021: Britt Wray on the age of climate anxiety

Host Laura England welcomes Dr. Britt Wray, a researcher and storyteller focused on the mental health impacts of climate change. Dr. Wray, the director of the Circle program at Stanford Psychiatry, explores the intersection of climate science, psychology, and communication. Dr. Wray shares her journey navigating interdisciplinary fields, including conservation biology, science communication, and the ethics of synthetic biology. She highlights the importance of storytelling in climate communication, emphasizing the need to connect emotionally with audiences to inspire collective action. Dr. Wray also discusses her work with the Good Energy Project, which seeks to integrate climate narratives into Hollywood storytelling to raise awareness and reflect the pervasive impact of climate change on our lives.

 

Laura

Dr. Britt Wray is a groundbreaking researcher and storyteller, and a growing voice around the mental health effects of climate change. She's the director of Circle, community minded interventions for resilience, climate leadership, and emotional well-being at Stanford Psychiatry in the Stanford School of Medicine. Dr. Wray’s acclaimed book, Generation Dread, about finding purpose during the climate crisis is an honest, profoundly compelling exploration of our climate related stresses. Dr. Wray brilliantly weaves scientific research and evidence with personal lived experience to make the case for embracing our climate emotions, especially the difficult ones we'd prefer to ignore. She reveals how the very grief that pains us can also mobilize and transform us, and how emphasizing support and community will help us protect our planet and its inhabitants. She's the creator of the weekly climate newsletter, Gen Dread, about staying sane in the climate crisis. A highly in-demand speaker, she's given talks at TED and the World Economic Forum alongside the likes of Jane Goodall and Ban Ki-moon, a prolific science communicator. She has hosted several podcasts, radio and TV programs with the BBC, NPR, and CBC, and is an advisor to the Good Energy Project for Climate Storytelling and the Climate Mental Health Network. She has a PhD in Science communication from the University of Copenhagen, and has been recognized with numerous awards for her work. Britt is an incredible climate thinker and doer, and we're really thrilled to have a conversation with her today. Welcome, Britt.

Britt Wray

Hi Laura, thanks. So good to be with you.

Laura

We're so thrilled to have you here at App State and really enjoyed your conversation. Your talk last night on our campus. So I just shared your professional bio, and we'd love for you to fill in a little bit of the in-between spaces by telling us a little bit more about who you are as a person.

Britt Wray

Oh, sure. Well, thank you so much for having me. And who I am as a person. Well, I would say I am a bit of an interdisciplinary beast. It has always been hard to explain what I do and how I got there, because it was not at all a linear path. And so while my early days were spent in biology, studying conservation biology, learning about the sixth mass extinction in my studies, which is what really I think awoke me to feeling and not only thinking about the planetary health crisis that we’re in. My mind was lit ablaze by David Attenborough and his BBC nature documentaries when I was an undergrad biology student, and I realized that, oh wow, I can actually commit myself to sharing and weaving narratives about science and the natural world and sharing them with others in order to hopefully galvanize some interests from those who don't think of themselves as quote unquote science people. And I don't have to necessarily spend my life in the field or in the lab doing the the scientific exploration primarily. And that led me to get into radio and podcasting. And then I had many years working at public broadcasters like the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, the BBC and so on. And, my big passion was science, documentary, science, storytelling. Somewhere along the way, I ended up going to art school, studying interdisciplinary collaborations between synthetic biologists and artists and designers, because I thought that it's really in the margins where different fields collide, that we get the most interesting questions that we can ask about how we push fields forward, and how we can silo ourselves in our society and not leave these hugely ethically contentious and societally profound questions that are coming out of science and technology. Don't leave that only to the scientists and technologists. Bring in the philosophers, the artists, the designers, people who can ask critical questions from different perspectives. And that, yeah, that really took over my life for a while. And, the kind of art science space because there was a whole new movement where synthetic biologists are basically biotechnol