Our emotional responses to climate change have everything to do with who we are, where we come from, what our experiences with nature have been, and how much power we have to address it.
Explaining how this works this week is my guest, climate emotions expert and feminist Nigerian youth activist, Jennifer Uchendu. As Jennifer describes, our respective experiences of climate anxiety depend on how much agency we feel in doing anything about climate change, what our definition of “success” looks like, whether we feel seen and heard, and whether we have the capacity to perceive and honor our deep connection with the more-than-human world. Jennifer invites us to see that solidarity built on the shared emotions of care and commitment to repairing relationships (especially across generations) is not only possible, it is already happening.
Shownotes
- Uchendu’s website
- SustyVibes, Jennifer’s first organization
- The Eco-Anxiety Africa Project (TEAP), Jennifer’s current big project
- Yes! Magazine piece, “Is it time to abandon the term ‘climate anxiety’?”
- Rosanna Xia’s LA Times piece, “To Fix Climate Anxiety, We Have to Fix Individualism”
- Charles Ogunbode’s research on the global prevalence of climate anxiety
- The Lancet 2021 piece on the global prevalence of youth climate anxiety
- The COP 30 Belém Health Action Plan
Transcription
UCHENDU:
I'm looking at more ways to repair our relationship not just with nature, but with each other, right? We got here because of a lack of empathy, a crisis of care, as you know, is often being called. And so perhaps our Eco-emotions and these conversations can help us come to the table and talk about our differences and usher a way forward. That for me, is how I've started to look at it.
RAY:
Welcome to Climate Magic, where we talk about the relationship between climate change and our hearts and minds. I'm Sarah Jaquette Ray, a professor at Cal Poly Humboldt and fellow climate-despairing human. Today on Climate Magic, I speak with Nigerian youth activist Jennifer Uchendu. Jennifer is founder of Susty Vibes, a youth-led organization advancing sustainability advocacy and implementation across Africa.
Susty Vibes started as an educational blog simplifying sustainability for young Nigerians. Recognizing the power of pop culture and activism, Jennifer transformed it into a vibrant youth-led movement using creative mediums—music, dance, art, and community events and parties—to drive sustainable action. Today, Susty Vibes is at the forefront of youth-driven sustainability research and design in Nigeria, bringing together passionate volunteers to to make climate advocacy impactful and inclusive.
Jennifer's work with SustyVibes led her to recognize the important role of emotions in sustaining environmental advocacy, including her own. In response to this, in 2022, she launched The Eco Anxiety Africa Project (or TEAP), an initiative dedicated to understanding and addressing eco-anxiety across African populations. TEAP attempts to shed light on the emotional and psychological impacts of climate change and advocates for mental health concerns as a key part of any climate conversations that are happening in Africa and beyond.
In 2023, Jennifer was named to the BBC 100 Women list for her work at the intersection of climate change and mental health. She’s also a 2023 Omega Resilience Fellow, a 2022 UCL impact scholar, 2021 Ashoka Fellow, a 2018 Mandela Washington Fellow and a 2018 Bill and Melinda Gates goalkeeper.
I have been observing and collaborating with Jennifer over the years, and I'm really struck by the clarity of her voice, her passion and her mission.
I wanted to talk to her as an example of the climate generation, but with specifically a Nigerian and feminist perspective, since young women of color in places like Nigeria are the most affected by climate change now, not just sometime in the future. I also admire Jennifer's attention to mental health, and wanted her to help us flesh out the climate emotions of frontline identities.
In a fantastic Yes! Magazine interview with Jennifer, which I'll link in the show notes, she described moving from Nigeria to England to study, and being stunned by the different emotional lexicon and experiences her peers were having with climate change. She heard her peers in England talk about guilt, whereas Jennifer mostly felt anger.
If the term climate anxiety can mean anything from anger to guilt, Jennifer started to wonder, does the term lose its utility? This is why that article's title is provocatively called, “Is it time to abandon the term climate anxiety?”
In that essay, she called for a more nuanced discussion of climate emotions that would not just include but center more marginalized voices. Climate anxiety often doesn't capture the larger context of what's going on and sometimes even deflects attention away from tackling those structural sources of oppression and extraction.
Focusing on the climate as the source of anxiety can also make it harder to imagine how you dismantle those broader social structures and heal those histories in the first place, and can have the downside of locating the problem in the individual rather than in those structures and histories.
In this interview for Climate Magic, Jennifer and I talk about all of this, we delve into her own moments of peak eco anxiety, grief and overwhelm, and how it led her to working on the role of emotions in climate action in the first place, we talk about the ways that different communities relationships with the environment are so shaped by their unique histories of oppression and their relationship to power and access to power, which in turn shapes their emotional response to climate change and environmental protection. So climate emotions here are really steeped in relationships to power.
We talk about anger and grief and how we make a daily practice of building a new world based on care and resilience.
We dip into intergenerational healing and the need for building relationships between young people and their elders and what that might look like.
Jennifer just moved to Baltimore to continue her studies on climate change and mental health, and is also a new-ish mother. Her 17 month old son was chattering in the background. Probably had something to say about the future of climate emotions and his generation. We do chat about the experience of motherhood and how it shaped her climate emotions.
Are you ready to hear Nigerian youth climate activist Jennifer agendas take on climate action and mental health? Let's dive in.
Welcome to the show, Jennifer.
UCHENDU:
Thank you, Sarah. Such a pleasure to be here.
RAY:
Just easing into this a bit. You’re someone I think of as having more “climate magic” which is thame of this show, than most people on the planet combined, so let’s see if we can tap some of that, amplify that, and share some of that out. Let's start a little bit by just maybe sharing a little bit about your story where, how did you even come to thinking about things like climate emotions, climate justice. I know you have in 2016 you started up just originally a blog on called zesty vibe that then turned into an organization, and now you've got the Eco anxiety Africa project going on so you know what how did you get there and what are you doing? How did that all come together for you?
UCHENDU:
Absolutely and again. Thank you so much for this invitation. Susty Vibes, which was a blog at the time I started, was really me trying to get into the world of sustainability and environmental protection from a young person's point of view. My first degree was in biochemistry, and I had struggled at the time to find work, and, you know, employment opportunities in the sustainability space. And, you know, this was a couple of years ago.
I'm from Nigeria, you know, we're constantly having to catch up right with these big topics like sustainability. And I remember just really wanting, you know, a job that just helps me protect the environment. And over time, I've had to reflect on why this was important to me, and I've, you know, been able to come back to that place of just looking after my inner child, and that child I really wanted to protect the mango tree when, you know, I was about eight years old, and, you know, I watched the mango tree being cut off, just unfairly and unnecessarily.
And I think it has always been in me to want to speak for the environment, you know, and also women at the same time. And so that's why I identify as an ecofeminist, and someone who does work for the environment and Susty Vibes was me creating a space for myself and for other young people in Nigeria to do sustainability work on our own terms.
And so when we started Susty Vibes, almost 10 years ago, it's hard to imagine it's been, you know, 10 years when we started, we were hosting parties for sustainability. We'll call it Susty party. And you know, we come together as young people play games, but we'd also talk about climate change. We'd also talk about you know the next events we wanted to do on what projects would, you know, feel very few rights for us, we'll talk about tree planting campaigns, reaching out to ex, organization, and just really doing good for the environment. It made us feel extremely happy that we're able to do one of them. And it kind of evolved, right?
It was a blog I started, you know, that then became this organization, and now we're here, kind of running multiple sustainability projects across, you know, different parts of Nigeria and now Africa. And it's just really exciting.
And then three years ago, I started something called The Eco Anxiety Africa project, which is what I'm now kind of known for, my work on climate emotions, eco emotions, and that came because of all of the work we're doing at Susty Vibes. As great as it was, we still felt extremely overwhelmed and stressed, because, again, as you know, climate change is so big, it's so complex, and its impacts are distributed unfairly.
So in our part of the world, when we think about climate change and environmental issues, we're thinking, Do we have a fighting chance? Can we thrive in this part of the world? What does our future look like? And then what we found, and we still have, is a lot of young people in Nigeria, many parts of Africa, are looking to escape. They're looking for a climate haven, but they're just looking for places where they can thrive and climate change as we know is a multiplier, so wherever there exists and you know, existing socio economic issues, climate change only makes things worse.
And if we're in the part of the world where you know, we're being hit the hardest, you can imagine how a lot of young people feel. And then here came Susty Vibes, this organization, making a lot of, you know, good trouble, as it were, on sustainability, doing activist and climate projects.
But it seemed like the more we knew about the issue, the more frightened we became, because it just seemed like our trees are not going to save us. You know, advocacy won't save us this. There's just so much that needs to be done. And I think that pressure and that weight started to, we started to feel it. And I myself as founder, you know, starting with this bright vision that we can do this work on our terms and young people, I started to feel extremely overwhelmed and discouraged at the same time.
And I guess I was fortunate to move to the UK at the time for my master's. And in that moment, you know, I attended COP, and I know we'll talk about COP in a bit. And I think COP for me was that space where I felt the most frightened about the work that we did. You know, as people working on climate change issues, because I was like, they don't even think this is a big problem. You know, everyone is just going around in their fancy suits. I know I felt extremely stressed at COP. I often call it my peak eco anxiety moment, because I would go back to my room and it was my first COP, you know, at the time was cry.
I would cry because A) I have chosen a career path that literally has no no hope. You know, I didn't know what success then looked like, because it just seemed like the future was bleak. And then two, I would cry because I just didn't know a way out of it because it's like what do I do now, do I look for a different career path. But what then happens to the sufferings that will continue as a result?
And it was in that sort of dilemma and struggle that I decided to explore these feelings a bit more deeply, and so I changed my final thesis topic to look at climate emotions, eco emotions. I really wanted to see, let me find out why I feel this way. Why do I feel this stressed, but yet still, you know, passionate and wanting to continue this work in some way. And how can this knowledge or insight help people back home, people within the Susty Vibes community, a lot of us who are doing this work, how can knowing about how deeply this affects us on a psychological level? What can that do for us, really, and just validating the emotions.
And, yeah, so I completed my thesis. And my thesis, I worked with climate activists in Brighton, which was where I went to school, and I spoke to them about, you know, climate anxiety, eco- anxiety, and sort of compared my experience with theirs. And you know, that was how I found your book, you know, it was like, Oh my God, you know, she's saying something that is really exciting here. And a lot of my work has been exploring the African experience of eco anxiety, as I like to call it, climate emotions, and looking at not just the differences, but what it means for us and how it can help us with climate adaptation, because that is really important. The impacts are already here, you know, it will take such a long time for mitigation to catch up, but there's already loss and damage that has been done. So how do we adapt, particularly as young people, and how do we still have the willpower to keep showing up.
And that has been my work. In the last three years, I have poured out a lot of myself, a lot of my time, into digging and understanding this experience of eco anxiety, climate emotions, and not just climate change, I like to always point out, but is the fact that our idea of the environment in Africa, and I think the global majority, is it's not just about the mountains and the trees. This is our life. This is our future. Everything that we do is tied around our food, our land and our relationship with nature.
And so if you know, if there's some sort of disruption, and we're seeing the impacts, you know, directly, then it does have an impact on how we think of our identity and our place in the world. And that has been, you know, the work that I've done, quite a long intro.
Ray:
I just, I mean, I'm like, I'm just so, riding with you and loving multiple threads. You talked about this reckoning at COP 25 where you cried every night just because you thought, I'm in this. The more I learn about this, the more I realize there's no hope. You talked about how your peers back at home who are working with us, maybe needed to think differently about what success would look like because what you went into it thinking success would look like it turns out not going to happen. So, got to retool that.
And I think, you know, I'd love to hear more about, you know, in your work with the Eco anxiety Africa Project, are you thinking about success looking quite different, and it's more, maybe more in this category of adaptation, instead of mitigation, like, you know, just to flesh out for anybody who's a listener who doesn't understand that language, it's kind of jargon inside of the climate space mitigation. Climate mitigation is about stopping emissions from going into the atmosphere that then kicks off all these problems. So how do we reduce emissions?
Versus adaptation, which is there's a certain amount that's already baked in that we're going to have to figure out how to live with. So we have to do a lot of you know, thinking about how we're going to adapt to the changes that are coming or already here. And so, you know, shifting sounded like you sort of shifted for your mental health and for the emotions of your peers and your co workers. You sort of had to shift away from thinking that success was about mitigation to success being more about adaptation as a way to kind of keep your willpower going. I'm just kind of pulling some of the threads of what you you said.
Uchendu:
Yeah, yeah. And I think at the heart of it, and more importantly, was rethinking what resilience then look like? And I think that has been our work in recent times. You know, adaptation, you know about coping, mitigation, about the solutions, you know, and all of the different things we need to do to stop. But I think resilience brings those two sort of subsets together, because we need the will power to keep thinking about solutions. We need to go back to our elders, for example, and look at the ways that they have, you know, built their resilience, and for us, resilience, helps us, it's that sort of very cool way we're thinking of both the mitigation and adaptation.
But we're also reflecting on what the future holds. What does it look like, you know, in a world that is climate changing, you know, if I can put that here, and how do we exist in that world? How do we remain resilient, still doing good for, you know, for our relationship with the environment and are still making sense of, you know, this human experience that, for me is, you know, where we are, we are right now.
So it's that entire spectrum, because we can't remove ourselves from the environment. It's our life support system. So we're here now. A lot of things are not going great, but things can still coexist in terms of things going great at the same time. So how can we build resilience? How can we do both and how can we be wise and optimistic at the same time, you know, and support ourselves, support each other. Because, again, as you know, the climate crisis is happening. There's the broader polycrisis that when you dig deep, dig deep, it's because we stopped caring, you know, and I've been thinking about that a lot, that sort of crisis of care. So, in fighting or in doing work, you know, for eco anxiety and climate anxiety. We do not need to stop caring, because that care is important right?
That care is necessary. It's that care that would drive what resilience will look like. You know, moving forward, because we still need mitigation. We still need brilliant solutions and thinkers, you know, to think about how to get us out of this mess. But we are in the mess already, so we need to adapt. And we need to adapt, you know, optimistically and and hopefully.
So that's kind of where we are right now, bringing back here into the conversation and looking at it as a human experience, that the climate crisis is not just about the environment, it's about us. It's about our health. It's about our food. It's about life as we know it, as it is so existing in a changing climate means that we then need to be resilient, you know, and rethinking what resilience look like, not just climate resilience as it's always called to mean something different but this is life, resilience, if I can you know, call it yeah so this is about holding space to grieve when we need to holding space to have joy. Holding space to think about solidarity, holding space to have conversations, to validate these emotions, but to still rest, to still come back and do the work that needs to be done. Yeah. So TEAP has taught me how we need to do this. You know, how we need to think of other systems and ways of being, and yeah, and kind of rejects the current systems that we have now.
RAY:
And yeah, and kind of rejects the current systems that we have now. Yeah, yeah. I love that you bring in care and resilience as kind of more useful frames than mitigation and adaptation for you. And it has that prioritizing the lens of, what is the inner what are the inner skills I'm going to need, and what the people who are doing mitigation, the people doing adaptation, they're all going to need? This inner resolve, this inner resourceness, and for the long haul, right?
And you mentioned it in your first response about your story, and you just sort of mentioned it again. You prefer the term eco anxiety over climate anxiety. And I also noticed that in that beautiful interview in an LA Times essay with Rosanna Xia, who I will put in the show notes, this beautiful article that you talked about how your emotions are connected to the environment, and you just talked about the mango tree of your eight year old self, which was so moving to here you challenge to readers to think about what the environment even is.
And you sort of bring in this perspective of, like you just said, the environment is not just the mountains and the trees out there, you know, from the perspective of somebody who recognizes that as sort of a deep interconnection with the more than human world, this is not, you know, it's not just something about like climate change and the abstract. I'm curious. You've thought a lot about this, but I do have a question for you about how a person's definition of the environment might shape their emotional responses to its degradation or to its protection, like, for example, a rural person might have different environmental emotions than an urban persons. Or somebody who lives off the land more closely, might have a different set of emotions.
You know, there's this kind of critique that you put back in several spaces that I've read where you sort of say, you know, climate anxiety might just not be the best term to capture somebody who has this much more intimate relationship with the environment, or a different definition of the environment than, let's say, a kind of privileged person in the US who thinks of the environment as maybe Yosemite or you know an Ansel Adams photograph, or something like distant and far away you know so something much more intimate, if the environment and its degradation is much more intimate to you. Do you or are different emotions happening or different, are there better terms than climate anxiety?
Uchendu:
Absolutely. And I mean, I think you've also kind of explained it really nicely. One example I always think of when I started this work, when I was working on my thesis, I thought about, you know, this concept of anger, guilt and shame, you know, as we know it's all within the spectrum of eco anxiety. And you know, eco emotions and I remembered when I did some work in Ogoni, the Niger Delta, and I met with young people there. And in meeting with them, I kind of came face to face with a different level of emotional attachment, as it were, regarding land and regarding identity. These young people were angry. You know, I thought I was angry about this war, but they were angry because they had their homes literally marked as unhabitable, you know. They have their soil and their fish, you know, and their and their entire identity wrapped in oil and degradation and soot and all of that, and that comes with a sort of dent, right, because this is now who you are, right?
You're from the Niger Delta. This is your village. This is who your people are known to be. You're known to be people who have suffered from, you know, exploitation of the environment. And that came with a sense of anger, and he then made me think that, well, their anger is justified, because I would never be able to relate to why they feel so strongly about this. This is where they come from. This is where they call home. This is where they call land and is no longer habitable.
And then I juxtaposed that experience with the young people in Brighton that I spoke to, and they talked about feeling extremely guilty and shameful. You know about the climate crisis, and you know they talked about how, upon realizing that their histories are tied with colonization, it's difficult not to feel guilty and ashamed.
And I looked at them and I'm like, I cannot relate to what you're talking about. And so I think at every point in time, it's our relationship with the environment. It's about power or the lack of it as it were. Those things help us, or they frame, you know, what our emotional response would be or not be as it were.
And so when I think of climate deniers, and I think, well, this is also a response, you know,, you've created this world to not think about where your food comes from, or where your oxygen comes from, or the entire process of, you know, life support and nature and how we come into existence. And you decided not to think about it, and, you know, you're in denial, as it were, that itself is a response. That is how I've, you know, I'm learning to think about these issues, but definitely our emotional response, how we cope, you know, how we think of adaptation and how eventually hope would look like and resilience will look like, will ultimately determine, you know, will ultimately be based on our relationship you know with our environment.
Ray:
Yeah, I can't I'm just like, I'm my I have a goosebumps listening to you talk, because you're saying things that I had never thought of in those ways before. And I'm so it's just, I can't wait to kind of chew on these, this interview for some time is just like, yes, yes. I'm over here going yes. It makes this question I'm about to ask you sort of sound a little bit like a little bit of a red herring question, but I'll be interested to see where you run with this, because your example about the youth that are angry, kind of gets to it.
The question I have for you is, is climate anxiety a global phenomenon? Do young people in Nigeria feel the same about climate change as say, a student in my environmental studies class in Northern California? And you've answered this question already quite a bit, but I'm sort of, you know, there are a lot of studies that are coming out, I know you're familiar with them, about the prevalence of climate anxiety around the world. You are very familiar with the 2021 Lancet study, about 10,000 young people being studied all over the world. I know you're familiar with Charles Ogunbode’s work about 32 different countries, climate anxiety prevalence. Lots of people are kind of, you know, going around saying, Hey, this is not just a phenomenon in the Global North, this is really prevalent everywhere.
I'm sort of curious what you see as the pros and cons of proving that climate anxiety exists everywhere, versus thinking about the nuances like you've just been beautifully described, is there pros and cons to seeing all young people, or that, not even necessarily young people, but that there's this, like shared global response to this climate crisis that then creates some sort of conditions for organizing together across the world. Or is there, you know, the need to really attend, as you so beautifully, just done to the nuances in different places, very much depending on people's own experiences with environmental issues and colonization and power as you beautifully put it.
Uchendu:
Yeah, yeah, great question. I do think for the longest, issues around you know, climate emotions, eco emotions, they're not things that you know you would relate in Africa, because, again, mental health is still, you know, not as mainstream as you have in the West.
And so that then begs the question of, should we be talking about this? I think it's important to establish that this is something that we're all experiencing. And as with climate change, right? We're in the same storm, but in different boats, right? And so our anxiety or emotional response doesn't look the same, rightly, so, right? Just because of the buffer nets.
You know, I was on a panel a few days ago, and, you know, people were talking about, you know, insurance after flooding. And I was like, Oh, my God, this is so fancy. People back home do not know that there's, you know, anything like this. And you know, in thinking about that, it doesn't mean I then erase the fact that some people may never have access to, you know, this insurance, as it were, in, you know, in the West, but it also means that I bring to for the fact that we do not even have access to these conversations, we don't have access to some of the safety nets and that that sort of defines emotional response, because we see the injustice of the problem.
And so the climate injustice, as it were, sort of, you know, hovers around our experiences, you know, of climate anxiety, our climate fear, our climate worry, is that injustice is the fact that even if we were to talk about this, you know, impact in the same way, you Know, it would just not be the same thing, because your worry is different from my worry, and it's just the unfortunate reality.
But I do think it's important that we make space to validate the emotions, wherever it's coming from, and because it then helps us move away from the blame game, I think. And I got into this work in a lot of blame. There was a lot of blame game, oh, they did this, and we did not do that, you know. They did that. They should pay, you know, and all of that.
And then I think we need to then move into this idea of solidarity and interdependence and working together, because there's a lot of good that can happen when we work together. When I'm in a space and I listen to someone you know from Brighton, or you know from the US, tell me about their guilt and their shame. I may not be able to relate with that, and I tell them about my anger and my overwhelm and my powerlessness, they may not be able to relate to that, but we can come out of those conversation feeling heard and listen and it helps us wake up the next day so I think it's important. I'm looking at more ways to repair our relationship, not just with nature, but with each other, right?
Because, again, I talked about we got here because a lack of empathy, a crisis of care, as you know, is often being called. And so perhaps our Eco emotions and these conversations can help us come to the table and talk about our differences and usher a way forward that, for me, is how I've started to look at it right.
RAY:
Yeah, I love that there's there's, you just said about the blame game. And I think that's so beautiful. Because part of the reason why people, you know, on a sort of, like, maybe excessively sophisticated level, talk about the word climate change itself has the effect of kind of side- stepping blame, you know, like, Oh, it's just the climate changing. It's not any one particular oil executive who made some poor decisions that maybe we want to hold them accountable, you know.
And you say, you know, the sort of like, there was some article you were quoted. I think it was a Yes! Magazine, and I'll put it in the show notes, where, you know, you were talking, you were interviewed. And also Glenn Albrecht was interviewed as somebody I've mentioned on this podcast a few times about this sort of climate anxiety is not the right word, because it's just that it's all wrapped up and in, oppression, in general.
And this sort of, you know, calling it climate anxiety, has a potential effect of avoiding its relationship to these colonial systems that caused it in the first place, and maybe even sidestepping the blame, right? And so you're saying, Yeah, I'm not too I'm not too worried about sidestepping the blame. We, there's so just so much we can do together. And the focus on repair and care are where you are finding the resilience yourself to keep doing this work. Am I understanding that right?
Uchendu:
Absolutely, and that, and that is because the people, and you know, there's research back in that, right, the people we need to be having conversations with, you know, as activists, or, you know, the people making the decisions of the government. You know, the fossil fuel, you know, exploiters and all and they themselves, need to come to that realization.
And I'm realizing that in having conversations that are in having conversations that look towards repair and healing, maybe we can get there. But I don't think it has been useful to have a conversation with you, for example, and say, just because you're from the US, then you should sit with your guilt, you know, and we should be on a blame game, sort of debate and antagonize. So I guess it's directing the anger to who needs to hear it. And what do we do with that anger? Can they go back home and rethink some of their conversations.
For me, when I think of what success looks like, for example, with the work we do at tip is that someone comes into our space and you know, whether it's a cafe or whatever event we do, and when they think of the role, the jobs that they do, they think more of I would take a job that would, you know, exploit the environment. I won't be part of the polluting, you know, the polluters, because at the end of the day, these are choices that we make, and we make them for different reasons.
And so we need to go back to that sort of psychological shifts. At what point do people decide that they are going to negotiate, you know, for fossil fuel for example, they're going to negotiate to keep damaging the environment. Where did that disconnect come from? And how do we repair that disconnect? I think that might be a, you know, and I haven't always been here, right? I've always, I'm an activist, right? I've always been very angry, and I'm thinking that because I'm not so exhausted, because we've come into this poly crisis, where it's not just the climate crisis. There's a health problem, you know, there's, you know, economic inflation, there's wars, and we just don't care anymore. And so how do we reframe and use all of the emotions all of this pent up anger, how can we use it for good and how can he help. Basically.
RAY:
Yeah, I love that you just described your own kind of, what does success look like? And how to, you're not saying, let's not be angry anymore. We're gonna give up on anger to repair and just go kumbaya into the sunset with all the fossil fuel executives. You're saying, you know, let's have some of that anger help channel to make them make different decisions. And it's a little bit,, it's like, super strategic, and it has an emotional intelligence and a wisdom to it that comes from your years of really thinking through this, and your experience of trying to go down different paths with your different emotions and and it not really working for you, you know. So I really just, I love listening to you talk about how you were never… You were always here.
Uchendu: It's taken some work.
Ray:
Yeah, so I was going to ask you, you know you're, you're doing this work, what is, what are your practices? And also, maybe it's connected, or maybe you prefer this question, because sometimes that question of what are your practices is very intimate, so I'll let you take it if you want or not as you desire, but what do young people need in this polycrisis you're you know, what do they need?
And translate that experience to us, either from, you know what you're learning from TEAP, or you know what you're planning to do, maybe in the next phase of your career, because you're on the precipice of another, another phase, right? Absolutely.
Uchendu:
And that's such a big question, what young people need, and I think at the hack of it is to be listened to, because a lot of times. And it's interesting, because I've done the work at Susty Vibes for almost 10 years. And sometimes when we go into spaces, or before we start projects, we kind of already assume you know if we do this and we do that, they would come you know they would love it they would engage, but we're learning, and even you know I was having conversations with folks at the Climate Psychiatry Alliance– this is something that we're seeing everywhere.
We don't have the answers, no matter how good-intentioned we can be. And so we need to ask, we need to listen. And you know, it's really hard to listen to people, because it can be, can be uncomfortable, especially with young people, and the more aware they are, the more they're willing to kind of talk about everything. And you know, the delivery might not be as we like, but I think it's important to listen in listening we then kind of hear things, and we can guide right with whatever experience that we have. I think young people ultimately need to be listened to, and they need to be validated, right? Their emotions need to be validated. Their experiences need to be validated, right? And I'm learning especially from TEAP because sometimes people come in and, you know, they're like, Oh, they're so fearful. They can't do this, they can't do that.
But in more conversations, you realize that they're so fearful because they just can't think of the possibility of taking the next step. Whereas the space that we make, you know, create some form of enablement, and we say, Oh, we can do this. We can do that. You have this person to talk to. Well, you can actually think of this solution. You can get on this campaign. You can start something.
And so creating space to listen has been useful. And one thing that has been very interesting in our work, and I did this work with Britt Wray and, you know, Sally Weintraub, and we worked with elders across Nigeria, the UK, and also in the New Orleans, in the US and in Nigeria, this entire project was really to look at the roles elders come play in having conversations around climate distress and all of the worry that you know, young people are experiencing, and in Nigeria, we had our elders who were part of this project apologize and admit that they were not bold enough, they were not courageous enough. And for me, that was extremely powerful, and it was powerful for all of the young people there to hear our elders, because culturally, that's not something you see, you know in Africa, elders admitting, you know that they didn't do enough that they could have pushed more for a more livable and better future for us, and admitting that, you know, they are kind of implicit in in how we got here, it was extremely powerful.
So I think for me, things like that, right young people, being listened to our elders, admitting guilt and apologizing have been very powerful. You know, as we think of what resilience looks like moving forward. Yep.
Ray:
I love that. I love this kind of intergenerational communication thing you're talking about and and you also said about learning from our elders about their resilience earlier in the conversation. You said something along those lines. So on the one hand, there's this kind of contrition about how they participated or were complicit in the future they're handing over to their kids, and sort of seeing that regret or seeing that grief in our elders and the healing it might have for young people, but also passing on of knowledge and wisdom about how maybe we used to do things that are more sustainable, or practices that we have to keep resilience in the face of difficulty and oppression. You know that intergenerational wisdom exchange, too, feels like there's a little bit of apologizing and sharing wisdom and all kinds of stuff that could happen, that so much healing could happen with that relationship with elders.
So it seems to me like the move in your work with the Eco Anxiety Africa project is if one dimension of it is connection to elders, it seems like something we could really take a page from in youth movement stuff in the US too, much more, because in the US. There's such a kind of fetish of youth. And, and at least a kind of culture I was raised in was very much like, once you reach a certain age, you're you get put on a shelf somewhere, and you don't have any salience or relevance to the world anymore and and I think I really need to unlearn that, and we're in a cultural moment of needing to unlearn that.
So thank you for that reminder. I wanted to ask you about COP, you know, we're speaking right now as COP 30, which is the Conference of the Parties, is a big, the biggest and the only place where multilateral conversations about climate change happen? You know, you've described the way that a COP experienced in the past caused you to have some great moment, a peak moment of climate anxiety and grief. Do you find any emotional hope? Or what is your emotional relationship to COP at this moment? Do you feel like COP 30 in Brazil offers hope for all of us, or do you just put this aside and this you're in a different conversation, and you don't you're not even kind of thinking about that kind of multilateral scale of climate optimism?
Uchendu:
Sure. Great question. I think I'm very open minded. And, you know, I am on the lookout for I mean I kind of see it as a stock- taking COP, as it's where you know, where it's more of countries, saying this is what we're doing, you know and you know and all of that. B ut there's been some really good things come out so far for the health community in particular. So, for example, the Belem Action Plan, which has a lot, you know, around infrastructure and conversations about mental health in it.
So I think in some extent, we see that these spaces can create a lot of good if the actors are grounded. You know, the actors know the reality of the problems. And, you know, prior to COP, we're also involved in a bit of campaigning, trying to get the cup presidency to understand why it's important to have mental health conversations within, you know, these conversations within the Belem action plan.
And it's, it's nice to see that, and I think what the next step would look like is to have sort of finance, will power, and, you know, more traction come in line with all of these commitments. Because those good intention need a lot more research. They need a lot more infrastructure. They need a lot more support. And I think it was just yesterday, a couple of global philanthropists committed 300 million USD. That's great, but we need more and to think more, it means that intersection around planetary health that needs to come and become a bit more synced up. So we're looking at climate crisis as a health crisis as a people crisis and an existence crisis not just about some ordering that we've always done historically. And so, more people are coming together. Doctors are coming together and saying well we need to do something about this teachers are coming together, everyone is coming together. Teachers are coming together. Everyone is coming together.
And so I think, for me, ultimately, spaces like cop, what they can do is that in some near or distant future, we have, you know, conversations where people are saying, well, maybe less on war and more thinking of protecting the environment and all of the other things that oftentimes takes a lot of budgets, takes a lot of our attention, and we see that in protecting the environment, we're protecting ourselves, essentially.
So I'm very, very open minded. You know about COP I may not attend all the time, you know, I haven't been there in, I think, two, three years, but I'm looking forward to all of the you know, actions and results that come out of it.
RAY:
All right. Well, that's better than I expected. That gives me a little rush of good feelings. So thank you for that.
Yeah, I do feel, you know, I I have a lot of feelings about it, and I won't go totally down all these rabbit holes, but I have this feeling of cautious optimism too, because, in a funny way, the US backing out of it, there was a lot of worry about, is that going to cause everybody to kind of drop out? And it's funny how so many people have kind of stepped into that vacuum of leadership, and I do appreciate that.
So I was going to ask you, you're a mother and a climate activist, what future do you hope for and imagine for your child and I also want to make sure you have time to share what you're doing next and how people can support and learn more about your work, so I'll let you just run with that.
Uchendu:
Okay, sure.
I mean, I became a mom last year, and I think significantly, kind of changed my the way I see the work that I do, you know, as a climate activist, that someone stewarding, you know the planet as it were, and I've started to think more of what kind of future what kind of world am I going to live for my son. And so I think that's what brought me to this you know conversation about care and rest and slowing down, even I know we didn't talk a bit about that part.
As part of our work at TEAP we've said to look at, how do we encourage because I think the world has also gotten really fast, right? Everything has just gotten really fast. And the system of the world, and I think in you know, true labor and recovery and healing and that process, I saw how much stronger I was when I took time, took time to rest when I took time to you know kind of slow things down. And I've been thinking about how, how could that learning, you know, because that in itself, is a natural process, how could that learning be, you know, put back into the ways that we work, particularly as, you know, activists and advocates of slowing down of looking at repair and healing and of taking time to look out for each other and look out for ourselves.
And I think that's one thing for them mentally that, you know, being a mother has has done for me, basically, and in many ways, it has made me a bit, you know, extra consent, you know, about what we're doing and thinking, what approaches are we using, you know, to get things to work and and trying to think more of well, we need, we need, we need solutions. We need all hands on deck, and we need everybody to to have that sort of light bulb turned on in your head, right, that where we're we're not doing we're not doing ourselves any good if we deny the problem or ignore the problem. Unfortunately, I find myself, you know, in the US and in a place where sort of climate apathy and protecting the environment is at an all time low.
But I'm also seeing the rise of community, the rise of people saying, we can still do this, and I think that's useful. That's useful for the world that we live in. So I'm kind of holding space, kind of grieving everything that's happening, but also staying hopeful. You know, staying hopeful that we can bet a new world, as it's where a world that cares a bit more, a world that is more attentive to what really matters, and a world that looks at, you know, the fight towards protecting the environment as a fight towards, you know, our own sanity on our own, well being,
Uultimately.
Ray:
oh my gosh. Thank you so much, Jennifer, you leave me with a very filled cup and heart. Thank you so much for all the work you're doing. As I'm listening to you. I'm thinking, how can it be otherwise? How can it be otherwise that we're not birthing this world that cares more? When you are in your life, are practicing it every day that you're parenting, every day that you're an activist, and all the study that you do and all the sharing you do, and then all the people out there are doing that same thing, like you said, community is kind of having a rebirth, you know, and that that gives you a lot of hope. So thank you so much for your time. Jennifer, I'll follow up with an email, but I'm just so, so grateful for everything you're doing. Thank you.
Uchendu:
Thank you for having me on Climate Magic. Thank you so much. Take care.
Ray:
That was my conversation with Jennifer Uchendu. I wanted to spend a few minutes now to unpack an aspect from this conversation that really got me thinking.
Jennifer brought up the topic of intergenerational repair and collaboration, which is a topic I care a lot about. It's pretty new to me, but I think it deserves a little closer attention.
There's a lot of division between generations. This can be really exemplified when youth activists from Australia famously asked older generations to step aside on climate. They had a comment that then turned into a meme, “okay, Boomer.”
This dismissal of boomers is really understandable. Young people's frustration with older generations is really based on the sense that older people have benefited immensely from the extraction of fossil fuels, yet they won't have to suffer the climatic consequences of their consumption.
They're the wealthiest generation. They're living longer. They have high quality of lives in general. They have retirement accounts, they have property. They build wealth off the winds of generations that came before. They have better health outcomes. The list goes on.
Young people are not really jealous. They just feel that the privileges of older generations were selfishly gained at the expense of generations that will come after older folks often didn't even know the harms they were doing and maybe weren't bold enough in their resistance to the ecological harms of extraction and economic growth.
Then, to add insult to injury, those same older folks, upon coming to terms with how bad things have gotten, often also say that they are counting on young people to fix the problems, that young people are their only hope. I cannot tell you how many older people have fallen apart in tears over their grief about the planet we’re handing over to our children and grandchildren. This pain is so legitimate. I, too, can easily cry at the thought. And also, this can be felt by younger generations as a sign that doom is in fact inevitable, that even their elders are giving up hope, and not taking responsibility for the mess. They’re stepping out of it and asking younger people to fix the problems they are passing along. This insult seems like it comes in the form of a compliment– “you give me hope, oh young person”-- and can therefore feel all the more painful– at least, that is how my students and the youth activists I interview have explained it to me.
So this is where the repair comes in, which Jennifer discussed so beautifully. These same older folks, who are handing over a much depleted planet, also have incredible wisdom to transmit. They have gone through their own social movements, suffering, and battles. They too have faced existential threats and had to figure out how to thrive in perilous times. What can our elders teach us?
The division between generations ultimately does a disservice to all the generations, and the planet. Some of us might be tempted to dismiss the older folks in our lives as out of touch and irrelevant to our current crises– we may even see them as the cause of it. But might they have cultivated practices of resilience and collective solidarity that we can learn from? What wisdom did they acquire over their lifetimes that might help us in ours? And even further, what do our ancestors have to offer us? Which of their projects do we want to help the world heal from, and how can we start that work by repairing our relationships with them? Which of their projects do we want to carry forward?
The flip side of this is that older folks often dismiss younger people as unnecessarily worked up about nothing. That they lack grit, are snowflakes, excessively sensitive, or naively idealistic. I’ve heard many older people ask “how are the current challenges any different than the challenges my generation faced?” Do young people have a unique claim on feeling existentially threatened by climate change, or are they just being initiated into a stage of lost innocence that every generation undergoes?
As Jennifer pointed out, instead of being patronized and dismissed as overly idealistic or sensitive, young people need to be listened to, by which I think she means that their worries should be validated. They are facing unique threats. The breakdown of the biosphere is frightening in an existential way. It’s no wonder so many younger people don’t want to bring kids into this world and think all of humanity is doomed, as research on Gen Z’s feelings about climate change has shown. This is objectively a terrifying time to be coming of age. Can older generations bear witness, validate, and help younger folks see their own power and role in bringing about a better future? Can they help younger people translate that terror into agency, without putting pressure on them to solve all the problems alone?
So, the empathy gap between generations goes both ways, and represents yet another kind of division that undermines our collective effort to heal the earth.
This issue of intergenerational healing is ancient wisdom, it’s not new news. Collectivist societies, indigenous communities, and cultures where taking care of elders is built in, not outsourced to the state or privatized for the accumulation of capital by others, know the benefits of making sure elders and young people spend time together.
And the other generations we spend time with needn’t necessarily be biological family. Our elders can be related, or not. Organizations seeking to rebuild these connections and repair this empathy gap are working in the area of Intergenerational Housing, for example, which offers the cobenefit of addressing the social isolation of both younger and older generations, as well as the housing crisis. The concept of the ‘Multigenerational campus” is a co-living program that pairs college students, who are looking for short-term housing, with elders who want to share their space with them.
Do you experience this generational divide? What can you do to help heal this rift between generations? Are you an older person trying to support younger folks? Are you a younger person feeling infuriated by the selfishness of older generations? What are some of the gifts we can receive from each other to help heal these wounds? What are some of the ways you can build relationships across generations in your life?
I hope you enjoyed this conversation about climate anxiety, youth activists in Nigeria, and intergenerational healing with my guest this week, Jennifer Uchendu. You can find this and more episodes of Climate Magic, as well as shownotes, at KHSU.org. Follow us on instagram and Linkedin, and submit a review of Climate Magic, wherever you find your podcasts. I’m Sarah Jaquette Ray, and thanks for listening to Climate Magic.
