Student develops café as ‘safe space,’ ‘to build deeper connection to the land’
Western Washington University is hosting a series of “eco-anxiety workshops” this spring to act as a “safe space” for students experiencing distress over climate change.
“The eco-anxiety café workshop series aims to provide a supportive and engaging safe space for participants to help each other with the isolation, helplessness, and overwhelm that can arise from eco-anxiety and to build a deeper connection to the land,” according to WWU News.
However, one environmental research fellow told The College Fix workshops such as these emphasize emotional responses over empirical solutions, articulating how fear-mongering rhetoric does not reflect “what the science actually says.”
The workshops are hosted by the College of the Environment’s Environmental Sciences department. The series includes three workshops in April and May, but organizers also have plans for “between sessions for hikes, cold plunging, meditation, yoga, and other related activities.”
Bella Rossi, a senior in WWU’s Environmental Studies program, coordinated the events. She originally developed these workshops for her hometown in Spokane, Washington, but has since brought them to the public university.
The student designed these workshops using a framework called the Work that Reconnects, which is an “interactive group process” that “draws on foundational teachings, including Systems Thinking, Deep Ecology and Deep Time, Spiritual Traditions and Undoing Oppression,” according to its website.
“The work of Undoing Oppression is the work of uprooting racism, classism, sexism, and oppression related to gender expression, ability and culture,” the website states.
The Fix reached out to Rossi and the university via email over the last week for further comment on the topics discussed in the workshops, but received no reply.
Heritage Foundation Senior Research Fellow Jack Spencer criticized the fear-driven narratives in environmental workshops in an email interview with The Fix. Spencer researches energy and environmental policy for the Center for Energy, Climate, and Environment.
“I think that any sort of workshop – any narrative – can be geared towards creating fear and anxiety in order to engender support for a specific agenda. That seems to be what’s happening here,” he said.
“Almost by any measure, the environment is doing great today. What the United States has done over the past 50 years is really quite amazing,” Spencer said.
He told The Fix America has achieved a steady decrease in traditional pollutants such as particulate matter and sulfur dioxide.
“They’re close to normal background levels. This is while we were burning hydrocarbons like gas, coal, and oil to produce the prosperity that has increased the standard of living for many Americans,” he said.
“We have it great [in America]… Don’t listen to what these people and narratives are saying,” he said.
Spencer said America should continue prioritizing its economy, adding it “cannot sacrifice economic prosperity for other things. Economic prosperity is what gives us the wherewithal to do the other thing.”
However, a facilitator and leadership member of the Work that Reconnects Network disagreed, telling The Fix, the climate issue “is overwhelming.”
“Everywhere we look, there’s something falling apart. I’m one person, and that brings a feeling of powerlessness,” Kathleen Rude said.
“The Work that Reconnects helps us shift our understanding of power. We remember our interconnectedness to all life on the planet,” she said.
When asked about the phenomenon of eco-anxiety itself, she said: “Initially we think these emotions are things we want to get rid of and that there’s something wrong with us because we are feeling this way. Instead, these emotions give us information that tells us something is wrong in the environment.”
“Our fear, grief, anxiety, and overwhelm feed the flames of love, courage, our passion for justice, and our sense of imagination and possibility,” she said.
Gaia said while the WTR process does not itself fix or solve the climate change issue, “it is a powerful framework” and a “wonderful way of helping empower a group working on an issue.”
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IMAGE CREDIT AND CAPTION: Aerial view of WWU campus; WWU Vikings Athletics/Youtube