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Dr. Maria Vamvalis's avatar

Thank you for this sharp and timely piece, Sarah. I deeply resonate with your framing of climate anxiety as a politicized terrain increasingly manipulated by those who refuse to reckon with systemic failure.

In my work on holistic climate justice pedagogies, I’ve explored how youth climate emotions like grief, rage, and anxiety are relational evidence of a deeper cultural, ecological, and spiritual rupture. They call us to a different kind of witnessing and education that does not so easily fit the polarizing narratives on offer. While the right is weaponizing youth distress, liberal institutions often anesthetize it. I see them offering resilience but without reckoning with collapse and unravelling systems. What we need instead are pedagogies that cultivate moral imagination, grief literacy, and collective agency, particularly for those already carrying the heaviest burdens. In Canada, one of our most prominent environmental scientists just gave this interview with no filter: https://www.ipolitics.ca/2025/07/02/its-too-late-david-suzuki-says-the-fight-against-climate-change-is-lost/. If we take his words seriously, it shifts the educational landscape.

If climate anxiety is being turned into a PR liability, then our refusal must be in opening space for relational, decolonial, and regenerative ways of being. As unsustainable systems unravel, part of our work is to light possible pathways through the dark and "seed save" the most precious educational inheritances that future generations will need for rebuilding.

Thank you for again helping name the crossroads with such incisive clarity.

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