Climate, Psychology, and Change

Praise

“The climate crisis is the greatest physical crisis we’ve ever faced as a species, but maybe the greatest metaphysical crisis too: as our assumptions about the present and future, about safety and risk, about individuality and solidarity are upended, it is bound to be both psychologically hard and psychologically rich—and as these intriguing essays make clear, some of the finest minds in the world are thinking through the problems and arriving at powerful answers.”
—Bill McKibben, author, environmentalist, educator, activist, and founder of Third Act

“Steffi Bednarek has curated a collection of texts that asks extremely important questions about what psychotherapy might look like beyond its mainstream individualistic, anthropocentric, and Western/colonial frameworks. Without providing definitive answers, this book invites the readers to consider how the focus on individual mental health and wellbeing is preventing us from recognizing how our current inner cognitive, affective, and relational infrastructures are tied to the collapsing infrastructures that surround us. Climate, Psychology, and Change is an invaluable companion to those interested in who we can be once we process the difficult lessons of modernity dying within and around us.”
—Vanessa Machado de Oliveira, author of Hospicing Modernity

“Climate, Psychology, and Change is an outstanding update of the ecopsychology movement. A broad range of perspectives are brought together in this collection of marvelous essays showing that the human soul cannot be healthy on a sick planet. The healing of the anima mundi and the healing of the human soul depend on each other. It is more than a book; it is a treasure of radical ideas and profound insights. It is a book of wisdom! Steffi Bednarek has woven a garland of great thoughts which will inspire the reader to look at the world and see it as an interconnected whole.”
—Satish Kumar, founder of Schumacher College and editor emeritus of Resurgence & Ecologist

“Climate change is a systemic problem with geophysical, technological, economic, political, and ethical dimensions, among others. The in-depth exploration of our climate crisis from a mental health perspective offered in this book will be an important contribution to an urgently needed dialogue.”
—Fritjof Capra, author of The Web of Life and coauthor of The Systems View of Life

“Climate, Psychology, and Change is an exquisitely crafted deep dive into the profound uncertainties we must face in these times of climate breakdown. The editor’s intention to ‘bring regenerative disturbance to the commons of our profession’ is well-fulfilled. This is a prophetic book, necessarily disturbing, articulating many necessary paradoxes. It is a catalytic gift to the psyche professions and beyond.”
—Judith Anderson, Jungian analytical psychotherapist, chair of board of trustees for the Climate Psychology Alliance

“Nothing is what it seems, the symptom is not the problem, psychology is not just psychology. There is a necessary blurring that brings transcontextual combining into every moment of life. The response is not a strategy, but rather a shifted ecology of perception. As this era unravels the stitchery of so many destructive illusions woven tightly into the last several centuries, new questions are surfacing. The familiar is a trap of traps wrapped and soaked in separations that perpetuate the existing habits over and over again. There is so much possibility just waiting—but it looks nothing like it used to. This beautiful book leaves nothing behind.”
—Nora Bateson, filmmaker, author, and founder of Warm Data

“This powerful collection explores how psychotherapy can help us face the unfolding reality of climate change, focusing on a wide range of crucial questions including how we can build communal containers to help us hold our grief, rage, and fear, and how we can learn to stay with the unknown, reacting to the world as it emerges rather than pushing for premature solutions. An extraordinary and hugely timely book.”
—Rebecca Henderson, John and Natty McArthur University professor at Harvard University

“As we ponder the climate crisis—how we could have let ourselves get to this point and what we can do about it—the voices of mental health professionals have often gone missing. Until now. For those seeking new ways to understand and take action, there are answers. In Climate, Psychology, and Change, renowned authors share their knowledge, passion, and experience, bringing the psychological components and complexities of our climate predicament out of the shadows. And as important as numbers are, even more telling is their recounting of the root of the climate crisis—the crisis of the human spirit. This book tells that story, and more.”
—Lise van Susteren, MD, psychiatrist, specialist in climate and mental health, and founder of the Climate Psychiatry Alliance

“Climate, Psychology, and Change is an urgent and necessary response to the most critical emergent questions of our time. Steffi Bednarek and the contributors offer a bold vision that reimagines the role of psychotherapy and widens the ways we think about what it means to be human. Not only does the book equip us with the skills to help clients navigate climate anxiety, eco-distress, and disruption, but it asks us to stretch our imagination beyond the assumptions of an outdated worldview. The authors move our focus from the care for the individual to practices that are grounded in collective action. This beautiful book illustrates how to meet this moment with care and grace, even as we look toward uncertain futures.”
—Britt Wray, PhD, director of CIRCLE at Stanford Psychiatry and author of Generation Dread

“For well over a century, psychology has tried to help us better adjust to what is. In this book, a refreshing diversity of psychologies asks us to realize that being well adjusted to ‘what is’ is in fact deadly. If before we were challenged to grow up, this book offers the container that will help us break down. It shows us that healing our personal traumas was never a big enough lens for the incipient pain inside and around us. It reads to me as if—in these pages—psychology itself comes into its own maturity; as if it could be the true elder, the trustworthy guide, that so much of humanity needs to make it through this dangerous, painful passage toward a saner, wiser world.”
—Susanne Moser, PhD, founder of The Adaptive Mind Project and director of Susanne Moser Research & Consulting

“The climate crisis is not just ‘out there’; it is also a crisis of the disembedded and encapsulated modern self. Deploying contributors from across the world, Steffi Bednarek has assembled not only a multi-perspectival critique of this self but also a ferment of new possibilities for the practice of being therapist, citizen, and human.”
—Paul Hoggett, cofounder of the Climate Psychology Alliance

“What an exciting book! Its very forms speak to what is different about it: for only genuine dialogue, within a broader container of the more-than-human, can indicate a path forward from the wrecked civilization whose psyches are now seeking to change.

This book is not a tedious chorus of agreement, but an emergent dialogue of deep insights and ideas that criss-cross one another. So refreshing!

What this book evinces is both a subtlety and a seriousness about helping climate distress to enter and alter psychotherapy. The difficult eco-emotions are an invitation to us all: to refind our collective voice, to become who we are, and to manifest as deep determination the pain we feel for the Earth and for each other. This book issues a wonderfully wild invitation.”
—Rupert Read, professor at the University of East Anglia and codirector of the Climate Majority Project