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.

Cracking Open - from Viola

I think it is very hard to know what to do to prepare. After all, we have never quite been in this situation before, so how can we know? And we may find that we are indeed already doing some of it, and finding that we may be able to do some of it more mindfully and therefore more... richly.

As an activist, I have felt shouting is sometimes an undervalued activity. Or at least that people don’t like you shouting unless you have the answer. Of course simply raising the alarm is sometimes good enough, and environmentalists spent much of the past 10 or 20 years doing this, alongside working out what the solutions to climate change could be.

So this is just to say I don’t think that the shouter does have to know what they’d like to see differently, although of course sometimes the shouting indicates that the shouter does know. But I do think it is good to begin having the discussion to sketch out what we might want to see happening, once enough people have started listening to the shouting.

I have been left with many thoughts since the Bristol conference. I thought it very interesting that as a group we managed to walk several tightropes between the many (sometimes overlapping) positions we can take up:

* There is enough time, we have to keep positive and hopeful (and not scare people or “make” them feel their guilt etc);
* We are all f***ed and there is nothing we can do except face up to the facts and prepare for the worst;
* We are committed already to so much devastation but we must do what we can in case it helps;
* We have the knowledge and the power, so we have the responsibility to act;
* There may be nothing we can do, but the task now is to honestly face the devastation, while staying with the not knowing and doing what we can.

There was some (although not much) discussion at the UWE conference about the dangers of saying we are f***ed, including the fear of aggressive scapegoating and blame (which we are already seeing to a certain extent in the more racist end of the population debate).

And then there is concern it will simply elicit greater defences, denial, despair and more eco-destructive behaviours, like flying to the Pacific islands before they become completely submerged.

I have to say, in some ways I would like to believe there is definitely nothing we can do, as I’d like to fly away to somewhere nice and sunny for a holiday, or visit my sister in north Africa (who also gave up flying many years ago and who I may never see again, as her overland journey takes her ever further from England).

And I would love to stop talking about all this difficult stuff and all this soul searching and live a life of delicious hedonism. Yes, really! …This hair shirt is ever so itchy… ☺

There was a study done (by someone, somewhere at sometime, apparently) on the mindsets of Nazi soldiers. It revealed that the soldiers were convinced they would each die a violent death and that this was key to having the psychological freedom to carry out the atrocities they each committed.

It is a short step to think about how people may respond to the traumatic realisation of just how bad the crisis of our industrial lifestyles is, without the resources – empowerment, psychoemotional literacy etc etc – to handle the knowledge.

I would like to talk some more about this, as there are a whole range of positions out there, including those who perhaps haven’t even woken up to the urgency and the enormity of the problem. And yet there are others who are already overwhelmed, dissociated and despairing.

It clearly is a very sharp knife edge that we must walk – with the power to cut us free, or cut our throats.

So where are we at? We have the technology to make a transition (although, yes, the Spiegel report is gloomy about that, and yes, somewhere far away, the other side of the world, China, threatens to make the UK’s actions irrelevant – an excuse for inaction that the politicians have delightedly publicised). But as individuals, as a global community, we seem unable to make this transition happen.

At the conference, we talked about the multitude of reasons why this is the case, and Mary-Jayne’s talk encapsulated much of that in outlining our social conditioning around what progress and being powerful means in Western, industrialised culture.

What is becoming clear to me is that climate change does not simply require transition. It requires transformation. It requires a physical transformation, for example, of the way we produce and use electricity. And it requires a personal, psychospiritual transformation of the way we understand ourselves to be part of a living planetary system.

We have long known the technologies (or at least the first models of the technologies) needed for maintaining our lifestyles while reducing CO2 emissions, and yet we haven’t made the transition.

This reminds me (as I know it does others) of times in therapy where it is essential to face the shit – where our own therapeutic process holds our face down in the shit, where the grief, the fear of failure, the shame of our actions and inactions, the guilt, the despair …all of it… cracks us open, and in doing so exposes the kernel of health within the experience to the sun, so that slowly it begins to uncurl and grow.

We do not have a crystal ball, and the scientists and the computer models have got it wrong before (although yes, they have generally underestimated quite how bad it is!) and we do not know everything there is to know about the Earth, human nature and the global climate.

What I am saying is we cannot know that our actions won’t make a difference, even though it looks in every way impossible. The situation – the process as it is – means we have no choice but not to know, even though clutching at the straws of certainty (that there is nothing we can do) may be easier.

And the heat of the not knowing, the very real possibility of failing, the grieving, the shame, the guilt, the fury …all of it… will be transformative.

I think no one will escape having to face this, whether that is the grief of losing loved ones in freak weather disasters or the fear of what the future will hold for their children or the realisation of what each of us has done in our ignorance and the dawning of the consequences of our inactions.

In the meantime, yes, there are things we need to put in place, alongside those needed for the technological transition. These things are processes and systems and knowledge and practices that will help us face the devastation we are already committed to, while dealing deal with the white heat of transformative experiences.

Preparation? We are in a changing climate, a changing ecosystem and a changing society already: it’s not about packing sandwiches, it’s about making them while we are on the journey, as best we can, with whatever ingredients we find on the way. Rocket anyone?

(Pun unintended, but I found it amusing)

Mary-Jayne on preparing for what is to come

Mark, you write below that: “The piece missing for me in Bristol, and still missing in the public discussion around climate change is that the public discourse (as the sociologists say) must move from an exclusive focus on trying to prevent the worst happening to a very serious and sober discussion of how, without losing hope, we also prepare for that very worst.”

I think you and I must have very different ideas about what preparation means.

For me the whole day in Bristol was, in part, about preparation - an emotional preparation. As we know from therapy, in order to move on, we must digest and know where we are, and how we got here. Otherwise we simply repeat the same mistakes.

And surely the Transition Movement (here in the UK) is precisely about preparation?

Have you ever heard Rob Hopkins’ story? About how he could see what was coming, and spent two years building a cob house for his family in Ireland, so that they could try to be in some kind of safe place for when the worst hit.

Two weeks before it was finished, his cob house got torched. As he recovered from this trauma he realised it was no good at all standing with a gun outside his own house protecting his family. That we have to prepare as communities.

So Rob moved to Totnes in 2005 and out of that emerged the Transition Town Totnes, and the rest followed. The whole concept of resilience is about preparation.

And No, it’s not enough, and Yes the government should be doing far far far more. But at least the Transition Town handbook was the fifth most popular book for MPs' summer holiday reading last year. So clearly something is going from grass roots to central government.

Please let’s acknowledge all the hard work that is being put into preparation. And that there is a great deal of overlap between prevention and preparation.

I keep hearing you shouting ‘You’re not doing this and you’re not doing that". I still haven’t heard from you what it would mean to prepare. What would you like to see happening now?

Facing Climate Change - therapists and academics talk in Bristol

Photographs from China are becoming a useful tool for this blog to illustrate what I'm trying to articulate around psychology and climate change - the picture on the left here being a Chinese taxi graveyard from the Spiegel's website in Germany.

But that's just a despairing teaser to some thoughts on a stimulating but also, perhaps inevitably, frustrating day spent in Bristol yesterday discussing, with an encouraging turnout of some 130 therapists and academics, how we are or at not Facing Climate Change.

As ever, Jungian analyst Mary-Jayne Rust had some powerful and moving insights on what she calls humankind's myth of progress (which ignores the non-human world). And reflecting our discussions on this blog, she took a deep breath and named what she acknowledged as the frightening reality likely to happen much sooner than we think - huge loss of life worldwide, and the loss of safe spaces for humanity.

Her address will be posted soon on her website - read it!

And we also heard a very sober and tightly-argued portrayal of climate change denial from one of Britain's leading activists in this field, George Marshall, talking of how our inability as a species to acknowledge and deal with this urgent danger represents a failure of what he termed our "risk thermostat."

The terms limbic system and amydgala weren't used in the Bristol discussions, but as I've argued here before, those are the actual bits of our physiological kit which unfortunately for us aren't equipped by evolution to respond to what, as George listed them, are the invisible, unprecedented, drawn-out, complex but also indirect threats to our existence posed by climate change.

As Mary-Jayne, George, and also Paul Hoggett argued as Professor of Politics at the University of the West of England, we won't get serious about tackling climate change and living sustainably on the planet until we move from just thinking about it to actually feeling its impact.

And despite what all agreed in Bristol is a striking change of public mood now underway, at least in Britain - Prince Charles is today quoted prominently as warning we have just months to turn things round, and the august Financial Times recently spoke of extinction being just six degrees of warming away - I no longer believe, as readers of this blog know, that we will manage this shift in time.

In my view, it's just not doable - psychologically, technically, in terms of economy, politics or development. On which see a grim and sobering Spiegel report on how China, even in the best-case scenario of carbon capture, conservation, low-carbon growth, is already committed - short of social and economic collapse - to a doubling of CO2 emissions in the next two decades.

Which means - and this was the piece missing for me in Bristol, and still missing in the public discussion around climate change - that the public discourse (as the sociologists say) must move from an exclusive focus on trying to prevent the worst happening to a very serious and sober discussion of how, without losing hope, we also prepare for that very worst.

Which in turn raises the question cogently posed by Mary-Jayne of what the narrative is within which this story is being told. A subject perhaps for the next post, for that's where journalists come in.

PS - just as I'd finished this post, Tania Dolley alerted me to a breathtaking, even by his standards, misrepresentation of the Bristol conference in yesterday's Daily Telegraph by one of the principal and in my view dangerously influential deniers of climate change in this country, Christopher Booker.

"At the University of the West of England in Bristol this weekend," writes Booker, "a conference of 'eco-psychologists', led by a professor, are solemnly exploring the notion that 'climate change denial' should be classified as a form of 'mental disorder'."

As a former journalist myself, I thought the first thing you are meant to do when reporting something is check your facts. True, we did have professors present. But perhaps Mr Booker is referring to a different conference, since the idea of climate change denial being a mental disorder was neither on yesterday's agenda nor part of the discussion.

Perhaps, in the light of such idiocy from Mr Booker, it should have been.

Viola on how we manage the interim

What a relief, Mark and Mary-Jayne, to hear you sketch out some of the process between now and whatever temperature we fear the earth will reach. I am often struck by how much focus there is on that 'end' point (the epic climatic climax) and not enough on the interim.

I have a slightly different take on Lovelock's view that it is hubris to think that humans know how to save the Earth. "The planet looks after itself. All we can do is try to save ourselves."

Firstly, we are already powerfully changing the Earth. Secondly, we have known what to do to correct our actions for decades, and yet we have failed to do that.

In contrast to what Lovelock seems to be saying, I think it is negligent to think we can't know and therefore should not try. Yes it would be hubris to think we know everything, but there is much that we do know, or can at least make a wise guess, and that knowledge is power (and therefore responsibility) to act. So we should try, not just to save ourselves, but the life on earth that we are steadily destroying.

As for just saving ourselves, to be honest, I don't care as much about saving humanity, especially if it continues to come at a cost to the rest of life on earth – which as desperation increases, I guess it will. It won't just be us/those humans who survive that will be grieving. Elephants and whales clearly and recognisably grieve and I imagine in some way trees do too and the whole, wider consciousness of life.

I'd say: our actions and inactions place us in a position of responsibility. While the planet looks after itself (and us), we can also look after the planet – not in a power-over sense, but a power-with.

Another thing that strikes me is that climate change isn't a single event – that end point. It is a gradual (or sudden) set of changes. There are several tipping points. We might not be able to stop the first one, but can we prevent even worse? At what point do we throw in the towel and carry on flying and partying and burning coal while the climate and life on Earth continues to change? Do we transition to a low-carbon lifestyle simply because it's better, whatever the outcome climatically? And do we need to commit to deep transformation – personally, socially, culturally, ecologically – as part of the inevitable process?