CLIMATE PSYCHOLOGY
How do we deal with the crippling anxiety induced by impending climate breakdown? What effect does it have on our psyche and what can we do to keep ourselves sane in an increasingly maddening world? This month’s picks from the Rebel Library include books from Anoushka Grose, Jonathon Porritt, Steffi Bednarek and Geoff Beatty, providing valuable insight on how to cope as the planet burns.
– September 2025
Climate, Psychology and Change by Steffi Bednarek
With so many immediate and intensifying crises unfolding around us, how can therapists adapt to promote healing and growth? Climate psychotherapist Steffi Bednarek’s response, in the form of this collection of essays by Francis Weller, Bayo Akomolafe, Hāweatea Holly Bryson, and others, attempts to answer this urgent question.
While Western psychotherapy views our practice as a way to bring clients back to baseline “normal,” Bednarek argues that our society’s “normal” is profoundly unwell, and that our lives reflect the same unsustainable systems that erode our ecosystems, accelerate global destruction, and ultimately extract our humanity. Which means that finding healing and purpose in uncertain times entails altering not just the way therapy is done, but the way we think about mental health.
What We Think About When We Try Not to Think About Global Warming by Per Espen Stoknes
As evidence of global warming continues to mount, resistance to addressing it often grows just as quickly, making it increasingly difficult to cut emissions and prepare for inevitable climate impacts. This paradox, explains psychologist and economist Per Espen Stoknes in What We Think about When We Try Not To Think About Global Warming, stems from a poor grasp of how people actually think and behave.
Drawing on examples from business and government, Stoknes identifies five key psychological barriers that hinder climate action. More importantly, he provides five strategies designed to overcome them by aligning with human nature instead of fighting it. These strategies emphasize social connections, positivity, and simplicity, making sustainable choices more natural and accessible. They also highlight the power of storytelling to create shared meaning and community, while using signals and feedback to reinforce progress.
Stoknes’s approach transforms obstacles into opportunities, showing how collective and personal change can emerge from reimagining how we talk about—and act on—climate change.
A Guide To Eco-Anxiety by Anouchka Grose
Anouchka Grose’s guide is not a self-help manual in the traditional sense. Instead, it treats the unease and dread triggered by the climate crisis as a rational, even healthy, response to the unfolding planetary emergency. Her central claim is both bracing and consoling: that anxiety can be a compass, pointing toward what we value and what we must protect.
Drawing on her psychoanalytical background, Grose examines the emotional landscape of the climate emergency: grief, “pre-traumatic stress,” denial, burnout. Each, she suggests, has a role. Grief acknowledges loss, anticipatory trauma warns us of risk, and anger can catalyse action. Left unspoken, however, these emotions can stagnate into paralysis. Naming them, and allowing space for them, is part of what makes resilience possible.
The book doubles as a manifesto for grounded engagement. Grose explores how to talk honestly about climate change with children, how to resist the paralyzing pull of denial, and why life needn’t be measured in constant happiness. Guilt, too, is dismantled: she urges readers to drop the corrosive habit of self-blame and instead embrace “radical friendliness,” an ethic that blends realism with compassion. She is sceptical of simplistic binaries—veganism versus flying, plastic reduction versus political action—arguing instead for a layered approach that encourages sustainable forms of activism that avoid burnout and nurture solidarity. Candid, witty, and often irreverent, Grose offers a way to transform anxiety into collective energy, protecting both the planet and our psyches.
Love, Anger And Betrayal by Jonathon Porritt
In his powerful account of a year spent talking to young Just Stop Oil protesters, the veteran campaigner Jonathon Porritt paints a deeply personal and urgent portrait of a new generation of climate activists. Weaving the broader origins and evolution of the protest movement with the intimate profiles and testimonials of young adults prepared to sacrifice their liberty for the cause, what emerges is a powerful narrative of compassion, inter-generational struggle and solidarity.
Highlighting how the media and our political systems have systematically misrepresented and marginalized activists, Porritt connects the struggle of young JSO activists with the historical legacy of movements like the Suffragettes, whose bravery and moral clarity was scorned by most of the country’s most powerful men, yet ultimately recognized as a catalyst for vital change. Framing Just Stop Oil’s activism as an act of love and deep empathy with future generations, Porritt’s book is a reminder that it is the young who continue to bear the emotional and political weight of challenging a status quo locked into environmental destructiveness —and that we owe them far more than we may ever know.
Psychological Roots Of Climate Change by Sally Weintrobe
Psychological Roots of the Climate Crisis tells the story of a fundamental fight between a caring and an uncaring imagination. It helps us to recognise the uncaring imagination in politics, in culture – for example in the writings of Ayn Rand – and also in ourselves.
Sally Weintrobe argues that achieving the shift to greater care requires us to stop colluding with Exceptionalism, the rigid psychological mindset largely responsible for the climate crisis. People in this mindset believe that they are entitled to have the lion’s share and that they can ‘rearrange’ reality with magical omnipotent thinking whenever reality limits these felt entitlements.
While this book’s subject is grim, its tone is reflective, ironic, light and at times humorous. It is free of jargon, and full of examples from history, culture, literature, poetry, everyday life and the author’s experience as a psychoanalyst, and a professional life that has been dedicated to helping people to face difficult truths.
The Future We Choose by Christiana Figueres, Tom Rivett-Carnac
Christiana Figueres and Tom Rivett-Carnac know the climate crisis from inside the machine. As the UN’s Executive Secretary and Chief Political Strategist during the Paris Agreement, they helped broker the closest thing we have to a planetary lifeline. Their book emerges from that crucible, insisting that what they call “stubborn optimism” must win over the narcotic of ecological despair. It is less a cheerleading manual than a clear-eyed reckoning with two futures: one hellish, the other hard-won.
We know the hellish version: a 2050 in which we failed to act. The air is toxic, seas change the shape of coastlines, cities become deserts, and forced migrations sweep across the globe. The imagery is suffocating, and deliberately so. It echoes the fatalism that dominates much climate storytelling today—a genre of doom that anaesthetises as much as it warns.
But then comes the counter-vision: a 2050 where humanity took itself in hand. The air is fresh, cities buzz with life and greenery, and economies thrive on renewable abundance. Transition was difficult, but liberating: it’s not utopia, but it is survivable, and charged with possibility.
The strength of the book lies in this friction between terror and hope. Figueres and Rivett-Carnac don’t try to ignore the abyss. Instead they argue that optimism is not naïveté but strategy: the sober, disciplined choice to believe that change is possible, to acknowledge that positive that shifts are already underway – and that history turns on the will of small, committed groups. The Future We Choose doesn’t let its readers off the hook, but —it dares you to step into the future with open eyes, in the knowledge that despair is a luxury we can no longer afford.
Understanding Climate Anxiety by Professor Geoff Beattie
Understanding Climate Anxiety describes climate anxiety as a new type of anxiety shaped by the modern world and ‘the high carbon economies and industries that have flourished since the industrial revolution’.
Professor Beattie says the scepticism and hostility targeted at people with climate change anxiety is similar in some respects to that initially shown towards traumatised troops in WWI. He states that it is a chronic form of psychological distress that does not fit neatly with other clinically recognised forms of anxiety, whilst noting that pathologizing what is a rational response to scientific data might not actually be helpful.
He argues that in order to tackle valid climate anxiety people need to feel that they have agency to change the future of the Earth in a positive way through individual, societal and political actions.
Reducing climate anxiety, and helping people deal more effectively with their negative emotions regarding climate change, is a pressing issue for us all. We need people to overcome their feelings of helplessness through this disinhibition of thoughts and feelings, and understand that positive action and change is possible.
Poetry
POEM OF THE MONTH
The Peace Of Wild Things
by Wendell Berry
When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.
Contact our Librarian if you would like themed book lists to support teaching about climate change.
We’re always looking for contributors to our growing collection of literature to explain and explore the climate and biodiversity emergency. If you’re a writer or poet and would like to share your work or ideas, please get in touch! Contact mattroselibrary@gmail.com for prose or poetsrebelxr@gmail.com for poetry.