Generation Dread: Finding Purpose in an Age of Climate Crisis by Britt Wray is the book that no one wants to read but everybody should.
I saw Generation Dread on a list of books about the climate crisis curated by Oregon State University. The title of the book both repelled and intrigued me, so I looked it up on the Internet. It seemed like it might be an informative yet painful book to read. I felt compelled to read it and prepared myself to feel uncomfortable.
While reading Generation Dread, I felt grief, anger, and guilt. I learned terms like eco-anxiety, psychoterratic, white fragility, disenfranchised grief, eco-fascist, binocular vision, gerontocracy, environmental melancholia, and lifeboat ethics. But Generation Dread is not all doom and gloom. It’s about transforming yourself and connecting with other people.
“Rather than bury our heads in the sand and suppress our discomfort, we can harness and transform the distress we feel into meaningful actions and forms of connections.”—Britt Wray
Typically, when I publish a book review, I provide an overview of the book and explain why I think people should read it. This time, I decided to do a book review in person at a City Council meeting. Our City Council has resisted even acknowledging that a climate crisis exists.
City Council Meeting Public Testimony
To prepare for the city council meeting, I drafted my comments. I timed myself reading them to ensure I could complete my testimony within the three minutes allotted per person. I submitted my speaker’s card early in the hope that I would be selected as one of the five people allowed to give testimony at each city council meeting.
I was the second speaker of the night. As I walked up to the speaker’s table, I noticed the city councilors and the mayor looked stone-faced. I wondered briefly if they already knew what I was going to say because they had read the written testimony that I submitted for the record.
Below is my written testimony and a link to the city council meeting recording.
Good Evening.
My name is Linda Poppenheimer.
I am the mother of two young adults. I fear for their future.
Tonight, I am going to read a few excerpts from a book called Generation Dread, written by a young woman named Britt Wray. This is the book no one wants to read, but everybody should.
For those of you with children, take a moment to think back to what you and your partner were thinking about when you decided to have children. My now ex-spouse and I were concerned that our children would be healthy and happy, whether we would be good parents, and if we could afford to save for their college education.
Here are Britt’s thoughts on potential parenthood in today’s world. Many other young people feel the same way.
“I had a reckoning…when my husband Sebastian and I thought we might start trying to get pregnant. A deep sense of grief and despair came crashing over me when I considered what it would mean to deliver a child into this world—a world dominated by a small group of greedy humans who are walking with open arms into ecological dead zones, mental breakdowns, and conflict over dwindling resources; humans who won’t raise their fists to these calamities because their avarice restrains them.”
And from the next page.
“It was either have a kid, and risk being taxed with crushing anxiety for the rest of my life about how our child will deal with a planetary condition that is becoming deadlier and more devoid of natural wonders; or don’t have a kid, and miss out on something we deeply want to do and all the nourishment that kids bring into people’s lives.”
Generation Dread is about learning to cope with grief and dread over the coming future. The book is also about learning to live with joy and helping each other survive and even thrive under circumstances that will only get worse over time. I recommend you check this book out at the library.
I urge you to talk with the young people in your lives about their hopes and fears about living on an unstable and unhealthy planet for the rest of their lives. Maybe then, you will do something about improving their odds of having a healthy and joyful life.
Thank you.
City Council Meeting Recording Link (my testimony begins at about 14:40).
Those of us from older generations need to be willing to make space for the voices of the younger people who will be living for the rest of their lives on the planet that we have wrought. Our children and grandchildren cannot afford for us to look away and do nothing.
Read the book.
Talk with the other people about it.
“Life on Earth can recover from a drastic climate shift by evolving into new species and creating new ecosystems… humans cannot.” —2021 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change draft report
Featured Image at Top: A group of young people protest inaction about the climate crisis by holding signs and blocking the road —Image Credit iStock/Vittorio Gravino.
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