Forging Purpose Through a Crucible of Emotion

In 2017, Wray felt forced to confront the climate crisis on a personal level when she and her husband, Sebastian, began seriously discussing having a baby. By then, she had been absorbing grim news of planetary destruction for years as a biology student turned science communicator. The question of whether or not to bring new life into a seemingly doomed world caused simmering fear, frustration, and anger to boil over.

“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,” she recalls in Generation Dread.

A feeling of isolation deepened the crisis, which drove her to explore whether others were experiencing similar existential fears. Through conversations and research, she learned that she was not alone and became connected to a burgeoning community that offered strength and resolve.

Over the last five years, Wray worked her way through this crucible of emotion and forged a new sense of purpose — and a new livelihood. She began to research the mental and emotional toll exacted by the climate crisis and environmental destruction and in 2017 launched a popular newsletter about eco-anxiety.

Through this work, she met Glick and many others like him. Glick, Wray writes, eventually found support and purpose by connecting with like-minded groups, working with a climate-aware therapist to understand and cope with his emotions, and moving in with his aging aunt to save resources and forge connections. “He was learning to live with the planetary health crisis and accept its gravity with some lightness, in his own way,” says Wray.

But not everyone Wray spoke with found their way to this place of acceptance and beyond it towards constructive responses. Her research made clear the gap between the devastating nature of many people’s climate anxiety and the mental health support that existed for them. Wray herself continued to struggle with deep emotional distress over the climate crisis.

“I figured that I could contribute to helping close this gap if I devoted my career to it,” she says, “and that this purposeful mission would give my work meaning and simultaneously help with my own coping.”

Around that time, she learned about the new Stanford/LSHTM Planetary Health Fellowship and applied.

A Pioneering Fellowship

The Planetary Health Fellowship is a postdoctoral program created in 2020 by Stanford and LSHTM to generate more research and evidence about the health impacts of climate change and environmental degradation. The unique partnership enables wide-ranging multidisciplinary support for early-career researchers in tackling pressing questions, with each institution’s distinct strengths complementing the other’s.

The fellowship was envisioned by Barry and LSHTM’s former dean Peter Piot, with inspiration from Kathy Burke, CIGH senior adviser and current planetary health lead at the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment. It was made possible with support from CIGH Executive Director Allison Phillips and Kari Nadeau, MD, PhD, the Naddisy Foundation Professor of Pediatric Food Allergy, Immunology, and Asthma, who helped secure funding from the Sean N. Parker Center for Allergy and Asthma Research.

Wray was joined by another inaugural fellow also focusing on the effects of climate change on mental health and well-being: Elaine Flores-Ramos, MD, PhD, a Peruvian doctor at LSHTM’s Centre on Climate Change and Planetary Health and Centre for Global Mental Health, who has studied chronic posttraumatic stress disorder following disasters in Peru. During the fellowship, Flores-Ramos has focused on climate and environmental disasters’ impact on women’s mental health in low- and middle-income countries. “I believe that empowering women as educators, caregivers, holders of knowledge, researchers, and agents of social change will improve mitigation and adaptation policy interventions and will help inspire new ways of thinking that will develop a resilient and sustainable planet,” she says.

The center recently announced its second cohort of three fellows and hopes to secure funding to expand the fellowship — for instance, bringing on more fellows each year or partnering with universities in Africa and Asia to host additional fellows, says Phillips.

The fellowship, Wray says, has provided a platform for conducting collaborative scientific research in a burgeoning field with outstanding global researchers. She considers this work a form of “scholarly activism” that also enables her to influence policy makers.