Climate Crisis Communication
Keywords: Dr. Sarah Jaquet Ray, Per Espen Stokes, climate crisis, climate anxiety, climate communication, five psychological barriers
Last week, Dr. Sarah Jaquet Ray came to one of my classes to discuss how to communicate the climate crisis. The main focus in her speech was effectively communicating the climate crisis to people without giving them anxiety about it. It has been shown that people in Generation Z, my generation, have so much climate anxiety that many of us feel powerless to stop it, myself included.
This climate anxiety has led many people to believe that the small changes they make to their lifestyle won’t make a difference (by the way, they do). Dr. Jaquet Ray brought up the fear used by scientists as well as the media to try to make people more concerned about climate change and how this is an ineffective way to communicate. Per Espen Stokes, a psychologist and economist from Norway, said in an interview with Yale Environment 360, “If you give people a guilt or fear-inducing message and then ask them to solve a problem that requires creative thought, there is a statistically significant reduction in the amount of creativity that people come up with to formulate solutions.” Fear is clearly not the answer.
Stokes also touched on how lack of concern for the environment is a cultural, not global, phenomenon. He then went on to talk about the five psychological barriers that make climate change communication so difficult. These barriers are distance, doom, dissonance, denial, and identity. Each barrier creates a distance between the individual and the climate crisis.
Dr. Jaquet Ray ended her speech in my class by saying that it is the good emotions that motivate people: joy, love, hope, awe, and satisfaction, to name a few. If this is true, then focusing on appreciation for the earth and all it has done for us as humans will be helpful in achieving environmental justice.
“We need stories about a new kind of happiness not based on material consumption,” Stokes said. I think this is a crucial point, and someday I would like to live in a world where people are not so caught up in the material or told they need to be, but rather, I want to live in a world where people are enabled to bring justice to one another and to the non-human nature we are surrounded by.