‘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
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?
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.
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.
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.
We are a diverse community of therapeutic practitioners, thinkers, researchers, artists and others. We believe that attending to the psychology and emotions of the climate and ecological crisis is at the heart of our work.