Get Angry About Climate Change

The environmental crisis is an immediate existential threat. It is also, however, psychologically overwhelming. This combination is potentially deadly—we need to act fast, but often find ourselves paralyzed, drowning in anxiety, angst, and despair. To combat this, the standard narrative in academia is we ought to turn to eco-hope and eco-optimism. Here, I argue while both of these emotions are important, researchers have left an important tool for combating paralysis off the table: eco-anger. I survey the history of anger as a force for social change, and as a means of motivating action in the face of overwhelming negative emotions, arguing it needs to be pushed to the fore of our eco-emotion conversations. I then show what features eco-anger must have to be productive, distinguish between anger as action-motivating and anger as action-guiding, and respond to worries that anger may be a counter-productive emotion.