Key Points
Her 2018 book, Infertile Ground, explored how population growth in the Global South has been misguidedly framed as a crisisa perspective that Sasser argues had its roots in long-standing racial stereotypes about sexuality and promiscuity...
And so this book is my response to three years of research delving into climate emotions, distressing emotions, in particular, how those emotions are impacting how young people feel morally and ethically about having children, about raising children, about the future..
What those researchers have studied less of, and what I do in this book, is understand how other groups, particularly socially marginalized groups, people of color, and low-income groups, are also people on whom those climate emotions land hardest..
What I found in a survey that I conducted is that the most distressing emotions were reported by people of color, who in a statistically significant way, most identified feeling traumatized by the impact of climate change..
What I was not anticipatingbut this is also significantis that when it came to parenting in the midst of climate change, people of color in my study were most likely to report positive or action-oriented emotions, including feeling motivated, feeling determined, feeling a sense of happiness or optimism..
