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To say that questions of climate change are intimately connected with the future and survival of planet earth is of course no exaggeration: there is, as we all know, no “Planet B”. Indeed, the long history of climate change denial, collusion with big business, and governmental and inter-governmental policy failure, has led to a race towards extinction that is now reasonably well understood. It seems that very little progress has been made in addressing the problems, with the global community stuck and—in spite of some notable exceptions—largely unable to act decisively. As UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres told the COP27 Climate Change Conference in Sharm-el-Sheikh in November 2022, “We are on a highway to climate hell with our foot still on the accelerator”.
If addressing climate change is pivotal to our survival, then so too must climate psychology be: as the book’s title suggests, climate psychology is a matter of life and death, and it is the psychology of climate denial that is rather less understood. That the death referred to here may be principally concerning those a long way from many of us, and some time into the future, is not the point. We know that we already bequeath a damaged world to future generations, and, if as a species we cannot act, the danger is that this battering and trashing of our environment may be so far reaching that, tragically, it will ultimately lead to the ruination of the planet. So, as many in our field of work are wont to do in relation to such psychological (and psychosocial) questions, we cannot but enquire “what is going on here?”, and “why are we so stuck?”.
Within this context, a new book on such matters from these four authors was eagerly anticipated. With Paul Hoggett, a pre-eminent scholar in the area of psychosocial studies; Wendy Hollway, a key thinker on qualitative research methodology and the unconscious; Chris Robertson, a chair of the Climate Psychology Alliance; and Sally Weintrobe having played an early pioneer