Becoming Lost, Climate Change and Collective Trauma, On Sitting in Uncertainty…these are just a few of the recent themes of our regular Climate Crisis Digest.
The Digest is available on the first of every month here on our website and also goes out monthly to CPA members and those subscribed to our mailing list. If you would like to subscribe to receive this Digest in your inbox every month use the 'subscribe' option on the footer of this website.
The name Digest reflects the psychoanalyst Wilfred Bion's insight that experience needs to be digested in order to be thinkable, especially when it is hard to bear (hence CPA's approach to difficult truths). The Digest style is not academic or polemical, more journalistic and exploratory in tone. That requires reflection by the author, to invite reflection in readers. Reflection here means inquiring into our emotional experience so as to more fully engage with the meaning of what is written. The theme can be anything, so long as it is treated using a climate psychology lens.
Writing a Digest (around a thousand words) is open to all CPA members and help from the editor is freely available at whatever level of experience the writer brings. If you are a member and interested in contributing, have a look through some past editions and contact the editor, Wendy Hollway .
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Climate Crisis Digest - November 2024 - Reflections on 'Beyond Western Rationality' - Explorations Issue 6
During the final editing of Explorations: Issue 6 I was struck down by a tummy bug. Urgent dashes to a not-so-private bathroom kept me, my baby and husband stuck in a studio flat. My fever peaked with fainting at 4am, delirious from dehydration, having given all my milk and energy to my baby and everything else to the toilet bowl. Read More.
Climate Crisis Digest - October 2024 - Individual Accountability, Collective Action
Like Nessa, I identify as a white middle class woman. I’m conscious of my privileges and responsibilities that come with my cultural heritage. I believe it is Whiteness - its values, psychologies and ideologies - that are driving climate change. Climate change is racist. Let’s reflect on this. Read More.
Climate Crisis Digest - September 2024 - Reflections on Individual Action
Last year, the jarring discrepancy between the climate emergency and ‘business as usual’ became overwhelming. Read More.
Climate Crisis Digest - July 2024 - The Climate Crisis is an Intergenerational Social Justice Issue
My positionality
I often begin training on anti-discriminatory practice by citing the multiple privileged positions I occupy within ‘the matrix of oppression’.[1] I typically name that I’m white, heterosexual, male, financially secure, and lucky to have been born with cognitive and physical abilities that support me in navigating an ableist society. Read More
Climate Crisis Digest - June 2024 - How to Teach in a Burning World: A Summary by Wendy Hollway
The Existential Toolkit for Climate Justice Educators is subtitled ‘How to Teach in a Burning World’. Just published,[1] Read More
Climate Crisis Digest - May 2024 - Love in the breaking by Maya Adams & Hold onto the breaking: a response by Trang Đặng
Beloved one
what is it that you are holding onto? Read More
Climate Crisis Digest - April 2024 - "Don't Look Down!"
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In "Views of the Apocalypse" (Orion, Winter 2019), Lisa Wells, author of the biographical work Believers, reports paying attention to her repeated experience of falling down various stairways. She finds herself thinking about Freud’s notion of parapraxis, where something internal emerges through a crack into the everyday but in an alien form, subject to immediate denial. Read More |
Climate Crisis Digest - February 2024 - Free short course in Climate Psychology
A week ago, the Open University's "OpenLearn" website went live with a free short course called Climate Psychology: facing the climate crisis. It was inspired and written by two CPA members, Trudi Macagnino, a staff tutor at the OU and Wendy Hollway, a retired OU academic staff member. Here it is - as easy as clicking this link (open.edu). The first week opens in this way:
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Climate Crisis Digest - December 2023: Ears of Stone: Song and the Ecological Crisis
What has singing got to do with the climate and ecological crisis?
This is the question I have set myself in the writing of this digest. Writing it arose from a post I wrote for my newsletter “the Imaginal Ecologist” called “Sounds heard through an Imaginal Doorway: Ways to Deepen a song”.
Climate Crisis Digest - November 2023: Harnessing the Wind: Ecotherapy is for Everyone
Long ago, as a small child, the wind lifted me and toppled me to the ground when the strong rains came. It was my first experience of natural power.
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Climate Crisis Digest - October 2023: The Potentiality of Climate Emotions
In Hummingbird Salamander (2021), award-winning American author Jeff VanderMeer tells the story of a security analyst, Jane Smith, who suddenly decides to give up her job and risk her and her family’s lives for environmental causes. One day, she receives an envelope,
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Climate Crisis Digest - September 2023: Sketching an integrative model for climate-based interventions
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Eco-Integration is the name of the model I have been developing for the last couple of years. As the word ‘integration’ suggests, this model does not present itself as a “different” way to dealing with the climate crisis, but as a creative synthesis of different influences combined. It feeds mostly from the work of CPA pioneers like Sally Weintrobe, Paul Hoggett and Caroline Hickman, Ro Randall and Rebecca Nestor, to name a few. In parallel, it is also influenced by Joanna Macy’s The Work that Reconnects, yet, so far, with no open emphasis on spirituality. |
Climate Crisis Digest - July 2023: Reflections on two books
The backdrop to Barbara Kingsolver’s brilliant 2012 novel Flight Behaviour was the climate emergency and human disruption of Nature. Her latest book Demon Copperhead, a 21st century Appalachian version of Charles Dickens’ David Copperfield, looks very different. But both stories are about the countryside and country people. The first involves unintended disruption of life; in the second, disruption is angrily desired.
CPA Climate Crisis Digest - June 2023: Letting Come
It is not about wrestling with the controls of economics to force it in the direction of degrowth, but about getting ready for the moment when the coming climacteric does the heavy work of degrowth for us. David Fleming1
Climate Crisis Digest - April 2023: On being fine when everything isn't
I opted out of the big earthquake feed but could not escape its vicarious trauma.
Climate Crisis Digest: Mar 2023 - Nature is Being Re-Ensouled
Last month, Mary-Jayne Rust introduced the idea of The Great Turning, the turn towards life-enhancing structures and the world view which sees the web of life as sacred and humans embedded within it. This Digest continues that theme.
Climate Crisis Digest - Feb 2023: Hidden in the human heart
The Great Unravelling and The Great Turning
We are living through a period of major upheaval as we face the shadow of industrial growth culture. Old ways of dominating the rest of nature are falling apart. This is a time of great uncertainty, of chaos and suffering. The birth of the new is emerging in glimpses but its shape cannot yet be seen. We are in a liminal space of cultural breakdown and transformation.
Climate Crisis Digest Dec 2022: An Uncanny Reflection
UK politics has felt like a whirlwind over these past few months. From Boris Johnson’s resignation, Liz Truss becoming Prime Minister, the death of Queen Elizabeth, and now the appointment of Rishi Sunak as Prime Minister following Truss’s resignation – it has been hard to keep up.
Climate Crisis Digest Nov 2022: Ecology as the new class war
As the recent Conservative, neo-liberal UK government dug in around the mantra ‘growth, growth, growth’, as it attempted to mobilise supporters by conjuring up an enemy called the anti-growth coalition, I see the desperate dying throes of fossil fuel interests. Not dead yet, still deadly.
Climate Crisis Digest Oct 2022: Pathways in a broken world
This autumn, it is clearer than ever that we are in a political, economic and social mess, as well as an ecological one. The UK is in its own predicament, but it’s hard to think of a country that isn’t. And some kind of breakdown is inevitable, since even the best of political parties and governments are not willing to face fully into the societal transformation that would be needed to address the climate and ecological crisis.
Climate Crisis Digest Aug 2022: Climate Change & Thirst
In May this year, Shelot Masithi was invited to give one of the two keynote speeches at the virtual conference organised jointly by Climate Psychology Alliance and the Association for Psychosocial Studies. Her title was 'Climate Change and Thirst’.
Climate Crisis Digest July 2022: Feeling the Real, Finding the Words
A couple of weeks ago, something real bubbled up through the CPA Google Forum and I found myself caught up in the emotion of the exchanges. A link had been posted to an article in the Guardian newspaper with the title “Suicides indicate wave of ‘doomerism’ over escalating climate crisis.”
Climate Crisis Digest June 2022: A glance from the shadows- a Russian psychologist’s reflection on isolation in an abusive country
Imagine a world where there’s no truth. Anything anyone says can be misinterpreted, doubted, and punished. Everything you’d relied on has perished, the future is completely uncertain, and you’re isolated and hated by the rest of the world. This is how I feel since February 24th, 2022. I live in Moscow...
Climate Crisis Digest May 2022: What does healthy climate agency look like?
Agency in climate psychology
My involvement in Climate Psychology Alliance stems from a wish to understand, with others, how humans can empower and motivate ourselves and each other to stop the destruction that we are part of.
Climate Crisis Digest April 2022: Worlds Apart, Worlds Colliding
Part 1. Ukraine
Four weeks after the invasion started, a “Digest” about the war in Ukraine feels like an oxymoron. The terrible attrition of people and places grinds on; atrocities against the Ukrainian people mount daily.
Climate Crisis Digest March 2022: Staying with the Trouble
"Our own life has to be our message" -- Thich Nhat Hanh1
I live alone in rural Maine, on native Wabanaki land. My two kids are in their early twenties, alive and well in other states. I can't imagine how their lives will engage this climate emergency.
Climate Crisis Digest Feb 2022: Covid, vaccination and climate anxiety
Unconscious displacement on a global scale
I cannot get out of my head the thought that the global North's panic stricken response to Covid-19 is also a displacement of climate anxiety. This displacement would be working at the level of the societal unconscious; perhaps the most global societal unconscious displacement humanity has ever spawned.
CPA Newsletter Jan 2022- Climate Crisis Digest: Becoming Lost
‘In order to find your way, you must become lost.’
Bayo Akomolafe remembers this advice from his ancestors. He insists that we need ‘to fall down to the earth and listen’.
Becoming lost, as we enter the new year, how do I learn to listen to the earth?1
CPA Newsletter Dec 2021- Climate Crisis Digest: Working for fossil-fuel companies
At the recently-concluded COP 26 talks in Glasgow, there were so many representatives of fossil-fuel companies that together they constituted a larger delegation than any nation.1 What is it like to work for one of these companies, to keep doing business as usual in the knowledge of the terrible damage that it is doing to us all?
CPA Newsletter Nov 2021 - Climate Crisis Digest: Serious play: experiments and connections
At the beginning of 2021, I chose a sequence of three books on the climate crisis. In a sense, I curated some reading to experiment on myself, because I wanted to find out how different kinds of books worked on me.
CPA Newsletter Oct 2021 - Climate Crisis Digest: Is This the Best We Can Do? Some reflections a month ahead of COP26
Peter Carter, IPCC expert reviewer and Director of the Climate Emergency Institute, in an interview with Nick Breeze at COP 25, Madrid, argued that the COP process was set up to fail.
CPA Newsletter Sep 2021 - Climate Crisis Digest: Climate Change & Collective Trauma
In a recent article on climate change, fragmentation and collective trauma (2021)1, I suggested that in order to understand the ground from which ‘the culture of uncare and exceptionalism’ (as Sally Weintrobe describes it2) emerged, it may be helpful to look through a trauma lens.
CPA Newsletter July 2021 - Climate Crisis Digest: On Sitting in Uncertainty
As I joined the Climate Psychology Alliance recently, I thought it would be interesting for this month’s Climate Digest to bring the perspective of someone new to the CPA and new to trying to set up conversation spaces such as Climate Cafés.
CPA Newsletter June 2021 - Climate Crisis Digest: Emerging Reciprocity
During the pandemic, I acquired three Khaki Campbell ducklings, a domesticated duck bred for laying.
CPA Newsletter May 2021 - Climate Crisis Digest: Decolonising Loss within Climate Psychology
The car bumps and shakes along the winding dirt road that has been degraded by logging trucks.
CPA Newsletter April 2021 - Climate Crisis Digest: Decolonising Ourselves
A small group of those racialised white in CPA have been meeting to explore racialisation, decolonisation and climate psychology. The group was one part of a response to the need for anti-racism practice within CPA. It followed discussions on the CPA google group, calls for those racialised white to do their own work, and the general increase in awareness about internalised and systemic racism following the murder of George Floyd in May 2020.
CPA Newsletter March 2021 - Climate Crisis Digest: Water Shortage
When Shelot Masithi, a Psychology student at the University of Limpopo in South Africa, contacted CPA, she had an interest in climate psychology’s approach to water scarcity. Kate Evans was struck by what Shelot called the ‘daunting question’ posed on the CPA discussion forum: “What will be the state of health psychology in a society with a deepening climate change, food shortage, and degrading land?”
CPA Newsletter Feb 2021- Climate Crisis Digest: Conspirituality
As anxiety about ecological crisis and the coronavirus spreads, we might expect defensive psychological formations to take hold on a large scale.
CPA Newsletter December 2020: Climate Crisis Digest - Identifying Social Collapse?
Has it not already started, the social collapse predicted to be part of climate derangement?
CPA Newsletter November 2020 - Climate Crisis Digest: Petromasculinity.
“Proud Boys”
An American all-male neo-fascist militia group called “Proud Boys” came to international attention recently when Trump gave it explicit public support.
CPA Newsletter October 2020 - Climate Crisis Digest: Meeting the future that's arrived.
How can CPA adapt its purposes to the rapid and profound changes that are now impacting the climate and climate psychology, from unprecedented hostile weather to unbridled governments manipulating through lies, from a losing fight to vanquish Covid-19 to record levels of mental distress? Does it mean a shift of focus within the scope and topics CPA has developed over the years; does it mean a radical new approach?
CPA Newsletter September 2020 - Climate Crisis Digest: Air Pollution.
Right to breathe clean air
The politics of air pollution needs a climate psychology of breathing. Breathing safe air is not just a civil right, it is an existential necessity.
CPA Newsletter July 2020 - Climate Crisis Digest: Racial Justice and Climate Justice.
Black Lives Matter
Black Lives Matter has given a huge hopeful impetus to resistance.
CPA Newsletter June 2020 - Climate Crisis Digest: How many people can the Earth support?
Overpopulation
How many people can the earth support? Dr. Christopher Tucker raises this question after pointing out that between 1970 and 2017, human population more than doubled, going from 3.7 billion to 7.5 billion. Tucker’s book title provides his answer: A Planet of Three Billion.
CPA Newsletter May 2020: Climate Crisis Digest -The Human Predicament of Pandemic
What, collectively, do we do with the sickening knowledge that air pollution takes more lives the world over than this virus?
CPA Newsletter April 2020: Climate Crisis Digest - Nature Reappears
Dilemmas
How does ‘nature’ figure in the way we meet the threat of Covid-19, this virus that is upsetting human life across the world?
CPA Newsletter March 2020: Climate Crisis Digest - A tale of two tipping points
By the time this letter goes out it may have become clear whether a tipping point has occurred in the global spread of the coronavirus.
February 2020: Climate Crisis Digest - Davos and Daily Mail Narratives
Asked about climate change at Davos, President Trump said that he was all for the environment.
CPA newsletter January 2020. Climate Crisis Digest - The Abysmal Failure of COP25.
December was a dismal month,
CPA newsletter December 2019. Climate Crisis Digest - The New Climate War
‘This is the new climate war’ says Professor Michael Mann,
CPA newsletter November 2019. Climate Crisis Digest - Extinction October Rebellion, Gaian Change
Amongst those who face the truth of global heating, ecological destruction and species extinction, there is widespread consensus around one radical new starting point:
CPA Newsletter October 2019: Climate Crisis Digest - A New Epoch in Facing Difficult Truths
Good news that over 250 media outlets have pledged to focus on climate crisis...
CPA Newsletter Sept 2019: Making Connections (and welcome to the New Zealand Climate in Mind Initiative)
...recognising and understanding the disconnections which maintain our sleepwalk into the disasters of ecocide and climate disruption ...climate psychologists are the forensic psychiatrists of the climate movement
CPA Newsletter July 2019: Future in the balance
The Anthropocene is the most important descriptor of our epoch. Our understanding of this and climate psychology’s response are both evolving constantly. The basics, so eloquently explained in Clive Hamilton’s Defiant Earth, are increasingly self-evident: we humans are now an Earth system in our own right, operating invasively and destructively, with limited and reducing choice as to outcome.
CPA Newsletter June 2019: You can't declare an emergency and then act like nothing has happened
Some resistant cultural complexes are themed in this newsletter:
CPA Newsletter May 2019: Polly Higgins
We are devastated to have lost International Earth lawyer, friend and colleague Polly Higgins who died on Easter Sunday 2019 after a short illness.
CPA Newsletter April 2019: Conflict and Taboo
...a fatal exploitation of the earth’s generosity ...
CPA Newsletter March 2019: We are school striking because we have done our homework
"typically clear and feisty" ...
CPA Newsletter February 2019: A Psyche the Size of the Earth
What of greater-than-me awareness – the recognition that we are connected to and utterly dependent on the land, wood, air, water and energy balance of our planet?
CPA Newsletter November 2018 - a Climate Minds dialogue
This months newsletter has a different feel to it. At its heart is a 'Climate Minds' dialogue between therapist and poet, Steve Thorp, and writer and coach, Julia Macintosh.
CPA Newsletter Oct 2018 - Choice, Tragedy and Sacrifice
Irish author Colm Toibin, in his 2017 novel House of Names, weaves a dark and disturbing tale,
CPA Newsletter Sept 2018 - Facing the Truth, BBC and Balance
CPA members challenge BBC - "The Cat is out of the Bag"
CPA Newsletter June 2018 - Psychology of The Possible
Agreed Facts, Differing Conclusions
CPA Newsletter May 2018 - In The Face Of Self-Destruction
Most of us would probably agree that good is more likely to come out of our work if we are operating out of appreciation for the gifts of individual life, of the natural world and yes, of civilisation.
CPA Newsletter April 2018 - Farewell To Sudan
Many hearts will have been cast down by the death last week of the last male Northern White rhino.
CPA Newsletter March 2018 - Critical Conversations
Fertile and Sterile Conversations was the theme of CPA’s 2013 Members Day.
CPA Newsletter February 2018 - The Unthinkable Anthropocene
Does a Rupture in Earth’s History Count as News?
CPA Newsletter December 2017
“O Wedding-Guest! This soul hath been
Alone on a wide wide sea:
CPA Newsletter November 2017
Thirty years ago I wandered in a dazed state around Hampstead Heath London aghast at the devastation from what was called the Great Storm.
CPA Newsletter October 2017 - A Change of Order
This month, for the first time, CPA’s own news comes first, though there is no shortage of global climate events posing psychological questions.
CPA Newsletter July 2017 - Not Blown Away
An Effective Counter Response in Desparate Times
CPA Newsletter April 2017 - Doorway To The Underworld
The evocative title of this image was a gift
CPA Newsletter February 2017 - Shoot The Messenger
In post-truth politics, lies become “alternative facts”
CPA Newsletter December 2016 - The Sting
2016 will be remembered by progressives and environmentalists for the nasty sting in its tail.
CPA Newsletter November 2016 - If The Oceans Die, We Die
Humanity fails to grasp that the ocean ecosystem is a planetary life support system.
CPA Newsletter October 2016 - The Power of Wilful Ignorance Cannot be Overstated
This incisive claim was made in a short e-talk about industrial farming.
CPA Newsletter September 2016
Could Plenty Ever be Enough?
Naomi McCavitt’s disturbing picture “Land o’ Plenty” evokes so much, with its combination of fantastic portrait, landscape and still life.
CPA Newsletter July 2016
Murder and Forgiveness
The sickening murder of English MP Jo Cox on 16th June sent a shock wave through the country.
CPA Newsletter June 2016
The Climate Emergency Deepens
What will it take in the way of climate disaster to mobilise determined action, to create a human tipping point?
CPA Newsletter March 2016
Imprisonment is this month’s headline theme because it has been proposed or threatened, virtually simultaneously, on both sides of the climate struggle.
CPA Newsletter January 2016
New Year Issue: “Apres moi le deluge”
Nature has obliged with post-Paris deluges in the British Isles, the Missouri region and a large tract of South America.
CPA Newsletter December 2015
How can we help to sustain legitimate and constructive hope, in the face of either delusional expectations or resignation and despair.
CPA Newsletter November 2015
The Road to Paris
For a while in 2009, as Copenhagen approached, the denial industry seemed to go very quiet. Have they given up? some of us wondered. It was the lull before the storm of “climategate” which helped to ensure that COP 15 ended in disarray.
CPA Newsletter October 2015
Diverse Themes
The refugee / migrant crisis is a huge and complex subject not least in the tension between these two terms.
CPA Newsletter May 2015
As Britain comes to terms with the surprise general election result, many of us whose attention is focused on climate change will reflect on its virtual absence as an election issue.
CPA Newsletter April 2015
This 1st April CPA newsletter must include a thought on the place of the Fool. Honoured in royal tradition as a challenger of dull rationality, the fool enjoyed some immunity from the penalties of irreverence.
CPA Newsletter March 2015
“We’re drunk in charge of the world”
This, from Lord Stern, was one of the memorable utterances at the RSA event: “Climate Change Question Time”.
CPA Newsletter February 2015
A remarkable article was published on 25th January by Dahr Jamail in Truthout, title: “Mourning our Planet: Climate Scientists Share Their Grieving Process”.
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