As I joined the Climate Psychology Alliance recently, I thought it would be interesting for this month’s Climate Digest to bring the perspective of someone new to the CPA and new to trying to set up conversation spaces such as Climate Cafés.
During the pandemic, I acquired three Khaki Campbell ducklings, a domesticated duck bred for laying.
The car bumps and shakes along the winding dirt road that has been degraded by logging trucks.
A small group of those racialised white in CPA have been meeting to explore racialisation, decolonisation and climate psychology. The group was one part of a response to the need for anti-racism practice within CPA. It followed discussions on the CPA google group, calls for those racialised white to do their own work, and the general increase in awareness about internalised and systemic racism following the murder of George Floyd in May 2020.
When Shelot Masithi, a Psychology student at the University of Limpopo in South Africa, contacted CPA, she had an interest in climate psychology’s approach to water scarcity. Kate Evans was struck by what Shelot called the ‘daunting question’ posed on the CPA discussion forum: “What will be the state of health psychology in a society with a deepening climate change, food shortage, and degrading land?”
We are a diverse community of therapeutic practitioners, thinkers, researchers, artists and others. We believe that attending to the psychology and emotions of the climate and ecological crisis is at the heart of our work.