Following up on what I wrote on Friday about how my colleague respond to her talking about sustainability issues with “don’t make me feel guilty”, I am exploring eco-guilt as a search term that seems to produce quite a different set of results. In contrast to the literature I summarised on Friday, where guilt is described as a deactivating emotion that needs to be changed into constructive hope in order to lead to action, the studies below mostly describe guilt as an emotion that can (and should) be used to promote environmental friendly behaviour. But I do not think those studies are super convincing, so better proceed with caution here…

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Today one of my colleagues told me that a very common reaction she gets in her department is that people do not want to talk to her about sustainability because “that makes them feel guilty”, and also say that is why they do not want to talk about sustainability with their students. To me, that really feels like a “you” problem — how is it my, or her, problem that you feel guilty because I talk about something that matters to me? Then do better and you don’t need to feel as guilty! — but at the same time that’s probably not the most constructive approach to deal with that situation. So let’s see what the literature says what is going on and what we should do about it!

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