Lavin Exclusive Speaker
Our climate change anxieties have never been more overwhelming—but they’re also the key to saving the planet. Britt Wray shows us how to embrace our complicated, messy emotions about the climate crisis. Her revolutionary scientific research on the psychological toll of climate change—outlined in her brilliant book Generation Dread—reveals a surprising truth: that acknowledging and dealing with climate anxiety helps us find purpose, avoid burnout, and solve both mental health and ecological problems. Deeply compassionate, scientifically rigorous, and, above all, hopeful, Britt Wray “helps us manifest something we all need nowadays: strength” (Adam McKay, director of Don’t Look Up).
Britt Wray is a ground-breaking researcher and storyteller, and a growing voice around the mental health effects of climate change. She draws on rigorous investigation and insightful interviews with therapists, activists and researchers to make the scientific case for embracing our climate crisis emotions—especially the ones we’d prefer to ignore. When we heal ourselves through community and open communication, we’ll be better equipped to heal the planet. Britt’s new book Generation Dread, about finding purpose during the climate crisis, is an honest, profoundly compelling exploration of our climate-related stresses and “a road map out from under the burden of environmental chaos, made all the more compelling by the way it tracks her own journey” (Macleans). It was named a finalist for the 2022 Governor General’s Literary Awards.
In Generation Dread, Britt takes a candid look at the many ways our “eco-distress” pushes us into a state of grief, numbness or fatalism, and how it makes us burn out and question big life decisions like whether to have children. But she doesn’t leave us in our anxiety. 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. David Wallace-Wells, the New York Times bestselling author of The Uninhabitable Earth, calls Generation Dread “a marvelous exploration of the divergent, sometimes paradoxical, but always human ways in which we navigate the effects of climate change.”
Britt is a writer, broadcaster and creator of the weekly climate newsletter “Gen Dread,” whose original research focuses on the mental health impacts of the climate crisis. She’s a TED Resident and speaker and was a guest host of the CBC science show Quirks and Quarks as well as co-host of the BBC podcast Tomorrow’s World. Her previous book, Rise of the Necrofauna, was described as a “must-read” by The Sunday Times, and The New Yorker called it one of the best books of the year. Britt has a PhD in Science Communication from the University of Copenhagen, and is an advisor to the Good Energy Project for climate storytelling and the Climate Mental Health Network.