When wildfires tear through cities or forests, the smoke often carries more than ash, it brings fear, grief, and a growing sense of helplessness about our planet’s future. But what if these emotions could also be starting points for deeper understanding and change?
In a recent co-authored contribution by our project Principal Investigator Prof. Kerry Ryan Chance and Dr. Sophie Chao to the Ecological Distress Collective’s academic series Teaching Ecological Distress (SOAS Anthropology), a powerful pedagogical model emerges that uses real-world crises like urban fires to explore the politics and emotions of climate change. Their section, Reflecting on Distress, presents a bold and accessible approach for students to engage with the emotional and political dimensions of environmental crises, especially urban fires and their unequal impacts. Through this innovative teaching method, wildfires, so often symbols of destruction become flames of insight, illuminating the complex intersections of emotion, governance, and climate justice.
This blog post celebrates Kerry’s contribution to the series and highlights how this educational resource empowers students to think critically, feel deeply, and act thoughtfully in a time of climate emergency.
A Groundbreaking Pedagogical Approach
At the heart of Kerry’s teaching tool is a deceptively simple but powerful exercise: students are asked to select a recent urban fire from anywhere in the world, conduct a review of news articles, and identify statements related to eco-anxiety from officials, scientists, and ordinary citizens.
Once students bring their findings into the classroom, they engage in small group discussions followed by a collective conversation led by the instructor. The goal? To unpack how different social actors express, respond to, and even strategically use feelings of climate-related anxiety.
This method opens up complex questions in a hands-on, emotionally resonant way. It turns abstract terms like “climate anxiety” into something deeply human and politically charged. Through this exercise, students sharpen their research and analytical skills and learn to recognise how climate emotions circulate unevenly across communities, often reinforcing broader patterns of inequality.
What Is Eco-Anxiety Governance?
A standout feature of Kerry’s work is her introduction of the term eco-anxiety governance. In simple terms, this concept describes how governments, institutions, and even media outlets may respond to, or manipulate public fear and concern about environmental disasters like wildfires or floods.
Eco-anxiety is often portrayed in the media as an individual psychological response to climate change. But Kerry shows us that it’s also a political tool, sometimes used to galvanise action, and other times to distract or control public attention. For example, a government might highlight eco-anxiety to justify increased policing in informal settlements after a fire, while ignoring the systemic causes of the disaster itself, like poor housing infrastructure or climate injustice.
By introducing students to this lens, Kerry’s pedagogical tool encourages them to ask:
- Who benefits from eco-anxiety?
- Whose fears are taken seriously—and whose are ignored?
- How are emotions linked to power and policy?
Why Diverse Perspectives Matter
One of the most powerful parts of this exercise is its focus on analysing multiple viewpoints. By comparing how officials, scientists, and everyday people talk about the same fire, students begin to see the complex and often conflicting narratives that emerge during environmental crises.
Officials might emphasise preparedness and control. Scientists may focus on data and risk. Citizens could speak from grief, fear, or anger about displacement and loss. Each of these perspectives offers a different window into the realities of planetary change and understanding all of them is key to building more just and resilient responses.
This approach not only deepens empathy but also reinforces the value of participatory learning in environmental education. When students engage with real-world voices and stories, they are more likely to connect emotionally and intellectually and to imagine new possibilities for climate action that centre justice, not just survival.
Towards Hope and Action
By acknowledging and exploring these difficult emotions, we create space for collective reflection, imagination, and solidarity. This is exactly what the Teaching Ecological Distress series sets out to achieve. Kerry’s contribution, alongside Sophie’s brilliant guided reading of Loss and Wonder at the World’s End, offers a toolkit for educators and students alike to grapple with climate emotions in ways that are grounded, sensitive, and transformative.
Reflecting on Distress encourages students to think with emotions, rather than brushing them aside, thereby helping prepare the next generation of scholars, organisers, and policymakers to respond to the emotional toll of environmental change with nuance, care, and critical insight.
Learning Through the Flames
Returning to our title, “Learning Through the Flames,” we can now see how this metaphor runs throughout Kerry and Sophie’s work, from the reflective power of analysing urban fires and their emotional narratives to the act of engaging diverse voices in shaping our understanding of climate breakdown and its lived effects. These pedagogical tools turn sites of trauma into spaces for inquiry, resistance, and renewed imagination. They remind us that environmental disasters, while dangerous, can also be moments of reckoning and reimagining, a spark for resistance and learning. This is exactly what Kerry and Sophie offer in their teaching approach: a way to turn the heat of crisis into the light of inquiry.
Through guided research, emotional reflection, and open dialogue, students gain tools to think critically about eco-anxiety, power, and resilience, not in the abstract, but in the real-world contexts where these forces collide. This is education as activism, scholarship as solidarity.
Want to learn more?
- Explore the full Teaching Ecological Distress series on the Ecological Distress Collective website.
- Dive into the section Reflecting on Distress by Kerry Ryan Chance and Sophie Chao.
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