Faculty Research Corner

While on sabbatical, ENST program leader Sarah Ray wrote a book for what she calls “the climate generation”-- people just like ENST majors-- on how to grapple with anxiety, despair, and grief in these politically and ecologically frightening times. The title of the book is A Field Guide to Climate Anxiety: How to Keep Your Cool on a Warming Planet, and will be published by the University of California Press on Earth Day, 2020. The book is meant to be an accessible book that provides what she calls an “existential toolkit” for readers struggling with worry about the fate of democracy and the planet. Sarah Jaquette Ray publishes book on eco-anxiety and the climate generation

As a companion to the book, Dr. Ray is organizing a workshop at the Rachel Carson Center in Munich in July that will gather teaching resources from educators around the world on how to teach about climate justice in this heavy moment. Along those lines, she has published a website of teaching resources on climate anxiety with CSU-Fullerton English professor Nicole Seymour through a UC-CSU faculty collaboration, called NXTerra: Transformative Education for Climate Action, available at https://www.nxterra.orfaleacenter.ucsb.edu/topic-climate-change-emotions/.

In November, Ray also published a co-edited book, Latinx Environmentalisms. The whiteness of mainstream environmentalism often fails to account for the richness and variety of Latinx environmental thought. Building on insights of environmental justice scholarship as well as critical race and ethnic studies, the editors and contributors map the ways Latinx cultural texts integrate environmental concerns with questions of social and political justice. Includes original interviews with creative writers, including Cherríe Moraga, Helena María Viramontes, Ana Castillo, and Héctor Tobar.