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Dear Joe, You have asked me how I feel about climate change. It's probably the first time I have ever been asked to say what I feel, rather than what I think and it's a hard question to answer. […] So, what do I feel about climate change? Interest, intellectual curiosity, satisfaction, excitement, extreme worry, sadness, fear, and perhaps a glimmer of hope…
In 2014, science communicator Joe Duggan created a website called “Is This How You Feel?” His primary goal was to show that scientists are not brain-fed, organically grown robots disconnected from complex emotional life. Rather, Duggan wanted to demonstrate that climate scientists not only think through the challenges of our contemporary climate crisis but also feel their way through them. Duggan did this by collecting hand-written letters from scientists responding to the deceptively simple question: “How do you feel about climate change?” Ruth Mottram's response above exemplifies the affective landscape of many of the letters on the site. An overwhelming number of scientists discuss how “frustrated” they feel, with a cluster of other feelings like “tired” and “angry” making frequent appearances. Amongst these “negative” feelings, almost all of the letters end with a sense of optimism or hope—sometimes alone, or sometimes coupled with apprehension about children's futures.
Frustration, hope, and anxiety are some of the many affects that fill the pages of Kyle Bladow and Jennifer Ladino's wide-ranging and timely edited collection Affective Criticism: Emotion, Embodiment, Environment (2018). Unlike Duggan's website, Bladow and Ladino's collection is interested in how affects relate to and connect us to different environments, rather than the scientists who study them. As literary scholars, Bladow and Ladino are no strangers to ecocriticism and affect theory: as well as organizing workshops and panels dedicated to “affective