Spectrum Line of Ecological Emotions

This is a helpful activity for opening any class, meeting, or workshop where participants have been engaging in difficult material regarding our climate crisis and environmental injustice. If the meeting space does not allow for people to stand up to move around, an alternative is to simply ask participants to voice their response or indicate their emotional state through a show of hands. However, the spectrum line activity is typically more inclusive, since all participants in the room (even those who remain silent) get to use their bodies to represent their responses. I teach in a program with a large number of international students and English Language Learners who can tend to be more reticent, so I appreciate the fact that this activity doesn’t leave any voices out. In addition, it can be a powerful activity when working with students whose disciplinary training has made them uncomfortable about sharing emotional responses to ecological loss. For example, since the physical sciences prioritize objectivity and dispassionate discourse, students and faculty in those programs can feel a stigma around discussing subjective responses, or worry about compromising their professional credibility by appearing hyper-emotional. The spectrum line activity allows participants to share their responses in a non-verbal manner.

The Spectrum Line activity is adapted from Professor of environmental theology Panu Pihkala, who gives a fuller discussion of the exercise (along with resources) on his blog Eco-Anxiety & Hope.

ACTIVITY:

In the spectrum line activity, one emotion word is mentioned at a time, each corresponding to an invisible line running across the room: one end expresses that "I feel this emotion in relation to our ecological crisis (or climate crisis) strongly or very often." The other end expresses that "I feel this emotion seldom or not at all." As each word is shared with the group, participants move into a position that matches the intensity of their response.

A common sequence that facilitators use is:

  1. ”CONCERN”

  2. “FEAR”

  3. “ANGER”

  4. “GRIEF”

  5. “EMPOWERMENT” (or “HOPE”)

After each round of positioning themselves along the spectrum, participants can share with the full group why they are where they are along the line, or share their thoughts/reflections on this particular “ecological emotion.”  It helps to solicit responses from different points along the line. An alternative to facilitating this discussion in live time is to wait until after all the emotions have been represented, and then break participants into smaller groups and ask them share their responses with each other. At the end of this session they can report out to the full group. To shorten the activity, you can simply run three emotions (like fear, grief, and hope)

 Comments:

I like to open classes or workshops with this activity for multiple reasons (and I usually share this openly with participants immediately following the activity):

1) Enacting these emotions honors the lived experience of people in the room; our climate crisis is impacting all of us, not just scientists studying melting glaciers. The activity centers the embodied content that our students bring to each class.

2) The exercise highlights that it's possible to experience conflicting responses at the same time. One can feel grief and hope simultaneously. After they go to the far end of the line indicating that they strongly feel SADNESS, in the next round that person may move to the same position indicating feelings of EMPOWERMENT.

3) Finally, the activity makes visible what is largely an invisible part of the climate story: we're hyper-focused on impacts to physical landscapes, but this crisis is also taking a huge emotional and psychological toll. When students are asked to line up like this, they can clearly see a dimension of the crisis that they might not have considered before.