Solastalgia – the word used to describe the grief we feel at the loss of beloved landscapes, creature and ecosystems – is woven through Frances Weller’s much-loved work about the importance of embracing, rather than denying our personal and existential grief. “Grief,” he writes, “offers a wild alchemy that transmutes suffering into fertile ground.” Profound, poetic and comforting, this is a book to stir the soul of anyone who has loved and lost.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Holistic and intersectional, this collection reckons with the ways power, colonialism, and capitalism impact our myriad crises—while shaping Western psychology as we know it.
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.
This vivid collection of prose, poetry and photography centres on the intersection of modernity and nature in a rapidly changing Scotland, taking us from walking to wild swimming, from red deer to pigeons and wasps, from remote islands to back gardens. Featuring writers and artists that all call Scotland home, the anthology takes a diverse and radical look at nature and landscape within the context of the evolving ecological crisis. ‘There is eco-anxiety, ‘solastalgia’, feminism; there are the ruins of capitalist endeavour.’
It is not all doom and gloom though. The noticing and caring, Jamie argues, ‘amounts to an act of resistance to the forces of destruction.’
With contributions from Amy Liptrot, Malachy Tallack, Chitra Ramaswamy, Jim Crumley, Amanda Thomson, Karine Polwart and many more, Antlers of Water urges us to renegotiate our relationship with the more-than-human world, in writing which is by turns celebratory, radical and political.
This debut from a young researcher, writer and award-winning activist begins with a harrowing account of the suicide attempt which left him a double amputee, and morphs into an uplifting road-map to a positive, liveable future. The climate and ecological despair that led Herzog to the brink of death is becoming endemic in his generation, yet remains relatively unexamined. Which makes his meticulously researched, deeply moving and sublimely-written account essential reading for anyone struggling with climate grief or working with those who do. This empowering and uplifting book may start by making you cry, but it will end by making you think. And it may even change you. – Liz Jensen.