A community built by its members

ABSTRACT: The paper explores 'animal ethical mourning' through three directions: 1) mourning for nonhuman animals, 2) mourning for lost human ideals, and 3) mourning with nonhuman animals. First, it investigates the political and moral significance of animal ethical mourning, arguing it is a radical normative act. Second, it claims such mourning extends also to given human ideals, which our treatment of animals reveals to be forsaken; here it introduces 'misanthropic melancholia' as one affectively challenging yet normatively illuminating aspect of animal ethical mourning. Finally, it considers what it means to mourn with other animals. The paper's central claim is that more rituals and rhetoric are needed to evoke these aspects of animal ethical mourning.

Based on interdisciplinary research and workshop experience, this chapter offers tools for evaluating and working with various aspects of climate grief, which can manifest as both acute grief and a persistent mood. It discusses the challenge of discerning between normal but deep forms of climate grief and those requiring clinical attention, the interconnection of climate guilt and grief, and engages with Robert Neimeyer's framework of 'meaning reconstruction' and narrative re-storying.

This study examines the mental health impacts of climate change on Aboriginal pastoralists in regional Australia, focusing on the social and psychological consequences of the downsizing of the pastoralism sector during a period of prolonged drought. Drawing on qualitative research, the authors document declining mental wellbeing among Aboriginal people who have been displaced from pastoral work and forced to migrate from regional areas into nearby towns, often through no fault of their own. The study explores the loss of connection to country and cultural identity bound up with this displacement, and highlights the need for alternative meaningful activities and support structures to help affected communities maintain a sense of wellbeing and purpose in the aftermath of livelihood loss driven by climate-related economic decline.

Drawing on interviews with leading UK climate scientists and communicators, the authors argue that the climate science community's continued attachment to an idealised picture of value-free scientific rationality produces a 'socially constructed silence' - protecting researchers at an unconscious level from the emotional turbulence aroused by the politicisation of climate change, but leaving policymakers poorly served by open conversation about the science.

Drawing on interviews with UK direct-action climate activists, the authors explore how activists manage the powerful feelings aroused by confronting the disturbing truth of climate change, identifying unhelpful binaries ('all or nothing', 'now or never') that can lead to despair, and describing a more emotionally-intelligent culture of proportionate engagement, self-care and reflection emerging among a newer generation of activists.

Written for the British Psychoanalytic Council's climate change special issue, exploring what it means to face the reality of the climate and ecological emergency without collapsing into denial or unrealistic optimism.