A community built by its members

By Georgina Ramsay, Gareth Morgan and Lauren McGregor (University of Leicester), The Conversation: The framework was useful in highlighting how people experience a range of meanings and emotions in relation to the climate crisis, such as guilt, responsibility, alienation, despair, grief, powerlessness, anger, hopelessness and hopefulness. We regarded all these different responses as understandable in the context of the climate crisis and its dismissal by others in participants' lives. Some of the most useful questions related to social power - participants told us that differences in social standing impacted on their sense of being heard and included when discussing climate change, and that their experiences were shaped by negative media coverage of climate activism and societal messages that dismissed the issues they were trying to draw attention to.

ABSTRACT: Critical social studies have highlighted the varied methods by which climate activism is reproduced in discourse. This paper examines an incident in which an African youth climate activist, Vanessa Nakate, had her image cropped out of a media photograph taken at the World Economic Forum. The analysis utilizes discursive psychology and conversation analysis to highlight three discursive methods by which Vanessa's activism is challenged: a challenge to her ability to represent 'African' climate activists; an undermining of her claim that her exclusion was racially motivated; and a discourse of emotionality as foregrounding irrationality and incompetence.

Are we too broken-hearted to face the truth about climate change? As therapists and coaches, can we help to heal our collective heartbreak? During lockdown, grieving the demise of our bee population, I opened to the truth about our environmental emergency. Searching for solutions, I read David Attenborough's witness statement outlining the need for collective action within five years, if we are to avert annihilation. My heart weeps for the species we have wiped out, for the farmers driven from their homes by drought or flood, for the toxic seas and the overarching threat of extinction.When survivors of sexual abuse talk about their pain, they use words like numb, broken, frozen. This feels like my experience of eco-anxiety - cut adrift from the wisdom of the body, in limbic distress, trust shattered.

Written by a young person who was first asked about their climate feelings at age 12, this piece traces a shift from inarticulate overwhelm towards a more productive way of processing climate emotions.

ABSTRACT (CC BY 3.0): The Transition movement is based on the notion that peak oil, climate change and the precarious economic situation cause the greatest potential disruptions to human society and therefore require a pre-emptive response. As such its focus is on proactively creating a future in local communities that meets people's psychological and physical needs rather than reacting to the crises that seem imminent. This paper draws on research into the Transition movement in the Australian context that considers the role of inner Transition, which is one of the features that differentiates Transition from other movements for change. However, inner Transition has tended to be marginalised in the movement, because ultimately, action-oriented outcomes take precedence over the often difficult work associated with group dynamics and relational experiences.

ABSTRACT (CC BY 4.0): As the ecological crisis grows more intense, people experience many forms of eco-anxiety and ecological grief. This article explores the broad process of encountering eco-anxiety and ecological grief, and engages in the constructive task of building a new model of that process. Eco-anxiety and grief are here seen as fundamentally healthy reactions to threats and loss, and only the strongest forms of them are seen as problems. The aim is to help researchers, various professionals and the general public by providing a model which is simple enough but more nuanced than stage models which may give a false impression of linearity. The proposed new model includes both chronological and thematic aspects, with early phases of Unknowing and Semi-consciousness potentially followed by Awakening and various kinds of Shock and possible trauma.