Sarah E. Fredericks

PhD (Boston University)

Professor Fredericks' research focuses on sustainability, sustainable energy, environmental guilt and shame, environmental justice, and the interaction of religion, science, and philosophy. Her work draws upon pragmatic and comparative religious ethics. 

Fredericks is currently working on a new project about the roles of rest, joy, and action in the time of climate change.

With Cynthia Lindner and Erika Dornfeld, Fredericks received a grant from the American Academy for the Advancement of Science, to fund “Living Well During Climate Change.” The grant-funded workshop and conference resulted in a website that offers a range of resources for individuals and community groups interested in living well amid climate change. It focuses on the emotional experiences of climate change and how we may respond to them.

She recently published Environmental Guilt and Shame: Signals of Individual and Collective Responsibility and the Need for Ritual Responses (Oxford University Press, 2021), which examines the ethical dimensions of experiencing and inducing environmental guilt and shame, particularly regarding climate change.  She makes three major claims in Environmental Guilt and Shame: First, not only individuals but also collectives, including the diffuse collectives that cause climate change, can have identity, agency, and responsibility and thus guilt and shame. Second, some agents, including some collectives, should feel guilt and shame for environmental degradation, including climate change. Here she extends ethical work on environmental emotions, which tends to focus on positive emotions (e.g., biophilia), to consider the propriety and value of experiencing negative emotions such as guilt and shame. Third, she maintains that a number of conditions are required to deal conceptually, existentially, and practically with the effects of guilt and shame on individuals and collectives, and with the underlying wrongs that lead to them. They can be developed and maintained through rituals. Such rituals are already emerging in online and activist communities, but more intentional ritualization is needed to fully deal with guilt and shame as well as the anthropogenic environmental degradation that may spark them.

Professor Fredericks is the author of Measuring and Evaluating Sustainability: Ethics in Sustainability Indexes (Routledge, 2013), and articles in Journal for the Study of Religion, Nature and Culture; International Journal of Sustainable Development and World Ecology; Environmental Justice, and Ethics, Policy, and Environment. 

 
Previously, Professor Fredericks was an Associate Professor in the Department of Philosophy and Religion at the University of North Texas. She holds a PhD in Science, Philosophy, and Religion from Boston University.