Sarah Jaquette Ray
About Sarah
Dr. Sarah Jaquette Ray (she/her) is a professor and chair of the Environmental Studies Department at Cal Poly Humboldt, and host of the radio show and podcast, Climate Magic. She works at the intersection of social justice and climate emotions, particularly among youth activists and in higher education.
Ray is author of two books, The Ecological Other: Environmental Exclusion in American Culture (Arizona, 2013), on the emotion of disgust in environmentalism and its implications for social justice, and A Field Guide to Climate Anxiety: How to Keep Your Cool on a Warming Planet (California, 2020), an existential toolkit for the climate generation. She has co-edited multiple volumes bridging social justice and environmentalism, including Latinx Environmentalisms: Justice, Place, and the Decolonial, and Disability Studies & the Environmental Humanities. Another volume on how to center the big emotions of climate change in the classroom is The Existential Toolkit for Climate Justice Educators: How to Teach in a Burning World (UC Press, 2024).
Ray has taught mindfulness courses on climate and activism, and is a certified mindfulness teacher through the UCLA Mindfulness Awareness Research Center. She serves on the scientific advisory board for the Climate Mental Health Network and speaks and publishes widely on the role of emotions in climate advocacy.
An environmental humanist with a BA in Religious Studies from Swarthmore College, a MA in American Studies from UT-Austin, and a PhD in Environmental Sciences, Studies and Policy from the University of Oregon, Dr. Ray draws on an eclectic range of disciplines and epistemologies in service of climate justice and healing.
“The way I think, teach, and feel about climate change has been permanently and positively altered by the extraordinary wisdom embodied in this powerful work of deep reflection, care, and healing.”
— David N. Pellow, author of What Is Critical Environmental Justice? and Professor of Environmental Studies, University of California, Santa Barbara
Climate change is hard to wrap your head around, and it’s not your fault: our brains were never wired to grapple with a problem this big, which can leave us stuck in responses that feel protective but only make things worse. On Climate Magic, Dr. Sarah Jaquette Ray, author and Environmental Studies professor at Cal Poly Humboldt, connects how you feel about the climate to your power to do something about it. She digs into what climate anxiety really is and how to move past it, what happens to your mental health when you take action, what we know about PTSD in wildfire survivors, why culture and biology conspire to make us bury our heads in the sand, and what Gen Z has to say about it all. Along the way, she spotlights everyday people rolling up their sleeves, despite and because of their despair. This is the emotional side of climate politics, and the planet needs you to tap your inner skills to build a better world. It’s not rocket science… it’s Climate Magic. Listen and subscribe to Climate Magic on KHSU, Apple Podcasts and Spotify.
