Feeling Climate Change: How Emotions Govern Our Responses to the Climate Emergency

Examining the social response to the mounting impacts of climate change, Feeling Climate Change illuminates what the pathways from emotions to social change look like--and how they work--so we can recognize and inform our collective attempts to avert further climate catastrophe.

Debra J. Davidson engages with how our actions are governed by a complex of rules, norms, and predispositions, central among which operates our emotionality, to assess individual and collective responses to the climate crisis, applying a critical and constructive analysis of human social prospects for confronting the climate emergency in manners that minimize the damage and perhaps even enhance the prospects for meaningful collective living.

Providing a crucial understanding of our emotionality and its role in individual behaviour, collective action, and ultimately in social change, this book offers researchers, policymakers, and citizens essential insights into our personal and collective responses to the climate emergency.

Debra J. Davidson is professor of environmental sociology at the University of Alberta. She is the co-editor of the Oxford Handbook of Energy and Society (2018) and co-editor of Environment and Society (2018), as well as the author of numerous articles on sociology and the environment.