New blog address now definitely up and running

If you've found this blog, that's great. I hope you find the posts, such as they are, stimulating and challenging. If so, then make a note, please, of my new definitive blog/website address, at

WWW.PSYCHLOTHERAPIST.COM.

Nothing new is being posted here, so happy hunting on other site.

Mark Brayne

Switching Sites

Delighted to discover that people I hadn't realised were following this blog (well, at least one, in the person of Caroline Finnigan at the BBC) are so doing. See comment to the last post on Tiananmen Square, and apologies for leaving you out of the credits, Caroline.

The psychlotherapist blog continues, for those armies of interested out there, at http://psychlotherapist.wordpress.com. A nicer-looking page, and easier to edit and elaborate.

For a simple link to the new address, here it is.

Tiananmen Anniversary Approaches

It's quite extraordinary to think that it's now 20 years since Chinese students and much of Beijing - then still Peking in BBC-speak - rose up and occupied Tiananmen Square to call for democracy and an end to corruption.

I have a picture somewhere undiscoverable of a much younger MB standing on pretty much the same spot as here two decades ago, posing with BBC microphone among crowds of hunger-striking students as I reported on possibly the biggest news story I've ever covered.

After serving there from 1984-87, I was back in Beijing at the time as the BBC World Service's London-based Diplomatic Correspondent to report on what was intended as a groundbreaking visit to China by the then Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev. Groundbreaking it was, but in dramatically unexpected ways, as China was shaken by its biggest protests since the Communists came to power in 1949.

My successor as Beijing correspondent, and now Economist correspondent there James Miles, has just broadcast a riveting account on BBC Radio 4 of those euphoric but ultimately tragic days, digging out priceless old recordings with the help of editor Caroline Finnigan, and of our good friend and producer in China in 1989, Peter Burdin.

James makes the cautious point which my wife Sue and I have also heard argued in Beijing two years ago (when the photo above was taken) that the Chinese today have much of what the students had demanded in the way of freedom, openness and economic liberalisation, and that paradoxically and painfully, the Communist Party may even have had a certain justification in putting down (although in a disastrously violent way) some very firm boundaries in 1989 in a country whose history is one of at times cataclysmic instability.

Do listen. And if the impact of Tiananmen Square, like an old trauma, still burns for you, you might find interesting accounts this week of the newly-smuggled memoires of China's late reformist Party leader Zhao Ziyang, banished from power at the height of the demonstrations in 1989 for arguing the students' case for tolerance.

But back to cataclysm, as Barack Obama lays out sadly inadequate but important new legislation on improving the fuel consumption of American cars, Madeline Bunting in The Guardian this week made some of the most cogent connections I've yet read between the current UK parliamentary expenses scandal and our much more widely shared but equally unsustainable sense of entitlement merely as inhabitants of the 21st century Western world.

And this at a time when more and more publications, in tune with Madeline Bunting, are beginning to name the catastrophe that is coming our way - notably the Lancet this week, which has finally named climate change as the biggest threat to human health in the 21st century, noting that many are going to need counselling to cope with the emotional distress this will entail.

I actually suspect that, when things begin to get really bad, there won't be either much appetite or financing for psychotherapy.

So, time to get cycling around the world before it's too late?

Glasgow Therapists' Conference Wakes Up to Climate Change

Beginning seriously to speak in public about my own firm conclusion that climate change catastrophe is now inevitable, and relatively soon (10 years? 15? Certainly no more than 25), is a bit like Coming Out.

But at an inspiring conference of politically-engaged psychotherapists in Glasgow this week, speaking that truth as I see it was both less scarey than I feared, and appeared to be not without impact.

Which was profoundly encouraging and gratifying - especially the engagement of over a dozen fellow therapists in the first public workshop I've led on the science and emotions of climate change and peak oil, looking in particular at how our evolutionary trauma mechanisms are, as yet, preventing us as a species from taking the threat seriously or from doing something about it.

I've devised an experimental Climate Change Attitudes Questionnaire (CCAQ - and see the picture above and also this link which should download in a printable and fillable-in format) designed to uncover what people really think about the changes of our current civilisation, the planet's current flora and fauna and our current human numbers surviving the coming cataclysm in anything like recognisable form.

I'll be interested in any comments from this blog's vast (not) readership, but from the 14 responses I got at today's seminar, at the wonderfully crumbling Pearce Institute in Glasgow's former and now very forlorn shipbuilding quarter of Govan, we registered an average score of 47 out of 70, meaning in my interpretation that many more ordinary folk (OK, therapists on this occasion), know more and are more alarmed about climate change than the public discourse would suggest.

Scores ranged from two highs of 60 down to one of 31 - do the questionnaire yourself, and you'll see what it's intended to unearth.

The scores certainly confirm for me that there is a kind of collective unconscious beginning to stir that will soon see massively larger numbers of people around the world truly waking up to what now faces us - and by the end of the two days of meetings and workshops, our commitment in a final discussion-in-circle was to draw up a shared statement not on psychotherapy and politics in a narrow sense, but specifically on climate change.

And while I'm at it, I've just updated our Braynework website to include a new page on climate change, with resources and documents and further links that don't disappear, as those on this blog do with every new post, further and further down the page...

People Just Aren't Interested

Oh dear.

We've just installed solar water heating, as I mentioned a couple of weeks ago, and it's working brilliantly. Completely, so far, doing away with the need for any additional gas water heating.

But, what's the first thing the neighbours said when we first encountered them this week after the installation?

"Did you get planning permission?"

Not, What a good idea, How is it working, Tell us about it. Glad to see that someone is trying to make a difference.

OK, we live in a conservation zone. But as long as the installation doesn't protrude more than 20cm, there's no need - I have it in writing - for local authority permission. And, Severn Water rapidly stumped up £1000 towards the cost with not a quibble, with a further £400 from the Government's Carbon Buildings Trust, and those grants together covered a quarter of installation

Somebody wants us to do this. But ordinary folk? They/we may worry (sometimes) about climate change and the implications for our children and grandchildren. But, DO something serious about it? Or support the immediate neighbours if that changes your accustomed view? That's a different story. Not In My Back Yard.

And there is more this week. Last night at the Frontline Club in London, where discussions about Obama's foreign policy, or the Middle East, or press freedom, or the future of newspapers otherwise pack them in, the Club's first serious discussion about climate change and the approaching "perfect storm" with Labour MP Colin Challen attracted, perhaps, 35 people.

Compared to the usual standing-room-only 120 or so.

Challen has just published a book on the politics of climate change, Too Little Too Late, and has long been one of the most vocal activists in Parliament pressing for much more investment in alternative technology and climate change mitigation.

Clearly, those at the meeting last night were a self-selected group of those already engaged with climate change - and indeed, in a quick hands-raised poll, about half agreed that it's already too late for the survival of our current civilisation.

But, otherwise, let's face it, the human race doesn't want to know. And when humanity's (and journalists' and our Cotswold neighbours') collective alarm systems do fire, it will - it really will - be too late. And probably very messy.

How soon? A therapist friend gives it two years. I perhaps would give it five. In the meantime, I think I do after all need to cycle around the world. While stocks last.

Findhorn and Farewell to Father

So, my father's funeral has been and gone, as has my curtailed Findhorn retreat and my own same-day 59th birthday.

And while my sibs, my kids (excepting daughter in NZ) and nephews/nieces were there with my steps to see Dad off in Birmingham, for ancient but still important family reasons, my Mum and I needed to remember Thomas quietly in our own way back on his and our old Norfolk home territory.

The Easter Findhorn retreat was place to ponder how this farewell was best done. And while at times turbulent and challenging, it was done well.

A quiet mother-and-son moment of reflection on a father who did his rather limited best, and a bike ride with said mother at 10 days short of her own 82nd birthday across the Heath to a pub supper in Salthouse, and home to Sheringham via a thankfully soft landing in....

...a hedgerow just this side of Weybourne.

What a character.

Findhorn up in Scotland was once again, 15 years after Experience Week there in 1994 turned my life around, magical - especially its sanctuaries such the Troll House, as my former partner

Jutta and I used to call it, also pictured here,

for long, deep, gentle meditations on family and planetary woundings and how they might be faced and healed.

My Dad, born 1921, was of probably the most extraordinary generation the world has ever known - one whose lives spanned a century that took our Earth from largely old-ways sustainability to the point at which our civilisation is beginning terminally to break down.

They had it astonishingly, unprecedently, unconsciously easy.

My father just missed getting killed in the Second World War - he was aboard a landing craft heading to almost certain death in Japanese-occupied Burma when the atomic bombs brought Japan's surrender.

Then from his Cambridge education in agriculture, a life in farming gave him and his first and second families ever-growing fossil-fuelled prosperity to the point where his relatively peaceful and NHS-orchestrated death of lung cancer at 87 could scarcely have been more gentle, even elegant.

Even if he was unable and unwilling to comprehend to the very end that he was dying. Indeed, his almost last words to me on the phone, 10 days before the end, were that "I somehow just don't seem to be able to shake this off."

Our own, next baby-boomer generation born in the 50s may just die peacefully in our beds as he did. Sadly, I doubt whether our children, and certainly our grandchildren, will have that luxury, as all breaks down around us and them.

Death is a time for truth, openness and honesty, sometimes painful, for integrity and also reckoning.

That is as true for humankind and the planet as it is for just one individual and his complex but perhaps finally healing family.

It Really is Over. A Paradoxical Relief

Just to prove that I am blogging from the real Scotland, and not like Neil Armstrong from a Hollywood studio (OK, I know men went to the moon), a couple of Very Scottish Photos.

One of an abandoned, ruined but thoroughly Wromantic 18th century barracks built by the English in their initially vain (and perhaps once again so) efforts to subdue the Scots.

And the other, cycleway markings in the Middle of Highland Nowhere giving priority to non-existent motorised traffic into a farm track. In Holland, France and Germany, as I found last year, bikes have priority, pretty much always.

But as towards bikes, so towards the environment, our priorities are so very far out of alignment with anything that willl make a difference.

On which, at the risk of over-blogging (a warning from my very techie-literate son Alastair), I would like briefly to put on record what feels a conclusive, liberating awareness this evening that the Game is indeed Over.

Mary-Jayne has sent me a link to a blog and website of colleagues in the US who have drawn much condemnation and pain from making a film, which it seems names the catastrophe that's coming, in the understanding that we're already beyond the tipping point.

I was reminded reading their blog of a new builder friend who came round to our Cirencester home the other day to quote for some loft insulation, and with whom we ended having an inspiring, honest and totally no-holds-barred conversation about how there's not really much point any more, as nothing can stop the catastrophe that's coming.

He emailed me afterwards saying he'd wept on his way home, with relief and also sadness at meeting someone who was, with him, prepared to face what now awaits us.

I realise, epecially after my father's death this week and his one individual inability - determination not - to confront and accept what was happening to him, that humankind just can't do this.

And doesn't want to, yet anyway - despite actually KNOWING quite deeply (as I've found on the this bike trip, talking with dozens of very ordinary, everyday students and B&B owners and shopkeepers) that it's really bad.

I suspect that many ordinary folk, as they go about their ordinary lives, are in fact now, possibly even a touch desperately, looking for real leadership from those courageous enough to name what is happening and map out what this will mean for us

Only then can we truly make choices about how to respond. The rest is denial and collusion.

Do We Deserve to Survive?

The photo doesn't show it very clearly, but with the journey resumed by train from Edinburgh to the Highlands, across the Forth Bridge (see pillars in the background), I'm moved to wonder whether we as humans really deserve to survive.

My tendon is behaving itself after all, to my surprise, but this morning in Edinburgh, the locals weren't, and my bike is minus one front pannier, nicked from right next to me at a lovely Turkish café as I drank a coffee and read my map.

We are capable as humans of wonderful things. But at least as often, we can be despicable and selfish. How much will that pannier, containing a bike lock, bike tools and a wet bike cover, be worth on eBay to the thief?

Twenty quid? I can keep cycling, but it leaves the foulest of tastes.

A bit like fatty foods, which a new survey reported by the BBC this week tells us we're continuing to consume regardless of knowing how it can contribute to cancer.

Cognitive dissonance, as also in continuing a carbon lifestyle we now know will kill us as a species if we carry on consuming as usual.

Sore at the unxpected loss of my pannier, I expect the worst of human nature when things get really bad. There will be goodness, kindness, but there'll be a lot of the other as well.

Subjects to be discussed at a reassuringly rich set of public meetings in London in the coming few weeks on climate change.

In reverse order, on June 20 Birkbeck College is discussing the psychodynamics of climate change, and why humans prefer stay in denial.

On May 12, the Science Museum has a free debate on the unprecedented action it says is needed, from the global political to the individual, if we're to have a chance of getting through this crisis.

And first of all, on April 28, the Frontline Club near Paddington is creating a space for journalists and those who care about journalism (at last) to quiz politicians on why it's so hard for the system to initiate the change we need.

Can human nature change? An Achilles tendon can heal much more quickly than expected. But this morning, minus my pannier and also minus my Dad, who died quietly yesterday at 87, unaware to the last what was really happening to him, I am not very optimistic about people.

Greetings from Achilles

Readers of this blog from last year may recall my Europe trip being held up for several weeks in Vienna and Budapest with a sore left ankle.

Well, Achilles is back, and the rest of the body to which the tendon is attached is, after just one day, laid up in Hawick, stlll Scottish borders, with zero chance now of reaching Inverness by bike by Friday.

Above the view from the invalid's window in a delightful, warm and dry farmhouse B&B just outside town.

Moral of the story, especially when you're nearly 60? Stretch those muscles and tendons before charging off like a 20-year-old and doing 65 miles from a cold and clearly (despite regular running in Cirencester Park) less-fit-than-imagined start

Still, with luck it's a mistake I'll need to make only once, though how much cycling I'll get done this week, not at all sure.

Time, therefore, to think and muse yet further on climate change etc.

On which, it occurs to me that while the fundamental problem isn't CO2 but overpopulation, that's not in the sense of too many people having been born these past 50 or 100 years, and therefore something that can be tackled with birth control or smaller families.

It's that too few of us have died - of disease, hunger, war and injury in the way we did for 10s of thousands of years before hygiene and modern medicine came along.

It's a heretical thought, but if there are historians to look back in coming years and consider where it all went so terribly wrong, I suspect that, along with fossil fuels, they'll name the discoveries of germs (and the need for hygiene) and of antibiotics as the most important nails in the coffin of advanced civilisation.

In other words, it was the discovery of how to keep people alive that will have condemned our species to death. Not what was intended. And - although grimly logical - how sad.

Sent from my Windows Mobile® phone.

Oh Yes, and by the way we're doomed.

It's so good - and knackering - to be on the road and the bike again. From Hexham in the far English North across a sunlit Hadrian's Wall and to Kielder Water some 40 miles into a determined headwind

Sun in the morning casting a bulky shadow of self, heavily-loaded panniers and Raven (readers of the old blog know her as my steed), and then slow, slow but rewarding progress, knowing that it always takes a couple of days to get into the swing.

Been thinking a lot on the bike, pedalling left-right-left-right in a bilateral stimulation sort of way, about Why Blog, especially when I have concluded that it's too late anyway to avert catastrophe for humankind in this century.

Well, I realised this blog is actually more for me than for you. There just are Things I have and want to say, and if there are folk out there who find that faintly stimulating, or annoying, or inspiring (main thing they're reading it), then that's good enough.

And the Thing I'm Thing-king of today, mainly, is how we are approaching the death of (most of) our species just as many individuals approach their own death.

My father is dying as I write this, aged 87 and with just days to live. He hasn't wanted to know that the cancer is back. Should we, as fractured family, have insisted that he understands this is the end?

I'm uncomfortable seeing him off so unconscious, although not really much change there. But the family concensus is, no need to distress him unnecessarily.

But what if, as I've written elsewhere, our collective survival had depended on his knowing and acting upon (of course, as of today, it's too late for him personally) the knowledge that he, and we, are dying?

We would all have been much less ready to collude with his denial. Yet, with the demise of our species, that's what we're doing when we choose not to speak out, loudly, about how urgent and mortal is the danger we're in.

And is there any sign that the public, or the media, are getting the plot? Not really.

This morning, Sunday, BBC Radio 4 finished the 0700 bulletin with an item on the dramatic breakup of a portion of the Antarctic ice shelf, much earlier than predicted. This, said the reporter, could have serious implications.

End of the news. Next item we turn to Jacqui Smith's husband's porn video expenses and Jade Goody's funeral. Much easier to deal with and less frightening over the cornflakes.

But also part of a much wider failure of journalistic responsibility.

So, back on the bike for 20 more miles today. To reach Inverness in six days, I have to average 60 miles a day. Hope the wind tomorrow is quieter and my legs less like jelly.

Sent from my Windows Mobile® phone.

The Best Explanation Yet Why This Is So Urgent

I've just chanced on a brilliant, and indeed inspiring cartoon by Leo Murray about the tipping point and why this time in human history matters so terribly much.

It's the best and most accessible exposition by far that I’ve seen on the science and implications of what's happening with the climate, and what it means for us as we move towards a much hotter world.

The video can be downloaded, and deserves the widest audience.

Off to Scotland....

Johann Hari in the Indie names the unnamable about the G20

First the good news. We now have a solar water heater installed, as of this week - and it's brilliant.

I'm sure that it took vastly more CO2 to construct and install than it will ever save. But when things get bad, and gas goes off, at least we'll have hot water.

As long, that is, as we have mains power, as the pumps and controllers all need electricity... And yes, we do do still have the Aga in the kitchen on the right. But she's about to be switched off for the summer, as we switch to cooking with much more efficient magnetic induction hobs until the autumn.

I know that my blogging can sometimes feel a bit desperate and maybe even extreme, in its relentless focus on the negatives of what is now likely to happen. But do read Johann Hari in the Independent today.

Unlike anyone else I’ve heard or read in the mainstream coverage of the G20 summit just concluded, Hari names it.

"We are facing 'devastating consequences'," writes Hari, quoting scientists from the recent meeting in Copenhagen. "Not in some distant future, but in my lifetime and yours. Unless we swerve fast, we are soon going to hit global temperatures that no human being has ever lived through."

I rest my case, and remain sadly convinced that humankind will not make the changes that might avert disaster.

We have to prepare for the worst – that message surely has to be at the heart of what we say and do. As psychotherapists claiming a modicum of consciousness, I believe we must build our approach to healing on an awareness that this, sadly, is now a death watch for almost everything we currently take for granted.

So, this climate change blog is going to take a break for a while, as I cycle over Easter to Findhorn for a week's contemplation of a not-yet-silent spring. If you are amused or stimulated to follow that trip, I'll be posting a thought or two here as I pedal north.

John Ashton's Full Speech in Copenhagen

A couple of short thoughts before I get on my bike on Saturday and start pedalling (with a bit of interim help from CrossCountry Trains) from Hexham to Inverness, for a week at the Findhorn Foundation contemplating the current spring awakening. (I may well blog along the way - keeps the mind safely occupied over those cool evening end-of-slog beers...)

First, as mentioned lower down in this blog, John Ashton, senior adviser on climate change to Foreign Secretary David Miliband, has written what's in my view one of the most powerful current messages on the urgency of a radical political awakening on the environment, and on the importance of science stating its message much more clearly. On Surviving the Collision. It's short, cogent, and WELL worth reading in full.

Second, I don't know if you noticed, but in today's Guardian, a report on Lord Stern's warnings against building a new coal generating station at Kingsnorth makes an interesting choice of information sequence.

At the top, the lead is on how the government should, in Lord Stern's view, halt the Kingsnorth planning process until carbon capture technology is sorted out. Fair enough. Read on, and the details unfold, until you reach the very final paragraph of this news report, quoting Stern as calling for carbon emissions to be reduced as soon and as fast as possible, since we should in his words otherwise expect a 5 degree rise in temperatures above pre-industrial levels.

"We haven't seen temperatures like that for 30 million years," Lord Stern continues. "We've got to understand the magnitude of the risks we face. It will transform where we live. Some places will be deserts, others will be racked by storms. It will involve the likely movement of hundreds of millions, possibly billions of people, and extended conflict."

Billions of refugees. Extended conflict. And that's the last paragraph.

Organic vegetable gardens at the White House and switching lights off for an hour in the world's cities as a gesture of concern are all, in their way, worthwhile contributions to giving people the sense that they're Doing Something.

But unless such actions coupled with a serious and sober realisation, and blunt discussion/reporting in the mainstream media, of the reality of what is overwhelmingly likely to happen (namely, billions dying this century, not just becoming refuges), I'm not sure I see uncoupled gestures are going to help all that much.

Nihilism and Radical Uncertainty - Thoughts from Mary-Jayne

(Reposting this with proper formatting and also correcting a fairly major Freudian slip, which suggested that flying and driving might be a meaningful contribution to combatting climate change.... A reminder that it's best not to post things very late at night and in a hurry.)

In an earlier post, this blog tackled the challenge of whether someone who's ecologically-aware can use a car, or even travel by plane, without needing to feel guilty or being judged by eco-peers.

My own view, while agreeing that it makes every bit of financial and social sense to use public transport, was that refraining from (!) driving or flying - within reason - is valuable more as a personal gesture than, sadly, as a meaningful contribution to stopping climate change.

Mary-Jayne Rust has come back with a very useful perspective, with which I entirely agree (although I would challenge the understanding of my own position as "depressive", except in the paradoxically positive Freudian sense.)

Addressing our friend Martin, who is concerned about using his car to travel to a summer gathering of ecologically-engaged therapists, Mary-Jayne writes:

"Martin, I would feel sad if you didn’t come because of your fear of being judged for driving there. I agree we all struggle with our own constraints.

I’m also interested in your comments on nihilism, hopelessness, and Mark’s ‘depressive position.’

It is depressing to face the situation we are in. It looks increasingly likely that we are heading for unimaginable loss of life. And while I don’t believe this is “The End of the World” it does seems as though it’s “The End of the World as we know it”.

Nihilism seems rather different. For me it lies in the ‘f**k it’ mentality. This runs something like: “We can’t turn this around, therefore there’s no point in any action anymore, and we may as well fly as much as we like or do anything we like because ultimately nothing will make a difference.”

Ultimately this is “F**k Gaia”. It’s f**k life. That attitude is for me the most depressing and hopeless and hard to bear of all. And it’s entirely understandable...

I guess the question is about making a difference to what? Even when death is certain, there is still opportunity for extraordinary transformation which can make such a difference to both those who are on their way out as well as those who remain here.

So my way out of nihilism, of finding meaning at the end of the world as we know it, is to spend what time we have looking our Shadow in the eye, trying to see what we have been caught in, trying to repair the damage as far as we can. This, for me, is a question about how we make peace with Gaia.

Mark made a comment some time back that (for example) stopping flying now wouldn’t make a difference in terms of averting climate change. The only difference it would make is personal. I want to challenge that, to try and understand this on a relational level.

That's because I think that all actions make a difference to my relationship with Gaia – which is my relationship with myself, with you, with all of life.

It makes a difference on a eco-spiritual level."

The Age of Stupid...

Just back from seeing The Age of Stupid, a new UK-produced film looking back from an imagined hot world in 2055 from on mankind's failure to take the steps that would have saved our homo sapiens from catastrophe.

I guess I'd hoped for a repeat and equally inspirational experience of Al Gore's Inconvenient Truth - a film that changed planetary thinking about climate change and the threat it presents to our survival.

That's a very big ask, and although it's a well-made, thoughtful movie with compelling individual narratives aimed to jolt Western viewers into protesting on the streets, accepting windfarms in their back yards and taking climate change seriously, Age of Stupid isn't in the same league.

A Nigerian girl living close to a Shell oil facility wants to be a doctor and enjoy a life of Western-style luxury. An Indian budget airlines entrepreneur dreams of getting all India airborne. Iraqi children in Jordanian exile play soldiers-and-insurgents. A grizzled old Mont Blanc guide in France tearfully and movingly laments the disappearance of the glaciers and of autumns and springs in the mountains. A New Orleans oilman lost everything in Katrina and comments that this must indeed be the Age of Stupid.

The film had the very best scientific advice from climate change guru Mark Lynas, filmed explaining how CO2 emissions must peak in 2015 and then fall rapidly if there's to be any chance of holding global temperature rise to an only minimally disastrous two degrees.

But, as a movie, Age of Stupid didn't, I'm afraid, for me light the blue touchpaper.

Despite the film's grim final countdown to global meltdown by 2055, it just underlines how hard it now is and will remain, until catastrophe gets truly personal, to bring home to ordinary Western folk in our comfortable fo

ssil-fuelled comfort the reality of how we stand on the brink of the precipice.

So HOW do we prepare?

Humankind with our current level of political and economic courage is like that addict, believing that we can keep using/abusing and somehow change at the same time. We can't, and only very tough love will wake us up. The difference with the therapy analogy here being that it isn't just the client who's killing him/herself. Our own survival is also literally dependent on our clients' ability to change. We are in this together, and don't have the luxury of endless, slow-moving therapeutic work that gets there in the end.

Nick Totton asked the critical question in answer to my last blog, HOW should we begin preparing for the very worst.

The answer to that question is not at all clear to me either.

I am sure that Transition Towns, energy-saving, the work being done in spiritual communities and all the rest of which you all know so much more than me, and in which you have been engaged for aeons, is valuable, essential, and part of that preparation.

My concern is that the possibility/probability of potentially catastrophic breakdown, and how we approach that, needs to be made much more central and explicit.

As is done, evidently, in new movie The Age of Stupid. And as is terrifyingly NOT done in 99% of current media, political, cultural, economic discourse. Despite my hopes last weekend that we were possibly at last seeing a tipping point in how this is being understood and discussed. Another false dawn, though it's just a question of time.

Once many more people begin engaging with/taking on board just what a challenge this is, I am confident that all kinds of options, approaches, possibly even (though I am not optimistic here) solutions will begin to emerge.

However, as long as we focus almost entirely on the likelihood/option of stopping climate change before it's too late (and of course, it's about so much more than CO2), we will never generate sufficient drive behind the need to change profoundly and rapidly. That was my personal disappointment with the Stern report and indeed with the IPCC conclusions of 2007 - mealy-mouthed, optimistic, lowest-common-denominator. And which is why the Copenhagen discussions last week were so very important - naming it more clearly than ever how it really is.

Two analogies. One our old friend the Titanic. The other picking up on therapy.

Let's imagine we are indeed on the Titanic, steaming - indeed picking up speed - towards the scientifically-predicted collision with the iceberg. The chances of finding ourselves dying in the water are, let's say, 98%. What do we, as passengers and crew, do?

• First, we seriously appraise the risk. And make sure everyone on board understands that this involves them too.
• Then, we bring together the best minds and souls on board to look at how we might avert the collision. Slowing down, changing course, all options. But that can be only a part of our work.
• At the same time, we have to prepare the ship as best we can for the actual collision. Reinforcing bulkheads, moving equipment and supplies to safer places, ensuring energy supplies for whatever and whoever survives the impact.
• Parallel to that, we appraise realistically what supplies we have on board, the state of the lifeboats, and how best to use them. Both now before we hit the iceberg, and on behalf of any likely survivors.
• This bit is really difficult - we have to start thinking about who is going to be on the lifeboats, and how to handle panic. We have to name the fact (as some are now beginning to do) that many, many will die. And that terrible choices will have to be made.
• We must do whatever we can to ensure that there ARE survivors of the impact itself and its immediate aftermath, who then carry with them what they need to keep surviving. We need to consider how any survivors of the likely collision are going to live in the world they reach beyond the immediate catastrophe. That will have to be very differently to how we/they have partied on the boat so far. Transition movements, meditation, discussions, realtionships, spiritual preparation, consideration and preparation of sustainable technologies and supplies and the rest. Absolutely essential, and all work done now can only benefit that future community.

In short, there's a huge amount to be done - practically, emotionally, spiritually, politically. But, and here's my second analogy, none of it will have the impact it needs to have if most of the planet doesn't realise how urgent this task of preparation is, and somehow thinks it can continue with business-as-usual, with just a bit of tweaking.

• I don't know about others in this conversation, but as therapist, I know that I cannot begin serious work with an addict until they have acknowledged what a mess they are in, and in AA terms climbed on the wagon. If the client continues to use drugs or get paralytic six nights a week, I can sit (and occasionally have sat) with them until blue in the face. And the therapy won't work, full stop. As addict after addict has told me, until the wheels came off the wagon, they weren't ready to change. THEN, we need to be here, and to help them pick up the pieces in a new way. So we have to sit with them, and keep talking and listening, until they're ready to shift.

Your question How? is critically fair, Nick. What I do know is that I personally don't believe I will serve anything or anyone by beating around what I see as a very clear bush. It's damned uncomfortable, but I don't see that any other approach than the bluntest of talking - let's hope it comes very soon from our political leaders - will help.

The iceberg looms.

Trains, and Boats and Planes - Sustainable?

A couple of thoughts from Eeyore's gloomy corner of the Gaian wood about guilt and shame and travelling by car or plane to an ecotherapy retreat weekend in July.

As any readers of this blog know, the position I've found as a relative newcomer to these discussions is one of sad certainty that the Game is Over - just look at the vapour trails left over Cirencester to see a tiny part of how we continue to pump out greenhouse gases.

And even if it isn't Over (staying with Nick Totton'sdetermination to hold on to even 0.001% chance that there's hope), the equally sad truth is that we, individually, by choosing to travel by train or car or plane or even horse or bike (which is my own favoured mode), can't actually make a blind bit of difference. Except to how we personally feel about ourselves, and that matters.

That's not a counsel for despair. As I see it, it's a fact. Just by existing as one of nearly seven billion humans on this planet, which isn't a choice we ever made, we are part of whatLovelock so rightly calls humanity as a force of nature that is radically changing the environment, just as a dozen spewing volcanoes or a large meteorite would have (and have regularly) done. Thereby rendering it largely uninhabitable for us and for a tragic number of our fellow Gaia-dwelling species.

This isn't at root about our own human guilt or shame or blame. We can't help being what and who we are as homo sapiens, behaving just like any other species, and unable, unkitted-out - not because we're evil - to be any different. At least, not in time to reverse the changes we have been making for 10s of thousands of years, and not just since the industrial revolution.

I personally dislike travelling by car, and much prefer the train or the bus, combined with a Brompton bike. But I have the luxury of being a fit Western middle class male, and happy to get wet and sweaty sometimes. If I travel any serious distance by car, I'm aware that it's not my preferred option, and that taking public transport would be more fun, and quite often cheaper. But I no longer kid myself that when I leave the car on the drive I'm helping save the planet.

We're at last putting solar hot water into our house in Cirencester. But that's not out of guilt, or any hope to save the polar bears. Not really any more about saving money either. It's because when things hit the fan in the coming years, and when energy gets terrifyingly expensive, we would still like to have at least some hot water to wash in. Part of a very personal survival strategy.

I also occasionally travel by plane (although, thankfully on many fronts, radically less than I did until a year ago when I stopped training internationally in journalism and trauma). My wife Sue and I flew to India last year, and to China the year before.

This summer we're flying the tandem to Transsylvania for three weeks. I would prefer to go to all these places by train. But for many practical, financial and very familiar reasons, we flew and still occasionally fly. And sadly, again, I have no illusion that by choosing the train, I might help stop global warming.

(Friends of ours from Cirencester are currently trying to travel as carbon-neutrally as possible around the world. Their cargo ship from Canada to the UK has just been cancelled. They looked into the Queen Mary - but that liner's CO2 emissions are twice as high per passenger as flying. So, they're flying. The only way to be carbon-neutral is to stop travelling.)

Yes, that is fatalist. But as I understand it (see George Monbiot this week, though he draws a different, We-Cannot-Accept-This conclusion), that's the reality.

So while I agree with many of my fellow participants that it's better to travel to our July weekend by public transport or on horseback, I personally will neither be feeling hostile towards anyone who chooses to come by car, nor will I feel personally guilty for however I've got there myself. Which will probably be train and bike.

As ever, I know this is blunt. I wish, I wish, that my sceptical realism was unfounded. But we really do need at least to think about preparing for the very worst.

Naming It Like It Is

As we have struggled on this blog with the challenge of naming looming Armageddon without terrifying people into paralysis, UK press coverage of climate change seems to have crossed a tipping point this week.

The Sun has published an astonishingly forthright piece on the Age of Stupid's movie scenarios for a rapidly warming earth, with the Sydney Opera House ablaze, the Alps denuded of snow, and London flooded.

A piece, albeit, commented upon by readers what appears to be a fairly standard ratio of about three-to-one head-in-the-sanders saying this is alarmist rubbish and a plot to squeeze out profits and push up taxes...

However, it's been quite a week for UK media coverage.

George Monbiot argued on Friday that it's time we stopped using the gentle term climate change for something that will be much, much more terrifying. He suggested climate breakdown. How about climate catastrophe?

Also on Friday the 13th, Lord Stern of the once cautious Stern report was quoted from the Copenhagen as warning that billions may become refugees as the whole areas of the planet become inhabitable.

The politicians, Stern says, just don't yet realise how serious this is - and 2500 scientists behind him joined in an urgent, watershed call for a change in political understanding of the threat that faces us.

The Economist this week warns that sea levels are rising twice as fast as predicted - that is, as predicted in the fatally flawed lowest-common-denominator 2007 IPCC report.

And we also hear from Copenhagen that the rain forests are already seriously compromisedeven if emissions stop immediately. Which of course they won't.

Prince Charles in Brazil was widely quoted as saying that at this "defining moment" in world history we have less than 100 months to stop the slide to catastrophe.

And yet, there's such a long way to go.

On BBC Radio Four Any Questions last night from Northern Ireland, all four panelists, asked for their response to Prince Charles's warnings, said they thought it was a bit alarmist, a bit OTT, one adding, what credentials does Prince Charles have anyway?

They included a Northern Ireland political commentator, the Editor of The Economist, the Chief Commissioner of the N Ireland Human Rights Commission and a Belfast Professor of Politics and Member of the House of Lords. Influential and intelligent people who clearly haven't yet grasped the science of this.

Also, our old friend Bjorn Lomborg, leading climate change sceptic and a major force in recent years behind the Western media's presentation of a supposedly objective balance of views, argued this week, at the same time, that global warming will also save lives.

But, Mary-Jayne, Viola and friends, our fears about naming the unnamable are increasingly, I think, misplaced. The collective unconscious is becoming rapidly conscious, and the tipping point to global alarm which I (and many others of course) have foreseen could now be rapidly approaching.

Copenhagen Names it Like It Is

(A reminder first that climate change posts are now also going up at facingclimatechange.blogspot.com).

As we have struggled on this blog with the challenge of naming looming Armageddon without terrifying people into paralysis, UK press coverage of climate change seems to have crossed a tipping point this week.

As George Monbiot rightly argues today, it's time we stopped using the gentle term climate change for something that will be much, much more terrifying. Climate catastrophe? Climate breakdown?

Today, Friday the 13th, Lord Stern of the once cautious Stern report is quoted from the Copenhagen as warning that billions may (may!) become refugees as the whole areas of the planet become inhabitable.

The politicians, Stern says, just don't yet realise how serious this is - and 2500 scientists behind him join in the desperate, watershed call for a change in political understanding of the threat that faces us.

The Economist this week warns that sea levels are rising twice as fast as predicted - that is, as predicted in the fatally flawed lowest-common-denominator 2007 IPCC report. And we also hear from Copenhagen that the rain forests are already seriously compromised even if emissions stop immediately. Which of course they won't.

Prince Charles in Brazil also warns that at this "defining moment" in world history we have less than 100 months to stop the slide to catastrophe.

Bjorn Lomborg, leading climate change sceptic and a majorforce in recent years behind the Western media's presentation of a supposedly objective balance of views, argues today, at the same time, that global warming will also save lives. So there's still a way to go.

But, Mary-Jayne, Viola and friends, our fears about naming the unnamable are increasingly, I think, misplaced. The collective unconscious is becoming rapidly conscious, and the tipping point to global alarm which I (and many others of course) have foreseen could now be rapidly approaching.

Shifting Web Address

Reflecting the theme of signposting on the left (cycling in Bavaria last spring), it's time, I think, to move this blog to a more appropriate address, namely www.facingclimatechange.blogspot.com.

I'm leaving all the climate change comments on this site for the time being, but preparing for this to be, as originally intended, a space for things more immediately personal, family and above all cycling!

So, as I was saying, please go to www.facingclimatechange.blogspot.com and if necessary (not sure if these follower settings were also imported) sign up anew. And above all, let me know if there are any glitches. As there always are.

Not If, but When

This blog template isn't yet the most perfect - we're beginning to write serious quantities of important thought, and it all tangles up, like the splendid and rich roots on the left, in a lot of text on the front page. But bear with us/me, as we experiment with new ways of posting an intro, with a link to more. Which, in this case, is my thoughts in response Mary-Jayne and Viola.

So - is this working...? Well, no. Still all in one block. I'll keep trying.

Viola's summary of the options we have is much clearer and more comprehensive than I could word it - and Mary-Jayne rightly expresses her frustration that I seem to be shouting rather than acknowledging solutions and the work that's already been/being done.

MJ's point about the Transition Towns work is especially well-taken, and I've been reading Rob Hopkins' book this morning - and finding so much of my own Johnny-Come-Lately understanding of peak oil and climate change reflected.

(And I'm reassured that even Rob Hopkins only really began to be alarmed four years ago or so, as indeed James Lovelock himself, as I read in his new book and biography, only realised in 2004 just how desperate and urgent the likelihood of approaching cataclysm was. So while I've only recently come alive to the reality of this, I can now see how the alarms have also only recently seriously begun to go off even for those much longer aware. )

Very simply put, Mary-Jayne, I for my part am now certain, rather than "believing" or "fearing", that contemporary human civilisation is heading for catastrophe at an accelerating pace - the result of climate change, peak oil, and everything else we have done as a species since the invention of agriculture and the discovery of fire 10s of thousands of years ago.

In that, I (as a complete amateur, but perhaps tuned in somewhere to an emergent collective but as yet unconscious truth) now part company in my core and articulated understanding of this from Rob Hopkins, or Jonathan Porritt, or even Jim Hansen, in framing this catastrophe still in terms of "If".

I'm entirely with Lovelock, and his new book so bears close reading, especially towards the end where he speaks of his hope for a human intelligence that will survive this cataclysm and be able to live with love and harmony as part of Gaia.

By continuing to talk about what will happen "If" we don't cut CO2 emissions, "If" we don't go local, "If" we don't do this or that, we are, in my view, avoiding the key reality that (and every piece of scientific data points that way, as we're hearing this week from Copenhagen) disaster, and the massive loss of life and economic coherence is now programmed in.

As Tom Burke puts it powerfully on chinadialogue.net, this year with the Copenhagen talks is arguably the most important year in human history. And yet it didn't even figure on the front pages of newspapers as we entered the New Year.

It really is like the Titanic. We ARE going to hit the iceberg. Only small numbers WILL survive.

So, imagining ourselves into that space on the liner as it steams blindly through the night, what indeed do we do?

We can talk, as Rob Hopkins does very powerfully in the Transitions context, about local economy, about alternative energy, about visions for 2030 and beyond. We can consider ship design, the salinity of the water we will shortly find ourselves pitched into, how we might survive on an ice floe... Or we could, as well at least, seriously consider the seaworthiness and stocks of the lifeboats and survival gear that we have, and prepare practically as well as emotionally for the worst.

If 90% of the world's population/the Titanic's passengers are going to die, and within present lifetimes, and if the whole web of the global economy which sustains and powers them is on the brink of almost total collapse (happening already, even without the environmental drivers), then even Rob's vision in the latter parts of his book is unrealistic and out of sync with the warnings he rightly articulates in his opening chapters.

I could write much, much more, but our posts are getting quite long as it is! And I'm aware that I too, once again, am slipping into If-talk.

The truth is a) it's not If, but When. (Just look at the Telegraph's coverage of Copenhagen today to be reminded of the blinkeredness/idiocy of so much blog comment on this). And b), I don't know either what we should do. As Viola says, we've never been here before.

In therapy-speak, it really is like personal struggle when client (perhaps someone with a terminal diagnosis) and therapist are both stuck, neither can see the way forward, and just have to stay related and connected, keep talking, and trust.

Except in this global scenario of approaching meltdown, it's not just the client who's got the terminal diagnosis. We all have, and that changes fundamentally how we should engage.

Mary-Jayne, I'm stuck. But I do know that this discussion of ours, in the widest sense, is incredibly important.