The Role of Emotions in Facing Climate Change

This talk is part of Ethically Speaking: A UCF Interdisciplinary Series on Contemporary Moral Issues. 

Dr. Sarah Jaquette Ray discusses her book, A Field Guide to Climate Anxiety: How to Keep Your Cool on a Warming Planet. The book threads together different aspects of the environmental humanities, including social movement theory, environmental justice, climate psychology, mindfulness, and affect theory, to outline strategies for coping with anxiety, grief, despair, and other responses to the climate crisis and other crises, such as coronavirus and ongoing struggles for racial justice. Ray will talk about how a new generation of young activists is changing the climate movement and why it’s so important for them and for the planet that they cultivate intellectual and existential resilience. What will it take to imagine, desire, and thrive in a climate-changed future? How can taking an interdisciplinary approach to environmental problems help us rise to this historical moment?

 Speaker Bio

Dr. Sarah Jaquette Ray is chair of the Environmental Studies Department at Humboldt State University. Her first book, The Ecological Other: Environmental Exclusion in American Culture (Arizona, 2013) explores the ways that environmental discourse often reinforces existing social hierarchies, drawing on a legacy of nativist, racial, and ableist exclusion in environmental history. Her second book, A Field Guide to Climate Anxiety: How to Keep Your Cool on a Warming Planet (California, 2020) is an existential toolkit for the climate generation. Dr. Ray is working on an Existential Toolkit for Climate Justice Educators and a workshop offering for educators, the Climate Wisdom Lab.

 About Ethically Speaking
Ethically Speaking is a campus-wide partnership that brings internationally renowned leaders to UCF to discuss cutting-edge topics in ethics. All members of UCF and the community we serve are encouraged to attend. More information on this speaker series and upcoming talks can be found at https://ethicscenter.research.ucf.edu/speaker-series/