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
