming of the mesa behind you,   what's happening there, the more you can  distribute those kinds of solution stories   and more people think oh that's happening right  in my backyard, I can get involved with them.

Or,   maybe I can model that in my community where  I'm at.

People think that the only way to solve   all the problems we have is that by tomorrow we  need to get rid of capitalism or whatever it is,   right?

Like, we need to have all the land back  by tomorrow and everything feels impossible, this   all feels like too big of a task, but when we see  the stories of what's happening around the corner,   what's happening in our community, we see it  modeled, when we see all the adults in the room,   if we're younger taking care of something right  here, that can scale out that just perpetuates   the cycle.

And so, if we live in a story  of what Joanna Mesa calls a great turning,   where everybody's doing this work, we're much  more likely to show up to do the work.

So, it   becomes that kind of a self-fulfilling prophecy.

LAURA: Yeah, I like what you write about slow   hope and how there's always this, yeah,  this emphasis on urgency and action   and that that constant urgency also does,  like, stresses you out, but also can make   people not be as inclusive.

Or, you write about,  you can, you know, sacrifice your allies to get to   a certain outcome.

What are the benefits of  this slow hope in a world where everything   seems to be moving so fast all the time?

SARAH: Well, for that very reason, the speed at   which the world is moving is part of the problem,  right?

That's where the disconnection happens,   when we, when we we're moving too fast and we  have that sense of urgency.

We're much less   likely to be compassionate towards each other.

We're much less likely to interpret the behavior   we see on the media that we're watching or the  people that we're interacting with, from a space   of understanding or awareness of what the causes  and conditions that make people do what they do,   we're much less likely to want to cooperate with  people or collaborate with people.

Speed makes   interconnection really inconvenient and much  less respect for the earth, right?

Like, I'm   too busy.

I don't want to hang my laundry up on  the clothesline, you know, that just for a small   example and it has the effect of the urgency,  the urgency mode is sort of, has always long   been a political tool, to get people to surrender  their rights or to give up, you know, to look the   other way at unethical behavior, you know.

So,  there's a real sense of when we, when we're,   when we're in a state of urgency, when we feel  things are urgent, we tend to, you know, not do   things like the slow, deliberative processes that  are required to make sure all voices are included   in a conversation about solutions.

Or, we tend  to think that this is the most urgent thing we've   ever had and nothing ever before was as urgent as  this, when in fact lots of people have lived under   unlivable conditions, in lots of parts, places  of the planet and historically and even now.

And so, this isn't, maybe, perhaps, the most  urgent thing for them, right?

So, there's   a real politics to the, to urgency that we  should be suspicious of, not because it's,   you know, nefarious and for any particular  reason, but because there's, there… it's a   rhetorical strategy to get people to act and it  may make us act in ways that are not very wise.

LAURA: So, you, I like this book.

You kind of  you lay out lots of background information and,   but at the end of each chapter there's like a  checklist and there's also some like exercises   in the book that you also do with your students.

And you write about this one exercise in   particular that you did with your students.

And,  it reminded me, I did something similar in 2016   in the Fall of, you know, knowing that there were  going to be a steady, a steady stream of important   issues that would need to be covered.

And so,  at that time, like I wrote out a very specific   list for myself about what I can do and what I,  what my skills are.

And what I need to focus on   for the next four years.

And it was really helpful  and really guided me for those four years.

I'm   curious, can you talk a little bit about what this  exercise is that you have students do and how it   might be helpful for our viewers to do as well?

SARAH: This exercise, I think you're talking   about the eco manifesto <yes>.

So when we have  that information coming at us from all sides,   that 24-7 access to news cycles, information  from all corners of the globe, all the   terrible things are happening, it makes it very  difficult to prioritize and sort through what,   where we want to devote our attention.

What  is the most urgent things to triage all that   and that creates this overwhelm.

The urgency and  the quantity of it and the urgency of it all which   of course the media wants to make sure we feel,  actually, has this deadening effect, right?

That   has this kind of like, “Oh, I'm overwhelmed.

I'm sort of…” instead of immobilization,   because of the intensity of it all and we often  might feel like just the witnessing of it,   you know, is enough to participate, but really,  in fact, what needs to happen is that most people   need to focus in on one particular issue that  is really the combination of their passion,   their skills, their interests and where they think  is gonna, they can have an effect and an impact   and sometimes that can be at a very intimate  scale, close to just yourself, right?

Many of   us don't have access to leverage points of power  or institutional change.

We need to build that out   and so where can we, where do we start?

Where do  we, where do we have control?

Where do we have an   ability to make an impact?

And I have an  exercise called the spheres of influence   activity, that's in the book too, that I got  from dear friend Abirez, where you can sort of   map out where your spheres of influence  and where you can even begin to start.

But, this allows us, as we, as we sort of, you  know, visualize going back to that visualization   activity.

If, we think about where we're trying  to go and what our particular passions and skills   are, we can figure out what the next step is  and it's really a matter of just prioritizing   what our what, our big yes is, as opposed  to all of the things that maybe other people   find as their big yes.

So, we can say no.

That again goes back to the collectivity   thing.

It allows us to say no to everything  that's not in our most important priority   and this is the sense of overwhelm is really  common, I think, in people these days.

And the   ability to triage and just say yes to that which  is in our mission, our manifesto, allows other   people to say yes to the things that we might have  to say, no to that's something that I love.

Adrian   Ray Brown's book emergent strategy helped me think  about my no is actually a yes for someone else and   opens up the door for someone else and so when  all of a sudden oh yes we're in a collectivity   we don't all have to do it all, you know.

LAURA: Yeah, well thanks for saying yes to   this interview.

I really have appreciated  this conversation.

O really, really   recommend your book to anybody who's thinking  about these issues right now.

So, thank you.

SARAH: Thank you so much.

I  appreciate talking to you.