Generation Dread: How can we help?

Generation Dread

How can we help?

My wife recently listened to an excellent talk by Britt Way, the author of Generation Dread, while participating in an online conference for Nurses on climate and health. Britt Wray is a Human and Planetary Health Postdoctoral Fellow at the Stanford Center for Innovation in Global Health, Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment and London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine’s Centre on Climate Change and Planetary Health. Her research focuses on the mental health impacts of the climate crisis on young people and frontline community members, socio-emotional resilience and capacity building for vulnerable communities, and public engagement for improved mental wellbeing and planetary health. Today I ask: what can we do to help?

Her goal is to help ALL of us cope with the emotional stresses that ecological collapse is inflicting upon all of us but given the fact that the young have more at stake Britt’s focus is on the young and how we older folks can help out. This is her line of thought as she asks:

Why the emotional angle on the climate and wider environmental crisis?

Have you ever felt real discomfort when buying a plane ticket because you don’t want to fly but another part of you really wants that trip? Have you ever cried upon reading that a species you love is going extinct? Have you ever lost a coastline you call home to the sea? Have you ever felt that a part of your identity is disappearing along with the stability of the climate? Have you ever felt abandoned by older generations? Have you ever dreaded our collective ecological future? The age of eco-anxiety is upon us and climate-aware therapists are just a call away. Meanwhile, the afterglow of climate disasters radiates psychiatric trauma throughout the globe. We need to get wise about what is happening as well as what we can do to better care for each other and ourselves, so we don’t all lose our marbles. [ https://www.brittwray.com/gen-dread ]

You can listen to an interview with Britt at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TI3EXjf0aWM .

To give you sense of how this is impacting the young here is a bit of Britt’s backstory of what motivated her to write the book:

I became overrun with eco-anxiety and eco-grief when my partner and I started talking about trying to get pregnant. The process of confronting what scientific models say about the terrifying ecological track we’re on, matched with completely inadequate action from the political establishment, birthed a painful dilemma. Back then, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Miley Cyrus, and umpteen news sites had not yet legitimized this form of anxiety. National polls hadn’t yet been tallied. Activist groups on this theme had not yet appeared (with the exception of this one). And academics weren’t yet studying reproductive angst in the climate crisis as a social phenomenon. (You can expect more on those studies in future editions of Gen Dread). But there I was, suddenly overwhelmed, and because I’ve never had an anxiety disorder also quite disoriented. Almost overnight, I’d turned into that annoying person who manages to bring up climate trauma in every discussion. Congratulating friends who were newly pregnant became a tightrope walk tinged with tragedy. And when I cried about the climate, it hurt like the wind was knocked out of me. It was real deep grief, like someone I loved had died. [ https://gendread.substack.com/p/the-backstory-to-gen-dread ]

If I still have not convinced you that this is something YOU can do something about, consider watching this short 20-minute video of a presentation by Jim Bendell, author of the infamous paper “Deep Adaption [2017] – which by the way is a must read – encapsulates well what the aware and more sensitive souls are sensing – suffering and pain is coming quickly towards us.

[ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0mwdbFrz_Fw ] Still think that the word DREAD is over the top? Read this to convince that not feeling some dread just means you are in denial of what is happening around us and to many of us. https://newrepublic.com/article/174710/stop-calling-climate-anxiety-its-climate-dread

Our challenge is this: how do we act NOW, beforehand, so that we avoid being a reactive, unthinking mode of being and instead see what’s coming and choose a path NOW. Along that path I believe it is incumbent upon us who are older and especially those of us who have extra resources, to help Generation Dread face and prepare for the onslaught coming their way. Talk with them. Give of your time and resources. Acknowledge that their fears, while well founded, also allow us to act and adapt and improve the situation – even if its just a drop in the ocean. Help them not be overwhelmed and don’t just talk – DO SOMETHING concrete to help them.