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We are all negatively affected by the climate crisis, in one way or another. Until now, the psychological community's approach to helping patients handle struggles with everything from fear to grief to guilt has mainly been providing insights and tools for living with and adapting to the crisis. In most cases, it's assumed that man-made carbon emissions are at the root of the devastating effects on the planet we're already witnessing, and that individuals have little to no control over systemic causes. But what if we're approaching the problem while employing a concept of reality that is the underlying cause of the climate crisis? That is the premise of
Climate Psychology: A Matter of Life and Death, by Wendy Hollway, Paul Hoggett, Chris Robertson, and Sally Weintrobe.
The authors came together as members of the Climate Psychology Alliance (CPA), cofounded by Hoggett and Adrian Tate in the years 2009-2012. Among the collaborators, Sally Weintrobe in particular is widely known for her body of work identifying collective psychology factors themselves as an underlying cause of climate change. Her 2021 book Psychological Roots of the Climate Crisis: Neoliberal Exceptionalism and the Culture of Uncare, reviewed in this issue by Maureen Katz, explains that while most people are no longer in denial of the crisis itself, we have collective difficulty recognizing its “deadly seriousness.” Weintrobe writes, in the welcoming introduction to her website, that many more are now “appreciating with much greater empathy that this bubble [of denial] has served to maintain white privilege and Exceptionalism,” and goes further to identify and blame neoliberalism, an “ideology-driven deregulated form of capitalism that [has] gained ascendancy over the past forty odd years.” She recognizes that we all need guidance in coming to terms with these overwhelming realities and their congruent cognitive dissonance that arises through our guilt, grief, and sense of moral injury while we cont