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I am delighted to present this Special Issue on our environmental and climate crisis, which continues the Journal's engagement with pressing contemporary matters that affect both therapists and patients alike. Climate change and environmental devastation are inextricably intertwined, and this is bringing us perilously close to irreversible systemic tipping points. In the 18 months or so that it has taken to bring this volume to fruition, there has been an increasing number of previously ‘unprecedented’ environmental disasters around the world, leaving shock, death and destruction in their wake. Parts of our Earth are becoming uninhabitable, millions of people are being displaced, and disruptions to food production and water and energy security are now a fact of life for many more of us. Although the impacts of extreme and repeating fires, droughts, floods and famine consequent upon shifting climate patterns, temperature rises, ice-melt and rising sea-levels are often felt disproportionately by indigenous peoples and marginalized communities worldwide, even those more affluent amongst us will soon have to make difficult decisions about how we live our lives.
In these increasingly uncertain and troubling times of global environmental, climatic, social and political upheaval and transition, anxieties are high as our taken-for-granted narratives regarding ‘life as we have come to know it’ (wherever we are and whatever kind of life we are living) are being challenged along with the sustainability of our taken-for-granted Earth as planetary boundaries are being exceeded. This leaves us all increasingly ‘vulnerable’ and it is difficult to imagine how we humans might be able to make the changes necessary to avert climate and environmental catastrophe. As analysts, our specialty is not only the provision of safe spaces for thinking the unthinkable and feeling into what was imagined to be impossible, but also to be alert and attentive to what is emergent, to catch the drift of