Northeastern’s Anncy Thresher makes it clear that to avoid the sense of eco-paralysis that many people are feeling will require acknowledging the role anger can play in motivating people to act.
One of the challenges environmental advocates face in addressing climate change is that it’s hard to even talk about climate change. The topic is so existential and overwhelming it’s enough to provoke what some experts have taken to calling eco-anxiety or, worse, eco-paralysis.
The typical strategy environmental advocates and organizations use in trying to solve this issue is to focus on hope and optimism. In a paper set to be published in Environmental Ethics, Anncy Thresher, an assistant professor of public policy and urban affairs and religion and philosophy at Northeastern University, suggests another tactic: anger.
“If you care about stopping paralysis –– this idea that you’re so overwhelmed you can’t do anything –– hope and optimism will only get you so far,” Thresher says. “You need to have something that pushes you, and anger is directed. It’s a thing that pushes you to do something because you feel like you’ve been harmed.”
Anger is often labeled a “violent emotion,” Thresher explains, but, historically, it’s the most vital tool for social movements to actually make progress.
“If you look at things like the way MLK talked about the civil rights movement, he talked about the fact that you should be angry about what’s being done to you by the world around you but you need to be productive in that,” Thresher says. “It’s about organizing and channeling that anger into doing things for your community … and having this collective action spurred by the fact that you recognize things are going badly for you.”
Similarly, the suffragettes and the movement around the AIDS crisis recognized the hurt that people were feeling because they had been harmed or let down by the systems at large and used that hurt to fuel action. The same lesson can be applied to combating climate change, Thresher says.
The key, she says, is to keep your anger from turning into rage, recognizing that “you can be angry and not act out of anger.” Part of how people can do that is by making sure their anger and actions are targeted in the right direction.
“Don’t get angry at the guy who delivers your mail because he drives a truck,” Thresher says. “Don’t get angry at yourself because you have to fly across the country to see your family. Get angry at the systems that have set up these kinds of problems that are failing to do anything about it.”
Unfortunately, Thresher has seen that many climate organizations have a fear that playing into the anger many people, especially younger people, feel around climate change might drive them away from the cause. The tendency is to encourage advocates “to be kind and optimistic and joyful the entire time that you’re dealing with a massive crisis of a global scale,” she says.
Optimism and hope shouldn’t be discarded entirely, Thresher says. Acknowledging the hurt that people are feeling while giving them something to work toward is a proven message and strategy for policy advocates and grassroots organizers alike.
“You can’t completely get rid of hope because in order to have productive anger, you have to be able to see a future where you can make a difference,” Thresher says. “Anger that doesn’t have any hope is just spiraling in on itself.”
Destigmatizing anger and letting people know that it’s both a normal and understandable emotion to feel in a moment of crisis is a starting point to engage with people and bring them out of a potentially paralyzed mindset. From there, it’s possible to engage people who are not just interested but actively motivated and driven to make positive change.
“We need to start recognizing that people are scared and hurt, and there are injustices being done to them,” Thresher says. “You can’t solve that by telling them to be optimistic. You can solve that by telling them to hope for a better future but be angry about the way they’re being treated right now. … A lot more climate groups would be a lot more successful if they embraced that a little bit.”