I am proud to be featured in this New Yorker article. It’s especially great that they shoutout my forthcoming book Transform Yourself with Climate Truth. More re: my book coming very soon! Margaret Klein Salamon, who trained as a clinical psychologist before founding a climate-advocacy organization, takes the opposite view. She doesn’t see fear as …
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=72RwXgO3cZY While in Iowa for The Climate Mobilization’s highly successful Climate Emergency Caucus, Ezra Silk and I took some time to reflect on how The Climate Mobilization got started, and the theoretical and moral underpinnings of our efforts. One issue that kept coming up was the Holocaust, which is personally meaningful to both of us. Ezra …
Read more “Reflections on Mobilization: Video of Me and Ezra”
We’re facing a global emergency, but the great majority of Americans are acting as though everything is fine. The Climate Mobilization is creating tools and props to help each of us intervene in the trance of collective denial in our daily lives. As I elaborated in my recent article in Common Dreams, climate change creates a situation of …
What a weekend! The People’s Climate March was an absolutely outstanding, beautiful experience, and The Climate Mobilization had a great launch! Here is a brief update on our March activities. We talked with tons of Marchers about the Pledge, gained many allies, and received an exciting, if surprising, amount of press attention! But since this is …
Read more “First Video! Introducing The Climate Mobilization”
A slightly shorter version of this post was published yesterday on the Psychology Today blog, “Contemporary Psychoanalysis in Action” It is easy to scoff at climate change “deniers”—people who refuse to believe the scientific consensus that fossil fuel emissions are causing global warming and a host of disastrous impacts, including intensified drought, flooding and severe …
Read more “Are You in Climate Change Denial? Three Signs to Look For”
Climate change threatens to destroy the global climate and cause human civilization to collapse. Given this grave set of circumstances, what is my moral obligation? What is yours? How is it possible to live a moral life under these circumstances? When the systems we live within fail so terribly, how can we, as individuals succeed …
Last week, TIME ran an article on the contributions that psychologists are making to understanding inaction on climate change. This is a good opportunity to acknowledge the work that other psychologists have contributed to this issue, and also to delineate differences in thinking between them and myself—particularly, that I think the focus on “individual action” …
Part I: A Psychologically and Technologically Informed Strategic Critique Introduction: The Human Climate Movement draws much of its strategy and tactics from the Civil Rights Movement; they engage in marches, demonstrations, and similar civil disobedience. For example, scientists and citizens handcuff themselves to the White House gates and face arrest, echoing the tactic of lunch …
(Return to Part 1: Strategy Analysis and Critique) Introduction In the previous section, I have delineated the ways in which the Human Climate Movement shares goals with the Civil Rights Movement, but differs in the barriers to those goals, and the technological context. I argue that both movements must 1) empower their membership, 2) …
I Introduction Our society is living within a massive lie. The lie says, “Everything is fine and we should proceed with business as usual. We are not destroying our climate and, with it, our stability and our civilization. We are not committing passive suicide.” The lie says we are fine—that climate change isn’t real, or …
Return to Sections I-V VI Tokenism Environmental tokenism plays a major role in maintaining the Climate Lie. Tokenism asks that you reduce your carbon footprint, recycle, bike, and turn off the lights when you leave a room. This is the dominant discourse on climate change. When people think: “God, climate change is terrifying! What should I …
The vast majority of reporting on climate change is about data and facts. Temperatures have risen by this amount, glaciers have melted by that percent, Hurricane Sandy has cost this many billion dollars of damage. This type of discussion, though obviously necessary, speaks almost purely to the intellect. It fails to address what changes to …