From Doom to Empowerment: Self- Help Tools to Help Us Navigate Disaster and Difference
Each quarter, a group of students, faculty, and staff at WWU convene an environmental justice reading group to read and discuss recent texts. In Fall 2020 the group read Sarah Jaquette Ray’s A Field Guide to Climate Anxiety. This post reflects and extends our discussion.
From Doom to Empowerment: Self- Help Tools to Help Us Navigate Disaster and Difference
By: Cassidy Thornton and Mikaela Keator
The sense that the Earth is doomed feels more real now than ever. Messages of disaster, panic, uncertainty and scarcity are likely swirling in our heads amidst the global pandemic, perceptible climatic changes and social upheaval around racial injustices. These doom and gloom messages are what we see when we open our magic boxes to the media transmitting dramatic imagery of the apocalypse, and it is what our human psychology latches onto as part of our negativity bias. And to add more fuel to this discouragement, there are still people who deny climate change overall.
We recognize this. The apocalyptic narratives and climate deniers are real and out there. The question is how will we navigate them? In A Field Guide to Climate Anxiety, Sarah Jacquette Ray provides tools for our box to help us shift our orientation away from the doom and gloom in crucial ways.
One tool is growing emotional intelligence, The practice of mindfulness is a good vehicle to begin identifying and acting from our emotions. Mindfulness gives us a space to pause and recognize distressing forces to develop more beneficial habits of attention. This attention may look like asking yourself: what emotions do you need to feel in order to be hopeful and compassionate? How can my sadness be harnessed with wonder, hope and optimism? In reflecting on questions like these, we can unveil the gray areas in our nuanced lives. We can shift orientations of panic and scarcity to ones of preparedness, values, opportunity, abundance and spaciousness. More importantly, we can begin to regain a sense of purpose and empowerment.
Another tool is having curious compassionate conversations. Ray provides strategies for finding a middle ground when having conversations with people about topics on which they disagree. The premise is to have productive conversations with people who have differing ideologies or values with “curiosity, flexibility, and respect” (Ray, 2020, p. 99). Ray states that it is important to listen to the concerns of the individuals with the differing opinions because oftentimes their opposition is rooted in unmet need or unseen values. It is helpful to find truth and logic in their concerns so that we may have more compassionate conversations. Ray describes many different strategies to use when initiating these conversations.
The strategies that Ray discusses includes focusing locally when having conversations as this reduces polarization. Instead of talking to someone on a large scale, which can be overwhelming, talking locally can engage people as property owners, consumers, insurance policy holders, taxpayers, etc. (Ray, 2020 p. 100). To have these conversations we must find out what they care about which can be a starting point for curious conversations.
Another strategy that Ray discusses is reframing the issues during conversations. By reformulating the topic as a unifying issue that deals with the daily lives of the individual we can have more productive conversations, as opposed to looking at the issues from political sides. Ray also says that we must avoid polarizing language, as a lot of language has become a charged topic. People tend to have very visceral reactions to certain terms, so in order to have productive conversations we must shift away from charged language.
Ray also mentions the role of empathy in these conversations and whether it should have a role at all. Ray warns that maybe empathy is not always positive like it is perceived, especially in conversations that are happening across differences in ideology and values. Ray says that empathy can have an emotional appeal to “just get along” with others who might have differing values and ideologies for a sense of harmony (Ray, 2020, p. 108). However, Ray states that during these conversations we should not have to abandon all our emotions in order to have these conversations, “the point is not to love them or empathize with them, but to be generously curious about the feelings that motivate them…” (Ray, 2020, p. 108).
The last strategy that Ray touches on is compassion and self-preserving. This ties back to the practice of mindfulness that was mentioned above. By recognizing the feelings we experience when conversing with individuals who have differing ideologies and values, we can begin to understand and explore the motivations behind their ideologies and values to have curious compassionate conversations.
Ray, S. J. (2020). A Field Guide to Climate Anxiety (1st ed.). Berkeley: University of California Press
jessicaibes • January 25, 2021