Sarah Jaquette Ray on educating the next generation of activists

"I asked my students to visualise the planet 20 years from now, and they couldn't. It was heartbreaking."

LEARNING

PEOPLE

9 MINS READ

DATE

AUGUST 16, 2023

AUTHOR

Sarah Jaquette Ray

Sarah Jaquette Ray is currently working on The Existential Toolkit. Check it out here.

IMAGE

Cristian Wari'u young communicator, indigenous activist of the Xavante people and student of Organizational Communication at the University of Brasilia (UnB). He is the creator of the Youtube channel called "Wari'u" where he talks about indigenous peoples in contemporary times with a modern and accessible language and thus has resignified the struggle of the indigenous movement through digital cameras, mobile phones and internet.

TALES caught up with Sarah Jaquette Ray, author of A Field Guide to Climate Anxiety and an Environmental Studies professor at Humboldt University, California, to discuss the role education can play in fighting the climate crisis. She dives into how and when we should include young people in the conversation.

TALES: Last year, you released the book A Field Guide to Climate Anxiety, aimed at helping young adults deal with the emotional impacts of climate change. With ever-worsening weather events brought on by global warming and a clear rise in the number of people experiencing so-called eco-anxiety, this seems to be a well-timed piece of literature. What exactly made you want to write it?

Ray: My background is in environmental justice, from a humanities perspective. I studied human geography and explored ideas about place and identity and power and discourse. I have led environmental studies programs since my first tenure-track position. I realised about five years in, during my first year coming to Humboldt State, that students were not emotionally equipped to deal with this information about the climate breakdown, and the information was getting worse. I felt like it was not doing them any service to depress the hell out of them and many of them would end up just leaving school. I was starting to wonder what we were really doing. What were we doing to our students? I decided I had to go and research it, and ask what the consequences of this information could be, and what the psychological endgame or concept ultimately was.

“I was watching students drop like flies”

Ray: My focus was college students; rethinking environmental knowledge to teach other professors and also to teach my students about the kind of hidden emotional curriculum of our syllabi.

Climate change was quickly becoming my focus of interest, and climate justice in particular. I was excited about how the justice movement was changing the climate movement. I was paying attention to that question: how did the movement all of a sudden become a justice-oriented one? I then had to figure out how to bring in the psychology aspect to know how best to teach my students...