I wanted this book to be...well, more helpful. I find that reading something like this tends only to increase my eco-anxiety and this book had a laundry list of new reasons to be stressed within its pages. I find that everything on this topic encourages "feeling through" and facing rather than deflecting, but stops short of providing anything actionable in that regard. I still feel it was worth reading this title and it will, unfortunately, become only more relevant as time goes on.

I honestly don’t know why I put myself through this shit. As if it wasn’t bad enough having massive amounts of anxiety about my own life, the anxiety I feel anytime I listen to climate change deniers just adds a ton of doubt onto my brain! Climate change just seems like such a huge, unfixable problem! Generation Dread tries to address Climate Change Anxiety in a way that seems hopeful, but at times preachy. I’m honestly not sure how much of my mental health is focused on climate anxiety and how much is just my own little world. It was an interesting book with lots of information, but I’m not sure how meaningful it will be to my life. Time will tell.

Not exactly the book I want, but the book I needed to read.

I have an anxiety disorder, and while my own climate anxiety, or ecological distress is not near the unrealistic level of the author, she does hit some salient points in the first part of this book. It does seem exceptionally sensationalized (I have specialized in astronomy and astrophysics in college, so I am not a science-denier, but I am much more tempered in my logic) in the beginning, and while it serves to set the stage, I struggled to get into the book.

My climate change anxiety is probably at a moderate level, but as someone with an anxiety disorder, I know how to cope with anxiety. We have more of it, and we learn how to deal with it.

The second part is much more targeted to helping with burn out, and focusing on action/selfcare. I appreciated it, but I would not necessarily recommend this book to anyone to read, because it feels very White-Lady Preachy, and exceptionally out of touch with reality, even though she herself admits that it holds white privilege. So a lot of the "fears" feels hysterical and sensational.

I'm a multiracial female in my 30's for reference.

Had I to read it over again, I'd skip the stuff in the front, because it doesn't honestly add anything to the conversation and feels more like setting up a foundation for the second part of the book. That could have been done in less than half the space it took up.

This summer, it feels like climate change is accelerating and making itself irrefutable, and the emotional response to this change has also ramped up: anxiety, stress, uncertainty, dread, fear, anger, you name it. What more people are coming to understand is that our ability to address climate change and find a positive way forward depends very much on how we address the difficult feelings we experience in response to climate change. Eco-anxiety is more widely acknowledged and understood now, and there is more help available in dealing with it, but it's not easy, as this book reveals. Wray names the climate crisis as a "collective trauma" that requires us not only to rethink our relationship to the world around us but also to reconnect with others who share this trauma and to work together to create a healthier, more just world.

What I appreciated most about this book was how Wray brought in the voices of marginalized communities and never shied away from the fact that a divide continues to exist between those who feel eco-anxiety at a distance from the most severe impacts and those who, due to racism or socio-economic status, are on the front lines of climate change and trying to survive. We have to ask ourselves how we can be true partners with others in responding to climate change when we live in a deeply unjust society, and that depends on a true acknowledgment of our history and actively listening to other voices and experiences. It's not an easy task, and Wray offers no easy answers, but it's a good place to start. Read in tandem with How to Live in a Chaotic Climate (by LaUra Schmidt and Aimee Lewis Reau).

Thank you, The Experiment and NetGalley, for providing an eARC of this book. Opinions expressed here are solely my own.