“The Center for Climate Psychology is the Deep Ecologist’s final refuge. It is other worldly, worshiping Nature as if mankind was the plague. But under a human betterment standard, Nature can be just fine–and preserved from wind, solar, and battery industrialization.”
The Centre for Climate Psychology (“nurturing collective wisdom in times of collective upheaval”) is layering alarm on alarm with its peculiar, futile, wasteful mission. Instead of questioning its assumption of climate crisis due to modern industrial living, the group marches on the Road to Psychological Serfdom.
CCP describes their urgency:
What we feed our minds and hearts can nourish or diminish our personal health and well being. As we move to meet an ever threatened world by climate catastrophe and changing political landscapes, how do we meet the coming challenges with resilience?
The organization has a flagship book, Climate, Psychology and Change: Reimagining Psychotherapy in an Era of Global Disruption and Climate Anxiety. Perhaps professional climate activists can scare enough people to pay high hourly fees to climate psychotherapy. Sounds religious.
Climate, Psychology, and Change reckons with the ways power, colonialism, capitalism and our innocent seeming familiar perceptions impact our myriad crises – while shaping Western psychology as we know it. Our society’s ‘normal’ is profoundly unwell and our familiar ways of being reflect the same unsustainable systems that erode our ecosystems, accelerate global destruction, and extract our humanity. Moving towards healing means evolving the way we think about who we are.
Grief Ritual Training
The Center just completed a Grief Ritual Training for the Climate Aware, based on Francis Weller’s Entering the Healing Ground: Grief Ritual Leadership Training. The website explains:
From all observable indicators, the season ahead will be challenging. We have entered what could be called The Long Dark—a time of endings, decay, and dissolution. This prolonged season, spanning a generation or two, will bring tremendous challenges for the earth community. The cumulative losses will touch everything and everyone, and grief will be the keynote for the foreseeable future.
After many years of offering grief rituals, it has become clear that there is an urgent need to share this work with others. The requests are too many, and the need too pressing. It is essential that we generate a robust community of skilled grief tenders. We invite you to come learn with us.
Conclusion
The Center for Climate Psychology is the Deep Ecologist’s final refuge. It is other worldly, worshiping Nature as if mankind was the plague. But under a human betterment standard, Nature can be just fine–and preserved from wind, solar, and battery industrialization. The worldview of energy’s first philosopher, Alex Epstein, comes into play when he states:
The popular climate discussion … looks at man as a destructive force for climate livability … because we use fossil fuels. In fact, the truth is the exact opposite; we don’t take a safe climate and make it dangerous; we take a dangerous climate and make it safe. High-energy civilization, not climate, is the driver of climate livability.
– Alex Epstein, The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels, pp. 126–127.