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Wendy Hollway, Paul Hoggett, Chris Robertson and Sally Weintrobe, eminent British climate psychology thinkers, share in this book their cutting-edge reflections about the current state of our world characterized by the calamitous eco-psycho-social crisis of the climate emergency. They advocate for and explore the emerging field of climate psychology designed to raise awareness of our current maladaptive cultural assumptions and help find more reality-based, integrated, connected, and less binary ways of living, being, and acting in the world. They maintain that the age of Modernity with its beliefs in individualism, technological fixes and exploitation of earth's resources without limits to satisfy our need for progress is coming to an end leaving behind significant and irreversible devastation evidenced in extreme climate instability, pandemics, genocidal and eco-cidal assaults. A new Climate Psychology is needed that transcends the binary thinking of Modernity, i.e. individual/social, human/environment, natural/cultural, thinking/feeling and allows for an eco-psycho-social interconnectedness and linkage (p. 5).
These four authors have written about the climate emergency for many years and share the conviction that a cultural transformation is required to avoid the worst effects of global warming: irreversible mass extinction of biodiversity and an unlivable planet. The authors are active members of the Climate Psychology Alliance whose mission is to help us “Face Difficult Truths about Climate Change and Ecological Crisis.” Drawing on their conversations with each other and Climate Psychology Alliance members, they illuminate the psychological reasons why, in particular, the global north continues, for the most part, to live as usual, when our life-styles and actions clearly bring about widespread extinction (p. 3).
The book consists of two chapters written together by Hollway, Hoggett, Robertson and Weintrobe: Chapter One: “Introduction: A matter of life and death”