Scan barcode
A review by obscuredbyclouds
Generation Dread: Finding Purpose in an Age of Climate Crisis by Britt Wray
1.0
This was not the book I thought I was picking up. I thought this would be an exploration of eco-anxiety and how to deal with it. There were a few interesting bits and pieces here and there – that activism is not a solution to the anxiety although it's certainly a good thing by it self, that people suffering from climate change dread are not generally people already suffering from other (irrational) types of anxiety, and the discussion of whether how to try and stay positive when the data doesn't show anything to be positive about. But those bits and pieces were buried in a horrible structure with most time spent reiterating how eco-anxiety feels. I think most people picking up this book already know what it feels like. It's clear the author is also suffering from it, but if I wanted to hear people's worst thoughts about the future I don't need to read a book that promises to talk about it on a meta-level.
All in all, this reads like a draft that's been written very chaotically and then thrown together to quickly publish it, without spending the necessary time on the editing process and sometimes this reads like an essay collection. Considering the author writes a newsletter about the topic, I can't help but think a lot of it was arranged around already written sections that she tried to fit together.
The authors weird fixation on being white while POC people have been suffering more under climate change (and general wealth inequality) just came off really strange, like she was just trying to shoehorn it in without having real points to make. You'd read something like “POCs are going to suffer more from from climate change” once and think yes, very important point. But with every time she brings up the same point again and again in different words, I found myself thinking if there was something else she needed to say on the topic and not just get over her own complex. She claims most climate activists are white and middle class and that this is a bad thing and that we need a different approach (which would entail what exactly?), only then to portray POC activists who do important work. So how come they started doing activism? Maybe there would have been a chance to dive deeper into the topic, but she doesn't dare to take it. She only muses superficially. A complaint I had throughout the book.
The only logical structure of the book was the one I found most annoying, a very navel-gazey discussion about the author's struggle whether to have children or not. In the beginning of the book she explains her reasons for not wanting to bring children into the climate chaos-ridden world with her parents and her brother berating her and telling how sad it is she's missing out on the “best feeling ever”. Then in the last chapter, she's having a child because... something something hope something, but really “because I wanted to”. I completely understand people who have hope in the future and decide to have children. I don't understand people who write a whole book about their anxiety and their almost certainty how bad the world is going to look in 20 let alone 50 years of time and bow to pressure of family and surroundings (and if she didn't mean to imply that, why did she put the pressuring in her book in the first place?) and “my own personal feelings trump my future child's well-being”. What an infuriating section to read.
Overall: such an important topic and what a poor execution! This is neither a how-to-guide to when you're dealing with eco-anxiety yourself, nor is it a in-depth discussion of the phenomena itself. It's one woman's feelings about her own eco-anxiety with the loose attempt to connect it to other people's anxiety.
All in all, this reads like a draft that's been written very chaotically and then thrown together to quickly publish it, without spending the necessary time on the editing process and sometimes this reads like an essay collection. Considering the author writes a newsletter about the topic, I can't help but think a lot of it was arranged around already written sections that she tried to fit together.
The authors weird fixation on being white while POC people have been suffering more under climate change (and general wealth inequality) just came off really strange, like she was just trying to shoehorn it in without having real points to make. You'd read something like “POCs are going to suffer more from from climate change” once and think yes, very important point. But with every time she brings up the same point again and again in different words, I found myself thinking if there was something else she needed to say on the topic and not just get over her own complex. She claims most climate activists are white and middle class and that this is a bad thing and that we need a different approach (which would entail what exactly?), only then to portray POC activists who do important work. So how come they started doing activism? Maybe there would have been a chance to dive deeper into the topic, but she doesn't dare to take it. She only muses superficially. A complaint I had throughout the book.
The only logical structure of the book was the one I found most annoying, a very navel-gazey discussion about the author's struggle whether to have children or not. In the beginning of the book she explains her reasons for not wanting to bring children into the climate chaos-ridden world with her parents and her brother berating her and telling how sad it is she's missing out on the “best feeling ever”. Then in the last chapter, she's having a child because... something something hope something, but really “because I wanted to”. I completely understand people who have hope in the future and decide to have children. I don't understand people who write a whole book about their anxiety and their almost certainty how bad the world is going to look in 20 let alone 50 years of time and bow to pressure of family and surroundings (and if she didn't mean to imply that, why did she put the pressuring in her book in the first place?) and “my own personal feelings trump my future child's well-being”. What an infuriating section to read.
Overall: such an important topic and what a poor execution! This is neither a how-to-guide to when you're dealing with eco-anxiety yourself, nor is it a in-depth discussion of the phenomena itself. It's one woman's feelings about her own eco-anxiety with the loose attempt to connect it to other people's anxiety.