Britt Wray on bringing emotions to bear on climate science
"Scientists are trained and taught to be objective, working from empirical data that is reproducible, and to extract any kind of emotion as irrational, artifactual noise... and this is a very unfortunate binary that I wanted to antagonize."
Nathan spoke with Britt Wray, broadcaster, science writer, and researcher at the intersection of mental health and climate change. Her new book is Generation Dread: Finding Purpose in an Age of Climate Crisis which is a deeply felt and thoroughly-researched study of what it means to wake up every day and live our lives on this warming planet we share—without succumbing to despair about it all.
Generation Dread: Finding Purpose in an Age of Climate Crisis
In Generation Dread, Britt Wray seamlessly merges scientific knowledge with emotional insight to show how these intense feelings are a healthy response to the troubled state of the world. The first crucial step toward becoming an engaged steward of the planet is connecting with our climate emotions, seeing them as a sign of humanity, and learning how to live with them. We have to face and value eco-anxiety, Wray argues, before we can conquer the deeply ingrained, widespread reactions of denial and disavowal that have led humanity to this alarming period of ecological decline.
Britt Wray didn't grow up reading the kinds of books you might expect a science communicator to read: "I was really taken with the book Memoirs of a Geisha. I think I was eleven when it came out. My brother who's much older than me married a Japanese woman and we got to go to Japan and see Kyoto. [...] The combination of those two things [the book and the trip] lit my young mind on fire. That's the kind of young reader I was. [...] I looked for immersion." "I remember being obsessed when I was really young with Roald Dahl's The Witches."
When she has time to read now, she seeks balance between the books her current projects require her to read and the books she's drawn to naturally as a scientist and generally curious person. "As a person who overcommits herself to multiple projects, I find that I have to read a lot of stuff, even for fun, that relates to my topic. [...] If I'm reading Elizabeth Kolbert's Under a White Sky or The Sixth Extinction it's both for fun and for my project. Bill McKibben, Naomi Klein, Rebecca Solnit's books—those kinds of authors I would be reading even if I were still doing synthetic biology, and they informs my approach to dealing with science and society. [...] I've been re-reading Rebecca Skloot's The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, which is such a masterpiece in science communication and storytelling. [...] Nathaniel Rich's Losing Earth, Jonathan Safran Foer's We Are the Weather are all double-dipping as work books and books I would bring to the beach."
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