Sarah Jaquette Ray on educating the next generation of activists

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.

I started to research how bad the mental health situation was for young people, and then compounding climate change with that, and their sense of a bleak future. I had a daunting moment when I asked my students to visualise the planet 20 years from now, and they couldn't. It was just heartbreaking. I started to think, “this is bad.”

I decided to write a book about it: A Field Guide to Climate Anxiety, to summarise all of this research. I wanted it to be digestible for young people. My purpose on this planet now is to make sure that this generation has what it needs to do this work. We need them to rise to the occasion and be up for it. The wisdom aspects are not always there yet with them, like their prefrontal cortex is barely online right now. They need so many skills around emotional intelligence, and I really think it is an existential task.

I thought to myself after the election in 2016, “what can an environmental humanities professor do in this world? Like, what action can I take, from this position? What's the bold thing that we all are called to do in this moment to change the tide?”

The book, the research on interior climate resilience, was the best I could come up with. To me, it feels like the environmental community, including students, but definitely educators, need a lot of tools around racial justice and interior resilience.

“There's this diversity of knowledge coming in the door”

TALES: You gave a talk on climate justice and race for the series of discussions on facing the climate crisis called ‘The Existential Toolkit’ back in January of this year. You mentioned the erasure of non-white environmental knowledge. Can you expand on what this means and explain the alternative?

Ray: One of the ways we talk about environmental knowledge is ‘epistemic harm’ or ‘epistemological violence’. This has to do with the environmental knowledge that comes out of the kind of enlightenment, ecology, and Western science, vs. the knowledge that was erased by that.

There's a delicate, and difficult, relationship with science and environmental studies. Environmentalism (including the science of ecology) has long used science as a way to dictate which people are ‘good’ to nature, which people are ‘bad’ for nature, what kind of behaviours are deemed good, and which worldviews are deemed good for nature. These distinctions have done a lot of damage. Think of the history of eugenics in America; the history of genocide and removal of natives from national parks; the worry about limited resources and how it can lead to xenophobia, hoarding, and fear of immigrants. This tradition is very strong in America, indeed you can see that the idea of this nation was built on it. That's what I wrote about in my first book, The Ecological Other.

A classic example is when white people saw native people doing rotational harvesting and moving with the seasons, and thought that they weren't using the land properly, not ‘improving’ it, which defined ‘ownership’ to colonisers, so they took the land from them. You use your lens to interpret what's objectively good and bad environmental behaviour, and you think of it as scientifically grounded in fact. I think that's what I'm trying to destabilise there. It's to have professors not just say “we're here to teach our science and get people on board.” That is not innocent. It comes out of a historical and social and racialised set of power knowledge formations.

If we think of our students then from an ‘asset model’, you create space to have them explore, articulate, get confident with and figure out how to deploy in their lives their already existing traditions of knowledge. That’s a very different approach. It's not the sort of mono-cultural idea of: 'I have got the knowledge, I'm going to teach it to you', but rather there's this diversity of knowledge coming in the door. So, what do we need to do to see all that? A  couple of my favourite people, such as Carolyn Finney, and Priscilla Ybarra, have written books on this. There are lots of traditions in African-American culture of being connected to the land: Indigenous peoples are five percent of the population but manage 80% of the biodiversity. It’s not a coincidence that biological life thrives where they are. They just haven't been counted as ‘environmental’ because they’re not the dominant view. So, what are all these ways of connecting to the land? And what is all that knowledge that's there already? We need some humility around the environmental science knowledge that is the canon, you know?

Indigenous knowledge is a great example. I have students who walk into forestry classes or rangeland science classes, and get told that the first rangeland scientist was some white guy in 1860. So then Indigenous students are thinking: “My people have been doing rangeland science since time immemorial you know?” So there's a sense of an ‘innocent teaching’ of the way you got taught as a white person that the first ecologist was Ernst Haeckel. There are founding fathers of the environmental movement that even if you think you're innocently teaching this stuff because you think of it as fact, it can feel like a complete erasure of millennia of knowledge building.

“The younger generation right now is teaching us everything”

TALES: How would you recommend educators or parents approach this, particularly with younger children, so that you don't get this erasure of knowledge?

Ray: I would have someone rewrite a kind of ‘environmental privilege knapsack’ for that age group. That would be so cool and I haven't seen that. It could be within different contexts, as that's a super US-based context.

Young kids can become really engaged right away about what it means to be an environmentalist and then go from there to express on who is an environmentalist. I love asking the question: “do people of colour care about the environment?” In my classrooms, I have to do it in an anonymous way. We have to separate the answers from each person because the calling out can get too angry, too quickly. It’s an intense conversation because the assumption about a lot of white students is that care about the environment is a kind of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs: it’s only for the privileged. The lack of BIPOC in dominant green spaces seems to prove it, but the data doesn’t bear this out. BIPOC are more concerned about the environment. So, if we can talk about it as ideas that are out there and engage and take them apart, it's a lot easier than to say “you're dumb” or “you're racist”. That doesn't work.

There's an assumption that the reason behind why students want to do environmental studies is because they grew up camping and hiking, or surrounded by nature in some way. I immediately think to myself, “OK, let's tease that apart.” Even the nature deficit disorder stuff is super privileged. Nature is everywhere, even under a freeway bypass, or in a Superfund site. Anywhere we are, we are part of nature. It’s not “out there.”

We need to educate young people at an early age and they're already doing it. I mean, the younger generation right now is teaching us everything, so I feel like I'm learning everything I know from them on this topic.

In the end, this is where I think that love of nature, all of the stuff that I am saying I'm critical of, is the doorway to climate anxiety. Love of nature is a doorway in. These are all doorways in. So, even if we then turn around and trouble those things, they have a value. You know, they're important. It’s what keeps people engaged for the long haul: it’s a love of all of that stuff.

While it might feel like there will never be a right time to introduce the topic of climate change to young people, the answer as we’ve seen is now. Don’t worry, we didn’t end our chat with Sarah before asking where to get started in a topic this complex.

Ray: Mary Democker has written a book, The Parents’ Guide to Climate Revolution and it's one hundred things that you and your kids can do. It's very much written for parents and it's entirely intersectional. I was blown away.

Leslie Davenport has written the book: Emotional Resilience in an Era of Climate Change, that's her main book. She's a clinical psychologist, but she's about to publish not just one, but maybe two books that are geared for young people.

And Elin Kelsey wrote Hope Matters. She is one of the people who collaborated on the Existential Toolkit.

This interview was carried out in January 2021. It has been edited to reflect this.

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