unpsychology

magazine

climate minds
anthology

No. 4, Spring 2018

 A journal of soul-making,
unpsychology ecology and wild mind

This special issue of unpsychology magazine responds to the climate emergency

and the psychological implications for everyday life of what may turn out to be
the human crisis to end all human crises.

In our call for submissions, we asked for activists, poets, artists and others
to respond to the theme of climate minds. We wanted to hear from those
addressing climate crisis in their conversations and communities – therapeutic
or otherwise.

We wanted contributions that were located in the ordinary worlds that

most people think they live in, and in the extraordinary, imaginary, spiritual
and ecological worlds that wrap round our inner worlds and are key to our
psychological wellbeing.

We wanted new stories about how human beings could be living their lives in
times to come, and explorations of how the climate crisis is reflected in our
psychology and in our cultural assumptions and behaviours.

Above all, we wanted to start a creative, artistic, poetic and everyday

conversation that can be carried into our communities. We’ve threaded this
issue through with a questioning dialogue asking: what is?, what might be? and
what can be done?

We hope you find this issue stimulating and thought-provoking – and that you
will feel inspired to join the conversation!

Steve Thorp and Julia Macintosh, March 2018.

No. 4 – SPRING 2018

CLIMATE MINDS ANTHOLOGY
edited by Steve Thorp & Julia Macintosh
 unpsychology contents

Front cover Untitled (Light series 3) – illustration Jenny Arran

Inside covers Call – illustration Jenny Arran
Back cover Low down listening – illustration Jenny Arran

Page 6 Invisibility – image Janet Lees

Page 7 Paris climate change conference – poem Helen May Williams

Page 8 Dialogue 1: What is – editorial Julia Macintosh & Steve Thorp

Page 9 Curvature – image Janet Lees
Page 12 Faltering – essay Emma Palmer
Page 15 Laugh out loud – image Janet Lees
Page 16 Lucifer – image Janet Lees
Page 17 The son – fiction C.G. Frederick
Page 20 Smoke signal – poem Zara Mhofu
Page 21 Acid rain – image Janet Lees
Page 22 Taking the climate crisis personally – essay Zhiwa Woodbury
Page 32 Earth cry – poem Becca Warner
Page 33 Genie – image Janet Lees
Page 34 Paradise Tales – poems Rachael Clyne
Page 34 Paradise Tales – poem
Page 35 A Darker Shade of Shift – poem
Page 36 Remembered – poem
Page 38 Dreaming – poem
Page 39 Becalmed – image Janet Lees
Page 40 Alberta – prose poem Monica Dragosz
Page 42 Composite – image Janet Lees
Page 44 Lament for a giant’s sigh – essay Toby Chown
Page 48 Red bird – image Janet Lees
Page 50 Mapping Hi-Zex Island – poem Janet Lees
Page 51 Plastic bag – illustration Carissa Tanton

Page 52 Dialogue 2: What might be – editorial Julia Macintosh & Steve Thorp
Page 54 Noni – fiction Alex Lockwood
Page 55 Tree – illustration Ruth Thorp
Page 56 Drowned world – image Janet Lees
Page 57 Feeling the way forward – book extract Dave Hicks
Edited with permission from A Climate Change Companion (2016)
Page 64 Water and the mountain – poem Rachel McDonald
Page 65 Submerged – image Janet Lees
Page 66 Survival – fiction Sarah Mahfoudh
Page 69 Flight – image Janet Lees

Jay Griffiths, Kith, 2013

4
 unpsychology contents
Page 75 Wake to listen – poems and illustrations Jenny Arran
Page 75 Here & Threshold – illustrations
Page 76 Wake to listen – poem
Page 77 Low down listening – illustration
Page 78 Call – illustration
Page 79 Call – poem
Page 80 Untitled – illustration
Page 81 Boundless – prose poem Jane Glenzinska
Page 82 Pathways – image Janet Lees
Page 87 Footprint – image Janet Lees
Page 90 Turtle – a monologue Margot Lasher
Page 90 Turtle – illustration Ruth Thorp
Page 94 Love – image Janet Lees
Page 95 Bobcat in the watertime – fiction Steve Thorp
Page 102 Living at the edge of duality – poem Irv Beiman
Page 103 Tatters – image Janet Lees

Page 104 Dialogue 3: What can be done – editorial Julia Macintosh & Steve Thorp
Page 106 Y – poem Meg Hollingsworth
Page 107 The vow 2 act – essay Meg Hollingsworth
Page 110 Climate stressors & climate resilience – essay Vanessa Thevathasan
Page 112 Perimeter – image Janet Lees
Page 116 Neurocolonisation – essay Pegi Eyers
Page 119 Monster – image Janet Lees
Page 122 Nature dreaming – illustrations and essay Fiona Brannigan
Page 122 Mountain of women – illustration
Page124 Still waters run deep – illustration
Page126 Autumn – illustration
Page128 Moon dream water – illustration
Page 130 Reaching for the climate mind – essay Irv Beiman
Page 135 Hope – image Janet Lees
Page 136 I will know her – poem Sarah Wint
Page 137 Love a tree – photograph Jean Thomas
Page 138 Indestructable – image Janet Lees
Page 139 If women rose rooted – book review Elizabeth Cotton
Page 142 Falling – image Janet Lees
Page 144 Climate mind, climate madness – essay Julia Macintosh
Page 152 Runes – image Janet Lees

Page 153 The climate mind, tasks and resources Steve Thorp & Julia Macintosh
Page 161 Storm – image Janet Lees
Page 162 List of contributors
Page 167 It is Late – poem Steve Thorp


5
 Image: Visibility by Janet Lees

6
Paris climate Helen May Williams

change conference
Sunday, 13 December 2015

I see no objections
in this room said Lauren Fabius
that arch diplomatist –

his eyelids lowered & his gaze

firmly on the text of The Accord

such a small green gavel

such a huge historic moment –

now make it happen

7
 dialogue 1: what is? Julia Macintosh &
Steve Thorp

This edition of Unpsychology Magazine was born partially out of a series of online dialogues
that we posted on Medium in 2017. We were exploring the theme of ‘Healing’, against
the backdrop of the climate crisis and other social, ecological and psychological challenges.
This format seemed to work well as a method of inquiring deeply into a theme, so we have
adopted it here in a series of three editorial dialogues to weave through the magazine.

Julia:
Hello Steve. We begin part one the Unpsychology Climate Minds issue with a piece
that speaks well to what is. Emma Palmer offers us a portrait of overwhelm, of flapping
about, of reaching out for the comprehensible: “Tea, that’ll fix it. Maybe cake.”

The roots of our predicament predate us by centuries. We are riding on a juggernaut of

consequence, the endgame to a strategy of disconnect from our place within the natural
order. Blame the airlines, the combustion engine, go further back to the Enlightenment,
the Renaissance, keep going to the Romans and the Greeks, the fertile crescent and the
domesticated goat. Man-made climate change grew out of patriarchy, out of colonialism,
out of religion, out of politics, out of Our Father who Art in Heaven and God Save the
King, the Pythagorean theorem and the principles of irrigation. It began with the Fall from
Grace. It began with knowledge. It began with dominion.

So here we are now, at the start of the 21st century, swimming in plastic refuse and
breathing in exhaust fumes, shrugging at mass extinction and mass depression and mass
privatisation of water and land and mass exploitation. None of us signed up for this, and
it was heading this way long before any of us arrived to witness the outcome. This is
simply what is.

Steve:
As always Julia, you go straight to the heart of the matter, from a standpoint of such
necessary stark existentialism.

The idea behind this edition of Unpsychology Magazine was to dig deeper – to go
beyond blame, to think beyond apocalypse, but also to wonder how imagination might
seed the different stories we tell for our futures. But, as you imply, these future tales
depend on nailing what is right now; and also recognising that what is depends to a large

8
extent on perspective. The climate crisis – or climate emergency, as writers like Zhiwa

Julia Macintosh & Steve Thorp

Woodbury name it – needs to be faced by each and every one of us. It is in the mind of
us all – each individual – and in the wider collective psyche too.

This particular crisis has unfolded as a story about spoil and degradation, and this theme
is reflected here. There are other voices here naming the crisis by way of their particular
way of seeing and being in the world. From Alberta to Dartmoor to plastic islands in the
ocean – and beyond.

To tell it like it is, we need the strident and the gentle, the determinedly pragmatic and
the imaginal.

Julia:
I’m responding to you from the other side of the New Year, with its annual nudge to step
back and take stock. More and more these days I see headlines and articles alluding to
the strain on systems and impending crises, even speculation about total collapse – no
longer as far-fetched as they once claimed, even just a few years back. The executive
function of contemporary society slips and slides like a fairground tilt-a-whirl, knocking
aside the flimsy conventions of so-called civilisation, swinging back and forth between
ignorant denial and panicked hubris. Are we feeling nauseous yet? More people are
allowing themselves to acknowledge the seriousness of our predicament, and fewer
people can claim that no one told them. As our so-called leaders quibble amongst
themselves and make ever more ludicrous claims and promises, increasing swathes of
civil society are picking up the proverbial mirror for a sober glimpse at the state of us.

As you say, we each hold a unique perspective that informs our understanding of not
just where we are, but who we are, how we are... even why we are. We each make
sense of the world through a singular mind, with its own particular limitations and own
unique gifts. “To tell it like it is” throws us firmly into the realm of personal and identity
politics, where different types of experience bump up against one another and vie for
the telling. How do we reconcile the multitude of viewpoints with a common resolve?
I’m reminded of that iconic phrase uttered by Neil Armstrong: “one small step for man,
one giant leap for mankind.” Grand and unifying in sentiment, it was also gender-specific
and conveniently ignored the divisive motivation for the moon-landing project, eg. the
‘space race’ between the USA and USSR. A more candid gesture was the American flag
planted in the lunar landscape. If we can’t even reach the moon – the moon – without
clinging to our constrictive identities, then what hope is there for transcending our
predicaments here on earth?

What is must own up to its spectacular blind spot: the majority of people still believe we
are separate from one another. Small pockets of indigenous survivors may understand

9
 What is must own up to its
spectacular blind spot: the majority
of people still believe we are
separate from one another.
our interconnectedness as tangible and actual, but the majority of industrialised societies
around the world dismiss and disparage that as ‘magical thinking.’ Even those of us willing
to entertain the concept on principle fail to grasp its full implications or relate to it in any
meaningful sense. Anyone taking it on board and following it through as a legitimate way
of existing would be sectioned and medicated. (I speak from experience.)

I go back to ‘taking stock’ – a mercantile turn of phrase originating in 1736, it means

making an inventory. That of course reduces us to quantities and ownerships. Perhaps
we could find another way to consider what is? We could return to the breath, as
in meditative practice. Or retreat, as in battle, to a safe distance where we evaluate
casualties and troop positions (harsh!). What about a more gentle version of retreat,
seeking out a solitary time and space away from daily routine. Seriously: could the
world not just book a week at a cottage in Shropshire? We’d feel so much better for it.
Especially if there were an open fire, we could sit there in our pyjamas with a cup of tea
and gaze at the flames... put it all into perspective.

Now we’re back to perspective. I think this is a good place to hand back over to you.

Steve:
Perspective. Well there’s a word with endless reach! All of this is about perspective really,
isn’t it? The trouble we’re in, to a large extent, rests on the cultural perspective of our
civilisation over the past century or so – or, as you point out, well beyond this window,
into the depths of history. If we’d had a different perspective, the Climate Crisis may not
have unfolded in the same way.

The way we have regarded fossil fuels, in particular: as endless resources fuelling
progress and the ‘white heat of technology’, meant that both right and left of the political
spectrum have reified and romantisised the hard, male industries that extracted coal and
oil, built ships and planes, and generally laid waste to our landscapes for decades. This
is about perspective isn’t it? And the need for new ways of seeing. It will be these new
perspectives that will lie behind the new stories that will feed and nourish our new ways
of living and being into the future. At the heart of this lies the idea of community and
connection – inter-connectedness, as you put it, Julia.

10
 Julia Macintosh & Steve Thorp
Image: Curvature by Janet Lees

The bottom line is that to move forward, we do have to accept what is – and this
is what our writers and artists have all done in their different ways. Some of us
are despairing and some of us hopeful (some of us fluctuating between these two
polarities!), but this is the psychological what is of the crisis, and we owe it to ourselves –
and to each other – to face it.

Janet Lees’ extraordinary series of photographic images that are woven through this
issue seems to me to sum up the contradictions we need to face. And yet, there
is humour, humanity and hope in these pieces too. It’s a bit like a good piece of
psychotherapy or counselling – the harsh truths are faced, but with self compassion,
gentleness and humour – and an acceptance of the wider context in which despair,
pathology or depression exists.

One thing that will need to change, I think, in my own ‘profession’ of talking cures and
psychological practitioners is that the climate mind needs to come into the therapy
space. This is the new perspective – the ‘unpsychology’ we so urgently need.

11
 faltering Emma Palmer
It hurtles towards us. The future. Now. Now.
Now. Now. Day by day, of course (although,
these days, I blink and another month has
passed.)
“To be a climate scientist is to be an active
participant in a slow motion horror story”
(Kate Marvel, 2017)*
I am no climate scientist, yet I get a daily whiff
of the fear, denial, overwhelm and horror now
and to come – mine and others’. The whirring
legacy of our rich ‘western’ lives.
How will I explain to my youngest niece,
what we humans are doing and have done
to the earth? How will I bear the look on her
face as, one day, I tell her that we’ve almost
certainly killed the coral reef, that we’re largely
responsible for the extinction of between
150 and 200 species of plant, insect, bird and
mammal every twenty-four hours in the sixth
extinction crisis of this age.
How will I let her know that, as we tuck in at
Wagamama’s, one in eight of our fellow human
beings go to bed starving? How do I say that by
2063, when she is my age now, extreme heat
is likely to be an annual occurrence? Perhaps I
begin by sharing my deep reluctance in buying
any more ‘Made in China’, heavy-on-the-fossil-
fuels-and-air-miles, brightly-coloured-crap,
masquerading as a toy?
* Marvel, K (2017), We Should Never Have Called It Earth, On Being website:
onbeing.org/blog/kate-marvel-we-should-never-have-called-it-earth
12
I’m sickened writing about the impossible...
Dizzy headed and sick in my stomach writing
about climate change. The ripped-off heads of
dolls trampled in mud, the sweet, sickly and
alluring smell of trickling diesel fuel, the throb of
the tooth’s root. “We will remember them”.
‘Climate change’ – such polite words for a
cacophony of chaos heading our way, or us
heading towards it at ever increasing speed:
hurtling in jet planes, 4x4s, luxury cruise liners,
with our fracking drills and coal powered
stations. Dizzy headed and sick to my stomach.
I don’t want to commit words to paper,
unusually for me, as it’s the way I work things
out, download my heart’s secrets. Here’s the
thing – I can’t work this one out. There’s no
working it out alone, it’s far more multi-faceted
than that. And yet, and yet, I can march, I show
up, I move around less, buy local, grow more
and have the unthinkable conversations which
make me unpopular. I hear it coming, the slow
seeping voice of “never enough”. It’s never
enough. It’s too late. It’s impossible. And yet, and
yet, keep on.
I drink tea and write about Climate Change. My
pen finds its way to despair swiftly this morning
(blood, gore, the shriek of a lone crow. Tea,
that’ll fix it. Maybe cake).
I distract myself with my flicking Facebook
finger. Reclaim the Power tells me that 16
people, including county and local councillors
and a civil servant, are heading to court for
taking action at Cuadrilla’s drilling site on
Preston New Road. The people of Lancashire
have already told Westminster what they think
of local fracking, and yet, somehow they are
the criminals, the baddies, the crazed activists
with the foolishness to give a shit about the
Earth, the water, the contamination. Idiots, put
them away! The sweetness of the millionaire’s
shortbread takes the edge off of the pain (for a
minute or two...).
“Clearly I know, the mind is mountains, rivers, and
the great earth; sun, moon, and stars”
(Dogen Zenji , The Shobogenzo)
I don’t want to write about climate change. I
don’t know what to write, sitting here, sipping
tea, sick of writing about controversy and
taboos. I don’t want to notice how quickly the
ink in my pen runs into despair. I should write in
blood. Or tears.
There’s no comfortable way to write about the
unthinkable, let alone engage. The unthinkable
is already happening, it’s actually nothing to
do with thinking and thoughts. It’s no longer
abstract, a future problem – it’s forest fires,
it’s floods and ‘extreme weather events’, it’s
growing numbers of displaced people, and
species dying, never to return.
Listening a while back to Guy McPherson, the
near term extinction guy, I felt a new, strange
lightness. At first gut-churning horror and a
familiar desire to simultaneously shout from the
roof tops and curl up in a tight ball, hedgehog-
like. One minute in a curled up faraway
hibernation, the next, this strange lightness.
Emma Palmer
Ha – dissociation, my familiar friend? No.
Instead, the relief of someone saying it as it
probably is whilst the rest of the world are busy
with Business As Normal (often me included).
It’s not good news, but then most of us know
that already. When climate scientists like Kate
Marvel point out that we are “perfectly naive
wilful victims” we know we have some stuff to
do - fairly urgently.
The words of the character ‘Red’, played by
Morgan Freeman’s in the film, Shawshank
Redemption come to me “Get busy living, or get
busy dying”. In the case of climate change we’re
so concerned with the first that we’re creating
the second; signing our own suicide note as we
ignore the danger signs of a struggling planet.
The changes ahead will hurt – facing our fossil
fuel addiction is as hard as healing any addiction
– and this time it’s en-masse (will there be
safety or denial in numbers?) Will we face the
grasping narcissism and instant gratification of
late-stage capitalism and see if we can grow up
in time? Those with the privilege, the cash, the
right colour skin, the right education, the right
genitals, in the right networks, of binary gender,
with the political clout - what will they do?
Gloomy messages about the future are a
hard sell. Talk about extinction and you’re an
immediate tree-hugger. Mention poverty and
you’re a do-gooder. Get real! It’s only the world
at stake here.
Climate Change education isn’t going to make
anyone a million on Wall Street. It’s not going to
win millions of votes for green politicians. What
fool welcomes bad news? And we’re busy
already, aren’t we? Apples to pick, work to finish,
a book deadline, a sick child. It’s all happening
13
 in my home and yours, keeping our lives on
track, not daring to let our gaze acknowledge
the state of the world around us – we’ve got
school shoes and stationary to buy and food to
put on the table.
This thing isn’t just about strategising – the
change we need is a change of the heart
(although strategising is important, in facing
the fact leading governments are caught in the
delusion of the corporate daze: “there’s sure
to be a technical solution, isn’t there?”). And
strategising from the heart is already beginning
to happen – look to the protectors of Preston
New Road – the ‘Nanas’ and their friends for
just one local example. Clubbing together,
raising awareness, making a noise, making a
nuisance with life in mind.
So, what of changes of heart? Will we face the
destruction we’ve caused and are causing? Will
we dare to do the grief work? Will we dare to
feel with our animal bodies? Will we sit still for
just a moment, feeling the life coursing through
our veins? Will we allow a re-wilding, unlearning
the dire fire thirst of our capitalist ways? The
hell realm of hungry ghosts with tiny mouths
and swollen bellies, desperate to be satiated.
Even if (and that’s the biggest ‘if ’ I’ve ever
typed) we find ways to reform our ways, the
world’s temperature continues to rise until it
finds its new point of balance. Can we raise our
children with the capacity to see things as they
are, not according to the consumerist bubble?
Might we teach them about resilience, flora and
fauna, carbon footprints, and the importance
of community, finding creative ways of telling
them the truth about what’s happened and is
happening to the planet?
14
Can I start by talking to my five year old niece
about my ban on plastic toys? My heart rips,
imagining her face as I tell her the truth, the girl
who loves rabbits and penguins. I remember my
eldest niece’s face as she asked me why I don’t
fly: “there’s nothing wrong with flying?” I tell her
in the simplest, non-scary terms why I don’t fly.
Her brows knit together and the corners of
her mouth start to pucker ever so slightly. Her
Mum flashes me a “for fuck’s sake shut up” sort
of look. So I do – I did.
Who do we think we are protecting? One
another’s delusion, I suppose. Collusion and
delusion. Perfectly understandable with dire
consequences. The world runs on it, we’re all
complicit.
Here’s the tragedy: the world also runs on love
– sorry to state the obvious, but I don’t find
it being said much, in climate change writing
(a bit, errr, soft and fluffy – bring on the fluff, I
say). Humans are awesomely amazing as well
as hellishly destructive. We could sort this thing
with vision, leadership, action.
When we spend more time feeling the love
connection (she said, descending happily into
cliché!), trusting ourselves and one another
a little more. When we see through our
brainwashing through the media, corporate-
fuelled message that we’re in competition,
that difference equals danger, and that status
is what matters. When we mature from the
love of pop songs and the first six months to
rougher-round-the-edges love. We know it well
but maybe we could channel it even more:
the love that repeatedly gets parents up in the
night, responding to the cries, the love that
keeps together the bickering seven-year-itchers,
the love across boundaries which is deemed
forbidden. Love that can handle difference, love “I do not know, I do not have, I do not

Emma Palmer
that stretches and strengthens, gluten-like. understand” (Tibetan guru, Padmasambhava)
Fumbling around, finding the words, taking the
time, witnessing something coming into being;
unborn, unknown, unknowable.

Image: Laugh Out Loud by Janet Lees

15
 Image: Lucifer by Janet Lees

16
the son C.G. Frederick

She was at it again, the tapping of her feet turning into a stampede. Why was it coming
to this? He had tried to make sense of it for a long time, and while he understood
her basic reasons, the master plan eluded him. He remembered better days: how she
nurtured him during his youth, how her warmth and predictability made him strong and
confident.

All of that seemed like an illusion now, and still it was the origin of his life’s purpose.
The green dress she loved to wear during the earlier summers, so delicate, strewn with
daisies and wild flowers. Her mere presence causing a flutter around him, giving the
impression that there was nothing but an abundance of beauty in this world. Anything
her fingertips touched appeared to bloom instantly. He pictured the graceful movements
of her past. Butterflies swirled around her gardens, attracted by her soothing smile.
Nobody, nothing could resist.

When he was young, her temper was gentler, of that he was sure. Often he stared at her,
studying her from afar, wondering if there was any unrest below the tranquil surface. He
knew it had to be there, somewhere, and if he ever really wanted to understand her, he
not only had to find it but to heal it.

Year after year, he dug into her moods and secrets, spilling them, dissecting them, and
now they were lying bare in front of him. He could see them, touch them. He showed
them to the world. But much of the world didn’t want to know. Then he suspected that
she didn’t want him to know. Just a quivering sense of uneasiness somewhere inside his
heart, more a water-skipping pebble than a sinking stone. He pushed it aside.

Despite those revelations, he struggled to comprehend the whole of her, and what had
seemed predictable before, he could scarcely foretell anymore. He felt helpless. Lately
it worsened. She was causing him sleepless nights. Despair struck him, more than once,
but an hour later, maybe a day, he reminded himself that in the end he had done enough.
Nobody could blame him, least of all she. She still loves me, he told himself.

Three decades ago he had discovered her volatility. He was taking his first vacation since
graduation, and she was by his side in the cabin, affirming the safety and meaning of
that time of his life. She was at once his refuge and the force that moved him forward,
shaping his career. So when her anger flooded over him, without warning, he felt naked,

17
 The girl smiled, stood up, and
walked out the door. Not because
she didn’t understand him, but
because she did. She wanted to be
upset, but she couldn’t be. After all,
he was a good son.
stripped of whatever she had given him before. Not for long, but long enough to give
him pause. Was he still doing the right thing? Did she think that he had abandoned
her? I never would do that to you, he said to her. I just need a moment to recharge. To
disconnect. Although he knew that he could never truly disconnect from her, even if he
wanted. And he didn’t want to. She was his only love.

Yes, there once had been someone else: at college he met a girl. When they first spoke,
he glimpsed the passion inside of her. We’re the same, he thought. Relieved, he opened
up to her, as she did to him. Sometimes he even lost sight of his mother, and it began to
scare him. What if something happened to her because he wasn’t paying attention? The
girl told him that there surely were others that could care for her. We aren’t the same
after all, he realized. What if everyone would think that way, he asked her. The girl smiled,
stood up, and walked out the door. Not because she didn’t understand him, but because
she did. She wanted to be upset, but she couldn’t be. After all, he was a good son.

In the cabin, darkness enveloped him as her anger grew. Why would she do this to him?
The louder she screamed the more distant he felt from her as if their invisibly binding
thread was stretched to a breaking point, each of them pulling on different ends. He
had heard of her behaving like this, but she had never done so in his presence. For the
first time in his life he was afraid of her. He didn’t want to be, yet he couldn’t stop it.
Afterwards, for months, he wondered what he had done to deserve such punishment,
after all that he had done for her. How had he hurt her? No, I never harmed her, he
assured himself.

He had an epiphany years later. One day as he was walking through another canyon,
through another valley, digging another hole. It wasn’t about him. Not about anything
he had done or not done. He shouldn’t take it personally anymore. The wounds were
not his doing: they had been done to her long before. Before he could do anything

18
to help her, maybe even before he could think. He felt good. He was free. And as he

C.G. Frederick
stretched out his arms towards the sky, it dawned on him that it didn’t matter: whether
it happened then or now, whether it was done by him or someone else, it was still his
problem. His arms dropped to his sides. Yes, my problem.

They were going to be one again. He always knew it would happen. It had been clear
to him from the start that she would outlive him. He wasn’t sad; on the contrary, the
assurance of this feeling – the fact – was what inspired him during his journey. He
couldn’t have continued otherwise. What he feared wasn’t the leaving but the incertitude
of who would take care of her after he was gone. He encountered many who claimed
they would, but how many of them could be relied upon he would never know. This was
it. He didn’t have to make any excuses. Her stomping grew fiercer. It reminded him of
the pebbles in his heart not so long ago. Now they were everywhere around him, but
they were not pebbles anymore: they were rocks. Or so it seemed. It didn’t matter, his
work was done. He went to bed.

The girl leafed through the magazine. Her wrinkled fingers stroked his face. It was only
a black-and-white photograph. Maybe it was better that way. She read the article, two
pages filled with words that made her smile, then frown. His mother had died when he
was five years old, and he had spent his whole life to save his other one. The girl wished
she had listened to him more. She wished she had been braver. She could be now. What
would he have her do? She listened to the rain battering her windows, harder than ever
before, got up from her chair, and walked out the front door.

19
 smoke signal Zara Mhofu

Shift to the right-hand

side versus hot collars rise.
Task set by old folks,
text sent by burning plastic.
Save us, reads the smoke signal.

20
Image: Acid Rain by Janet Lees

21
 taking the climate Zhiwa Woodbury
crisis personally

“To sleep, to dream, to keep the dream in reach

To each a dream, don’t weep, don’t scream
Just keep it in, keep sleeping in
What am I gonna do to wake up?”
(Europe is Lost, by Kate Tempest 2017)

In spite of the global attention that has been
focused on so-called ‘climate change’ (it’s not
change, it is chaos, it’s mayhem; according to the
International Energy Agenc it is mass migration
and mass mortality), the level of carbon dioxide
in the atmosphere is not only still rising, it’s
accelerating. Erik Solheim, the UN’s environment
chief, recently declared a global emergency:
“We still find ourselves in a situation where we
are not doing nearly enough to save hundreds of
millions of people from a miserable future. This is
unacceptable.”
If Western Civilization is to survive beyond the
21st Century as something more than a dark
remnant of another ‘Great Dying,’ the first of
which wiped out nearly every species that
inhabited our planet during the Paleozoic era,
we need to stop viewing climate change as just
another political issue to be labelled and ranked
in public opinion polls along with the economy,
terrorism, abortion, and transgender bathrooms.
Climate Chaos is no more a political issue, than
Zika virus or Alzheimers, in spite of craven
efforts by corporate-controlled media and
politicians to frame it as an economic concern.
Even more remotely, it is tempting for we
consumers to view ‘climate change’ from inside
our espresso-foam bubble as yet another
problem for science and technology to catch up
with, like cancer, nuclear waste, or space travel,
while we keep fiddling with our virtual reality
gadgets, or otherwise distracting ourselves from
the danger lurking beneath the turbulent waves
and behind the gathering storm clouds of actual
reality.
From an ecopsychological viewpoint, in a
completely interconnected community of seven
billion humans now awakening to the full extent
of our interdependence on one another and
on nature, and just now beginning to grasp the
Pandora’s box of un-imaginary horribles we
are selfishly unleashing on the biosphere, it is
incumbent on philosophers, psychologists, and
quantum thinkers everywhere to consider the
role of our collective psyche’s current mental
state, as expressed (‘acted out’) obsessively
through social and mass media, and to place
it in the context of our seemingly intractable
dissociative climate behaviour.
When you get right down to it, what we are
really dealing with here is an epidemic mental
disease of the highest (dis)order; a pandemic

22
of rampant cultural and political sociopathy
unrivaled in human history.
When it comes to this careening global crisis,
America presents both the world’s biggest
problem and it’s best hope for real change.
Now that we Americans have placed a person
with an obvious mental disease in the White
House, surely we can agree the time has come
to have a national discussion about mental
health in a cultural context – yes? What is it that
is causing us to consign all future generations,
including our own grandchildren, to a kind of
hell on earth? Have we really degenerated into
a society that devours its own progeny? Or is
this madness just a form of mass psychosis that
can still be treated?
Who cares for our common home?
Regrettably, at this critical time there is only
one popular world leader who really gets this
issue. And unfortunately, the Man in White has
yet to master miracles. Though he leads the
largest Church in human history – over a billion
people worldwide, with over 70 million here in
America – and although ‘His word’ is considered
by Catholics to be infallibly inspired by our
Creator, even Pope Francis cannot seem to hold
his follower’s attention on this life-and-death
issue! While a papal encyclical like Laudato Si
is required to be discussed from every pulpit
of every one of those churches, I’ve yet to
notice Catholics marching en-masse on D.C. to
demand the radical change the Pope has called
for – and the Earth demands.
I was born at the height of the baby boom,
a child of the Greatest Generation – the
same year and in the same town as the first
McDonalds. McDonalds hamburger stands,
like the American Dream itself, now reach
every corner of the world. I also got in on the
Zhiwa Woodbury
ground floor of the climate crisis. First in college,
as a student of environmental engineering
(thermodynamics), then in my professional
career, as an inter-governmental environmental
affairs specialist in the 1980s, when we first
discovered there was a hole in the ozone layer,
and Dr. James Hanson of NASA informed
Congress of the Greenhouse effect.
Horrified by my experience in government, I
spent two years backpacking around the world,
and then became a legal monkey wrench from
the mid-90s forward; challenging the grossly
negligent stewardship of federal forests and
grasslands by our federal mismanagement
agencies. Exasperated by that experience, but
still determined to get to the root causes of
what I’ve always viewed as a spiritual disease
anyway, I returned to school and became an
ecopsychologist.
Ecopsychologists place the planet, rather than
the ego, at the center of the self, and account
for our relationship to the natural world when
considering psychological problems – Mother
Earth, rather than just our mothers. Basically,
I’ve followed a career arc from dealing with the
many symptoms of the climate crisis to hacking
at the roots of the underlying malady.
Now, as these symptoms have become grossly
acute before my astonished eyes, in a world that
has truly gone off the civilized rails in a scary
clown car driven by a strangely charismatic
psychopath, I believe I’m prepared to render my
diagnosis.
Ahem… Is anyone still paying attention out there?
23
 Allow me to start:
“Hi. My name is Zhiwa, and I’m
having a climate crisis.”
Everyone else reading this:
“Hi Zhiwa!”
SADD: Schizoid-American Dream Disorder
All this madness we are seeing played out on
the world stage right now – American Empire
run amok, the ‘great unravelling’ long predicted
by social ecologists like Paul Hawken and
Joanna Macy – represents a frantic call for help
from a depressed culture that is borderline
schizophrenic*. A collective spiritual emergency
marked by extreme dissociative behaviors at
every level of social interaction (surely, you’ve
noticed?), and frantic socio-political episodes
of ‘acting out’ in the most irresponsible ways
imaginable. It all makes for entertaining news,
but this 24/7 Reality TV script that passes for
culture these days, which glorifies emotional
reactivity in order to entertain viewers
attentional affect, is inflicting grievous harm on
ourselves, our communities, our children, and
myriad others.
Most of us won’t visit a specialist unless we
suspect we have a real problem. There can
be no cure for the addict who will not admit
addiction, or the terminally ill person who
eschews doctors. The first step in treating the
symptoms at the root of a societal mental
disorder is for a critical mass of individuals in
* noun 1. Psychiatry.. Also called dementia praecox. a severe mental disorder characterized by some, but not necessarily
all, of the following features: emotional blunting, intellectual deterioration, social isolation, disorganized speech and behavior,
delusions, and hallucinations. 2. a state characterized by the coexistence of contradictory or incompatible elements.
24
that society – each one of us in this case – to
admit that IT IS I who have the problem -
not the planet or society or everyone who
disagrees with us. This applies especially to
those of us who already appreciate what is at
stake – we must be adults, and lead by humble
example. How do we do that?
We can begin by internalizing this crisis, rather
than upholding our natural psychological
defense mechanism that reactively externalizes
any threat of this magnitude.
Allow me to start: “Hi. My name is Zhiwa, and
I’m having a climate crisis.”
Everyone else reading this: “Hi Zhiwa!”
(Hey! That actually felt good!)
There is no technological fix for the climate
crisis, no silver iodide bullet. There is no political
compromise that can do the trick (take the
Paris Accords – please!). We’ve placed all our
eggs in those baskets for far too long, and they
are now as broken as the runaway climate
system itself. This is a deeply personal issue (are
you feeling me?) and we have to re-learn how
to talk about it. Quickly. Fortunately, as William
Burroughs once observed, language is a virus,
and with social media connecting the civilized
world into one super-sized Psyche, it can spread
quite rapidly.
The problem that prevents a solution is that,
all along, we’ve been viewing this unfolding
crisis – from scientists all the way down to
the swamp-creatures in D.C. – through the
very distorted lens of ‘Cartesian’ analysis and
worldview. Therein lies the intractability of
the climate crisis – a psychological defense
mechanism that courses deeply through our
culture. In plain English, we’ve been seeing this
all along as a crisis somewhere ‘out there’, like
inclement weather or a giant asteroid hurtling
towards Siberia.
“Can’t someone fix it?!” Right? Fix what, exactly?
In truth, what is happening out there in the
world today has almost nothing to do with
anything out there in the world today. Ultimately,
the only useful function of climate chaos is
to direct our attention to the real crisis, of
which global Discordia is but a complex set of
symptoms reflecting back our own collective
psychological disturbance – in turn reflecting
yours and mine, each in our own unique
manner.
As without, so within.
We are caught in Indra’s net. That ancient
metaphor is apt. On every node is a jewel that
reflects every other jewel, and at the same time
every jewel is reflected in all the other jewels.
There is only the illusion of an individual psyche
somehow detached from all other psyches and
from Psyche herself – Anima Mundi, our unborn,
indwelling nature. By seeing ourselves as apart,
we cut ourselves off from our own human
nature. On a collective scale, this can only lead
to crisis, and Mother Earth is reflecting that
Zhiwa Woodbury
unnatural self back to us in dramatic fashion,
doing her very best to slap some sense into us.
The Emerging Quantum World View
This seamlessness between planet and psyche
is the conclusion of the new movement in
psychology that arose in response to the
crisis itself. Ecopsychology is an extension
of Deep Ecology into Western psychology,
which can best be appreciated as psychology
with ‘eco’ (our home) substituted for ‘ego’
(our tormentor). It has accurately been called
‘psychology in the service of life.’ A stark
contrast to the development of psychology in
the West, which could just as easily be called
psychology in the service of death (thanatos) or
Freudian psychology.
Stated simply, from the ecopsychological
perspective, the climate crisis could come from
any deeper ‘in here.’ It’s not about political views
or education levels or any of that social media
fodder. Polarized talking heads cannot grasp it.
Instead, this crisis is about something inside each
and every one of us, no matter how much we
may think we’re not part of the problem (which
is ego talking, not body and not heart).
This idea of ‘mass psychosis’ presents a real
conundrum in a death-phobic culture that
pathologizes everything out of the mainstream,
and stigmatizes any and all mental illness –
except, of course, Narcissistic Personality
Disorder! Only awareness of this problem is
capable of neutralizing it’s deadening effects.
The path from climate perdition to climate
redemption is paved with self-awareness, honest
reflection, and humility. You know – all the traits
that are punished in a capitalist world order! We
25
 are called to serve a world in which no good
deed goes unpunished!
So perhaps we should not be surprised that
Pope Francis has come closest to offering a
practical course for treating the climate crisis.
He, at least, has begun the difficult conversation
that addresses our frozen unresponsiveness,
our relative inability to respond appropriately
to what is an existential crisis that is suffocating
the seas, breaking links in a disintegrating food
chain, and threatening all life on the planet. As
the Pope makes clear in his luminous encyclical,
Laudato Si (Care for our Home), the climate
crisis is a reflection of a much deeper spiritual
crisis, one that poses a most urgent question
to each one of us individually - and to all of us
collectively - no matter our religious beliefs or
political affiliations:
What does it mean to be human?:
(Can you feel the enormity of that question in your
heart? Do you sense its urgency in your gut?)
We are witnessing the dawn of what
geologists and other scientists are now calling
the Anthropocentric Age. Yes, it’s true – the
Holocene epoch that began approximately
eleven millennia ago, an age that saw the rise
of human civilization itself, has ended. Didn’t
you get the memo? In fact, they now date that
epochal ending to the first successful detonation
of a nuclear bomb in the White Sands desert of
New Mexico at 5:29 am on July 16, 1945.
‘Trinity,’ we called it. We now controlled the
“basic power of the universe,” our pathological
president announced. As the Pulitzer prize
winning poet James Agee noted in TIME
magazine, splitting the atom brought us
“inescapably into a new age in which all thoughts
26
and things were split.” And that splitting has
directly led to this great unravelling and our
schizophrenic acting out. It is admittedly a big
problem, but not insurmountable. Without
trying to treat it, it is highly unlikely we as a
species or culture will rise to the challenge of
rising seas and increasing economic and social
displacement.
‘Holocene’ is from a Greek phrase meaning
‘entirely recent.’. Now we’re in an ‘entirely new’
geological epoch, one triggered and being
shaped by anthropos – us – primarily through
the one-two punch of nuclear energy and
anthropogenic climate disruption unleashed on
a global scale. Has anyone yet asked the obvious
follow-up to the Pope’s question:
What does it mean to be human in a human-
created, human-centered age?:
(Dear Pontiff - have we become gods?)
Let’s do the Time Warp now!
There is another imposing problem in trying to
frame this global discussion – a type of cognitive
disorder: we humans are caught in a climatic
time warp. It’s unlike anything we’ve ever
confronted before… and it’s killing us. When we
consider all the disturbing developments in the
world – dying coral reefs, melting ice caps, killer
storms, extreme heat, drought, famine, exploding
Siberian methane bombs (from thawing
permafrost), we reflexively focus on the wrong
question: Are we causing all that?
The truth of the matter is that ‘we’ most
assuredly are not. That’s right, we’re not causing
the climate chaos you see in the world right
now. Unless, that is, you happened to have been
around in 1977…
Ah, there’s the rub! The real ‘Inconvenient
Truth.’ Everyone who was alive and engaged in
technological civilization in 1977 had already
caused what is appearing on the global climate
canvas right now. It’s a bit like spotting a star in
the night sky that, unbeknownst to us, actually
went super-nova millennia ago. But we’re still
seeing, with our own eyes in ‘real time’ how that
distant sun appeared millions of years ago.
Why worry about that star up there? Look – it’s
doing just fine! Looks can be deceiving. It’s a
provable fact that nothing exists as it appears,
right? And psychologically, that presents quite a
dilemma when it comes to causes whose effects
lay four decades in the future, a tomorrow
when maybe half of those reading these words
will no longer be. Compounding this quandary
is the unfortunate fact that we’re also a death-
phobic culture that has mostly forgotten how to
Zhiwa Woodbury
grieve what we’ve already lost, let alone face the
prospect of future losses. Instead, we turn away.
So no, what we are collectively causing right
now is not all the disturbing and quite unnatural
geophysical chaos we see in the world today.
Let’s not congratulate ourselves for that, though.
What we who are alive in the reeling global
chaos of 2017 are causing is some kind of hell
realm for everyone who happens to be alive on
this planet in 2057.
That’s some kind of terrifying time warp, isn’t it?
Can you see now how dissociated behavior is
rewarded by this natural phenomenon, which
separates the truth and consequences of our
actions from our actual decision making – by
four decades?!
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 Trouble ahead, trouble behind
Now, just what kind of hell realm we are talking
about 40 years from now – knowing that there
is already as much CO in the atmosphere again
2 underlies widespread depression, existential
as there was in 1977, waiting to be taken up
into the climate system (yes, we’ve more than
doubled all the emissions of the industrial age
in the brief span of one time-lag increment),
and that emissions keep increasing with every
broken heat record – is a question of (ahem)
hot debate? Now we see vast methane
emissions adding to the chaotic cocktail, thanks
to arctic warming that is outstripping the rest
of the globe and triggering permafrost bog fires
in Greenland, and similarly alarming ‘feedback
loops’ in the system.
The ocean’s role in all this is an unfathomable
scientific mystery that continues to reveal the
magnitude of our scientific hubris in increasingly
startling ways. And yet, it is because of the
oceans that we can confidently say, apart
from all the political hype on all sides, that
the window for avoiding an eco-catastrophic
future closed in 2014. Oops! Oh, you missed
that memo, too? What, you were expecting
the corporate press to provide fair warning?
Warming oceans are locked in for centuries to
come now, and if the food chain breaks and life
beneath the waves suddenly crashes into one
large watery graveyard, we will be left whistling
past our own mass graveyard.
There are even some scientists who speculate
that near-term human extinction is now more
than just a mere possibility. After all, about half
the oxygen we breathe is produced by life in
the ocean. And once this accelerating climate
train runs completely off the tracks, the mayhem
is likely to spiral out exponentially in ways we
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will be powerless to impede or control. (Pause
here for reflection on reader’s favorite scene
from The Walking Dead or Game of Thrones).
That is the gravity of the existential crisis that
angst, increasing suicide, and pandemic
substance abuse. It’s as if your mother was being
suffocated in the next room, and maybe your
dying baby is crying in the corner, while you’re
trying to figure out your taxes at the dining
room table.
At the very least, some kind of Malthusian
contraction seems inevitable for humanity
in the foreseeable future. That is always the
outcome of exponential population growth
once a species outstrips its resources. Did I
mention there were only 2.9 billion of us when
I was born (now 7.6 billion)? And the ‘collateral
damage’ of losing whole other species of
charismatic mega-fauna – Orangutans, Rhinos,
Giraffes, Elephants, Tigers, Whales, Sharks, Bears,
Bison, ad nauseam – seems to be more likely
than not in our children’s lifetime.
I am the Climate Crisis
As already alluded to, but worth returning
to now in sober reflection, one of the key
revelations of Carl Jung, Theodore Roszak,
and pretty much all indigenous people (that
is, people who still live close to nature) lies at
the heart of ecopsychology, and holds a key
to re-solving and surviving the coming climate
catastrophe.
Our individual and collective psyches are
umbilically connected to the Psyche of the living
Earth herself, referred to since time immemorial
as our Mother – a natural life-source, not a
natural resource – and grounded spiritually in
what leading ecopsychologist Andy Fisher refers
to as one flesh: “All phenomena interweave as a
single cloth or ‘common tissue’ [that] are mutually
informative in their commingling with one another...
because they are of the same elemental stuff.”
This worldview can be traced back to Plato, and
to the father of Western psychology, William
James, as well, and has essentially been proven
by quantum physicists, like the Nobel laureate
who pursued the union of physics and psyche
with Carl Jung, Wolfgang Pauli, or the father of
quantum physics, Werner Heisenberg: “The world
thus appears as a complicated tissue of events,
in which connections of different kinds alternate
or overlap or combine, and thereby determine the
texture of the whole.”
Of course, this worldview stands in direct
opposition to the scientific materialist
worldview that has given rise to consumerism
and commodification at the expense of
sustenance and spirituality – the Cartesian
objectification of life and nature. But in our
hearts we know which world view is true, and
which one deceives. Since nothing exists as it
appears, objectification and reification both
turn out to be rotten at their core. This simple
realization can give rise to great compassion and
caring.
The importance of this emergent, life-affirming
worldview during this time of immeasurable
peril is no coincidence. We must embrace it and
foster it with all our collective might. Whether
we choose to acknowledge it or not, the kinds
of grievous losses we are experiencing now, and
the existential crisis that we have brought upon
ourselves by attempting to shape the world
in our image, affect us all at the base level of
consciousness, the very ground of our being.
They give rise to our common psychological
Zhiwa Woodbury
distress, our shared mental illness – our dis-ease
with the direction of our lives, our society, and
our world.:
What will it mean to be human in a world with no
tigers, elephants and bears? OH MY!
There is a reason that the current drug
epidemic involves abuse of pain killers. People
are hurting in increasingly desperate ways!
Even scientists have begun to experience
heightened levels of depression and despair.
By contrast, most consumers are doing their
best to repress any grave issues of cause and
effect in the anthropocentric world we are
actively and passively creating for our children,
whilst politicians, corporations, and increasingly
centralized mass media continue to do
everything in their power to prop up the illusion
of the American Dream.
This was really brought home when, in response
to our distress over the terrorist attacks on the
World Trade Center (which we are still acting
out), George W. Bush went on national TV to
inform us: “Americans must shop.” That was such
a perfect response! The system depends on our
consent and willing participation. But that dream
we’ve been sold as the cause of happiness
is actually the heat engine that is feeding us
an endless supply of disempowering jobs,
mind-robbing distractions and spirit-numbing
pharmaceuticals, in order to grease its squeaky
wheels of consumption and destruction.
Just as in the ‘Great America’ of the 1950s –
that golden age the most traumatized among
us have naively mythologized – everyone is so
busy today trying to project an appearance of
success and happiness, or just trying to hold
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 onto some semblance of a normal life, that
nobody wants to finally admit something is
terribly amiss. The main difference between
then and now is that we’ve ‘progressed’ from
numbing ourselves out with liquor and valium to
the point of careless indifference, to completely
sedating ourselves with anti-depressants and
opioids to the point of death.
The suicide epidemic is a stark reflection of the
climate crisis, an acting out of the larger, ecocidal
culture. And we have a whole economy now
based not just on producing shiny new things
as in the 1950s, but on distracting ourselves
with endless ‘soft’ consumption and meaningless
pursuits. Pokémon Go? Really?? We’ve
substituted a virtual reality television show for
what used to pass for reality itself, with a farcical
leader of the free world who is clearly incapable
of distinguishing between fact and fantasy.
It is difficult to avoid the obvious conclusion.
This cognitive disorder that has us trapped
in a time-warped, Fukushima-fueled death
spiral – otherwise known as ever-accelerating,
abrupt climate chaos, ocean graveyards, waves
of refugees, and the Sixth Mass Extinction –
has now metastasized culturally into a rather
severe mental disorder, enabling if not causing
global-scale displacement and disruption of both
natural and human systems, and spewing forth
pervasive social pathologies masquerading as
political debate and business as usual.
From the institutionalized racism punctuated
by Standing Rock and Black Lives Matter, to the
ongoing slaughter of bison, bears and wolves,
the regular befouling of streams, the incessant
poisonous plunder of the oceans, from the
political scapegoating of vulnerable minorities
to the ongoing slaughter of foreign civilians,
30
these mental, social, and ecological disorders
are all feeding off each other ravenously and
inhumanely - rather like the fabled horsemen of
the Apocalypse:
What does it mean to be human in an unraveling
world?
Prescription: Natural Awareness
The road to recovery for our climate, for our
planet, and for our children’s children begins
with admitting that we have a nature problem.
Not just in the collective sense, but in each
of our lives, personally. Some have labelled it
NDD: Nature Deficit Disorder – though I think
it runs even deeper than that. SADD. This is
a moral and spiritual crisis; a crisis of human
nature reflected in the natural world. It impairs
our families, it lurks in our communities, and
threatens to sever all social ties. Crazy politics,
substance abuse, depression, hoarding behaviors,
gated communities, military fetishes, breakdowns
in social order, nationalism – all these modern
phenomena are, like chaotic weather, flooding,
and wildfire, symptoms of this mental disorder,
not problems to be viewed in isolation from
each other.
This cultural psychosis that is now so rampant
must now be our wake-up call. We have to
take ownership of this mass psychosis, and not
just reflexively externalize it anymore. We are
projecting our collective shadow, of which none
of us is innocent, and labeling it ‘Donald Trump
(or ‘Hillary Clinton’). We are labeling it ‘Global
Capitalism,’ and we are labeling it ‘Climate
Change.’
Brothers and Sisters! Can we at least admit that
we have a problem? That it is not so simple as

us and them anymore? Can we be adult enough,
to concede that we the people may even BE
the problem?
Pogo was right. This world is our mirror.
A clear and present danger exists, and we’re
exhibiting classic fight, flight, or freeze symptoms.
We’re all acting out, each in our own ways. And
we can only tackle this disorder in relationship
– with one another, in community, and with
ourselves – because it is, at root, a disease of
relationship.
For me, being human means cultivating and
exhibiting the best qualities of human nature.
Compassion, awe, caring, sharing, love, respect,
wisdom, humility. For myself, for others different
than me, for animals (even the ones we eat),
and for nature itself. Human nature is sacred. It
is humane and it arises naturally from cultivating
awareness, freed from distractions. What is
not humane in our behaviors in relationship to
Zhiwa Woodbury
ourselves, one another, and the natural world;
what is devouring that world and threatening
our life support systems; that by definition is not
human nature.
It’s a question of individual ethics writ large. For
what is left of human nature when humans are
engaged in a constant (un-winnable) war with
nature? That is a war with ourselves. And it is a
crime against humanity we continue to play out
in unspeakable ways, such as in Syria and Yemen.
I know people still tend to demonize human
nature, going so far as to suggest that warring
with one another is part of our nature – but
it’s not. If war was natural, why would so many
who experience it first hand be so traumatized
by that experience? No, as H.H. Dalai Lama says,
“war is monstrous.”
We are obliged to end this war with ourselves
within ourselves, within our families, within our
communities and on social media, by demanding
it from corporate media – and from there it will
filter upward into the realm of polity. It is up to
us to end this constant decades-long assault on
human nature that we have all enabled, and to
lead our leaders home or ask them to get out
of the way.
Fortunately, we have newly established models
we can follow. Defend the Sacred. Become a
Protector.
If we ‘the takers’ will only humble ourselves,
recovering our sense of sacred spirituality, then
Indigenous wisdom can lead the way toward
truth and reconciliation, with each other and the
planet – naturally.
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 earth cry Becca Warner

is this
how a child cries too
not knowing the words for the thing she wants
or even that this is hunger, or cold

is this
how a child cries too
hoping for something to be delivered to her
not knowing that she’s hoping at all

is this
how a child cries too
with sobs that rack the body, though they come from the mind
not knowing, of course, that the want starts and ends in her chest

where it meets the bosom of her mother

just as I, I lie
breast pressed to the ground
sinking into my mother
and crying for a want without words.

32
 33
Image: Genie by Janet Lees
 paradise tales

Some nights you gather

to recall a blue place.
You thought you’d been
tossed out of Eden,
not knowing you still
lay in her lap. Now
you keep her
only in thought-tales.

There you lived

in bodies, with something
called hands, to do something
called touch, with mouths
to taste her fruits. And colour,
you still remember colour.

There were creatures in waves

called air, where flying was
and water, where swimming was.

All babies born had furry,

scaly or peachy skin.
Repeat these words
to one another. Try
to understand what you lost.

34
a darker shade of shift

Rachael Clyne
Edges of roofs and milky spheres
of streetlight float through trees.
Fog-filled night obscures the combe;
its pearl grey shawl reduces the ash tree
to tracery against a smudge of hazel,
suggesting recognisable shapes,
until a world that seemed magical shifts

into an ocean of murk, with fumbling creatures.

Our eyes are clouded moons; we dangle antennae,
undulate etiolated forms, curl into ampersands,
our sides glowing with luminous dots.
We sport frills to furl us through sulphurous cloud.
Coitus is intricate. When beauty is blind,
each fluttering touch delights our senses.

We evolve signature sounds that carry.

Sonorous as cetaceans, we bask in choirs,
harmonise mournful melodies
and sing our way through the gloom.

35
 remembered

Remember the nameless ones

Who survived the kiss of glacier
The years of lean and those of plenty
Whose genes slipped through pogroms
Who turned right instead of left
Whose soft, quick tongues made jokes of fate
Whose fingers shaped scraps into latkes
Who clung to their traditions, their songlines
Their medicine plants, their kinship
With Grandmother Earth, Grandfather Sky.

Blessed are the vanished ones

Whose habitat became expendable
Whose lives were extinguished by indifference
Whose pelts, horn and other body parts
Were worth more to those
Whose backs, walls and libidos they adorn
Those creeping, flying, swimming, leaping ones
Whose raucous calls, gauzy wings,
Webbed toes and gaudy hues
Will not be heard or seen again.

36
 Rachael Clyne
Give thanks to the myriad scavengers
Who scuttle and hover; who devour matter
Whose unseen industry tidies away death
Who rag-pick life from a mountain of leavings
Whose ingenuity fashions answers from decay
Whose webs and threads spin shrouds
Blessed are the wanderers who leave no trace
Who huddle under flyovers, in rotten wood
Who eat from skips and tips and gutters
Who sup from the kindness of strangers
Who sleep nightly under the infinite.

37
 dreaming Rachael Clyne

Mountain sleeps
with her back to us; tender
dip of neck, shoulder
dark head full of dreams.
We are waiting it out
she whispers
till all of you go.

Note: Remembered and Dreaming are from Rachael’s collection,

Singing at the Bone Tree (Indigo Dreams Publications, 2014).

38
 39
Image: Becalmed by Janet Lees
 Alberta Monica Dragosz

Most start in the Rocky Mountains, hard edge just east of the continental divide. Casual
tourists and ardent adventurers crowd paradise. Where the good life is protected, in the
park. And free pass to boot this year – ‘Canada 150’.

But go east. Not very far.

Pumpjacks in fields of grass. Grass now propogated by the shit of cattle. Species that
never used to grow here, crowding out those that always did. All for them. Eventually
you will see the gleaming city skyline – the diamond towers. Sacred cows of industry.
These are the new churches.

In Alberta.

Go south and west again. Or north and west. Doesn’t matter. Cutblocks dot ‘provincial
recreation areas’, just far enough from the visibility of the Trans Canada. Cattle grazing
next field over. And the next. Grazing lease. Public land for rent.

The land. Outside the parks, it was called ‘Forest Land Use Zone’. The word ‘use’ was
already there. At least ‘forest’ paid some homage. Now it’s ‘Public Land Use Zone’.
Public. Use. The land is stuck in the middle.

In Alberta.

The land. Don’t bring up the land. At most, you may receive a muttered “it’s a shame”.
Or worse yet, a vacant, confused stare.

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“Life is good here.”

In Alberta.

“Climate change is a hoax”.

“Climate change is made up by liberal freaks.”
Or just silenced voices, as industry grinds out the land.

40
 Monica Dragosz
The land. Pumpjacks pump. Cattle graze. And release methane gas, day after day. Logging
trucks barrel down remote roads. No one hears the trees scream. Except for the birds
who first must escape the terror of the noise, then find a new home.

Forester says, “Logging has the effect of wildfire”. Regenerates the land, he proclaims, with
authority.

The land. “What about the understory plants?” My friend asks. Garbled words follow.
We press with questions about nesting birds. “The government looks at all that, has to, five
year plan, blah, blah, blah….” Vague words while nodding earnestly.

He once drank the Kool Aid.

Or is too aware which side his bread is buttered on.

In Alberta.

In Calgary, a woman chants “Hari Om”, wearing Lululemon. Finding herself in the second
half of her life.

Just don’t say anything to her about the perils of a carbon-driven economy. Her husband
works in one of the diamond towers, a cog in the machine that drives it all. Pays for all
that expensive spandex, and yoga retreats in nature. Out west, in paradise and even on
the continental divide.

It’s ok to be spiritual, as long as you don’t question the church.

And buttered bread in hand, she’ll probably ignore you the next time she sees you.

In Alberta.

Last summer, rain every day, following two-month early snow melt, and the Fort
MacMurray wildfire, to the north. Evacuating eighty some thousand. And too close to
the tar sands. Industry grinds to a halt, for just a moment in time.

‘Alberta Strong.’ Read the bumper stickers in the aftermath.

People – those not even in the path of the fire – feel angry, feel cheated. Defiant. But
they couldn’t tell you why.

41
 Image: Composite by Janet Lees

This summer, the fires burn west, across the continental divide. Smoke blows east across
it; the hard edge of the Rockies affords no protection. Haze and a red sun every second
or third day, over many weeks of summer. No rain this time. More fire to the south.
Calgary rates its air quality as poor as that of Beijing. At most there are a few hushed
tones, but mostly silence.

Flood or fire. Defiance or numbness. Literal hell and biblical times.

In Alberta.

I live on Patriarchy Lane, northwest of the diamond towers, and just east of the hard
edge of the Rockies and the continental divide. In the foothills, patchwork of gas wells
and pasture land.

The land. Caught in the middle, heart-land of industry.

Visit a woman up the road. A herbalist, healer. Has singing plants she introduces to those

42
of us gathered to listen. To see and hear the evidence of the sentience of life, of the land.

Monica Dragosz
The land. When she speaks, a diesel truck roars down the road, drowning out her voice.
“Every time I talk about the feminine earth, the patriarchal masculine shows up to interrupt.”
She states, with both certainty and awe.

You might think she is paranoid. Because there is always a diesel truck roaring down the
road. And she said the man on the next property over wanted her gone. Just for making
things grow.

In Alberta.

And south of her home, and my home, on Patriarchy Lane, a gas plant flares. Back up
after shutdown, spews thick black smoke into the air for twelve straight hours, mostly
during the night, when people are in their beds.

It’s doubtful they would have seen, anyway.

In Alberta.

This side of the continental divide, the ether is in spite of the beauty. It’s arid, harsh.
When the wind isn’t blowing, it’s hard to even feel the air against your skin. You just can’t
smell the land that much. And compared to other places across so-called Canada, there
is little water that flows through and carves out the land.

The land. It becomes too easy to ignore. Except for the black, sticky entitlement oozing
out of the ground. Sticking to everything.

In Alberta.

“Climate change does not exist.”

“There is no such thing as climate change”.
Or silence. As the machine grinds on.

Have you ever heard someone say “Denial is a crowded place”? I know the place. It’s just
east of the hard edge of the Rockies.

In the shadow of the continental divide.

In Alberta.

43
 lament for
a giant’s sigh
A reverie of nightwalking
In 2008, as part of my dramatherapy training, I
found myself walking in silence at night across
Dartmoor. We were given instructions to have
a buddy and carry a torch. We were told that
one staff member would go at the pace of the
fastest, and that another leader would go at
the pace of the slowest, and others would walk
between us. We had already surrendered our
phones, and we were asked not to use words to
communicate. We walked in rare darkness, free
of light pollution, along the country roads with
their dry-stone walls, banked hedges, high roots,
upward through the sparse woodland that leads
to the exposed treeless moors themselves. We
walked for a short while on the moor itself,
and then back down again onto safer and more
inhabited parts of that place.
It was an invitation to go within and without
at the same time, through the simple act of
walking, into a semi wild environment, in a
group, and yet alone. The subtle arrangement
of these conditions allowed for a mood of
deep reflection; of safety, yet challenge. The
act of walking and the suppression of words
encouraged reverie, that state of being where
images, memories and feelings flow unbidden
before one’s mind as in a dream, yet awake. Yet
the darkness and the tangible presence of root
and path made the environment vivid and real,
each step to be taken with care. Each step was
a step taken simultaneously into oneself and
44
Toby Chown
into nature, memories, images and reflections
mingled with the flash of torchlight and the
darkened outlines of trees and hills.
It is no accident that walking as a leisure activity
coincides with the birth of the Romantic
movement, suggests Patrick Harpur. A society
bound to the land could not romanticise
walking, or, perhaps be so able to view nature
as sacred in quite the way we do today. It
takes a level of alienation from the land to
be able to turn around and see it anew, as
something beautiful and exotic. Certainly, this
alienation from direct experience of nature
has happened, and what we find sacred in
nature rests, in part, upon this alienation. It is a
yearning for a return to something half-known,
half-imagined when we look back at the valleys,
paths and woodlands we have just walked, like
Wordworth’s nodding daffodils. Such a romantic
vision of nature still reflects something of
ourselves, that shadow we cannot get rid of, but
wish to shake off, wish to not see.
Making peace with nature
In the attempt to formulate more-than-
human ethics, lies the danger of an unthinking
misanthropy, where we project purity onto
nature, and cast ourselves as the devil, the
disease that must be purged. As I approach
nature, as a modern European, I cannot but
know that I am part of a community that may
destroy it.
Of course, Nature always has the power. We The small bird in the giant’s garden

Toby Chown
may yearn for a return to a deep communion
with the living world, and we may approach Small bird
nature in order to make peace with it. However, Hops and flutters
it is quite possible that the indigenous people In the branches of the
who know and venerate the Earth approach Winter tree.
nature not to make peace with it, as we need
to, but to appease it, as they have needed to. Giant men with
The roles in the relationship to nature are Tar blackened hand
here reversed - if you live in an environment Crash around
of thick trees and vines that towers over you, With nets and cages
where death may strike suddenly in the form To thieve her feathers,
of disease, or jaguar or anaconda, and you have Capture her song.
no access to chainsaws let alone metal tools to
clear your sight lines, your approach is likely to Her song’s like a life -
be one of bargaining and appeasement. ‘Nature’ Gone in a moment,
seems to have the power. Sun on green feathers,
And a dead tree that lives.
The true psychopathology of our time, argued
James Hillman, is not so much Narcissism – the Her sudden, swift colours
endless staring at the self in our digital mirrors Threatened by giant tarred hands
– but Titanism – the human self as limitless That want to squeeze
– greater than and above its environment. The Sun from her feathers,
Narcissism we see clearly, but Titanism, despite To spill on the leaves.
it’s great size, seems harder to spot. It is
embedded in our experience of life, and how The Giant is blindly drawn to the bird – to its
we approach technology, industry, illness and beauty – to capture and extract the Sun from
work. The towering trees of the Amazon, or her body. As with any metaphor, it’s meaning,
the Great Woods that once forested large parts much like the night walk on the moor, points
of England, no longer threaten us. Rather, we two ways. It points outwards to the soul
unconsciously assume a position of the giant in of modern Titanism and inward to our own
relation to nature, whilst our gigantic technology, desire to capture and own what is beautiful.
which seems the site of our greatest intelligence
and achievement, ironically makes us stupid, However, appeasing nature may actually be a
brutal and unconscious. The engine of a car is more congruent action to take than making
now plugged in to a computer rather than taken peace with it! It is our ‘selves’ we will destroy
apart and understood. GPS seems to render through climate damage, polluted oxygen,
a compass a romantic indulgence. Something downstream floods, harsh storms, sudden soil
seems missing, something basic, yet hard to see. erosion. And yet, these ‘little’ individual selves
are meshed into a much larger reality.

45
 We destroy the biodiversity that connects
tap water with the sea, the sea to the salmon,
the salmon to the upstream soil they die
in after spawning, the teeming microbe soil
that swallows their bodies to the great trees
the soil feeds that pump water back into the
skies. What is threatened by climate change is
everything we know to be alive. Our Titanism
obscures the dimensions of this ecological self.
Even a Titan is small within the dimensions of
the Earth and the Cosmos.
The reality of beauty
There is a level of despair at this point of
realisation – not so much at the gigantic
destructiveness of human nature, but at the
possibility of never making a mark on the world
at all, in the greater scheme of things. This is
a moment that invites us to muster stoicism
and courage in the face of the cold winds of
existential reality. And yet, this is still a vision of
the world where meaning lies only within the
province of human experience.
Romanticism takes a different path to confront
this existential challenge: by forging a link
between the inner and outer through the liminal
spaces of imagination. James Hillman and Henri
Corbin, challenge the idea that imagination may
be flimsy or unreal. It is, they say, the ‘Imaginal
Realm’, one that invites a mature vision of
the imagination, not one limited to individual
expression, but one opening a doorway to a
personal relationship with the numinous.
In this view, the patterns of our lives and the
great events in the world have an underlying
mythic, archetypal quality, that and connects
the mundane to the gods. This, in turn, regards
the Imaginal as a gateway to Nature, where
46
material reality re-unites with the numinous and
the beautiful. This way of re-visioning Nature as
the Imaginal allows us to participate within it, to
become it.
When this happens, Hillman says, “It becomes
more and more difficult to make the cut between
psyche and world, subject and object, in here and
out there. I can no longer be sure whether the
psyche is in me or whether I am in the psyche as
I am in my dreams, as I am in the moods of the
landscapes and the city streets, as I am in ‘music
heard so deeply / That is not heard at all, but you
are the music / While the music lasts’ (T,S.Eliot)”.
Paratheatre and the soul’s yearning
My walk across Dartmoor was a piece
of paratheatre. Paratheatre was a a form
of immersive experience, based on ritual
theatre and encounter. It was devised by Jerzy
Grotowski in Poland during the 1960’s and
70’s. It makes use of the powerful processes
that seek to completely break down the ‘fourth
wall’. In its place emerges a creative communion
between participants – a deep encounter,
where participants are ‘disarmed’ from their
everyday defences, by the flow of creative acts
of movement and voicework.
In Grotowski’s original work, a space was set
aside from the everyday – a holiday, or ‘holy
day’ – in which people could discover deeper
creative impulses. These startling events,
took place in pastoral, remote or wooded
parts of Poland, and attracted a great deal of
people, many of them, changed for life by the
experience. Nature is a key within paratheatre
to unlock depth. It makes real the idea that
creative impulses have oerganic roots in the
body. Creativity becomes a discovery of the
self ’s deep contact with its environment,
something that needs to be unblocked from
the body rather than invented by the mind,
as Kumiega discovers, in her report of her
paratheatrical experiences:
“July 24 1977, 6:00pm
We follow moist paths through the woods
We are skittish - soon sensitized to the communal
presence, a move from any direction
bringing a ripple of response.
Already there is a testing : of each against the
other against any interference of a
structure, against those who know the way.
Even finally against the way: against the
multiple shades of green and all it’s textures,
against another acceptance of the horizon.
Until we come up against ourselves,
Our bodies.”
(Jennifer Kumiega in Schechner and Wolford ed. 1997)
Paratheatre is a path rarely trodden, one
in which the creative potential of a person,
understood as a form of encounter, is
connected to the organic impulses that arise
from the same source that govern the patterns
of nature. It was as if what Grotowski was
aiming for was the human equivalent of a
murmuration of starlings – something deep
within the human soul that could be discovered
and made anew. Paratheatre was later adapted
by Steve Mitchell into therapeutic structures
within dramatherapy, for work with vulnerable
populations, or be used for self-development.
My silent walk across the moor was the start of
a weekend of paratheatre and the beginnings
of a new awareness: that it is not enough to
dispassionately regard nature. Rather, within
the body’s deeper convergence with the reality
of nature that we share, vision itself may be
transformed. Here in this work and in my walk, I
Toby Chown
found an answer to the misanthropy that casts a
blighted shadow over environmentalism.
I heard someone whisper: “Look deeper. There is
a shared source that links creativity and creation.
It is in your body as much as in the trees.”
References
James Hillman, Re-Visioning Psychology,
1975.
David Kidner, Nature and Psyche - Radical
Environmentalism and the Politics of
Subjectivity (2000).
David Kidner, Nature and Experience in
the Culture of Delusion (2012).
Tom Cheetham - The World Turned
Inside Out (2003).
Jeronimo MM - Ayahuasca - Tourism vs
Tradition, https://vimeo.com › Breaking
Convention › Videos
Patrick Harpur, The Philosopher’s Secret
Fire - A History of the Imagination (2002).
Christopher Innes, Avant Garde Theatre
1892 -1992, (1993)
Jennifer Kumiega in The Grotowski
Sourcebook, edited by Richard Schechner
and Lisa Woolford (1997)
47
48
 49
Image: Red Bird by Janet Lees
 Mapping Janet Lees

Hi-Zex Island

On the first day

we viewed the island from above:
a lightning flower flung across the skin of the sea
under the burning eye of the sun.

On the second day, we approached it from the water,

observing aspects of permanence –
three years and four months an island now,
its shape shifting between evening and morning.

On the third day we walked it, measured its synthetic

drumlins, its rope beaches, its tightly woven coves,
weighed the miles of clouded water beneath our feet.
Earth of a kind. Sea of a kind.

On the fourth day we went down to meet

this land mass in its own twilight. Ghost nets reached out
to finger our hair, calling us to the mausoleum
of the island’s rusted underbelly.

On the fifth day, we saw the ocean swarm –

angelfish and rainbow runners twisting through drifts
of polymer confetti that playact as food,
feeding the very body of our island.

50
 Image: Plastic Bag by Carissa Tanton

The sixth day we spent logging life.

A shore crab. Clams. An albatross in flight
off the western peninsular. We collected old eel traps, Note: This poem
was partly inspired
scraps like pastel coloured sharks’ teeth by this blogpost:
www.algalita.org/
hi-zex-island
with which to make a necklace for the children. (there’s also a
We bowed our heads under the weight of that night’s stars. YouTube video and
more out there,
And when the seventh dawn came, but this is a great
we saw our work was done. starting point)

51
 dialogue 2 Julia Macintosh &

what might be? Steve Thorp

Julia:
Hello Steve. Let’s move on to what might be?: that playground of the imagination and
source of all nightmares. We celebrate imagination as a creative principle, the soil from
which all progress and achievement has grown. Imagination separates us from the dumb
beasts and the mindless plants (or does it? and are they?) We humans have followed
the arc of imagination to the most impossible realities: we fly through the air, we dive
beneath the oceans, we walk on the moon (ah yes, we.) We take so much for granted,
those of us within this curious blip of history, living as we do inside a collective fantasy
which sprung from our minds as what might be.

We’ve all seen the photos: crowds of people pushing though the doors of a shop that
has opened at 4 am on the ominous-sounding Black Friday – people trampling and
swarming over a stack of merchandise like ants devouring a spill of sugar. We’ve also seen
the photos of starving children with stick-thin limbs and distended bellies, their weary
watery eyes staring at us in mute pleas for help. Which of these realities is really real? We
find ourselves trapped inside the results of the human imagination, a place where fifty
quid off a new tv somehow matters. What might be takes us right out of the here and
now, and it brings us right back to the here and now.

When we probe the consequences of our here and now, we don’t see a heroic grand
finale to the human epic. We see helplessness, smallness: ants scurrying around against
the immense intractibility of the rooted tree in Alex Lockwood’s Noni; a solitary
wanderer sifting through debris in your own Bobcat in the watertime; the self pinned
down by a merciless mortality in Jane Glezinka’s Boundless. When it comes down to it,
when we imagine what might be we turn to the idea of mere survival – well isn’t that
the greatest achievement of any living creature, after all?

Let’s not forget though the human fascination with terror. We shiver with creepy delight
at the suspense and fake blood in horror films, the weird violence in folk and fairy tales,
the gothic drama of the classic ghost story, the disgusting messy tragedies of warfare and
plague and natural disaster. Apocalypse is the icing on the terror cake, with its grandiose
tempo and utterly bleak narrative. Civilisation’s collapse, intractable climate change and
the toxification of our ecosystem – in the most perverse corners of our human nature,
we enjoy the terror of what might be. I’m reminded of lyrics in the song Millenium,
written by Chicago band the Del Psychos, in the lead up to the turn of the twentieth

52
century, when people stockpiled tinned food and toilet roll in the expectation of a Y2K

Julia Macintosh & Steve Thorp

intercontinental meltdown: “don’t push me away, I get closer every day – there’s a lot to
learn, you’re so unconcerned, like you’re at a Sunday matinee.” We sit with our popcorn
and watch our screens, waiting for the next Trump tweet or the latest Brexit backdown,
or is it a mass shooting again or perhaps another oil spill, a dire statistic from the NHS or
another price hike for public transport? What might be stands just outside our door, just
beyond the curtain, ready to pounce – and we shiver in expectation.

Steve:
Yes, Julia, we shiver at what might be – understandably – but apocalypse and dystopia are
addictive drugs in our culture – and sometimes it seems that there is no other way to
think of the future except through this lens.

And, as you point, out, it’s so easy to see dystopia in the present too.

However, what might be? must have something hopeful in it, shouldn’t it – or at least
something broader in terms of our imagination than tales of floods, fires and zombies. I
suppose that’s why I love speculative fiction so much, and the death of Ursula K. LeGuin
this year has reminded me that this genre – at its best – has the capacity to go beyond
the usual narratives, and take on something entirely new and strange. In some ways,
LeGuin’s book Always Coming Home is the ultimate Climate Minds book, though it
was written before this crisis had become so starkly apparent. Her work will continue
to be the touchstone for the imagining of new worlds and new versions of this world
that are not just macho space-fables, domination tales and dystopias, but stranger, more
compelling and beautiful stories, poems and songs of our present and our possible and
preferable futures.

For this reason, it is great to have so much imaginative writing in this section that is
involved in the deeply imaginative task of ‘world-building’ – longer stories set in some
future, and stranger poetic pieces that give voice to the Earth and to Trees and our
fellow beings.

It’s not all fiction and poetry, though. Dave Hicks is a writer whose hope is tangible
and who has worked, thoughout his life, to explore our futures – and for this reason,
I am really pleased to include a second piece from his book The Climate Change
Companion in the magazine. The first extract appeared in Issue 3, The Childhood
Edition, and Dave’s insightful, accessible work deserves real attention.

Just as our fiction writers and poets imagine what might be in terms of futures and
stories; We also need work carries a practical, active hope that is plainly set out, practical,
visionary and playfully infectious.

53
 Noni Alex Lockwood

A sailor once told you it was snowing butterflies and due to his acquaintance with the long oak
beams of his ship you believed him when he also told you that if you wanted to heal, find a tree
and sit by it. Sit long enough to trail its sighing. Of course a man; even a sailor; he understands
the creaks of wood in water, but he does not know how to talk about trees. Not a tree. Tree.
Not it. Not she. Ve. But he was right about this at least: owe your seaborne survival to the
proof of wood and you too will come to discern the inscrutable properties of knot and grain.
His instructions: fall into ver rhythm. Attend enough for tree to notice you. You can move; you
don’t need to be like tree; you don’t need to breathe on tree to have ver nurse your cankers;
it is not like steaming up a glass only to wipe it with your sleeve, desperate already to see
what you’ve obscured. Be with tree; ve is sensitive to the lightest impression – and deepest
contusion. Forbearance.Ve doesn’t respond immediately. What is fleeting isn’t concerning; how
you demand is not ver petition; what stays matters. It takes time for tree to notice you; remap
what you thought of as time; don’t rush; I know you entertain urgency; forget, the sailor said,
this desire for horizons; gnosis. Tree takes months to let go of ver leaves, if ve’s deciduous.
(Deciduus: ‘fleeting’; this tells you much about tree time.) When ve–tree–does–acknowledge
you–you’ll feel it; cellularly.

Let ant walk up your leg and across your chest and onto tree, if what you have done is implant
yourself in his path. They are weavers. Oecophylla longinoda. Look up. You’ll see their nests
curled into leaves; vessels for broods and glazed with larval silk. Fit to set sail, a sailor might say.
Tight.They don’t sting, but they’ll bite you if you stir and spit formic acid in the wound. Not that
wound.The bite. Pay attention: also: symbiosis: the ants protect tree from plant-parasitic insects.
The ants give tree chance to fruit. You can eat ver fruit, if one drops close enough. Pick it up
and break it open; inhale the seasoning pungency of who has been here and sat here before
and look up and think: yes, each fruit is the upshot of a person’s sickness. Vomit fruit. The pith
of decay; question: did they always smell this way? Before people came to sit? Who before you
has tolerated long enough the smell to plait a way into tree’s untouchable rhizome? Someone.
Otherwise you wouldn’t have come, nor listened to your sailor who laughs with the butterflies.
(N.b.: there were fifteen species of weaver ants. Thirteen are extinct.)

Look up past the nests and fruit. The Late Heavy Bombardment was a time three point eight
to four point one billion years ago when the planets were in formation. Gaia was battered by
asteroids shaken off the other planets; sent her way; as the orbits wobbled; like dusting the red
earth off your legs as you stand and stretch from your vigil; like the seeds you scatter as you
tear open the noni. Ver seed. When you stare up starward you see how things remain shaken.

54
 Alex Lockwood
Now you are with tree you should know that in time you
are closer to the weaver than you are to tree, and tree
is closer to the shakenness than to you. Without this
wisdom of distances ve could not help you. And ve
helps; not by choice; mutuality is formed by not
running away. It begins; with breathing. When you
breathe in rhythm, not only are you slowing down,
but tree is speeding up. You move even closer
to the weaver; dependant; as much as this may
dismay you; hapless ego. For tree, this is something
ve remembers from Dreaming. All of us came from
dingo: trees and ants and butterflies and people.
There isn’t any worthwhile distinction if
it helps your conscience; for your healing.
You win. The weavers come to tree; call
ver Noni; depend on ver; survive because
of ver and how ve provides leaves for their
nests. You come similarly. So sit; breathe;
weave with ver. And over time – ver time – the
lumpen contusion in your glandula will shrivel;
and behind, where your head rests on ver bark,
you feel new tumours grow in ver, instead. What
would have killed you will not slay ver. This is; so
transfer.Ve is greater; larger; ve is your shield; ve does
not judge how contumacious nor rash you’ve been
to reach this uneconomical condition of need; mutuality
refutes justice, although what ve affords instead /sacrifice/
is perhaps more compassionate; in the end.

Look. Not up: across. The forest; ver exodus. Tree survives your colonizing;
can absorb your maladies. But this only as long as there are others who ve
Image: Tree by Ruth Thorp

can breathe with; who absorb ver ills in turn. Soil? No hummus left. River? You
have plasticized. Ocean? Ask your sailor; between his tears; fish no fish. Ask:
is a New Heavy Bombardment? Yes. See: there’s more of you; resting your
heads on every tree.

55
 Image: Drowned World by Janet Lees

56
feeling the way
forward
In this extract from his book, The Climate Change Companion, Dave Hicks considers the psychological
implications of climate change and the active hope we might hold for the future
“It is common for people to experience a range of
emotions and psychological reactions when faced
with information about environmental threats and
predictions of an uncertain future”.
(Australian Psychological Society, 2014)
Why is it so difficult?
“It’s scary,” she said to me, ‘I don’t know what
I don’t know, should know, and haven’t got time
to know”. These are the sort of feelings that
come up for a lot of people when the issue of
changing climate is raised. It certainly did for me
and I remember thinking, “Do I really want to
know about this? Have I got room for it in my life?”.
The person I was talking to then asked me how
I felt about this, so I took a moment to get in
touch with what I myself was feeling. I realised I
felt nervous, uncertain, fearful, angry, wanting to
blame someone - an interesting list of feelings
I wasn’t sure I wanted to share. Later I realised
one of the reasons I felt uncertain was because
climate change makes the future feel more
worrying and thus my fearfulness about what
it might bring and my anger because I wanted
someone to blame.
At that point I could have dismissed those
feelings as unhelpful and getting in the way. But
then I wondered what would happen if I trusted
them, was the heart telling me something
Dave Hicks
important the mind could not? So, what can
we learn if we listen to feelings about climate
change?
Keri Norgaard, a researcher who wanted to find
out what people thought and felt about climate
change, focused on a small rural Norwegian
town where she talked to people, listened to
conversations, went to meetings and generally
observed what the population talked about. It
certainly wasn’t climate change. She found that if
this topic was brought up it was a conversation
killer. It was something outside the sphere of
normal life. Climate change wasn’t seen as being
a local issue. What she also realised was that in
a way the whole community was complicit in
this and realised that people avoided thinking
about climate change because it led to feelings
of helplessness, guilt and deep insecurity. If you
don’t think about it you’re not going to have
difficult feelings about it.
The emotional impact of climate change is
often underestimated. At the deepest level, if
one acknowledges global heating and climate
change, it can raise feelings of helplessness and
powerlessness such that one’s sense of identity
can feel threatened. I can’t manage this! I did
not bring children into the world for this! It
can make us feel very vulnerable because what
helps us to keep going in life is the opposite,
feeling that we’re safe and secure. Neither
57
 should we be surprised these feelings are
uncomfortable.
This is because they were also the ones we
experienced, but could not verbalise, as babies
and small children. Am I safe or not safe here?
The fact that we couldn’t put this into words
only made the feelings stronger. It is natural that
we want to protect ourselves against things that
seem to threaten us. So in relation to climate
change people often acknowledge the facts but
then deny their importance, as below.
Everyday denial
Deny their meaning:
“I don’t think it’s that serious.”
Deny the implications:
“People have coped with worse in the past. I doubt
it will affect us much in the UK.”
Deny the connections to their own lives:
“It’s not my responsibility – it’s down to the
government.”
Deny their emotional significance:
“I’m not bothered – I’ve got more important things
to worry about.”
Deny the practical significance:
“I know it’s happening but I can’t change my life
because of it.”
Deny the irreversibility:
“I’m sure it can be sorted out later/we can adapt/
science will find an answer.”
(Source: Randall and Brown, 2015).
Denial seems a pretty good idea in this context.
It’s not as if we sit down and ask ourselves,
“Shall I deny this information or not?” If at a very
deep level the information feels threatening, and
I’m not just thinking of climate change here, the
doors clang shut instantly. This reaction occurs
automatically when we feel suddenly threatened,
58
when danger appears from nowhere. But at
some point we need to find the space to reflect
on this automatic response. Was I overreacting?
Is there something here I can learn about myself
if I take a step back for a moment? Denial can
be useful – I don’t want to acknowledge that
my friend is an alcoholic, that this relationship
is over, that this is a terminal illness. Denial
can save us from pain, but at the expense of
avoiding the truth. We tell ourselves stories to
buttress denial – he likes a good drink now and
then, deep down she still loves me, I’ll get better
soon.
People give various reasons for denying or being
doubtful about climate change, from whether
it exists or not to how bad it might be or even
whether it’s caused by human activity. People
argue that no one can see carbon dioxide so
global warming can’t therefore be happening;
that nothing that has happened so far is
outside the normal variations of UK weather;
that if experts disagree why bother to believe
anybody; and that it’s a plot by environmentalists
to take over the world. The problem with
denial though is that it means not really taking
responsibility for looking after yourself, your
family and friends.
By contrast it’s interesting to look at what seems
to drive ‘professional’ sceptics and deniers. These
are a small number of people who spend a
lot of time and money trying to cast doubt on
the findings of climate change scientists. At first
this seemed a credible thing to do in the latter
part of the twentieth century, as scientists tried
different approaches to gain accurate data on
global warming and various theories were put
forward to explain their findings. There were
differing opinions and theories in the scientific
community. This, however, is normal. In any
Given the emotional

Dave Hicks
weather climate
change can create,
we need to share
both how we think
and feel with those
we want to work with
to create change. But
how does one create
a space where it feels
safe to share one’s
thoughts and feelings
about these matters?
59
 area of science ideas are put forward, data
obtained, findings checked with others and
theories developed, until a consensus occurs as
to the likely explanations for a phenomenon.
Disagreeing is a vital part of that debate, it is
part of the process that scientists use to arrive
at a consensus. It doesn’t mean, however, that
scientists can’t be trusted or that science is
often wrong.
Psychological impacts
Having looked at why it’s difficult to grapple
with the realities of climate change and why
the denial industry has tried to manufacture
doubt, it is also important to understand how
the various impacts of climate change can affect
people’s health and well-being. This has become
a subject of increasing concern and has various
elements. One important distinction to make
is between sudden disasters caused through
climate change and slower gradual effects.
Disasters occur at a particular point in time and
are highly visible. Floods, hurricanes, bushfires,
heat waves and drought are all increasingly in
the headlines. Gradual effects, by definition, are
much less easy to observe because they build
up over time. These include slow changes in
average temperatures, sea-level rises, spread
of disease, decreased availability of water and
increased numbers of displaced people. The
impacts will vary accordingly.
Young people in drought-affected areas, for
example, have been shown to exhibit high
levels of stress and concern about their families.
Unsurprisingly, they felt overwhelmed, isolated
and worried about the future. A number of
people affected by the Hull floods in 2007
were asked to keep diaries for eighteen
months to record what happened to them
60
in the aftermath, a period which they often
experienced as more traumatic than the flood
itself. A similar project worked with children and
young people to explore how they recovered
from flooding using interviews, drawing and
workshops. What traumatised young people
most was the stress and trauma their parents
experienced and all the uncertainty that
followed.
So the psychological impacts of climate change
cannot be overlooked, whether it is how people
respond to learning about global warming or
having had the experience of being flooded out
and consequent homelessness. Depending on
where you live in the world, if you are lucky you
will have a home you can eventually return to, if
unlucky you may have no choice but to become
a climate refugee.
Emotional weather
I have sometimes been surprised by the ways
in which feelings are often denied in society. I
don’t just mean troubled feelings, as discussed
above, but in some cases the whole spectrum
of emotional life. I do have a friend who’s quick
to point out this is a rather broad generalisation.
It is often true in our society that women are
left to do the emotional work, by which I mean
work which comes directly from the heart and
involves being open to feelings, being able to
recognise them, name them and express them.
It’s not that men can’t do this but that we’ve
often, but not always, socially and culturally
learnt to keep feelings under wraps. It’s not
that men don’t have them, but that they don’t
necessarily acknowledge them and can tend to
express them less often.
It is essential to understand, however, that as
human beings we are driven by both head
and heart, two sides of the same coin of self.
There are times when we can learn most from
using our heads and our intellect – observing,
describing, analysing, choosing and acting, for
example. We all need to be able to do this in
our daily lives, whether at home or at work.
But we are also creatures that feel and feelings,
whether acknowledged or not, inform what we
think and believe. Our values come both from
what we think and feel about different issues.
Feelings provide a quite different repertoire
of experience. Think of what we can learn
about ourselves and others if we are open to
feeling fear, love, compassion, grief and solidarity.
Knowing about the nature of solidarity is one
thing, experiencing it when facing a difficult
situation with others is what cements that
experience.
Given the emotional weather climate change
can create, we need to share both how we
think and feel with those we want to work with
to create change. But how does one create a
Helpful ground rules
Speaking – only one person speaks at a time, this
can be as a result of agreeing to take it in turns or
by putting a hand up.
Listening – it is important to listen attentively
to what the other person is saying without
interrupting them.
Not judging – listen without making judgements
about the other person respecting where they
are coming from.
Sharing – no one person should dominate the
discussion, no one should be left out, all should be
encouraged to contribute.
Voice – it’s not about saying the right thing or
having an answer, it’s about ‘finding one’s voice’,
which may just be sharing what one is feeling.
space where it feels safe to share one’s thoughts
Dave Hicks
and feelings about these matters? Sometimes
we just know it’s not a good place to do that
or alternatively one may be with a friend or
friends where it does feel possible. The situation
to aim for, if you wish, is to find a few friends
who would like to discuss such matters and
with whom it feels OK to share. One reason we
often don’t do this with others is because we
assume we will be judged in some way. In any
sharing it is useful to agree a few ground rules
to create a sense of security in the group as
shown below.
In order to move on it is helpful, if possible, for
uncomfortable feelings to be acknowledged
and shared in order to thaw out what may have
become frozen. In so doing one can begin to
feel more safe and hopeful again. The security of
working with supportive others is what enables
one to move forward. In their book, Active
Hope, Joanna Macy and Chris Johnstone offer
a wealth of ideas for opening up discussion on
how one may feel about the world.
This can be done in pairs, each individually
completing written sentences such as those
below (or writing one’s own) and sharing them
with a partner. For example:
* When I imagine the world we will leave our
children, it looks like...
* One of my worst fears about the future is...
* The feelings about this I carry around with
me are...
* Some ways I can use these feelings are...
Subsequent discussion will reveal similarities
of response as well as differences. From their
extensive experience of helping groups work
with difficult feelings about the state of the
world Macy and Johnstone observe that when
61
 fears are brought out into the open they often
lose their power to haunt us. It then becomes
more possible to tell new stories.
Moving forward
To be able to acknowledge and share troubled
feeling with empathetic others does not
necessarily remove those feelings, but the
opportunity to share them has more power in
it than one might imagine. I am reminded of the
adage, “A problem shared is a problem halved”.
Knowing and experiencing that others feel in
a similar way to you means you aren’t alone
with those concerns. Energy once used to keep
those feelings at bay can now be used for other
purposes. If you have a small group of friends
or colleagues with this shared concern what
might you want to do next with them? It might
be to become more aware of other groups and
organisations interested in climate issues. And
the surprise might be that you are not alone.
There will be others in your community, wider
area, nationally and globally. One realises one
is part of a wider web of connections and this
helps bring more focus and energy. There are
many others concerned about the hazards of
climate change and also how to work towards a
more sustainable low-carbon future.
“Individual’s perceptions that effective collective
action on climate change is possible may be even
more important than their beliefs about effective
individual action... Providing a forum where people
can share what they are doing, and learn about
what others are doing can lead to a positive
feedback loop in which actions inspire other
actions and support the creation of new social
norms.” (American Psychological Society, 2014)
At the heart of this is connecting with like-
minded and supportive others. It is also
62
important to cultivate hope. The word hope
gets used in all sorts of different ways from the
mundane to the profound. Hoping that I will not
miss the last post for a letter is important to me
but doesn’t signify much in the wider scheme of
things. I hope the sun will shine tomorrow and
that I will see my grandchildren next week. This
is, if you like, an everyday use of the word ‘hope’.
But hope has much more to offer than this.
What I am interested in here is what one might
call authentic or active hope, the hope that is
needed when the going gets tough, when we
are seriously running out of options. It is the
sort of hope that keeps us going in the most
difficult of times. Hope gives us the strength to
go on in such times and draws on a variety of
powerful sources. It is also true that such hope
does not necessarily mean one will achieve
one’s goal. Some of the sources people have
shared with me are briefly described in the box
opposite.
I wonder which catch your attention and which
you can relate to from your own experience?
It is worth remembering the ancient Greek
story of Pandora. When she opened the box
which contained in it all the troubles of the
world they suddenly flew free and, last of
all, hope also flew out. So what one might
therefore call authentic hope can be a vital
source of strength in turbulent times, the
power to continue, to believe one can make a
difference, to change things for the better. The
choice to be faced is between getting stranded
in fear and denial on the one hand or choosing
to work with others to help create more
sustainable low-carbon communities.
 Dave Hicks
Sources of hope
* The natural world – a source of beauty, wonder and inspiration which ever renews itself and ever refreshes
the heart and mind.

* Other people’s lives – the way in which both ordinary and extraordinary people manage difficult life
situations with dignity.

* Collective struggles – groups in the past and the present which have fought to achieve the equality and
justice that is rightfully theirs.

* Visionaries – those who offer visions of an earth transformed and who work to help to bring this about
in different ways.

* Faith and belief – which may be spiritual or political and which offers a framework of meaning in both
good times and bad.

* Human creativity – the constant awe-inspiring upwelling of music, poetry, and the arts, an essential element
of the human condition.

* Mentors and colleagues – at work and at home who offer inspiration by their deeds and encouragement
with their words.

* Relationships – the being loved by partners, friends and family that nourishes and sustains us in our lives.

* Humour – seeing the funny side of things, being able to laugh in adversity, having fun, celebrating together.

References

Australian Psychological Society (2015), Climate

change – what you can do: http://bit.ly/2HMcgPG

Norgaard, K. (2011) Living in Denial: Climate

change, emotions and everyday life, MIT Press.

Randall, R. and Brown, A. (2015) In Time for

Tomorrow? The Carbon Conversations
Handbook, Surefoot Effect.

Macy, J. and Johnstone, C. (2012) Active Hope:

How to face the mess we’re in without going
crazy, New World Library.

Clayton, S., Manning, C.M., & Hodge, C. (2014),

Beyond Storms and Droughts: The Psychological
Impacts of Climate Change, American
Psychological Association & ecoAmerica.
http://bit.ly/1CJSHQp

63
 water and Rachel McDonald
the mountain

The water spread nightly, twisting its way in lullabies of

numinous possibility, settling into the creaks and cracks of the
land. Sometimes the water reached houses solid as the lives
lived in them, but she responded by wrapping around and
seeping through them and carried on her way.

Soon she came to a mountain that rose into the sky as high
as it rooted down into the earth. Water tried to move around
mountain, but its girth strangled her flow. She put out feelers
– ice-cold rivulets that pawed at the stones and uprooted the
moss. But mountain did not yield. She tried to rise upwards,
but mountain was too steep for her to climb. Defeated, water
gently lapped at the mountain’s base.

She reflected on how far she had travelled from her origins as
a gentle river. Children had once splashed in her shadows and
she still carried their laughter within her. But then the clouds
had formed and the rains poured into her, spilling her open
and gushing her through meadows towards villages which she
quickly subsumed then on to cities which drowned beneath her
raging waters.

Now she was an ocean and what she contained alarmed

her – for she carried the emotions of each person she had
touched and held the last memories of humankind. She was
uncontainable – until she met the mountain.

64
Image: Submerged by Janet Lees

65
 survival Sarah Mahfoudh

She wasn’t supposed to be here alone, especially not at this time of day. But then she
often did things she wasn’t supposed to. Sometimes they punished her, but more often
than not these days, they didn’t bother. She suspected the adults in The Community
had given up on her, so unless she did something really outrageous – like tell one of her
stories or go across the border wall – she could do whatever she wanted.

Willow drew her paddle out of the water and lay it down in the flat-bottomed boat;
then she stretched herself out alongside it and stared up at the sky. The boat rocked
from side to side as she settled herself, but the lake was peaceful today, with only a ghost
of a breeze to ruffle its surface, and the rocking soon became a gentle, mild-mannered
bobbing. She held her breath, closed her eyes, and concentrated on being still, challenging
herself to see whether she could get the boat to stop moving altogether. She couldn’t
of course; she never could. But it had become somewhat of a ritual for her to see
how much she could control the world around her: if she walked slowly and straight
enough, could she stop the corn in the fields from rustling as she passed? Could she
walk through the forest without cracking a single twig? Could she make the border wall
shrink if she stared at it long enough? The movement of the boat calmed to a barely
perceptible lilt and Willow let out her breath and wriggled. The boat rocked in response
and she smiled to hear the water slapping against its wooden sides.

She opened her eyes. The sky was pale blue and speckled with pillowy, white puffs.
Fine, wispy clouds hung between the plump cushions like silk nets slung across the
atmosphere. Nets cast by celestial beings, mused Willow, to catch flying fish or dreams or
… She sighed and sat up. She shouldn’t think like that – it was too painful. Her head and
heart were so full of forbidden stories and dreams, she was sure that one day she would
explode from trying to keep them all inside. It hadn’t been so bad when she had been
able to share them with Grandma, but what with school (when she went) and tending
the fields, and the new baby, and Grandma sleeping so much more than she used to,
they didn’t get much time alone together anymore. Besides it was too dangerous to tell
forbidden stories now that Alec was in the house.

A low, directionless rumble disturbed her and she looked up. It was not thunder – the
day was to mild and calm, and the sound was too high pitched and regular to be thunder,
and anyway, it was more of a drone than a rumble. At the corner of Willow’s vision,
something glinted and then slid into view. It cut across the fabric of the sky as straight
and smooth as an arrow, leaving parallel white trails in its wake, which hung in the sky

66
long after it had disappeared. The thing had been far too high to make out, but the word

Sarah Mahfoudh
‘dragon’ came to Willow’s mind. The noise faded and the sounds of rustling leaves, gently
lapping water, and birdsong were audible once more, but Willow was only semi-aware of
them as she stared up at the trails of smoke. Slowly, very slowly in the windless sky, they
wavered and broke apart, and eventually melted into the clouds around them.

Willow blinked, and then she picked up her paddle and expertly navigated her way back
to shore. She sprang out of the boat and moored it to its wooden post, before dashing
off in the direction of home. For once she didn’t look back at the high, grey-stone wall
on the other side of the lake and wonder what was on the other side. She started off at
a run, but the scent of wood sap and dry pine needles in the forest soothed her nerves
and she soon slowed to a walk, weaving in and out of tree trunks, balancing along fallen
branches and skipping back and forth over the streams of dappled sunlight that trickled
across her woodland path. On days like this, it was difficult to believe the storms were
on their way – the world seemed so serene and content. She had the same thought
every year, but this year the bad weather felt even further away because they’d had
such an unusually good season. They’d had lots of sun – but it had been nowhere near
as hot as the previous years when the ground had become so dry it had cracked and
fires had broken out all through the forest – and they’d had enough rainy days to mean
a successful harvest, which would make autumn and winter easier. It had been a perfect
summer – probably the coolest and calmest she could remember – and there was a
part of her that wanted to scoff at the adults’ warnings. But she knew they were right.
Sooner or later the storms always came.

The sun was high and strong, casting sharp, definitive shadows across the space between
the cottages. Willow squeezed through the gap between Mrs Baker’s place, and Tina and
Johan’s house, and then scuffed her way across the clearing. It was only when she pushed
open the door to her family cottage and saw her mother’s dark stare that she realised
her mistake.

“You skipped school again,” her mother said through pursed lips as she moved Willow’s
sleeping sister from her breast and swaddled her in a soft brown blanket. She said
nothing more and didn’t wait for a response before turning away and placing the baby in
its basket.

“Is Grandma up?” Willow sniffed. Her mother shook her head but continued to stare
down at the baby in the basket.

“Grandma’s asleep. Don’t bother her, Willow; she needs rest.”

50
Something stirred deep down inside of her. It felt as though a coiled snake was beginning

67
 to unfurl in the very pit of her stomach – Grandma had been sleeping a lot recently.

“She’ll want to hear what I have to say,” she said, shaking away the unsavoury image with a
toss of her corn-coloured braid.

She started towards the back of the cottage, but her mother caught her by the arm.
“Don’t wake her,” she said, lifting her storm-grey eyes to Willow’s face. “Not today. Let her
rest.”

Willow stared into her mother’s sallow face and, not for the first time, thought how
breath-taking she must have been when she was younger. Even now, thin and worn-
down as she was by life, she was still considered one of the most beautiful women in
all five villages of The Community. With her thick, dark hair, large brooding eyes and
well-defined cheek bones, men had been falling over themselves to visit her after the
death of Willow’s father. People in The Community told Willow she was lucky because
she had inherited her mother’s striking looks, but there was no doubt that her freckled
complexion and blonde hair came from her father. And her smile? She wasn’t sure about
that one. She had been eleven when her father had been … had died, and although she
tried to cling to the memory of him – his smell, his happy sing-song voice, his strong,
work-toned arms – the memory of his smile alluded her. Her mother’s smile too was
nothing more than a distant dream these days. Willow knew she used to smile; she knew
that her wide, full lips had made her face shine like the sun; she knew that her throaty
laugh had filled the little cottage with warmth and love, but that was all such a long time
ago. Now the family home was dark and cold, just like her mother’s listless eyes.

“Leave her be,” her mother said again, and for once, Willow did not defy her.

She padded across the straw-covered floor to the table and poured a drink of water
from a wonky brown jug that her brother, Oak, had made out of clay dredged from the
river banks. It was a plain, ugly thing, which was just how the people of The Community
liked things to be. But Willow hated it: for her, it was a symbol of her oppression and a
reminder that she would never be free to tell her stories. Just like her brother, and all the
other children in The Community, she had spent many school hours collecting clay from
the river and learning how to form it into shapes. But whilst the others had made useful
things – bowls and pots and jugs – she had moulded hers into things of beauty: birds and
dainty leaves, and creatures from her imagination. Her teachers had been appalled. They
had thrown her creations back into the river and marched her back to the school hut to
lecture her about the dangers of ‘Imagination’ and ‘Speculation’. Those were the sins of
her forefathers, she was told over and over again. The Community must not repeat their
forefathers’ mistakes.

68
 Sarah Mahfoudh
Image: Flight by Janet Lees

Willow’s mother shuffled back to her chair next to the window and slumped down with
a weary sigh.

“I saw something today,” Willow blurted out. She never spoke to her mum about this
sort of thing; she never spoke to her about anything really, but she needed to tell
someone. “I think it was a dragon.”

Her mother turned her head sharply and there was a flicker of fire in her eyes that
Willow had not seen for a very long time. “Don’t,” she hissed. “Don’t talk like that. You
know what they’ll do.”

“But, it’s not Speculation if I saw it.”

“You didn’t see it. There are no such things as dragons. You shouldn’t even know that word.”

“But Grandma told me …”

69
 Willow’s mother stood up, her cheeks flushed and her eyes burning. “Yes, Grandma told
you about dragons and fairies and dancing gnomes. I know. She told me too when I was a
little girl. But they’re stories, Willow, and you know what happens to people who tell stories.
You know what happened to your dad.” She shook her head and then peered around the
cottage as though someone might have slipped into the room whilst they were talking. “I
can’t believe I am even saying these words out loud.” Her chest heaved. “Those words don’t
exist. Do you understand me? Do not let anyone hear you speak those words.” She fixed her
gaze on her daughter’s face and Willow found herself staring back as though caught in a
spell, unable to look away.

“They won’t do anything to me, Mum. I’m a child. At worst, they’ll slap my wrist and make me
dig out the compost toilets.”

The straw beneath her mother’s feet hissed and rustled. She bent down close to Willow
until their faces were level. “You are not a child anymore, Willow. You are sixteen in two days’
time and if they hear you Speculating, they will punish you.”

The snake in Willow’s tummy flicked its tail. “But …”

The front door swung open and Willow’s mother drew herself up to standing. They both
looked towards the man who had entered.

“Hello family.” Alec spread his arms and smiled, his perfectly white teeth gleaming even in
the gloom of the unlit cottage.

Willow’s mother twisted her mouth into a weak smile but the life had gone out of her
eyes again and the colour faded from her cheeks as she walked over and placed a kiss
on her husband’s cheek.

Willow scowled. “We’re not your family,” she said moodily, picking at a splinter that had
buried itself under the first layer of skin in her thumb.

“Willow,” her mother sighed. “Be nice.”

Alec sighed too. ‘Not at school today then Willow?’

The baby stirred in her basket and Willow’s mother went over to check on her.

‘What’s the point? There’s nothing to learn. I know how to count, I know not to
Speculate, and Mum and Dad taught me how to hunt long before you were on the
scene.’ She glared at him, but he didn’t bite.

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In spite of what Alec and her mother thought, Willow didn’t skip school all that often, but

Sarah Mahfoudh
Friday afternoons were ‘scripture’ lessons, which meant that the whole school gathered
in the main hall to be lectured at about the perils of Speculation. After eight years of
school, Willow knew exactly how it went:

Mrs Weaver would make her usual speech about how the weather was payback for the
sins of our forefathers, and then one of the younger children might raise their hand to
ask what the ‘sins’ had been. To which, Mrs Weaver would inevitably reply, “We do not
know and we must not speculate.”

It was really very straight forward and once you’d grasped the rule, there really wasn’t
much else you could say about it, so she failed to see why she should waste every Friday
afternoon listening to the same old drivel.

“Well, you know,” Alec said mildly as he pulled his mud-caked boots off and placed
them neatly by the door. “There’s more to surviving in this world than hunting.” He tiptoed
across the room and smiled down at the baby in the basket. “There’s farming and building
shelters, and maintenance and making tools and clothes and …”

Willow rolled her eyes. “Yeah, yeah, I know.”

He turned to her, his face as frustratingly gentle and earnest as ever. “It’s no joke. The
storms will be starting soon and we’ll need every single able-bodied person to chip in if we
are to survive.”

“Survival, survival! I’m sick of that word. There’s more to life than just surviving.”

She stormed towards the door, threw it open and then stopped. There was a strange,
ruddy haze hanging over the world and the clear, bright day had grown suddenly dark.
Moments later the emergency bells began to echo through the villages. Willow backed
into the house again and slammed the door.

She hadn’t heard the bells for a while but everyone in The Community knew what they
meant: toxic dust. Just when she wanted to get as far away from Alec and her mum as
possible, she was forced to stay inside. She slumped down on a wooden dining chair and
rested her head against the table. Alec and her mother let her be: they knew better than
to talk to her when she was in one of her moods.

Willow heard the front door go and looked up to see her brother, Oak, had returned
from the fields early. The lower half of his face was wrapped in a large handkerchief but
his eyebrows, eyelashes and hair were coated in a fine, red dust. He coughed and then

71
 untied the handkerchief and used the clean side to wipe his face and hair.

“It’s coming in thick,” he said with another cough. He padded over to Willow and ruffled
her hair. “Alright, Grumpy? What’s with the face?”

She batted his hand away and growled. “Get off!”

“Is that my Willow I hear out there?” came a thin, dry voice from the back of the house.
Willow sprung to her feet and sprinted towards her Grandma’s room.

“Willow!” her mother called half-heartedly, but then the baby started to cry and she gave
up.

Willow crept into the gloomy back bedroom and closed the door behind her. She
perched on the edge of the bed and took her Grandma’s hand. “Hello, Grandma. Did you
sleep well?”

“I did, darling. I did.” The old lady heaved herself up to sitting and Willow helped her place
a pillow behind her so that she could lean back. “Is that the alarm I hear?”

“Yes. Oak says it’s pretty bad.”

“Ah, so my little free-spirit is trapped inside for today.”

Grandma held out an arm and Willow shuffled up the bed and nuzzled into her.

“Yes. I was outside earlier though, and I saw something; something in the sky. I thought
perhaps it was a dragon.”

“Hmm, a dragon?”

Grandma’s face crumpled in thought and even in the low light, Willow noticed how
much older and frailer her Grandma looked these days. It was no surprise, of course
– she was over a hundred years old, and the only person left in all five villages who
remembered what life had been like before The Community.

“I’m not really sure what it was,” Willow continued. “It was too high up.”

Grandma’s eyes glazed over and a slow smile crept onto her face as she listened. “Well,
I haven’t heard of one of those for many years,” she said quietly when Willow had finished
talking. “I’d almost forgotten about them.”

72
“About what?”

Sarah Mahfoudh
“Aeroplanes!” she breathed. “When I was a little girl, aeroplanes were all over the skies.
Huge, metal machines that carried people through the sky, all the way across the world.”

Willow stared at her with wide open eyes. “People flew across the world?”

“They did, my darling. It was so common to see planes criss-crossing through the heavens that
it just became part of mundane, everyday life.”

“Did you ever fly?”

Grandma shook her head and let out a regretful sigh. “No, never. My parents didn’t agree
with flying. The aeroplanes let out terrible fumes, you see, that polluted the air and seas.”

“Oh.”

“I was twelve when Mum and Dad told me we were moving to The Community. I hated it
at first,’ she continued in a low, sing-song voice. ‘I came from a house that was always warm,
with lights that you could switch on whenever you wanted, and a lovely bedroom full of toys
and books …”

“Books?”

A tear tipped from Grandma’s cloudy eye, closely followed by another and another. “Oh,
you would have loved the books, darling Willow,” she whispered, pulling her granddaughter
in closer. “I understand why they had to change: I know we couldn’t have carried on as we
were. But the books! I never understood why the books and the stories had to go. They were
scared I suppose. They were worried about returning to how things were, but they took it too
far.” She was weeping now and shaking with grief, but she continued to talk, her voice
growing stronger and faster as the memories tumbled out of her. “Your father was a
dreamer like you, Willow. He was always making up stories and thinking of new ways to do
things, but his ideas were not dangerous. Nothing he ever said would have harmed anyone.
But The Council didn’t approve of his words.”

“Grandma,” Willow interjected, swallowing down her own tears. She hadn’t been there
when they’d executed him, but she remembered the day vividly; the pain of it was
scorched on her soul. She didn’t want to think about it. “Grandma, what is a book?”
Grandma looked down at her and blinked as though she had forgotten she had
company. But after a moment or two, she withdrew her arm from around Willow and
reached behind her. She pulled something out from beneath her pillow and held it out

73
 to her granddaughter. Willow took it and turned it over in her hands, trailing her fingers
over its silky smoothness.

“It is made out of something called paper. This is the cover and inside are pages.”

Willow opened it to the centre and stared down in stunned silence. She ran her hands
over the black markings, and then she turned the page, rubbing her thumb and forefinger
together through the leaf-thin paper and marvelling at the noise it made.

“It’s yours to keep, Willow.”

“Mine?” she gasped.

Grandma nodded. “It’s too late for me. I am too old to fly now,” she murmured. “But
you can. Keep dreaming, keep making up those stories in your head; keep questioning and
exploring and refusing to accept what those narrow-minded teachers of yours tell you. Keep
on being you, my little dreamer, and when the time is right to spread your wings, you will fly.”

The dust swept through The Community that evening, claiming two lives from one of the
more exposed villages, before moving on. By nightfall, the air was clear once more and
the bells had fallen silent. Grandma was snoring gently from her bed, the baby had found
its thumb and was making sleepy, sucking noises in its basket, and Mum had dozed off in
her chair. Oak, who would need to be out in the fields early the next day to make up for
the lost hours of labour, had taken himself off to bed, and Alec had stepped out to make
sure that everyone in the village was well after the dust cloud.

Willow tugged on her boots and pulled on her thick, woollen coat; then with Grandma’s
book clutched to her heart, she stepped out into the crisp, moonlit night. She moved
swiftly but carefully, challenging herself to make as little noise as possible as she waded
through the long meadow grass. The border wall loomed up before her. With the book’s
solid weight against her chest giving her courage, she walked on until she could touch
the rough stone with her fingertips. She walked slowly along its length, searching. There
must be one somewhere.

And then she found it. It was about the size of an apple and low down in line with her
knees so that she almost missed it in the dark, but there it was – a promise of freedom.
She bent down and put her eye to the hole and, for the first time in her life, she knew
for sure that there was a world on the other side of the wall ready for her to explore.

74
wake to listen Jenny Arran
poems and images

here
threshold

75
 wake to listen

I dream of rock form on the wind’s edge,

and hear the river. quietly gathering
things back
I wake to listen and to myself.
walk the curved back
of the ridge. Low down
The intensity listening
of mass stone shape
rising. Chalk bone in sheep space
under soft skinned an instinct of stillness.
grass. Through grass
written tall
I walk palimpsest here against the last of the light.
among the Hawthorn
in the hollow track Something here
footfall as gift whispered
footfall as question. gifting its strength in the dusk.

The soft blue The quiet song

of a flint flake shines of our familial
out of the tuned earth bond.
my thumb smooths
a silent orbit of its I wait for the sky
limits. pooling black
star - full
Surrender, you said. in warm darkness
Persevere.
I am here and feel the rock form
and hear the river.

76
Jenny Arran

77
low down listening
78
call
call

Jenny Arran
Know this soul
that burning hard
as rocks
that fierce iron
ache that blinding
face of sky
behind a loved
line of hills
that bone chill
and rook’s call
is only the shell breaking.
That longing that has you
running to feel
your physical body
that cannot be stemmed by blood
or what you call love.
Don’t try to match it
It is wide
as a storm full sky
taking each
face to earth,
back to flint
fingers to fire.
That clarity.
I call you.

79
80
untitled (light series 3)
Boundless Jane Glenzinska

Today I had the second best meditation of my entire life.

I knew nothing but contentment.
I did nothing but be.
I was all and I was nothing.
I was peace.

But to understand how such unadulterated bliss could possibly be secondary you must
hear the story of the best of the very best meditation of my entire life which came to
me in the face of death.

It is a face familiar to me as we spent months staring into each other’s eyes until finally, I
was able to look away.

Death’s approach was steady and slow; it did not pounce but bided its time, watching
and waiting, creeping closer and closer until its shadow hung over me like a promise and
my body had morphed to bear a striking resemblance to its morbid beauty.

I looked like death.

I smelled like death.
I tasted death.

And on the numerous occasions a day when a rushing sound filled my ears and
resounded through my head with such propelling force that my vision blacked out and
my body hit the floor

I heard it,
saw it,
and acted out its final throes.
Oh, we were close there for awhile
me and death.
We knew each other well.
But it needn’t have been so.

81
 Image: Pathways by Janet Lees

It was only due to a simple mechanical error. My stomach had turned upside down and
was wedged halfway up into my chest cavity, pinched in the middle by my diaphragm, so
that it was shaped like an hourglass

through which the sand of time

was falling
falling
nearly gone.
It was tempting at times to stand by
and watch the last grain slip silently through into the other side.

And when I felt like this, I would write letters to my babies, for them to read when they
grew up; to try and give them the tiniest inkling of just how vast my love for them had
been and how it had all been worth it

82
just to know the joy of their beings

Jane Glenzinska
the mystery of life
in my womb
the agony of birth
and the soft sounds of their suckling.
For these things I would have gladly died.

My oldest son, aged three at the time, sat in my lap one day and said “Mama, put your
bones away. I want a cuddle and you’re all sharp
and pointy.”

And so I was.
It was perfectly clear
for all to see
that I was starving.
And yet, no one seemed to be able
to believe it
and so pretended
that it wasn’t happening.

For my children’s father, it was an unthinkable thought. For my mother, father, brothers
– half way across the world – it was not happening directly in front of their eyes and so
they could easily avert their gaze.

For others, it was a sense of helplessness that led them to denial. But whoever they
were and whichever route they took, the end result was apathy and abandonment.

My doctor’s only offering was some anti-depressants. It seemed clear to him that a post-
natal woman who was vomiting was clearly being a little bit hysterical, and frankly, was in
need of the weight loss anyway.

He just kept brushing me off;

sending me away,
until finally, he told me with exasperation
not to come back unless I was vomiting blood.
Within a week or so
I was and felt relieved:
surely, now, something would be done
to try and figure out the cause?

No. I was told instead that I had taken the weight loss a little too far;

83
 that I was now medically underweight; that I should seek to get a grip on myself.

And I doubted myself

I doubted my sanity
I doubted my deeply intimate
knowledge of my life-giving body
and was silenced
as the grains of sand
continued to fall
unimpeded
through the hour glass.

Starvation is not about your tummy rumbling.

It’s about depletion.
The hunger is felt
in every cell
of every realm
of your entire being
so that you are ever so slowly,
but surely,
robbed of your very humanity.

I would watch other people eat with the eyes of a starving animal. I collected recipies,
stared for hours at photographs of food,

Receding deeper
and deeper
into my wild animal self
my cellular self
and I knew fear.

I began to present at A&E just as often as I could muster up the energy

but there too, I was turned away

Again and again

And again
And again
Until finally, one day
A doctor
A woman
A mother

84
Looked into my wild starving eyes

Jane Glenzinska
And believed me.
She saw the panic and the fear
But did not look away.

She arranged for tests to be carried out. The first one they performed revealed the
problem. I was admitted to hospital where further tests revealed that I was dangerously
close to death

A tube was inserted

directly into my heart
to expediate the transportation
of the nutrients
I so desperately needed.

And as I lay waiting for the tube to settle and my liquid feed to be prepared, I felt myself
slipping into an unconsciousness from which there would be no return. And I was
tempted to slip silently away into the welcoming embrace of my old friend death

But my babies,
to whom I had so recently given life,
returned the favour.
It was for them
that I fought to live,
chose to breathe,
evaded the embrace.

When the liquid feed was finally hooked up to my heart, I let go into the silence with
a hope and a prayer that I would be back. It was the unfamiliar feeling of saliva in my
mouth that woke me with a start, and the next few days were a joyous journey of
recovery and return to the realms of humanity.

I slowly felt myself being built up

But it was only in preparation
For the procedure
Of cutting me down
Right down the abdomen
From breastbone to bellybutton
They opened me wide.

My stomach was removed from my chest cavity, my heart returned to its rightful place.

85
 My diaphragm was sewn shut and my stomach – that errant organ – wrapped around
itself; stitched into place to prevent its woeful wanderings in the future.

As I came round from the anaesthetic,

I was sorely tempted, once again, to expire.
The pain was all encompassing.
Overwhelming. Blinding.
I could not see or hear beyond my pain. I could only smell and taste the oxygen
pumped into the mask on my sunken face

I had an epidural
In my spine,
numbing my body
from the diaphragm down
and I felt nothing,
did nothing,
was nothing
but pain

And the very act of inhalation and exhalation only served to increase the agony.
Every breath was an act of will – a choice of the most deliberate force, requiring the
concentration of my entire being.

I was my breath
And nothing more
For day
After day
After day.
That, you see
Was the best,
The very best
Meditation of my entire life.

I found peace in my pain;

life through near death;
interconnection through isolation.

But the story doesn’t end there. In many ways, that is where it begins, as I was reborn
into life after surgery. My organs rearranged and neatly tethered; the mechanical
error had been righted. But my eyes were now those of the starving; able to observe
absurdity everywhere they looked.

86
I viewed our first world

Jane Glenzinska
culture of plenty
through the eyes
of a third world soul,
and it was far
from pretty.

I had gone down to the underworld, only to find that I couldn’t return – doomed to
dwell in the borderland between life and death

east and west,

rich and poor
hungry and fed,
unable to oblige

Image: Footprint by Janet Lees

87
 those who were looking forward
to my return to normal
But my wild eyes stared, my mind reeled and my heart wept, one day,
for an avocado from Peru.

I just couldn’t bear

that this avocado pear
was flown to here from there
to feed the overfed.

And I just couldn’t bear it, because suddenly, I knew that what I had experienced was
a microcosmic manifestation of our planetary plight – and felt the sentience of Gaia. I
could empathize with the profound pain of depletion met by denial. Agony met with
apathy and the sound of heads swivelling as they turn to look away.

The earth hurts

And I hurt with it
For it, through it
I am of it

And the look in my eye became wilder, for it was yet another pain I didn’t want to bear
– yet somehow couldn’t share. I felt I must be mad. Never had I heard of such delusions
as planetary sentience and pain; and the burden of awareness made me feel like I had
made the wrong choice in turning from death; made me contemplate how I could bring
about its swift return.

It was my babies,
once again
that pulled me through.
One day, my son,
who by now was four,
made me promise
that I would live.
“Mama”, he said
“I like you better when you’re alive”

And so I lived
And I looked
And I desperately searched
For explanation and validation
Vindication and extrication

88
From this feeling of connection

Jane Glenzinska
To the pain of the planet
Until, one day, I came across the word ecopsychology and my stomach flipped again
(only metaphorically this time).

I got on the internet,

ordered the book
and when it arrived
greedily devoured its pages
as I came to know
that I AM Gaia.
and You are Gaia
and we are all in pain.

And so it was, as I set out to spend this day of silent solo fasting vision-quest, that I had
the feeling of trepidation and return. I wandered aimlessly at first, fearful of the silence,
the solitude and the hunger. And then I took the time to ask the land where I might find
the spot to spend my day.

I followed
my now vibrant body
to find my place,
my crevice,
my cave.

As I settled inside, directly in front of me a rainbow appeared and I laughed aloud

with a great joyous chortle and tears began to stream down my face.

I cried for me;

I cried for you;
my blood flowed for the stones;
my milk flowed for the hungry
as I lay in my cave –
my rocky womb –
and asked only to dream.

I did nothing all day long

I did not think, I did not seek,
I did not write, I did not draw
I did not walk or talk
Or sing or dance

89
 Or stretch or bend

I lay and dreamed.

I bled and cried.
My milk flowed as I was held
by my mother in a rocky womb
and I knew peace.

And visions came to me as my solar self bathed my human face. I knew the salmon red
of my retinas and traced my microscopic self dancing on their surfaces.

I heard the clattering of the hooves of my buffalo self above my head which gave me to
know that my womb was now a tomb and in this I could lie as peacefully as my sea-self
lapping at my shore-self as my bird-self sang in the distance.

Then as the sun streamed in, I emerged from my two tog chrysalis to find that it was
nearly dusk, and I was confused and argued with myself in a vain attempt to deny the
sinking of the sun.

I felt new pain

at the ending of a day
that had slipped by
without the contemplation –
even once –
of its passing.
NO. Wait.
I’m not ready for it to be over.
There was so much more
I wanted to do.

I sat stubbornly in denial of the day’s demise; felt the panic and the pain of its
approaching conclusion – and of our time here on earth – this earth that had cradled
me so gently
as I drifted through the day.

I packed up quickly,
shaking with shock
as I fled
through the fast approaching darkness
and realized that this time
the pain was not the planet’s.

90
The earth, in all her splendour

Jane Glenzinska
will (like me) choose to live.
Having given birth to humanity
she is able to withstand our
bad behaviour with benevolence.

And though she grieves our choices and will feel the pain of our ultimate demise, she
will survive the stretch marked scars of our gestation and continue to dance and spin in
majestic mystery until her true time finally comes.

I reached
the realization
that my pain is born
of interconnection
and I feel honoured and held,
comforted and calm,
as I now know
that my willingness
to be with the earth
and with her pain
is the pathway
to the profoundest peace
of the silent
boundless self.

91
 turtle – a monologue
Margot Lasher

Holly and I stare at the water. A turtle stares at us. The sun is
low in the late afternoon, and it sparkles from the turtle’s eyes,
two tiny lights on the soft water. Holly is mesmerized. And
then a fish breaks the surface to catch a water bug, and the
pond circles and vibrates, and Holly becomes the predator dog
she is, pointed to leap.

It is almost winter, and no one comes to the pond. Except

beaver, muskrats, a crane, turtles, fish, geese on their way south,
Holly, me. It is not lonely. The leaves fall over the bank and into
the current. Pine trees shake thickly. We are alive.

92
 Margot Lasher
I won’t be here at the end. I haven’t any idea what we, the
humans, will do. What we will not do. The animals who can,
the ones whose home is the ocean or air, will go to the edges.
They’ll escape for a while. And the others - the turtles, the fish,
the muskrats, the beaver - home only to the pond, will die. The
pond will die.

Holly and I will have been dead a long time. Or a short time, if
you are the earth. Or timeless, if you can be that.

The pond reflects us. The pine trees sway us. The leaves pass
lightly along our shadows as they move to the water. The turtle
sees us. Watches us. Knows our habits. Our schedule. Our
sad beliefs. Knows what is crucial. Holly and I.

93
Image: Turtle by Ruth Thorp
 Image: Love by Janet Lees

94
Bobcat in Steve Thorp
the watertime

In the watertime, Bobcat is stealthy; weaving wraith-like between old buildings. It would
not do to be seen. Watertime is danger-time in these parts.

Hiding in the broken corners of a waterlogged house, Bobcat hears the growl of the
patrols further up the valley. At this time of year, only the Royals are out and about.
There is too much water about, too much danger of flooding a precious and illegal Auto
engine, too much at stake for most people to be stopped with a little bit of something in
the back. But the Royals don’t worry about flooding an engine and, with too much time
on their hands, wouldn’t miss an opportunity to pick up someone out wandering.

Bobcat could sit here for hours at a time – days if her mind is set on it. She could hide
anywhere in this place, and Watertime is Bobcat’s time – a time to sift through the
ancient memories carried in soggy artefacts and the occasional photograph that she
unearthed; of a family, long dead or moved away, or an unfamiliar landscape captured on
paper long ago. Bobcat is intrigued by the texture of paper, and wondered how it had
ever worked – it seemes such an inefficient, ephemeral form of communication. She
touches the pocket where her precious Pad is hidden and shivers at the thought that
someone might ever see her with it.

When Bobcat had been small and feral she would often disappear into the estate, and
brother Jake would be sent in search, but now Bobcat is grown there is no-one to
search; no-one even to know she is gone. Jake has moved up to the City now, with his
Hawkmate Linden, and is living in a crowded Collex off the London Road. Mamma dead.
Dadda long gone. And Flute, the little one, taken for a Wildthing, and learning to sing
somewhere in a Bighouse up the valley.

Bobcat wants to sing, but knows that the Royals, and the Hawks, might be out. They
know the keening of a Lostling well, and would close in quickly. Best to wait here, in the
dark and damp of the receding flood and think of home. Maybe later Bobcat will find a
time and a place to let her voice rise. Maybe later.

Mamma would always sing to Bobcat and Flute; and Jake had always danced. He was
the storyteller; the storydancer. From small, he kept the fires burning on cold, late nights.
Someone hadn’t liked his stories, and the Hawks moved in, but Bobcat – then as now –

95
 was quiet and stealthy and crept unseen beneath their keen watching.

Dadda was a gentle man, until the Tecks said no, and then he would sit at home and
growl lightly to himself, as the nightlight fell. Something of the spark had been taken
out of him, when the bright-suited Tecks had said no. Then Dadda went away – or was
taken away – which was much the same thing. For what is there to do, when a person’s
factory-life dies?

There is another world, down here in the forbidden flooded zone, where textured, wet
brick scrapes on Bobcat’s skin, and creatures slither in and out. Bobcat marvels at the
sheer roughness of brick. It is like nature’s stone, but human-made and so extraordinary.
Everything from the old world seems so rough, she thinks, yet so alive. Sometimes
Bobcat hates the factory smoothness of the world; misses the chug of imagined industry.
At these times, she wants to hear something more than waterlap, Letrix hum and
birdsong. Even the Royals patrols are welcome; their powerful, hunting engines alive and
growling, in contrast to the swish of the giant Letrix that carry necessities and VIPs from
the City to the Lands and back again.

There are the old Autos too, of course, with engines that chug and stumble, and that
these days are only good for farm-runs and illicit forays across the fields and lanes,
carrying the delicious, forbidden carcasses that everyone eats at Waterfest – in the
waiting days each year before the waters rise and the curfew comes down.

What was it that Mamma used to sing? An old song about a river?:

“I was born by the river in a little tent

Oh, and just like the river I’ve been running ev’r since
It’s been a long time, a long time coming
But I know a change gonna come, oh yes it will”

Years back, the Heat started – and then the Ragetime. Now this river is a raging, tidal
sea, bringing salt to the sweetwater lands for three long months, and leaving barren,
brown silt in its wake each Spring.

This is where Bobcat now sits. The waters have receded and the old estate is revealed
– built from old brick and filth, its old lanes ribboned in old black – more silted over
and broken each year. At low-water, Bobcat can explore the whole estate: from the big
house at the top of the hill, with its top storey that still poked, incongruous, from the
waters even at the peak of the Watertime, to the small houses at the bottom – long
drowned.

96
Humans lived here once. Bobcat has seen their ghosts and sung with them. They sang

Steve Thorp
Mamma’s river song, but many others too. Strange laments for lost times. Songs of coal
and gargantuan fires in the heart of the earth. Of ships and cranes, noise and rivets and
oil. And men. Men who hewed coal and heaved fuel needlessly around the world. Men
who thrived in the rough world; brought their hardness to their fists and then even
to weapons that boomed, barked and tore. Men who went on journeys – exploring
faraway lands. Bobcat knew this from the stories, but found the idea of it strange and
unearthly.

What could ever be wrong with the bit of Earth we live on? Bobcat aches at the thought
of Jake, somewhere out there in the City, far from home. She had seen images of the
City on a screen at Homeschool once, back on one of the few days she had agreed to
attend. Mamma had said it would be good to get some learning, but Bobcat only went
sporadically – just enough to keep Mamma off her back. That day, an over-enthusiastic
volunteer Learnman had showed the kids a film of the City. It seemed strange and busy;
a smooth, self-important sort of place. People everywhere, but all of them aimless,
Bobcat thought. It didn’t give her much of a taste for learning – or for cities, with their
manicured CityFarms and their wide streets populated by the giant Letrix centipedes
that carried people from here to there.

Looking back, Bobcat wonders whether this was when she first knew she was a Lostling:
strangely at home with these damp, crumbling bricks and their lost history; and with the
Habitants – the creatures who had always shared this land with humans, even as the
storms had washed away the old places. Bobcat looks down into the estate, and up into
the sky where gulls travel back to their roosts on the coastal cliffs, and further up to
where the kites and buzzards circle – high above the flood-washed land – and wonders
what it had been like before.

A sudden noise. A falling stone or brick, and Bobcat’s heart beats fast; she feels hunted.
The Hawks might be out; it is their time of day. In some ways being picked up by the
Royals would be preferable to the Hawks. The Royals patrolled to keep the land clean.
They might rough you up a bit, but then they’d tip you out of their truck somewhere in
the wilds and, because you know these lands so well, you’d back in Town before too long.
Maybe it’s time to head that way now? The Hawks are a whole different breed of bird.
They select their prey with care, then home in and always take it. With the Hawks, who
knows where you might end up? What you’d end up being?

Bobcat’s heartbeat subsides. It was likely a feral cat or fox or some other Habitant. She
decides to move, though, and finds herself climbing the tower of the big house. Bobcat is
careful; it’s the only dry place on the estate, and someone – Human or Habitant – might
be lurking there. The rotting steps that remain strain and creak, and Bobcat has to do

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 some shimmying where the stairs have gone. She is careful, but there is no sound from
above. Bobcat sees a familiar ghost, and whispers a song to it, and the ghost goes up
ahead on the stair, into the room at the top, a kind of turret, made of brick, not stone like
those ancient castles. From here, Bobcat can see for miles in all directions. It is breath-
taking as the sun starts to set over the water, and she stands there for a while.

And then Bobcat sits down on the floor and beneath her hand the timber crumbles a
little. Searching around in the space between the broken floorboards, she finds a box. It
is a simple artefact, made of wood, but carries patterns so unlike anything she has seen
in this world, that it seems like a piece of magic. She realises that it has been carved;
inexpertly to be sure, but this is still a crafted thing. It was not produced from a box by a
TeckApp, smooth and certain, safe and sustainable. This is wood, carved from a tree, with
patterns imagined by some Human who might have lived here, in this brick tower, high
above a land that once was proud and unapologetic – a land manufactured from a belief
that anything can be utilised, consumed and replaced.

And yet this box does not have quite the same feel as its deluded times. The ghosts are
different – Bobcat can sense them faintly buzzing around the lid as it is opened. This, she
realises, is an article of uncertainty – one born from care and patience. It is, to see it
plainly, an item of plain and precious beauty.

There is unimaginable pain and grief here; she can see the hot ghosts of these emotions
clearly. They hit her like a storm, and she closes the lid, before gentler wraiths whisper
comfort and her courage rises again. She opens the box again. There is an smell of old
wood and must, and a small cloud of dust motes rises in the early evening sunlight.

Inside is paper. That stuff again! Bobcat is momentarily disappointed, but she fishes out
the wad. There are small objects in the box too: a bracelet made of beads and threaded
on wire that instinctively Bobcat puts on her wrist where it fits snugly; a small smooth
heavy object made from something Bobcat guesses must be a metal of some sort (she
vaguely remembers touching a metal pan and a hammer head one day in Homeschool
– not entirely useless, this learning, then, Mamma), but she cannot discern its function.
There is also a small frame made of a substance a bit like it was made in a TeckApp box.
In it is a faded picture of a smiling man with a checked shirt and a cap.

There are other things too, but Bobcat’s attention is drawn to the piece of paper at the
top of the pile, which seems thicker than the ones below. She notices that the pile is
joined at one side, and that the paper is hinged to open. “Book” – the word comes to
Bobcat like a flame. She flicks through it. The paper is musty and delicate. On the front is
a picture and some words. The words on the front are regular, like on a Pad display, but
the words inside, whilst readable, are in an irregular and strange idiosyncratic style. Some

98
of the writing is faded or smudged, and Bobcat loses patience. She puts the book aside.

Steve Thorp
Reading is tiresome at the best of times. She has gleaned enough learning to decifer
regular Pad-text, but this seems too messy and difficult.

Now a ghost gets inside her and she surrenders to the familiar static that always crackles
before the visions and voices come. This is what it is like to be a Lostling – and Bobcat
embraces the sensation. What once was so frightening and othering, is now who she is.
She settles in.

There is a woman in a room. It is drab and empty and two men stand beside her. She is
hunched in the only chair, which sits by a window. Outiside can be seen an even drabber
place where there are rows of things that look like strange small Letrix or Autos.
Bobcat reels, she has never seen so many of these machines in one place. The effect is
overwhelming and the vision almost fades. Bobcat breathes and holds on.

The woman rocks gently. One of the men is talking, but Bobcat cannot hear his voice. All
she can hear is the voice of the woman in the chair. She is repeating one word over and
over: “Flood, Flood, Flood, Flood!” Her mouth does not move; her voice like a silent scream.
The men seem kind; their body language is caring, but Bobcat knows that the woman
cannot hear them. And she knows that the woman is also a Lostling.

The connection flies like lightning. The woman’s eyes flicker and she raises her head
momentarily. She is terrified and her eye catches Bobcat’s eye – or so it seems – and
says, “Everything was lost”. Then she is back to rocking in her chair. One of the men,
catching the subtle change, seems to move towards her. Then he pauses, breathes out,
says something final to the woman and to the other man standing there, and turns to
leave. Bobcat is now in deep; she asks the woman a question. The woman’s head stays
down but her answer still reaches Bobcat: “The floods came”.

And then she is gone. Bobcat is used to this sudden disappearance, and brings herself
back into the turret room. The early evening has given way to dusk and there is a chill.
Bobcat isn’t averse to spending the night on the estate, but today she wants to go back
to Town. She decides to leave the box safely under the floorboards and tries to make
the space look as undisturbed as possible.

As she begins to track back through the hidden paths and gullies, she thinks of the
woman and the way her eyes had died when the men spoke to her. She settles into
the rhythm of her walking and notices, as she always does, the rustling and shifting of
Habitants on their unfettered familiar way around the land. She is always something like
happy at these times – alone and surrounded by the beings she can understand and
connect with. Alone with her visions too. Alone with her questions.

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 And then suddenly she understands that the box and the book are connected to the
woman and her story. She needs to touch these objects again to know what she must
know. Bobcat stops and turns, and reluctantly winds back down the paths to the Estate
again. The familiar ghosts welcome her, as they always do, and she climbs through the
cooling evening air, to the turret room again.

No time like now. She fetches the box again and feels the shiver as she touches the lid.
Something shifts in her – another familiar sensation, but this time she knows it is more
perilous. She opens the pages of the book and begins to read the smudged, untidy lines.
She hears the words spoken distinctly by a woman’s voice:

“I knew when I took the box in my hands, that a mistake had been made, though I could not
turn back now that the Earth’s future depended on me. So, I stood for an age, holding this
crafted, hardwood artefact. it seemed an innocent-enough, small piece of beauty.

It did not occur to me that I could open it. I became so used to holding it, that it held me; its
iron wood, magnetic. Then I caught my fingernail on the clasp, and my attention turned to
what I held. I set it down upon the table. Wood upon wood, it clacked and settled there.

It sat expectantly, as if inside was some carved homunculus, or an acorn holding he worlds
daemonic potential; as if it would come to life and, its lid-mouth flapping, speak its arboreal
truths with hinge-creak and a wood-voice croak.

I waited. It sat heavy and squat. I clicked open the clasp and lifted the lid. There was a faint
squeak and I peered inside. At first there was only darkness: a sable light, radiance inverted.
Then there were a billion stars: a universe encapsulated in carved boxwood. Tiny lights
whispered; dark light absorbed the silence so only my watching remained.

‘I am not here’, I said, ‘I am in a new room far from life and familiar breath; I have recently
arrived here. I have taken a long draught of these bright waters; I drink them to enter heaven.
I will return; will take a claim and stake it’.

I spoke as if the names of this new world could promise our forested reunion. The box was
still and silent. I closed the lid. Inside it, a prayer echoed. A faint, olive fragrance of hardwood
lingered.

Then the floods came. The fires came. My home died. I died. I rose again. I wrote this story.”

Bobcat is a Lostling and understands that meaning is not a necessity, but she knows with
raindrop clarity that she is holding a thing of madness – an object crafted in the eye of
a storm, a story written by hand in the days before the world became smooth. She is

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glad she didn’t live in those days, when words such as these were seen as crazy by well-

Steve Thorp
meaning men, and when such deep loss was regarded as an acceptable price to pay for
Human freedom.

Bobcat understands freedom – it is the way she weaves between storms, keeps out
of the keen eye of the Hawks, makes sure that a sniff of her isn’t caught by the Royal
hunters in their growling machines. Freedom is in the vision itself, and the way the
Habitants live and die with each other. Freedom is in the way Jake couples with his
Hawkmate in the City and Flute sings for a rapt audience on winter nights. Freedom is
in the precious scarcity of made-things – and can even be found in the Letrix, Collex,
Factories and CityFarms. Freedom is in a quiet world, and in the storms and tides that
are worshipped in the Watertime.

And freedom is in Mamma’s deep song of the river. A river that long ago swelled to
swallow up the Estate and the sanity of a Lostling who lived on its banks a long age ago.
A river that hides – even now, in the silt and detritis of its comings and goings – secrets
and artefacts, books and boxes, bones and memories – and ghosts.

Bobcat sees all of this, and she is glad, above all, that the ghosts are here to whisper
to her tonight. And she lies down on the floor of the turret, high above the Earth and
Water and sleeps in the Watertime with Mamma’s voice washing through her:

“It’s been too hard living, but I’m afraid to die

’Cause I don’t know what’s up there, beyond the sky
It’s been a long, a long time coming
But I know a change gonna come, oh yes it will.”

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 living at the edge Irv Beiman

of duality

Duality surrounds us repeated

it is intensifying in
the duality of light and dark rhythm
yin and yang with
con-structive and de-structive movement
hope and despair in
life and death rhythm
courage and fear with breath
self-ish and self-less over and over
attachment and living in the moment
Then go quiet
This is our challenge watch
the transmutation of despair listen
letting go of suffering be alert
clarifying purpose
imbuing consciousness with intention Signs appear
imagining positive futures Symbols are recognized
turning that into Clues become more evident

an “i am” or “we are” statement as the mystery unfolds

your/our aspirational goal and we create a better future

102
Image: Tatters by Janet Lees

103
 dialogue 3 Julia Macintosh &
what can be done? Steve Thorp

Julia:
Dear Steve, having considered what is? and what might be?, we now turn to what can
be done? Like fairy tale adventurers we are lost in the woods and the path ahead forks
in different directions toward the unknown: which way do we go? Even choosing to do
nothing is doing something.

In this final section we follow a trail of breadcrumbs, each in their own way describing
steps we might take at this crossroads of human history. Meg Hollingsworth encourages
us to “vow to act” thus framing our individual choices and lifestyles within a context of
personal commitment. Pegi Eyers offers us rebellion and resistance to a cultural heritage
born of expansion and exploitation. Elizabeth Cotton shares what happens when we
stop leveraging and start listening, and my own piece considers the benefits of letting go.

None of the voices in this section promises a solution or even a resolution. But like
weavers we each hold a thread in the overall tapestry, like choral singers we each carry a
note that contributes to harmony. There may be no single answer to the climate change
dilemma but there are myriad ways to live out these times. In this we are no different to
any other generation. Humans have never had an Answer – call it the Unified Theory or
the Holy Grail or the Meaning of Life. What we do have is each other, and the collective
fruits of our lives together: our folktales and fairy stories, our histories and archives, our
poems and songs and recipes and memories, our rituals and our humble respect for the
twin mysteries of birth and death. We carry these in our satchels as we walk the path of
what can be done.

Steve:
I love your imagery! Following the breadcrumbs or taking a less travelled path in the
woods: the one that seems to be tangled and grown; the one we would usually not take!
These pieces are journeys, calls to action or, in the case of Fiona Brannigan and Sarah
Wint’s grounded pieces, calls to get back to the earth and soil. “Let’s sqaut down in the
gunk” as Martin Shaw puts it in his essay, Small Gods (2016).

Whenever we think of the Climate Mind, there is an invitation, I think, to go counter-

intuitive and counter-cultural – not just for the sake of being radical or right-on, but for

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the sake of our future. From that future, looking back, the road we have taken in the

Julia Macintosh & Steve Thorp

wood will, as Robert Frost put it: “have made all the difference”. And so we’re back to
choices and stories again – and new ways of seeing and thinking about the state we
are in. However, as Vanessa Thevathasan reminds us, sometimes we just have to do
something, because the crisis is not sometime in the future. It is here, right now, and
playing out in myriad ways in communities and ecosystems across the world.

Julia:
It’s gaining momentum, that’s for sure. Thirty years ago, climate change lay in the boffin
realm of scientists and theorists, plus a committed margin of environmental activists.
Now it is firmly part of general public awareness – however one has engaged with it
(or not) and we are seeing its real impact in extreme weather, increased flooding and
disturbances in the living patterns of flora and fauna across the globe. The future they
warned us about is here at our door.

Intuition (you allude to it above) plays a pivotal role in our responses. The culture that
brought us climate change also brought us a deep distrust of the faculty of intuition, so
that we now have a very conflicted relationship with it. We must counter the impulse
to do something, quick! while also learning to listen more carefully to the quieter signals
speaking to us amidst the noise of modern life. In tandem with this indoctrination, a
constant undermining of self-trust leads us to grant more authority to lifestyle magazines
and advert jingles than to the promptings of conscience and heart. I hope that readers
of Unpsychology take away at least this much inspiration from our family of contributors:
to reinstill trust in one’s own intuition while navigating through the stages of what is,
what might be and what can be done.

Steve:
Your last comment almost sounds like an expression of ‘hope’, Julia, despite the
potentially despairing backdrop!

It’s hard to feel despair when looking back at the work in this anthology. Rather I get
a sense of something entirely human – the best bits of our species. I feel this strongly
when I look at the pieces in this magazine.

Each one of the writers and artists here is facing up to what their own troubled Climate
Mind is saying to them – and has put down their own artistic and creative mark in
the sand. Pieces of self-trust and courage, all, and I’m proud we are able to present
their work.. More will follow, I am sure, and perhaps all this will be the source of the
inspiration you hope for.

105
 Y?

Winter would be all but gone when the Bering Sea

wa s h e d 250 puffins dead upon Saint Paul Island.

Puffins, s e a b i r d s w i t h fa m o u s fac e s p r i n t e d

o n c e r e a l b o x e s , a m o n g c o u n t l e ss

c o u n t e d s ta rv e d i n t u rq u o i s e

wat e r s h o w n i n r e d

On the map,

Whilst

h e ro e s

f l e w t h ro u g h t h e a i r

p ro c l a i m i n g , It’s to o h ot d o w n t h e r e .

-m e g
the vow 2 act Meg Hollingsworth

I vow to act as if what I know is true

In 2014, Glaciologist Eric Rignot suggested that there may yet be a chance to slow down the West
Antarctic Ice Sheet’s rapid irreversible decline and “a different level of communication” is required to
translate the gravity of what he and his peers see. Asserting that to align behavior with message is
the different level of communication required, Extinction Witness ‘birthed’ the Vow 2 Act as a practice
response to Rignot’s call. The vow is printed here and can be signed at: Vow2Act.net

What is known: The results are in. Extremely narrow is the window for sufficient synchronized
action.

Current species extinction rates are 1,000 times higher than natural background rates and
Earth’s biodiverse population collapsed by 50% between 1975 and 2015, whilst human
population surged by 55%.

Annually by early August, humanity’s use of collective resources and services exceeds for the
year what the global community can collectively regenerate in that year. This ‘Earth Overshoot’
leaves refugees of all walks hungry and homeless and incites violence, targeted and untargeted.

Peaceful conflict resolution is top priority. Extravagance, most critically combat, must go. Battle is
always too great an expense to individuals and communities.

Regenerative solutions for reviving biodiversity and reversing global warming are known and
require scaling up in an overall process of slowing down human activity and production whilst
shifting from linear centralized mass production to circular decentralized distinct production.

Earth, like all bodies, seeks equilibrium constantly and will rebalance with or without human
assistance. If humans assist, there’s greater likelihood that more species will survive Earth’s
rebalance.

A variety of synchronized actions are necessary to avoid a catastrophic rebalance. For example,
biochar use may counter the influence of reduced or all-together suspended air travel on global
dimming by maintaining the particulate cooling effect in reduced global direct irradiance at
Earth’s surface.

107
 “Both air travel and biochar make particulates as byproducts, at levels partly controllable by
technology. So, any necessary level of global dimming can be provided by either air travel or biochar.
We can choose between carbon-intensive air travel and carbon-negative biochar.” 
James Greyson, BlindSpot Think Tank

Solutions aren’t solutions unless implemented.

Regeneration is possible when there is honesty. Regeneration happens through changes in

behavior.

The body’s own intelligence to heal inspires thoughts of what would be the wise choice in any
given moment.

Climate science is Earth’s own intelligence speaking through the human being. The trick is
listening to the cues.

Most urgent is to set aside judgment and punishment while aligning personal behaviour with the
message.

All must walk the talk.

And act not with anticipation of outcomes, which are always uncertain, but with care moment
by moment to relieve today’s pain and suffering.

Then, whatever future is to be, that future will be born of carefulness.

This Vow 2 Act:

In response to glaciologist Eric Rignot’s 2014 call for “a different level of communication”
on global warming*; with interest to support behaviors conducive to collective vitality; and
awareness that individual behavior is influenced and often determined by social norms:

The Vow 2 Act is a commitment to practice together what we know and what we preach.

The non-specific and non-binding Vow 2 Act recognizes that we are all learning as we go and
we need to support one another in making necessary behavior change.

Devoted to practicing behaviors that foster personal, thus, collective vitality with kindness and
universal compassion at the core, Vow signatories commit to act as if what we know is true

*Glaciologist Eric Rignot was interviewed by John Cook at the American Geophysical Union Fall
Meeting, San Francisco, December 2014. Find it at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rPWJztdPC_s

108
 Extinction Witness/Meg
the vow
I know that:

As participants in Earth’s biodiverse communities, humans influence and

are influenced by the presence and activities of all community members
and the climate we co-create.

This life is not solely about me and what I want. I exist because
community exists and I thrive uniquely when everyone thrives uniquely.

And, I am devoted to collective vitality.

Therefore, I Vow to Act as if what I know is true and prioritize actions

that foster collective vitality.

The Vow to Act influences all of my daily exchanges (sales, purchases,

and communications) and life habits. I am a free-willed individual and act
according to my own conscience.

Before activity, I ask, Is this exchange or activity healthy? Does this

exchange or activity contradict what I have learned? Are there healthier
options for the collective and, thus, for me? If healthier options do not
exist, how may I help bring a healthier option into existence?

In choosing personally as collectively healthy options, I ask others for

support as needed and assist others as I am able.

I am a life-long learner and understand that there is always more to

know. I acknowledge that there is more to existence than mechanistic
science can tell and heed what mechanistic science reveals.

I join with others in a commitment to personal and collective vitality. All

powerful together, we vow to act as if what we know is true.

109
 climate stressors
& climate resilience
Climate change is heralding in an era of
the unfamiliar in a disruptive, complex and
increasingly risk-filled world. What is facing
millions as the new normal, the unexpected
is opening up a consistent picture of
destruction on a scale that is now placing
whole communities in peril. In a year of
unprecedented environmental events revealing
the full impact of ecocide and the human toll
of immense loss, climate psychologists are key
to understanding the cause and effect of our
changing climate on our individual and collective
psyches, and how we can open up platforms for
inclusive narratives around healing and resilience.
Twelve years on, Hurricane Katrina gives us
an important insight into the mental health
concerns psychologists will need to respond
to in future climate-induced disasters. The
phenomenon of ‘Katrina Brain’ is widely
recognised as the result of the trauma and
shock people experienced in the days, months
and years after Hurricane Katrina battered
the Gulf Coast in 2005. Levels of suicide and
suicidal ideation more than doubled in the areas
affected by Hurricane Katrina, with depression,
anxiety and post-traumatic stress disorder
(PTSD) spiking sharply. The reasons behind
this are essential for understanding long-term
psychological distress. After disasters, people can
be exposed to a psychological cascade in which
initial behavioural issues that have become
normalised then impair their ability to function,
this is especially true when there are delayed
responses to rebuilding and reconnecting
services.
110
Vanessa Thevathasan
In New Orleans, the wide-spread sense of fear,
anger and loss in the scale of destruction done
to properties and people’s livelihoods, fatalities,
and personal injury dominated people’s initial
responses to the crisis, only to eventually give
way to extreme mental health concerns in the
years that followed. This disproportionately
affected poor, minority communities who had
no means to leave for safer grounds and were
forced into crammed, flooded stadiums without
access to food and water, and left with no real
sense of help and security.
What was a horrendous natural event
became one of political incompetence and
abandonment fuelled by racial disparities
over disaster response and aid effectiveness.
Recording-breaking hurricane seasons are not
only one of the clearest signs of climate change,
but also reveal communities experiencing
environmental injustice when their concerns
and needs go unheard and unmet, and the
greater risks of trauma they are exposed to as a
consequence.
The humanitarian crisis in Puerto Rico, after
Hurricane Maria hit late last year, has spiralled
into scenes reminiscent of New Orleans in the
still unfolding chaos, as residents continue to
endure loss of power, unsafe living conditions,
contaminated water supplies, and trickling
food aid. The renewal process cannot begin if
residents are still suffering the consequences
every day of the disaster. Unless these basic
services are re-established and social networks
rebuilt, daily life will become more stressful and
Unpredictable disasters are not the
only visible display of climate change
that psychologists are trying to bring
attention to.
coping mechanisms more difficult to establish.
Unpredictable disasters are not the only visible
display of climate change that psychologists are
trying to bring attention to. Climate change
trauma becomes more concerning in resource
poor communities where the ability to respond
effectively and timely to slow burning climate
effects is significantly impaired. Prolonged
exposure to floods, drought, and storms
over decades where people are dealing with
personal, economic and social loss every year
can be a precursor to serious mental health
concerns where we are seeing an irreversible
and devastating toll on whole sectors of society.
For those at the frontlines, many are surviving in
conditions that are simply no longer sustainable.
In Alaska, Native American communities face an
imminent threat from flooding, coastal erosion,
and temperatures rising twice as fast in the state
than the global average. Those on barrier islands,
such as Shishmaref, Shaktoolik and Kivalina, are
home to several thousand people that need to
be relocated in the face of advancing climate
change. The retreating sea ice, an essential
coastal buffer in these inhospitable, remote
environments, has led homes to subside or
disappear completely. The land they have lived
off for generations is now dying around them. It
is a bleak future for a community still coming to
Vanessa Thevathasan
terms with cultural genocide, historical trauma,
and forced displacement from their land and
heritage, knowing that current political ideology
means they are all but left behind.
It foretells of a future in jeopardy for those
who depend on the land or sea for their
livelihood. For Indian farmers, their land was
supposed to be the surest stability in delivering
a bountiful harvest to feed their families and pay
their debts. Yet, research by the University of
California, Berkeley found that over the last five
decades unseasonal droughts and floods have
directly caused over sixty thousand suicides
among farmers. When their only crop fails,
heavily impoverished and indebted farmers
have few ways out and suicide becomes the last
resort. Science and innovation now show how
we can prevent these tragedies from unfolding.
Crop insurance, low-interest loans through rural
credit markets, crop switching, and irrigation
technologies to regulate warmer temperatures
and water variability can all help mitigate against
climate-induced farmer suicides. It is imperative
that governments take seriously the urgency to
invest in climate innovation to redress mental
health challenges and protect the agricultural
sector that contributes significantly to economic
development.
111
 Image: Perimeter by Janet Lees

112

For some it is already too late as climate
change claims this era’s first wave of dual
conflict-climate refugees. Political neglect on
funding climate resilience for poor farmers
most devastated by unruly seasons is showing
stronger links with intensifying deep-seated
socio-economic inequalities, which can light
the fuse for unrest and violence. The civil war
in Syria is overwhelmingly classed as a conflict
birthed from political corruption and human
rights abuses, what is less acknowledged within
this narrative is that drought, migration, and
years of simmering social-political discontent
converged into a powder keg for nationwide
revolution. In the rural plains of Syria, the daily
economic struggles of dealing with years of
drought, loss of subsidies for fuel that were cut
by the government, and agricultural wages that
plummeted after the dismantling of a micro-
finance network led to over a million people
migrating to overcrowded cities where basic
essentials, food and water, became scarce and
expensive. The growing suffering and chaos in
the cities grew into widespread dissatisfaction
with the government and inequalities at every
level intensified the rallying call for popular
uprisings. Syria is one of the starkest reminders
yet of how environmental injustice can merge
with wider social-political discontent sparking a
war over land, people and rights.
Climate change does not mean that migration
and conflict is inevitable, but it is an important
catalyst and threat-multiplier that cannot be
ignored. Unless there is radical intervention
Vanessa Thevathasan
against climate change, near to 200 million
people will be threatened with forced
displacement by 2050 – meaning time is running
out for radical climate change interventions.
Climate change has created and will continue
to create enormous political risk for the 21st
century.
It is this future of unimaginable damage and
catastrophic loss that is giving rise to social
ecoanxiety. Watching what is now the consistent
global picture of the slow, impending and seemly
irrevocable impacts of climate change has
deeply affected people with a sense of despair,
helplessness and frustration that not enough is
being done to stall and prevent climate change.
Constantly seeing such devastation feeds our
negative bias, which pushes us to over-focus on
and over-react to stressful, harmful experiences.
At its extreme, in times of peril people look to
strong leaders to protect them and are willing
to have their rights curtailed for a greater sense
of security. In the last year alone, we have seen
an urgency to build walls to prevent asylum or
migration for those fleeing human insecurity,
violence, and climate change. Learning how to
cultivate positivity and optimism, through inner
and external resources, can in the long run
rewire how our brains react and respond to
climate crises at the social and political level.
Positive psychology hones in on hope, optimism
and actions to counter feelings of fatalism and
fear. The arts and storytelling are powerful
113
 means through which to open up conversations
within our communities and turn apathy into
meaningful action. Creative resilience not
only helps build individual social, emotional,
and spiritual wellbeing especially during and
in the aftermath of disasters, it also identifies
the resources and services that can weather
fractures. Salzburg Global Seminar’s The Art of
Resilience: Creativity, Courage and Renewal
is a timely report that centralises arts-based
platforms for transformative change and
collective engagement. Encouraging cooperative
decision-making and adversity-growth grounded
in the empathetic values societies should stand
for are crucial bulwarks against reactionary
politics to migration.
Clean energy and climate advocacy has been
shown to offset the negative reaches of climate
change on our psyches. By advocating for
greener spaces, clean transport, neighbourhood
recycling, and renewable energy we can help
cultivate activism that not only gives personal
meaning, but also leads to scalable practices and
activities that help better organise community
and individual disaster preparedness. Mental
Health and Our Changing Climate is a
pivotal report by the American Psychological
Association that recommends making everyday
environmentally-friendly decisions, such as taking
advantage of nature and other green corridors,
using public transport, biking, and walking in
urban areas.
Training community mental health workers is
essential to mitigate against the worst stressors
of disasters. Climate trauma must be seen
as a major part of the national public health
challenge, and in turn psychologists can play a
pivotal role in integrating psychological first aid
(PFA) into the mainstream of climate policy that
114
teaches people how to recognise and respond
to symptoms of mental ill-health while bringing
together communities to talk about trauma and
what forms it can take. This also helps to openly
and deliberately address the stigma of mental
health in a supportive and culturally-sensitive
environment. With growing numbers of people
facing the dilemma of deciding whether to stay
put or upend their lives and migrate, they will
have to deal with extreme weather at a time
when mental health resources are already
severely stretched. A community approach to
mental health helps build on resources that are
already available to strengthen the individual’s
ability to cope and encourage collective
resilience. Those who were engaged in multi-
level disaster preparedness have a greater ability
to recover and heal in the immediate aftermath
and later when emergency support withdraws.
Despite the dire consequences for the lack of
political action, there is reason for hope, albeit
one that takes the long-view. Politics tends
to follow popular social mores and with that
people vote on their feet to force policy change,
open funding and resources where it’s needed.
Author Robert Jay Lipton, who has spent years
unlocking the psyches of Nazi doctors and
Hiroshima survivors, has turned his attention
to the psychology of human behaviour around
climate change. Lipton points out that the
clear science of climate change and fear about
its consequences is pushing back against the
rhetoric of climate rejecters.
With people more informed and readying
for climate adaptation, an historical and
psychological cultural shift will mobilise civic
action against regressive ideological barriers
to climate policy. For those whose landscape
is torn apart by fracking, deforestation, and tar
sands, our psychological awakening could not must be at the frontlines of harnessing this

come soon enough.
After consecutive hurricanes hitting the
American coast and flash floods caused by
an extreme monsoon in South Asia last year,
the unprecedented is fast becoming the norm,
redefining our traditional understanding and
experiences with Mother Nature. The silver-
lining in climate events is that most people show
themselves to be resilient in the long run. Today
and in the future to come, climate psychologists
Vanessa Thevathasan
resilience at the personal, community, and
national level. They will be essential in shaping
the narrative on the consequences of ecocide
and climate trauma to open our minds, our
hearts, and our activism to uphold the central
core tenet: that we are collective custodians
of the natural environment that we depend
on for our survival and our healing. It’s a
perpetual reminder that a healthy planet
makes for healthy minds.

Resources for climate resilience

‘Katrina Brain’: The Invisible Long-Term Toll of Megastorms by Christine Vestal. Politico:
www.politico.com/agenda/story/2017/10/12/psychological-toll-natural-disasters-000547

The Art of Resilience: Creativity, Courage and Renewal. Salzburg Global Seminar:
www.salzburgglobal.org/topics/article/report-now-online-the-art-of-resilience-creativity-courage-and-
renewal.html

Is Syria Really a ‘Climate War’? We Examined the Links Between Drought, Migration and
Conflict. Lina Eklund and Darcy Thompson. The Conversation:
theconversation.com/is-syria-really-a-climate-war-we-examined-the-links-between-drought-migration-
and-conflict-80110

Mental Health and Our Changing Climate: Impacts, Implications, and Guidance. American
Psychological Association, Climate for Health and EcoAmerica. March 2017:
www.apa.org/news/press/releases/2017/03/mental-health-climate.pdf

Nearly 60,000 Suicides in India Linked to Global Warming by Alexa Liautard. Vice. August 2017:
www.vice.com/en_id/article/59bmnd/nearly-60000-suicides-in-india-linked-to-global-warming

The Climate Swerve: Reflections on Mind, Hope, and Survival by Robert Jay Lipton. Published
by The New Press. September 2017.

115
 neurodecolonization
(or, riding the waves of change)
“Nothing is so painful to the human mind as a
great and sudden change”1 wrote Mary Shelley
– and yet we can barely grasp the monumental
scale of the shifts that have happened in our
own era! At the same time that we have
grappled with the normal cycles of life and rites
of passage, we have also witnessed parochial
Empire-building and the rise of technologies
that have provided us with a “good life” of
entitlement and relative ease. The improvements
are enormous, and we are probably the first
generation in human history to have material
wealth comparable to individual fiefdoms.
But we might also be the last to have such
incredible privilege. Our attraction to the
newest trend, and our total choice in luxury,
food, wellness, wardrobe, entertainment, travel,
hobbies and gadgets are the direct result of
capitalism, and this excess (or surplus) in the
western world has led to a very real change in
the human condition. Never before have the
unlimited possibilities in accoutrements, lifestyle
or opportunity outpaced our ability to manage
this barrage, or to make the right decisions
based on an infinite number of choices. Yet
the modern lifestyle that we take for granted
is both a blessing and a curse, as we have been
disconnected from the elements that give rise
to true happiness, such as deep bonds with
community and the earth - the true source of
all well-being.
Another conundrum impossible for modern
minds to grasp, is that the same paradigm
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Pegi Eyers
of technological innovation, so full of hope
and promise, has brought us to the brink of
economic and ecosystem collapse! In just
a few short decades, as societal problems
worsen and earth degradation intensifies, we
have discovered that the dominant society is
unsustainable. The human-centric values that
created this hegemony are a lie, the idea that
‘evolution equals progress’ is an outdated
Victorian concept, and instead of utopia as
promised, we have crime, homelessness,
alienation, harmful technologies, environmental
breakdown and the destruction of natural
systems. We may have embraced modernity
because of its perceived benefits, but futurity is
an untenable construct and doomed to expire.
“Life as we know it is almost over. This high-energy
high-technology life that we in the affluent societies
live, is a dead end, and we are closer to that end
than ever before. A large-scale human presence
on the planet at this level of consumption is
impossible. We can’t predict when this party will
end, but make no mistake folks, the party is over.”2
On a planet with limited resources, the
worldview that drives our civilization is a huge
mistake. From the front lines, we learn that the
natural world is already pushed to the limits
of what sustains life: pollution of water and
air, destruction of ecosystems, and the surface
temperature of the globe altered past natural
law. And what is the main driver for climate
change, the most destructive force of all? It is
our massive high-carbon economy, addiction
to industry, fossil-fueled network, ecocidal grid
of highways and agricultural monocultures that
cause anthropocenic changes to the land. Throw
in an out-of-control population bomb and the
human infrastructure required to support this
explosion, and the chaos we face is grave.
So what do we do in the face of the massive
change that is coming? Movements everywhere
are seeking to stop capitalism in its tracks, to
reduce emissions, install renewable energy, and
resist the lure of civilization with voluntary
simplicity and degrowth. Alternative currencies,
solidarity networks, ‘localvore’, rewilding and
reviving our bonds with the natural world are
all activities we can pursue right now. Yet how
do we ensure that these initiatives are not
half measures, but lasting and permanent? The
greatest impediment to moving away from
the agenda of Empire and bending the curve,
are the beliefs we have internalized from the
dominant ideology. Deeply imbedded in our
psyches, the core ‘memes’ of Empire have been
created, spread, upheld and perpetuated yet it
is patently untrue (and another lie of Empire)
that the structure of the human mind has pre-
determined these choices. We have been in a
colonized trance, and rejecting the psychological
and physical impacts of modernity on body,
mind and soul is key, before we can truly move
toward an ecological civilization.
Starting with the deep examination of our
own psyches, we can identify the patterns
we have normalized as part of our collective
reality, and then work to undo this conditioning.
This process, known as neurodecolonization,
is an important tool for facing the looming
climate crisis. To decolonize is to reject all
that is ‘anti-life’ or does not serve the planet,
like resource extraction and exploitative
economies. As we do this work, it is helpful to
Pegi Eyers
remember that capitalism is a brutal, fascistic
system that kills millions of beings physically,
and millions more spiritually, every single day.
By replacing the juggernaut of modernity with
healthy alternatives, Anishnaabe leader and
activist Winona DaDuke reminds us that it is
possible to “have a worldview that is not based
on Empire.”3
By no means a comprehensive list, this
foray into revealing our colonized habits
will hopefully lead to a fuller inventory of
unlearning, and to new thinking and actions
that reflect our responsibilities to Earth
Community. Our transition from the doomed
economy of industrial growth must be to
a life-sustaining society, committed to the
recovery of the natural world and our place
within it. Neurodecolonization starts off as an
individual practice, but quickly moves forward in
solidarity with our communities and/or chosen
kinship groups. As more people answer the
call to change, we can insist on system-wide
transformation, and the shift to ecological
civilization will become an unstoppable force.
Reject consumer capitalism: How much
do we really need to live a comfortable life?
Our civilization has strayed far beyond balance
with the natural world, and it is likely that
in the near future we will pay the price for
this miscalculation in countless drastic ways.
The current levels of consumption cannot
be maintained, and it is better to give up our
expectation of material wealth and endless
accumulation now, and to see our privileges
and benefits for the illusions that they are.
Capitalism and consumerism have infiltrated
every aspect of our lives, and it will take much
examination to discern between the things we
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 need, and the things we think we need. Reject
the notion that industrial civilization is the only
way to live, or that those in the western world
will continue to live in this way for decades
to come. Be content with the simple things,
find valuable meaning in slowing down, going
for a walk, riding a bike, basic unadorned food
choices, a few good pieces of clothing, the
beauty of the ecosystem, tending gardens, the
company of friends, and the pleasures of your
own making in art, music, craft and words. Focus
on what you can give back, not what you can
consume, and cultivate true happiness from
creativity, spiritual pursuits and being in service
to others.
Reject the impact of commercialism
on your identity formation: by resisting
the brainwashing coming from the worlds of
entertainment, movies, fashion and sports.
Above and beyond a healthy sharing of creative
ideas, the marketing machines in these mega-
industries exist to make you think you need
something that you do not, or that you are
someone you are not. The notion that the
excitement or indulgence of shopping is a
necessary part of our emotional life, or that the
acquisition of material goods makes us feel safe
and secure, or that specific ‘brands’ in fashion
or sports define who we are, is simply a lie. As
consumers we are conditioned to invest our
identify with fantasies in mass-produced movies,
music, fashion and sports, but this illusion stems
from the absence of true connection and the
sacred in our lives.
Reject artificial values that are not your
own: Instead of a direct experience of the
processes in nature that affect our wellbeing
and every aspect of our lives, Empire has
surrounded us with synthetic ideas and
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infrastructures that cushion us from reality.
Instead of genuine connection and participation
in living communities – both human and other-
than-human – we are conditioned to conform
to societies that are artificially created to suit
fabricated notions of ‘politesse’ and prosperity.
Instead of joining the natural flow of life, we are
held back by a static fixation on an ideal set of
circumstances that can never be fulfilled. The
maintenance of the capitalist consumer society
is unsustainable both physically and mentally, and
we need to reject these artificial values in favor
of models that reclaim our place within Earth
Community. Our conditioning can be broken,
and our belief systems can be changed.
Reject the success = happiness myth:
One of the great memes of Empire is the
idea that true happiness can only be achieved
when we have reached the pinnacle of financial
achievement or success in the workplace. Only
a market-based society would perpetuate the
fallacy that being a high achiever is the only
worthy goal, and this myth teaches us that our
physical, emotional and spiritual wellbeing is
dependent on power, and the accumulation of
wealth. The dichotomy of ‘haves’ and ‘have-nots’,
‘winners’ and ‘losers’, accentuates difference,
creates false hierarchies, and does nothing
to bring people together. ‘Success’ is only
achievable with hyperindividualism (or stand-
alone corporatism) that promotes the values
of competition, and puts enormous pressure
on individuals to live up to impossible goals.
The commodification of human skills is built on
a toxic system of evaluation and qualification
that is objectifying, demeaning and infantalizing,
and there is no incentive to value community
or share knowledge or expertise with others.
Hyperstructured work environments can be
authoritarian, bureaucratic places of control,

where surveillance and rules are applied to
increase production and further the ideology
and goals of the corporation. In marked
contrast, within eco-resilent societies the
individual is accountable to the well-being of the
community, who in turn are accountable to the
well-being of the individual. At the root of these
values of respect and reciprocity, everyone is
accountable to the land and Earth Community.
Claiming our true freedom means choosing
to live outside of the established narrative of
‘success’. We need to get back to ecocentric
values, and the dictates of corporate-capitalism
are not the answer.
Reject hierarchy and privilege: Empire has
inculcated us with toxic structures of hierarchies
that are ultimately damaging to ourselves and
Pegi Eyers
Image: Monster by Janet Lees
the planet. Beyond the necessary leadership
that will arise organically in any human
collective, stratification, ranking, ‘othering’, and
oppression have no place in the new paradigm.
Decolonization means being aware of how and
when we perpetuate racism, classism, speciesism,
ableism or genderism, and working to rid
ourselves of this conditioning. Judge people
by their compassion for all beings, not by their
gender, age, colour, wealth (or lack of thereof),
culture, sexual orientation or ability! Once you
see the various intersectional hierarchies and
your place within them as an illusion, it becomes
impossible to maintain or benefit from the
privileges of ethnicity, gender, wealth, ableism or
heteronormativity.
Reject self-importance: A huge driver in
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 the building of Empire has been a delusional
separation from the natural world, and our
place within the circle of all life. Our human-
centric bias has convinced us that only our
admiration for ourselves and the obsession
with our own creations and technological
achievements are important. Our own self-
obsessions are a microcosm of the system-wide
imperialist ego that puts the needs of human
beings before anything else. Some day we will
pay the price for this huge and hubristic mistake.
On this paradise of a planet, surrounded by
natural wonders and the manifestations of
mysteries we will never fully understand, our
best response is to cultivate an attitude of
humility, gratitude and grace.
Reject Self-Indulgence: Don’t get caught
up in the self-absorbed emotional traps of
fatalism, escapism, alienation, apathy, numbness
or ennui – there is work to be done! You are
part of a living ecosystem, and your gratitude
for the natural world that sustains you should
ennoble and empower you to hold the vision
for a return to an ‘ecological civilization’. To align
with the sacred is to treat yourself scrupulously
with total love, respect and positive energy, and
to know that you are the perfect manifestation
of beautiful glowing divinity. “Love yourself. Then
forget it. Then, love the world.”4 It is essential to be
rooted in your own goodness, then seek healthy
expressions in acts of generosity, empathy and
kindness toward all life. Detoxify your life by
eliminating activities that do not align with your
true values, and negative pastimes that emit a
low vibration, such as gossip, personal drama
and consumer entertainment.
All of us have the agency to challenge our
habitual thinking and belief systems, and make
the essential changes in attitude required for
120
the recovery of a holistic worldview. The new
trend toward essentialism doesn’t even begin to
cover the amount of rejecting and relinquishing
that we need to master, with NO becoming our
daily mantra! Neurodecolonization is the most
difficult challenge we face individually and as a
species, to unplug from the false paradigm of
Empire and unlimited progress, and to dismantle
the systems of capitalism, hierarchy and
humancentric entitlement that make it possible.
Of course, change can be painful, and in these
unprecedented times an existential crisis
is also waiting, as we uncover new layers
of challenge and difficulty. As part of the
neurodecolonization process, we may unhinge
our habitual self from the constraints of time
to take the ‘long view’, and question why we
were born at this particular time and in this
particular place. What did destiny have in mind
for us, and why did our spirit choose to be part
of this momentous era, when humanity is at a
crossroads? When the sheer weight of human
infrastructure and technology is crushing the
natural ecosystems that give life to all beings?
When humans have lost their gratitude for
nature’s gifts on which we are dependent for
our very lives?
Why are we here? Is it to further the goals
of urbanized humanity, or to be a warrior on
behalf of the Earth, to honour the Earth in all
we think, say and do? Is it to mourn, to serve,
to witness, to be part of the solution instead
of the problem? Is it to stop supporting the
hegemony of an unsustainable economy by
our silence, to stop chasing after money and
superiority, to stop idolizing machines and their
makers, to stop indulging in consumerism, to
stop worshipping our wardrobes and toys, to
stop escaping into the disposable commodities
of entertainment, to stop consuming junk that of belonging in the world.

erodes our life force, to stop our complicity in a
civilization that enticingly offers us great benefits
while at the same time destroying the only
things that matter?
Perhaps the answers lie in realizing our true
potential, or ‘entelechy’ that leads to an
5,
interconnectivity with the evolving processes of
all life, and brings us back to our essential bio-
lineage. As we re-discover positive lifeways that
offer real benefits instead of harm, we become
motivated to embrace change, to replace and
transform toxic systems with practices that are
life-sustaining.
Ecological awareness – cultivating attitudes that
are in true symbiosis with the landscapes we call
home – means rejecting the dominant paradigm
and moving away from the values of imperialism
inherent in our government and economy.
Rethinking habitual patterns, living within our
ecological means, and focusing on small localized
communities will develop and deepen our sense
Pegi Eyers
First taking place in the psyche, the shift from
dominator culture to collaborative culture
empowers us to contribute our unique gifts in
service to community and the land. Are we
willing to exchange civilization and its amenities
for a return to the garden and right relationship
with the earth? One way or another, change is
inevitable, and we already possess the qualities
that will translate into sustainable societies and
wellbeing for all.
“Each of us is put here in this time and this place
to personally decide the future of humankind. Did
you think the Creator would create unnecessary
people in a time of such terrible danger? Know
that you yourself are essential to this World.”
(Chief Arvol Looking Horse)6
“Don’t sit this one out. Do something.You are
by accident of fate alive at an absolutely critical
moment in the history of our planet.”
(Carl Sagan)

Notes and references

1. Mary Wollstonecraft, Shelley, Frankenstein, Wordsworth Editions, 1997

2. Robert Jensen, We Are All Apocalyptic Now: Moral Responsibilities in Crisis Times,
CreateSpace, 2013

3. Winona LaDuke (Anishnaabe), Keynote Address at Powershift 2012, Ottawa, ON, Canada,
October 28, 2012

4. Mary Oliver, Evidence: Poems, Beacon Press, 2010

5. Analogous to the unfolding of our personal mythology, entelechy (en-’te-le-kē) is the

revealing of our inherent potential(s) hidden within, manifesting as lived reality, true purpose
and wisdom at various phases of life, or over an entire lifetime.

6. Chief Arvol Looking Horse (Lakota), Keeper of the Sacred White Buffalo Calf Pipe, Native
American Encyclopedia on Facebook, May 24, 2012

121
 nature dreaming Fiona Brannigan

When we think about Climate Minds most of us in the developed world will probably think about
human mind. We might consider the impact of the ever present threat of climate change on the
human psyche or the changes we need to make at a psychological level to meet the challenges
we face. Although these elements are incredibly important those from other cultures might also
broaden the concept out to include the mind of Mother Earth herself. Many of the ancient wisdom
traditions would recognise a deep intelligence, a knowing in the collective consciousness of the
natural world. They might tell us that it is not we who will save the earth but the earth that will save
us if only we open ourselves up to her innate wisdom.

Mountain of Women
The name of this painting
is the English translation
of a mountain in Tipperary,
Ireland called Slievenamon.
Slievenamon is immersed
in the myths and legends
of the area and is believed
to be the home of one
of the great fairy palaces
of Irish mythology. For
me the mountain radiates
an energy of love and
compassion and simply
spending time in the
valleys that surround her
is nourishing for the soul. It
evokes in me a sense that
the land is gently sleeping
and we are invited to
join her for a while as she
dreams.

122
It’s striking, isn’t it, that those cultures that see the earth as a sentient, nurturing mother are most

Fiona Brannigan
often the ones that live sustainably. Those who consider the mountains, the lakes, the forests to be
sacred, protect and care for the land just as they protect and care for their families and communities.
We only need to look to the Australian Aboriginal and Native American spiritual teachings as
well as those of many others around the world to see how, for these ancient cultures, the land is
part of them and they part of the land, there is no distinction. The practicalities of the provision
of nourishment, shelter and warmth are integral to the spiritual connection with the land, which is
wrapped up in respect and love.

Within the Buddhist traditions, our deep interconnectivity with the natural world – the idea that
nature is inside us, and is not something separate and external – is a central tenet of the teachings.
 With karma, the fundamental principle of cause and effect is understood. There is a profound
appreciation of our place within the web of life and the need to act with care and responsibility to
maintain balance and harmony. And in Taoism, the fundamental principle underlying all things has
been described as the ‘great mother’. To live in harmony with nature is to live the way of the Tao.

How different this is to the western approach. In his book Animate Earth (2009), Stephen Harding
traces the path taken through history to see the natural world as ‘other’ in the predominant western
paradigm. Particularly since the scientific revolution in the 16th and 17th centuries, the whole of
creation came to be viewed as a great machine that could be dissected, observed and mastered.
Within this utilitarian world view the natural environment is there for the benefit of humans and we
are distinct and separate from it. Recent discoveries in neuroscience suggest that for many of us this

Still Waters Run Deep

There are places in the
natural world that seem to
have the power to draw us
into deep reflection.
We don’t speak, we are
awed into silence as we
feel the place has depths
and interconnections that
are out of our reach and
yet we know they are
there. They touch us at a
level that is beyond our
ordinary senses.

124
idea may now be etched firmly within the deepest neural structures of our brains. It is likely to be

Fiona Brannigan
held within the ‘Default Mode Network’ – shaped and strengthened by each and every personal and
cultural experience. The more we talk about the Earth from a utilitarian perspective the more we
reinforce these neural connections and the more firmly this perspective will remain.

Is it this utilitarian approach to the natural world that encourages us to take it for granted and so
to destroy it? Have we become so disconnected and alienated from her, and has the destruction
faded so far into the background of our lives that we just don’t see the devastation? Perhaps the
impending catastrophes of climate change, ecosystem collapse and mass species extinction are just
acts of carelessness because the natural world isn’t on our radar. Or perhaps there are moments
when we understand it all too well, feel it all too deeply, but seeing the earth as ‘other’ allows us to
 push it from our minds once more and turn a culturally-sanctioned blind eye.

If we considered the earth to be our great mother – to be sacred as well as the provider of all we
need to survive and to flourish – would we not be more mindful about what is happening to her?
Would her protection not be our single guiding principle, enabling us to evolve, culturally, to a level
of maturity that respects natural boundaries and limits? And would we not open ourselves up to her
wisdom to help us to find our path to a more sustainable world; knowing all of the time that when

Autumn
When we are children we
can have (if we are lucky
enough to experience it)
a direct connection with
nature that is beyond
words. Autumn in particular
is a time of fun and laughter
as we jump in puddles, kick
the autumn leaves and
hunt for conkers. As we get
older there is something
about autumn that warms
the soul. There is such
vibrancy; the trees seem to
release their very life force
as a parting gift. It is as if
Mother Earth wants us to
revel in pure joy.

126
we do we are tapping in to the deepest, wisest part of ourselves?

Fiona Brannigan
Perhaps the simplest thing we can do to connect with Mother Earth is to spend time in nature – be
it a forest, a river, a mountain or even a garden or a local park and cultivate the ability to find the
stillness within. To breathe. To allow our minds to settle. To reconnect with our own being and to
open up our senses to what is present all around us. Greeting the earth with an open heart we can
let go of all expectations, all trying. We might choose to wander mindfully, allowing our intuition to
draw us to this place or that, or we might choose to stay in a single spot, to sit and connect. Either
way we can bring our awareness to what is happening both within and outside of our bodies. We
don’t have to go looking for these things, we can just notice them as they present themselves to us.
We might focus our attention on intricate details or we might allow our awareness to drink in the
whole of our surroundings. Rooting ourselves in the present moment, we can set an intention to be
open and receptive to the insights that arise.

And when we settle the mind in this way we might actually begin to quieten the constant chatter
of the ‘Default Mode Network’. We begin to create a little bit of space within and provide an
opportunity for a new way of looking at the world to emerge. Through this simple act, profound
transformation can occur.

And we can use our imagination: the world of dreams and possibilities. In Buddhist philosophy the
whole of reality is a dream, an illusion, not fixed and permanent as it may seem, but constantly
changing and transforming. We can use our imagination to understand our true interconnectivity
by seeing in our mind’s eye the way each element – water, earth, fire, air – is constantly being
exchanged between our bodies and the natural world. We can use our imagination to deepen our
empathy with every other sentient being on the planet by looking at life from their perspective,
whether we imagine what it must feel like to be an owl gliding silently through the forest at night
or a blade of grass swaying in the summer breeze. Buddhist teacher, Reginald Ray shows us how
we can also use our imagination to connect with the primordial earth. Through our bodies we can
experience a felt sense of sinking down into the depths of the earth’s womb, the origin of all life.

Beyond this we can use our imagination within the realm of art and poetry, myth and legend to
illuminate one dimension, one fragment of an ever changing landscape. To touch into the space
that is shared by the human mind and the mind of Mother Earth. It’s from this perspective that I
offer a series of paintings that capture an exploration of my personal relationship with the natural
world. They are loosely based on the idea of the Aboriginal dreamtime. Psychologist and medical
anthropologist, Alberto Villoldo describes the dreamtime as a creative matrix that “infuses all matter
and energy, connecting every creature, every rock, every star and every ray of light or bit of cosmic dust”.

It is the place from which all of creation unfolds.

127
 Moon Dreams Winter
In the depths of winter,
especially after freshly
fallen snow it can seem
as if the whole world
is asleep, everything is
still and silent. And yet
beneath it all, deep down
below the surface, the
heart of life is still beating.
The natural world has
entered into her deepest
dream and it is this dream
that nurtures springtime
into being.
Fiona Brannigan

129
 reaching for the Irv Beiman PhD
climate mind

As the mainstream and social media inform us
repeatedly of disturbing climate change disasters,
it is useful to engage deeply with our thoughts,
feelings and actions related to the climate crisis,
and the suffering and the great dying that is so
prevalent and increasing. In this article I share
a method that can be used to stimulate and
inform our growth for effective action.
The failure of political systems to adequately
respond to the climate crisis reveals the extent
of dysfunction embedded within the political
process. With few exceptions mainstream media
programming is blind to a deeper understanding
of the complex dynamics we face.
The climate destabilization that was predicted
to arise many decades in the future seems to
be here now, spreading catastrophe through
unprecedented drought, famine, fire and rising
seas, along with destructive wind, powerful
storm surges and the torrential rain that
accompanies hurricanes and typhoons.
With the exception of a few, people often seem
stuck in ignorance or in feelings of impotence
and learned helplessness. For those who have
‘awakened’, however, individual and collective
actions are increasing. Networks are expanding.
Strategies and tactics are being discussed,
planned and implemented. There is arising a
congealing of human consciousness focused on
purposeful action.
Our repetition of focused intention is
initially expressed silently in rhythm with our
movement, in rhythm with our breath. More
advanced applications of the method add
visualization to the practice, thereby blending
the verbal and visual information processing
centres of our brains. This blending enhances
our creativity and connects us with intangible
sources of guidance. The method combines
elements of mindfulness meditation, affirmation,
visualization, kundalini yoga and aerobic
reprogramming into a daily practice. It has the
potential to bring enormous benefits:
First – an increase in the number, length
and connective [synaptic] complexity of our
brain cells, thereby increasing the raw usable
intelligence of the practitioner.

A Powerful Method
We are being challenged by the destruction and despair of the climate crisis. One basic method
we can use for developing our individual and collective climate minds involves three core elements:
1. repetitive movement
2. rhythmic breathing
3. repetition of focused intention

130
Second – an increase in our focus on what is
important through increased commitment. Our
commitment to our purpose and our more
specific intention has three dimensions:
• diligent commitment – indicated by
the amount of time we devote to our
aspirational goals.
• opportunistic commitment – indicated by
the percentage of opportunities we engage
in moving toward our aspirational goals.
• creative commitment – indicated by the
number and beneficial impact of new
opportunities we develop to move toward
our most important aspirations.
Third – an increase in our awareness of clues
about what to do next.
Fourth – an increase in our strategically
relevant learning.
The benefits above enable increased effectiveness
for the goals we choose to engage. Additionally,
there are two more benefits that accelerate our
progress and reveal an underlying possibility of
intangible support beyond our expectations:
Fifth – an increase in serendipity, or unexpected
positive surprises and discoveries related to the
aspirational goals we have expressed.
Sixth – an increase in synchronicity, or
unexpected coincidences that enable
opportunities for progress.
These latter two benefits tend to increase as we
gain experience with the method, as we establish
clarity of our purpose and our intentions, and as
we more fully align our actions with our stated
intentions.
Restoring Balance
Irv Beiman PhD
Our needs, wants, hopes and wishes are
counter-balanced by the anxieties, fears and
barriers we perceive to be blocking our way.
While awareness of the climate crisis has
expanded rapidly, progress in coping with
the crisis has been blocked by the fossil fuel
industry. This and other economic forces have
established an enormous power imbalance by
effectively using mainstream media to create
confusion about the very real risks that we
collectively face. There are often opposing
forces within civilized society, but the light
of transparency normally enables a rational
balance to be achieved. While social media
can enable much greater transparency than
mainstream media, this has not accomplished
what is needed to mitigate the huge risks
bearing down on us.
One view of the conundrum we face is
that the global balance of restorative and
destructive forces on our planet has become
skewed toward suicidal destruction. To restore
balance to our individual and collective
planetary health, we must raise our vibratory
energy level to counteract the destructive
forces that currently prevail. As we raise our
awareness and clarify our goals through a
method such as this, we may become more
powerful through significant improvements
in our clarity, confidence, efficiency and
effectiveness. As we take action, we learn how
to become more effective.
This method offers a behavioral, psychological
and spiritual strategy for coping with the
duality of our lives, as well as for taking action
at multiple levels to move toward a better
future than the one we face. The method
131
 Imagine that a key part of our individual and collective challenge is to purposefully stimulate our
own evolution of consciousness. The content for this journey begins with what currently grabs us,
claims our emotions, and triggers feelings that motivate us to action. Multiple questions arise:
• What is our purpose?
• What are our goals?
• What is our strategy?
• What are the next step actions for implementing our strategy?

leads us to ponder our emerging role in the

dramatic ‘Game of Life’ within which we are
unavoidably enmeshed. The method enhances
clarity by enabling an increase in our ability to
focus, as well as an increase in our awareness of
clues for progress related to our key goals.
The method creates openings for us to go
through key barriers that have been hindering
progress, however defined. Our definition of
progress varies across time and circumstances,
but can cover a range of possibilities:
• working through the stages of grief for
what may seem inevitable,
• participating in climate action and
related networks to enhance our local
community’s resilience,
• enabling the deployment of solutions for
reducing greenhouse gases; e.g. focusing
on the eighty solutions identified in Paul
Hawken’s book: Drawdown (2017).
The Climate Mind
Let us imagine it is available now, congealing,
morphing, evolving into an intangible organic
whole. Our individual intentions are a piece of
that whole, contributing to it and influenced
by it. We are a part of something larger than
our individual selves, that it is both outside us
and inside us. There is intelligence, both rational
and intuitive, contained within multiple climate
minds and these are contained within a broadly
encompassing collective Climate Mind.
Going with the flow of direct experience can
enable us to bypass getting stuck in resistance or
hopeless despair because of the tragedies that
are unfolding. The collective Climate Mind pulls
us to go beyond individual selves and families to
connect with the larger whole that is emerging.
Perhaps this multidimensional vibration has
been long present? The challenge of societal
survival invites us to tune our perceptions to
that vibration which resonates with our evolving
planetary Climate Mind.

Consider that a collective Climate Mind may be
available. Taking the concept of individual climate
minds we can imagine an intangible connection
of climate minds across time and space. If we
attach a name to that collective entity and
imagine its enduring presence, we can conceive
of an intangible whole that is Climate Mind.
Our personal time and energy may be tied up
with practical matters in living, but entering the
Climate Mind space calls for us to allocate a
portion of our time and energy to repetitive
physical exercise. What we do with our brain/
minds during exercise is critically important.
When we repeat our intention in rhythm with

132
our movement in rhythm with our breath,
we amplify the multidimensional vibration of
consciousness, and we begin to discern clues
and symbols that provide guidance. While it
may seem to be an individual journey, this is not
the case. We are connected with other climate
minds, and our climate minds are connected
with Climate Mind.
Just as the individual cells of our body perform
their individual metabolic functions contributing
to our health and wellness, so can we as
individuals bring our resources, talents and
networks to bear on the climate crisis that
threatens us. In clarifying our most important
goals we can include consideration of the
Climate Mind space.
Questions that arise include:
• How can we reach to connect with the
Climate Mind space?
• How can we bring strengths, assets, skills,
talents and networks to that space?
• What might that look like and feel like?
• How might this be made manifest in our
everyday world?
• How can I/we make a beneficial difference
for a better future?
Considering these questions enables an initial
formulation of our intention as an affirmation,
beginning with “I am” or “We are...”.
1. Adapting that affirmative statement of
intention for self-programming begins with
repetitive movement [walking, jogging,
swimming, etc.].
2. The second step is breathing in rhythm
with the movement. As we establish a
sustainable pace for movement and breath,
we can establish a repetitive rhythm, such
as repetitively using four movements on
Irv Beiman PhD
the in-breath and four movements on
the out-breath.
3. The next step is to adjust the wording
of the intention to encompass one or
more breathing cycles. This requires
focus, trying different wordings until an
essential meaning can be expressed in
rhythm with repetitive movement and
deep breathing.
When we silently repeat a Climate Mind
affirmation in rhythm with our breath
and movement, we amplify the vibrational
signal. After multiple sessions in which we
consciously choose and implement our
own self programming, and after we are
comfortable that the wording captures what
we wish to focus on, we can repeat it aloud.
This brings us into the intermediate stage of
the practice. The journey will often accelerate
during the intermediate stage.
The advanced stage of this method includes
visualization exercises that stimulate the
evolution of our consciousness. Colors
are associated with different energy and
motivational centers in our body, which are
called chakras. The deeper meaning of each
chakra and color pair can can be used to
guide our behavior and clarify our intangible
goals. The blending of verbal and visual
information processing functions of our brain/
mind enhances our creativity and projects
a more powerful vibe. That vibe is reflected
back to us through unexpected discoveries
and reassuring coincidences. Thus do we
evolve amidst disturbing climate tragedies and
crises, with resilient hope for a better future.
133
 A few examples of generic
Climate Mind affirmations may be helpful:

• We are forming a Climate Mind [for a better future]

• I am clarifying my intention [for a better future]
• I am taking action [for a better future]
• I am applying my skills/talents/assets/networks [for a better future]
• I am writing/networking/marching/voting [for a better future]
• I am learning/designing/developing/delivering/disseminating solutions
[for a better future]
• I am clarifying my purpose [or my intention] for myself and my family/my community/my
planetary home/for humanity and our biosphere

Connect climate minds with Climate Mind
The value of the meme pair, climate minds
and Climate Mind, is considerable. The lower
case version, climate minds, expands the pool
of available resources from individuals to the
collective “we”, thereby dissolving the isolation
that those who have awakened may tend to
feel. The upper case version, Climate Mind,
suggests a presence, an intelligence, a force, that
is greater than any of us individually.
There are multiple ancient and contemporary
spiritual practices that enable connection with
this guidance. By focusing on Climate Mind as
an intelligent adaptive resource, we can begin to
recognize we have a role to play in this Game
of Life drama. When we engage this role with
an open heart – a sharing of truth to power
and an evolving degree of wisdom – we reach
our potential for beneficial impact beyond our
expectations.
Even though we may experience feelings of
sorrow as we learn of ever advancing climate
tragedies, we may still strive to be an archetypal
Hero in our individual journeys. What becomes
a mysterious journey can be observed at
multiple levels, with moments of clarity along
the way. An enduring clarity tends to be elusive,
however, because as the journey evolves, so do
the challenges as well as the opportunities.
This three-component method [movement,
breathing, intention] enables more rapid and
efficient detection of clues for next steps. These,
when acted upon, lead to learning that opens
doorways to opportunities. Engaging these
opportunities creates an amplifying intangible
signal that brings more information and
opportunities in response.
We may seek a rational understanding for
the unexpected but momentarily reassuring
coincidences and discoveries that arise as we

Consider the question, “How do I connect with that which is greater

than myself for guidance and support?”

134
repeatedly focus our movement, brain/mind move forward by experientially accessing this

Irv Beiman PhD

and breath on our most heartfelt goals and
aspirations. Consider the hypothesis that we
can access the Climate Mind by amplifying the
vibe of our heartfelt intentions. The method
described herein provides a reliable way to
mysterious source. This journey engages us with
life, with learning, and with the opportunity to
give and receive love as we explore, connect
with, and expand the boundaries of the wider
Climate Mind.

You can find out more about this method and its utilization as a Climate
Mind practice at: www.ReadyForBetterMethod.com

Image: Hope by Janet Lees

135
 I will know her Sarah Wint

In the beginning
is the earth.
Ever loyal,
life giving,
dependable soil -
My most constant friend.

Her cool calm clay is unmoved

by the stories on the wind
of heartbreak and heaven
of laughter and war.
Our joys and our moans
make no difference to her loam.

Our brief liaison -

My flirting with flowers,
my puny mud moving and
earth shaping,
my clumsy actions
with spade and fork,
she rewards with such gifts of
un-writeable beauty.

Something more than gravity

bonds me and my earth in life.
And in death,
I will know her,
but not love her better.

136
Sarah Wint & Jean Thoams

137
photo by Jean Thomas
 Image: Indestructable by Janet Lees

138
if women
rose rooted
a review of the book by Sharon Blackie
As a woman writer, I don’t slag off other
women’s books and I use the Feminist Fight
Club rule of thumb. This book however rattled
my cage as it is an uncomfortable hippy read for
a trade unionist for whom everything in politics
is a chess move. There’s nothing like a Celtic folk
story to expose my psychic thuggery.
If Women Rose Rooted is a book about
women’s lives and their relationships with
the land. There are conversations with
contemporary women, mixed in with ancient
stories of the cycles of life. There is actual
poetry and whole paragraphs on hormones.
The blatant spirituality of this book evoked
an immature reaction in me. Blunt, concrete,
questions to try to put this book into a political
position and work out what side Blackie is on.
Exhibit A: Housing. Throughout the book
there are stories of women who have regained
their belonging by moving to rural retreats.
As someone who doesn’t own anything I’m
more than a bit curious where did they get the
money? If I could afford a shabby-chic bunker in
Gloucestershire, where I grew up, I would go.
Right now. But I rent in London and increasingly
stare over the abyss of insecure housing. Like
most people living in London I can neither
afford to stay or go.
I can give you the exact coordinates of the
place where I belong. It’s along the river banks
Elizabeth Cotton
and cool woods of the Coln Valley. Only
problem being is that my entire generation
had to leave because the county has become
the Florida of the UK. Second homes, retired
rich folk, bankers. That’s not resentment, it’s
an important point, that this is a part of the
country where the rivers are running dry
because there is no stewardship along the
public and private waterways. To preserve the
Coln river would require belonging and the
responsibilities this implies, not just owning
something.
Exhibit B: Jobs. Nowhere in these radical
stories of reinvention is the issue of earning-
a-living discussed. Coming from a trade union
background that’s a big premise taken out of
the meaningful-life equation. As a writer who
survives by wage labour these women who
have found their voice without finding a basic
income are objects of my quite significant
envy. It’s also an unnecessary evasion, as
environmentalists have under-utilised leverage
through the potential for green jobs. Although
the trade union proposal for 1 million climate
jobs was met with indifference and then a
financial blocking by the last government,
the reality is that for ordinary folk to really
support environmental change the link to jobs
is key.
Exhibit C: Husbands. I’ll run the risk of
sounding absolutely beaten-up by life, but
139

my next question is about all these husbands
casually thrown into the mix of these women’s
stories. The contemporary cast are all married.
I’m not against marriage but we live in a society
where 2 million people stay in bad relationships
to keep their homes. Belonging has become a
dual income project. I’m just saying that because
I think it makes a difference to the credibility of
our narratives.
I’m half way through the book clocking up a
critique angrily scribbled in the margins and
then two things happened.
Firstly, I went to see the Inconvenient Truth
sequel. The film is a recap on climate change
and a whizz through Al Gore’s diary of high
level meetings and carrying out his training
programme. Bad supporting roles for women as
professional politicians in the current blow-dry-
figure-hugging-and-heels leadership uniform. No
frizzy hair or hot flushes here. As the film was
140
shown across the UK on the same night, there
was only a sad trickle of debate on social media.
Nothing radical happening here, just a bunch
of over-40s talking to the usual suspects. The
thuggish part of me noted that the tickets were
£18 a pop, missing the unavoidable truth that
young people don’t have the money to engage
with this particular demographic.
Worse is the political tiredness promoted in
the film. Despite his old school charm, there’s
something really dodgy about a political punch
line that it is our primary responsibility to
monitor the psychopaths in power and engage
in representational systems. As a response
to climate change this falls flat, to say that the
democratic crisis that feeds the environmental
one can only be solved by voting and lobbying.
Gore makes the joke that he’s a ‘recovering
politician’ as if somehow he was not a key
player in the political class that created the
conditions for this democratic deficit. In one
way this story is too old, an outdated view
about how environmental change will come
about, but in another way this story is not old
enough. For change to take place it will need to
appeal to the profound and deep need that we
all have for care and caring.
The second thing that happened was the
story of a woman being shoved onto the road
by a jogger running across a London bridge.
I couldn’t stop watching the video of a man
casually jogging past another man and then
just shoving a young woman randomly into the
road, with a bus narrowly missing her head. The
story that emerged was that this man was a
banker. True or not, it made a shockingly banal
and coherent narrative. Nobody was surprised
that now the veneer of equality has been
peeled off our society, real hatred emerges. I’m
guessing I’m talking to the converted here, but
it’s worth pointing out that misogyny exists
unchallenged in our society in a way I have
never experienced in my lifetime. In one sense
we are tapping into previous generations, going
backwards rather than going forwards on the
equality stakes.
Then, these glorious precious months of
#timesup and the radicalism of this book hit
me.
So, defences down, let me tell you about this
book.
The book describes the pilgrimages that we are
all able to make in these times when so much
is being lost. The chapters describe a primitive
journey; of travelling the wastelands, entering
the ‘cauldron of transformation’, finding the
pilgrims path, entering the enchanted forest and
fertile fields, then the mountains. The colours
of dark old landscapes that we can return to,
to fuel us emotionally and psychically. Stories
of the menopause, of love and betrayal. Of the
wisdom of growing up, of age.
This is a book that tells stories, to stimulate and
provoke the creation of our own narratives
within which we can find a home. A place
where women are not redundant, if they no
longer strive to be represented or believe in
having-it-all fairy stories. The book offers new
stories of women who found a place to belong
and with it a profound reorientation to the
earth. Old stories of Celtic folklore, of witches
and wise old women. Yes, stories that value
old women. A vivid vocabulary of deep wells
and dark caves, fruits and of our bodies. Of a
maternal love for the planet, caring about what
happens next and to the next generation. It is
a book that offers a taste of a different way
Elizabeth Cotton
of feeling about our environment. To feel an
enchantment, not the rush to formulate yet
another strategic campaign.
There are sections of such profundity it’s like
taking a bullet.
“Scream if you will, but let yourself fall. We
have to let ourselves fall. If we want to become
Voices of the Wells, we need to plumb their
depths. And in order to kick-start the process of
transformation to which we’ve now committed
ourselves, we have to destroy old ways of
thinking, remove old limits. So grope your way
blindly into the darkest cave, let yourself sink to
the bottom of the deepest lake. Jump into the
black, bottomless well.”
It captures beautifully the drama and the
ordinariness of the cycle of life. That things
become lost, things die, that learning
and change are painful and involve an
acknowledgement of the dark stuff of the
heart. These sections of the book feel like
a familiar walk along the line between
depression and the depressive position, a
fearful line between despair and hope. A long
way from the optimism of popular psychology
and the happy-ever-afters.
At the end of the book is a postscript, The
Eco-Heroine’s Journey: A Guide. Oh how my
heart sank. As someone who writes ‘Survival
Guides’ with a sarcasm health warning, I
needed this section not to be a retreat into
a psychic cul-de-sac of positive psychology.
I’m happy to report that this chapter is safe
and useful, no checklists or tick boxes, rather
a series of questions for the reader to think
about how these epic stages in our journey
141
 exist in our own lives. I found it quite helpful
to think about how these ancient stories of
women’s journeys could be mirrored in my
own life. Radical even to think something so
desperately uncool, thoughts that you wouldn’t
say out loud or on twitter.

This book caught me off guard, back to crying

on the tube and staring out of windows
during meetings. Back to the brave and foolish
emotional journey of psychoanalysis that
preoccupied my life until last year. Back to a
relationship with depression and a lovingly
brutal understanding my own grim story. Back
to an acceptance of the blood and guts of
bodily experience that underpins our internal
and external worlds. Back to a period of
burnout after years of activism, and learning
through that loss. The realisation that my actual
relationship with the planet can’t be fitted into
this very limited political model that I learned
to navigate. This book speaks to me, that as a
woman of a certain age my survival depends on
the defence of my capacity to care about the
next generation. To keep my heart beating, my
blood pumping. To continue to care.

There’s a quietness about whether Sharon has

kids that at the beginning of the book I felt was
an evasion. By the end of the book I felt this
wasn’t the right question. This book is confident.
A confident discourse on what it would feel
like to be unashamed of being a woman finding
her way towards belonging. With or without a
mortgage. Some books are both timeless and
exactly of their time.

142
Image: Falling by Janet Lees
 climate mind,
climate madness
“What was needed was what happened.”
(Rama Mani)
I noticed him immediately when he entered the
room. He had wandered in off the street during
Doors Open Day, an annual festival celebrating
local architecture and historic properties.
Buildings normally closed to the general public
throw open their doors to show off their
interiors. I was helping out for the day at my
workplace, an 18th century terraced block in
the heart of Edinburgh. You wouldn’t consider
it anything special from the street, where you
see just another grey stone facade with lines of
windows and an imposing dull portico. But step
inside this Georgian terrace and you will find
a sweeping grand carved wooden staircase, a
columned great hall displaying marble statuary
and antique oil paintings, and a magnificent
wood-panelled library, its glass-covered
bookcases filled with gilded leatherbound
volumes. Normally these spaces are reserved
for special guests and formal events, but on
Doors Open Day there are hundreds of visitors
ambling from room to room while we answer
questions and point out notable features.
So then: he wandered in off the street, just one
of many random strangers passing by, but my
eyes were drawn to where he stood; there
was something out of place about him. He
was chatting enthusiastically to other people
in his vicinity, people who looked baffled,
perhaps even a bit wary. Soon he moved on
to another room. It wasn’t until later that one
144
Julia Macintosh
of my colleagues arrived and asked in a voice
pitched to intrigue if I had seen the man or
spoken to him. Apparently, my colleague shared
with relish, apparently this man was claiming to
have discovered the cure for Multiple Sclerosis.
Multiple Sclerosis! Completely batty! Right off
his trolley. What a fizzing up of excitement
the man’s unexpected words inspired. A crazy
person! Here, among us! Insanity is the ultimate
otherness, with its abject refusal to follow the
invisible, unprovable rules holding us all in place.
And if we’re not in place, then we are out of
place.
I’ve been out of place myself. Completely batty.
For example: six years ago I was walking along
the High Street in Edinburgh on a mild January
morning, the sky a foreboding cloud-cover, and
I was dead. The world had become for me
a grey unalive wasteland of Hell, and people
passing by me on the pavement, going about
their usual daily business, were at the same time
damned souls like myself. I was there and yet
also not there, they could see me but not see
me, because it was Hell, and I was therefore
disconnected from everyone, even my most
dearest. My daughter’s father followed close
behind me, on his phone to the NHS, working
out a plan to get me to hospital. I was aware of
this but entirely indifferent; why should it matter,
if I was dead? Why should any of it matter if, as
they say, life is just to die?
This snapshot is as vivid to me as any other
memory I call up from the past, and equally as
logical. It happened to me. I can recall particular
details, like the moment when I dropped my
keys into a bin I passed (because I wouldn’t
need them if I was dead, now would I?) or the
point when I crossed over the cobbled street
to St Giles Cathedral and stepped into its dark,
cool interior in order to sit on a worn wooden
pew and reflect upon my predicament (what
does one do next, when one is dead?)
Later the same day, I fled from the reception
area of the psychiatric hospital where I’d been
taken. Filled with terror, and convinced now
that my daughter was in danger of dying just as
I had (in fact, with nightmarish logic, because of
me) I ran out into the hospital grounds with the
intention of reaching her school to find her, to
do all I could to protect her. Mother Tiger fury
drove me, even as a hospital warden tackled
me to the ground, where I screamed and kicked
and bit and hissed into his face like a wild animal
in a frenzied agony of helplessness. I didn’t
care what happened to me, but the thought of
death claiming my child – knowing that I could
not prevent it – that fuelled me with a ferocity
unlike any I’d felt before. What a spectacle I
made.
Even now, from the sober vantage point of
six years and suitable medication, I still believe
that I was dead. I believe it because it was true
for me, it felt real to me and it continues to
hold meaning for me. I was dead, and I was
also in a state of psychosis – both true, both
real. Hovering between one place and another,
sensing them simultaneously. Right off my trolley.
The memory I’ve just shared, that fills only
one page in the fat book of my life, but even
one short page yields a multitude of aspects; I
can tell the same story in any number of ways,
depending on where I’m standing in relation
Julia Macintosh
to that one experience. In one sense I’m
a bipolar patient with a hospital record. In
another sense I’m an explorer in the land
of dreams and visions. In yet another sense
– and make no mistake, this is all about the
senses – I’m a field researcher in panpsychism.
And another: a rebellious woman kicking off
at the patriarchy. A midlife crisis writ large. A
wise woman of the folktale, dealing in riddles
and prophesies. A true heart, seeking out The
Beloved.
In each of these senses, I dwell in a different
place - hospital, dreamland, folktale – with
my role, my identity, shaped and coloured
accordingly. Just because others don’t sense
what I am sensing, doesn’t mean it isn’t real
– even if it is only real to me. A dog hearing
a pitch inaudible to the human ear isn’t
insane. A bat navigating the darkness with
echolocation isn’t insane. Indigenous healers
who speak with the ancestors for guidance
and context aren’t insane. They all fit in their
place, whether or not anyone else shares it
with them.
When I was dead, that was real. Take a step
back and you may catch a glimpse: in a sense
we are all dead. None of us is getting out of
here alive. In a sense, my daughter will die
because of me, in that she is now alive to a
certain extent because of me, and that gift
comes with the pricetag of mortality.
Take another step back, tilt your head and
squint. What we call reality is no more than
the result of making sense out of nonsense.
We create meaning for ourselves using the
raw material gathered up by what we notice
and how we feel – yet what we notice and
how we feel depends on the meaning we
145
 have created for ourselves. We are living and
breathing feedback loops.
“The physicist John Archibald Wheeler has been an
eloquent proponent of the participative universe,
a place where the act of looking for certain
information evokes the information we went
looking for – and simultaneously eliminates our
opportunity to observe other information.... We
all construct the world through lenses of our own
making and use these to filter and select. We each
actively participate in creating our worlds”. 1
So this participative observation establishes
a relationship between our self and our
surroundings – you might call it finding our
place – each with our own unique perspective,
very specific to our own tiny point in the
infinite space-time continuum. Think of the vast
number of variables contributing to who you
are, right at this moment: your genetic ancestry,
your upbringing, your culture, your relationships,
right down to which t-shirt you’re wearing
today and what you had for breakfast. And
think of all the diverse realities that linger in the
background, ready to emerge with the change
of even just a single variable:
“ROCKFORD, IL—Retired post office branch
manager Nancy Hollander, 97, died at her home
of natural causes Tuesday, after spending her life
completely unaware that she was one of the
most talented musicians of the past century and
possessed the untapped ability to become a
world-class violin virtuoso. She is survived by two
daughters, a son, six grandchildren, and three
great-grandchildren, all of whom will forever remain
oblivious to the national treasure Hollander would
have become had she just picked up a violin even
once”. 2
146
What if insanity is just a taste of those vast
untapped potentials, a sensing and experiencing
of reality from a step or two back?
“A mind enclosed in language is in prison.”
(Simone Weil)
Try this thought experiment. Imagine you are
able to travel backwards in time, hundreds of
thousands of years, to a time before the use
of language. There is no consensus among
linguists on how language developed – whether
it occurred as a gradual process or a quantum
leap – but for the sake of argument let’s allow
as given that there was a stage in the prehistoric
past which involved our ancestors existing
without complex language.
So imagine, then, that you have travelled back
to this pre-language time with the following
task: to convey information about our present
human culture to those primitive ancestors.
Is it possible? Could you communicate the
concept of a skyscraper, for instance, without
using language? If you tried speaking, or writing
down words, or even drawing representational
pictures, would they understand? Or would
you be put into the prehistoric version of a
straightjacket?
Now imagine you are visited by a person from
hundreds of thousands of years in the future, a
person no longer Homo Sapien – a person in a
future state of evolution. Might they not live in
a reality with its own equivalent of ‘skyscraper’ –
unimaginable to us in our current state of mind
and degree of experience? How would this
individual communicate their understanding of
reality to us here and now?
The minds of our prehistoric ancestors
held the potential for language, such that it
gradually came into fulfilment over the long
and incremental process of evolution. Might
our minds now be just as likely to hold the
potential for evolving into something else? We
can only speculate but what fun it is to boggle
our wits with the paradox. Words cannot reach
or contain a reality that has been shaped by a
consciousness evolved beyond language.
What exactly is language anyway? Jay Griffith
has called it “the greatest artwork ever made,
created over thousands of years with the
signatures of millions.” We tend to think of
3
language as something we possess and use
like a tool – but this metaphor arises from a
view of ourselves as being in control of our
surroundings. We could just as well say that
language uses us to express itself, confining us
to its definitions and its grammatical rules. The
cold, wet splashing of W-A-T-E-R reached Helen
Keller in her deaf and blind prison, that and
the insistent fingers of Annie Sullivan shaping
sign-language letters into her palm. Language
reached out to her through the sense of touch,
but before she grasped hold of it she had lived
in her own mental place, her own version of
reality unshared by others. Did this mean she
was insane?
Words open the doors of our imagination, out
of nothing they create pictures, inspire dreams
and forge connections. Just as easily they sow
division, refuse to budge, evade precision. We
discuss the shape of reality as though it can be
captured by words, but no matter what we
declare, we will always bump up against the
limits of language. Language tries with all its
might to capture reality but it never can and
never will. It will only ever describe it.
“What sane person could live in this world and
Julia Macintosh
not be crazy?”
(Ursula K. Le Guin)
Let me tell you about the book I’ve been
reading: If This Is a Woman by Sarah Helm.
During the Second World War, Ravensbrück
concentration camp imprisoned around
130,000 women, where of course many of
them perished. In the decades following the
war, Ravensbrück lay behind the Iron Curtain,
and only in the 1990s did Western historians
gain access to its remaining archives and
survivors’ testimonies. Helm’s book reveals
the history of Ravensbrück in painstaking
detail, from the cold cruelty and barbaric
violence of the SS wardens to the awful
misery and acute suffering of the camp
inmates.
From this book I learned an appalling fact:
many of the prisoners turned on each
another in bigoted enmity. Labelled according
to their identifying offense (Jew, communist,
Gypsy, social deviant eg prostitute or petty
criminal) these subgroups were housed
separately and encouraged to compete with
one another for survival. Even in the most
perilous of circumstances, being imprisoned
and starved and tortured by their Nazi jailors,
many of these women still found it possible to
judge and hate and bully one another based
on whichever identifying symbol had been
sewn onto their striped prison uniform. It isn’t
lost on me either – me with my bipolar black
triangle – that people who were mentally
impaired or physically disabled were gassed to
death in their asylums before even making it
as far as a concentration camp.
Those symbols pinned people down like
147
 insects in a museum display case, and reinforced
the idea that reality is singular and categorical,
there to be contained and manipulated. Elie
Wiesel observed of Auschwitz that “In the
concentration camps, we discovered this whole
universe where everyone had his place. The killer
came to kill, and the victims came to die.”
No doubt many people during that time felt
themselves to be living in Hell on Earth, and
witnessing the certain end of humankind. But
then, so probably too did the young men who
died in the Battle of the Somme; the victims of
the Khmer Rouge; the residents of Hiroshima
and Nagasaki, Chernobyl and Bhopal; the
Cherokee Nations tribal people on the Trail
of Tears; the so-called heretics slaughtered in
the Spanish Inquisition; the children shot in
Dunblane, Columbine, Sandy Hook, Utøya,
Parkland.... and these are just off the top of
my head, a few examples among countless
instances of human-crafted atrocity. There is no
shortage of examples of how obscenely vicious
we humans can be, driven as we are by pure
unholy terror. Yet none of it – none of it – is
inevitable. Even Ravensbrück had a hospital wing
where some prisoners were offered treatment
and respite (and yet still others were murdered
by doctors and nurses.) Madness!
Ah now here’s where we get to it: just what
exactly counts as actual madness? We can
have a perfectly rational – albeit sadistic – Nazi
doctor who kicks a woman to death as she
lies prostrate on the ground. How do we
reconcile the out-of-place contradiction of a
healer inflicting injury? Let’s go one further: we
can have a mesmerising – albeit sociopathic –
Führer who manipulates an entire nationful of
people to pursue his implausible scheme of an
Aryan Master Race. But was Hitler insane? If so,
148
why was he not in the queue to be gassed with
the other black triangles? Insanity has more to
do with consensus than with any provable lack
of reality. In hindsight, out of context, we see
Hitler as a madman. At the time, he was voted
into power, supported by a host of minions,
humoured in his whims, obeyed in his orders,
cheered by millions.
Our fear of insanity belies the suffering it could
actually inflict. We are far more likely to be
injured by an aggressive drunk than by The
Crazy Person. Women are far more likely to be
assaulted by a current or ex-partner than by
The Crazy Person. Children are far more likely
to be molested by a priest than by The Crazy
Person. Americans are far more likely to be shot
by an angry young man who can’t get a date
than by The Crazy Person. And believe me, you
are far more likely to die a long slow death of
accumulated poison from household cleaning
products than by any sudden attack by a knife-
wielding out-of-control Crazy Person.
Here we are at the start of the 21st century,
with some appallingly gruesome human-made
tragedies filling our history, and some truly
daunting human-made tragedies ahead of us.
Global warming altering our coastlines and
disrupting our ecosystems, mass extinction
wiping out whole swathes of our biosphere,
plastic and chemical pollution damaging the
food-chain, overpopulation and urbanisation
breeding social disorder and disease, volatile
nuclear power facilities and mismanaged nuclear
waste deposits threatening calamity for the next
however many hundreds of thousands of years...
the bountiful garden we inherited at the dawn
of time is already well on the way to being
trashed beyond repair. Who can save us from
ourselves? May I suggest: The Crazy Person.
“Now I greet you from the other side of sorrow
and despair with a love so vast and shattered, it
will reach you everywhere.”
(Leonard Cohen)
Return with me to the man with the cure for
Multiple Sclerosis. Recall my attention drawn
from across the room and snagged upon his
otherness, recall the cheap-thrill voyeurism
insinuated by my colleague. What is it about
insanity that intrigues and horrifies us in such a
particular way? Is it the idea of losing control?
We dread the thought of becoming helpless
and vulnerable and, heaven help us, embarrasing.
Our social norms keep us safely sequestered in
place and of course, they’ve evolved for a very
good reason: all the better to stay warm, dry,
well-fed and not-eaten, when we can arrange
and predict our surroundings. But what if we
were to turn that voyeuristic focus onto our
so-called reality, would it really be any less weird
or illogical than a psychotic spell? Just because
we operate within a consensus, doesn’t mean
it’s fixed in place. Insanity intimidates us because
it forces us to look in a mirror which we usually
turn to the wall. It demonstrates the flimsy
fragility of the bars on our cage and reveals the
breadth and depth of our power to shape what
we call reality.
Insanity goes by another name: breakdown. It’s
what happens when familiar mental structures
and invisible boundaries come apart, when
the mutually-reinforced reality holding us in
place dissolves into an open sea of disparate
information with clumps of meaning floating
past like buoys. Language, symbols, beliefs,
expectation and self-regulation all dance to a
tune played at a pitch beyond our usual range.
We call this chaos, yet any physicist can tell you
that even a system in chaos follows its own
‘rules’: “within the apparent randomness of
Julia Macintosh
chaotic complex systems, there are underlying
patterns, constant feedback loops, repetition,
self-similarity, fractals, self-organization, and
reliance on programming at the initial point
known as sensitive dependence on initial
conditions.” 4
That could just as easily be a definition of
psychosis. So what can we learn from insanity?
Instead of dismissing it as pathology, instead of
dreading it as an affliction, instead of viewing
it as a perverse curiosity – what can we
learn from it as a natural variation of human
experience that is as valid as any other? What
if the insane person offers humanity a taste
of its potential, rather than an aberration
from which to recoil? What if insanity is actual
magic – no less than the key to our divine
potential as everyday miracle-workers? And
yes, I’m dead serious.
Let me share another page from my book: I
was alone one night in my flat, as my daughter
was spending the night at her dad’s. I took
myself to bed as normal, and at about half
past one I woke up filled with the certainty
that I was not alone in the room. I sensed a
divine presence, around me but also within
me, a layer of consciousness brimming with
intelligence and benevolence. It hadn’t newly
arrived, it was intrinsic to everything around
and inside me; it had always been there, I just
hadn’t ever noticed it, not like this. Think of a
background of wallpaper that suddenly shifts
from an abstract blur to a discernible pattern;
again, we gather up information with our
senses and our mind arranges it with meaning.
Divinity had always been there and at the
same time it only sprang into being when it
was perceived.
149
 Without any logical context, I felt compelled to
get up and leave home. I didn’t know where or
why I must leave, but that was irrelevant. I was
being invited to partake in something beyond
rational. There was no plot or plan, nothing
so specific or agenda-driven as a destination
or desired outcome. It was simply there: an
invitation to respond. And respond I did: my
senses led me out of my flat, eventually to the
airport, and from there to Amsterdam where
I spent several days undertaking a mission
(successfully, I might add) that eluded all
ordinary sense. I don’t have the space here to
describe everything that happened to me but
I can tell you this: it was like picking up a violin
for the first time and playing beautiful music.
Meaning lay simultaneously within me, around
me and beyond me. Like a single violinist in an
orchestra, like a solitary member in a secret
cell of organised resistance, I only knew my
own piece of the puzzle and contributed to the
whole by playing out my one small part.
What I experienced was real but entirely
personal and completely unprovable, and
yes, very much insane. In the flow of a divine
awakening, I felt boundless, expansive and
buzzing with awareness. At the very same
time, in a classic episode of manic psychosis, I
followed perverse threads of logic and took
risks at which an ordinary state of mind would
have balked. It felt sacred, magical, and at the
same time utterly normal; both real and unreal;
as though unknown possibilities hovered around
me in thin air, just waiting to be plucked into
existence. I can only describe what is was like
– and of course it sounds crazy, because it was
crazy. It’s like trying to explain ‘skyscraper’ to
you.
A common feature of the mystical experience is
150
its ineffability. As John Horgan writes in his 2003
book, Rational Mysticism, “Over time, mystical
knowledge came to be defined as that which
transcends language and so cannot be revealed.”
Now what if this became our shared reality?
Would it be any crazier than the reality we
share now, with its mass shootings and chemical
warfare and human trafficking? We shrug
when our beautiful world becomes clogged
with plastic litter and the insidious silent
noise of mass advertising, while we cringe at
the offensive discord of someone talking to
themselves on a street corner. Why on earth
is this?
Climate chaos, system collapse, and the death
of our modern ways of thinking give us clues:
we live in end times. In another sense, ending
means beginning – and on the other side of
the breakdown I see magic, wholeness and
human divinity. I only see this because of what
I have experienced: in the crudest way, I have
died and resurrected; I have walked through
Hell in total isolation, and danced in Heaven in
the arms of the divine. I was as crazy as they
come, and at the same time as grounded as I’ve
ever been. It was extraordinary, and at the very
same time just another experience in a life full
of experiences. I assure you it was composed
of the same material we all work with – what
made it different was that I let go. I let go. I
relinquished my grip and allowed myself to
drop into the W-A-T-E-R, to be swept along in
its current, and to trust that I would be held.
I was held. You are held. We are held, even in
this darkest of times, when our foolishness and
greed, our viciousness and complacency are
coalescing and reaching a crescendo of damage,
danger and despair.
This reality we have built together, with its
horrific episodes of human-authored tragedy,
needs something from us: it needs breakdown.
It needs us to let go and be held. And what is
needed is what happens.
The cracks are already showing Developments
in quantum physics and cognitive science
are overhauling our traditions about what
constitutes fundamental reality and how it
functions. Some researchers, for example,
propose that our brains are always hallucinating
– that hallucination is the actual process by
which our brains navigate our surroundings.
Please stop a moment and take in the
repercussions of this theory: if our minds
operate through hallucination, then how can
we say that one hallucinatory experience
represents reality more than another?
We must take it on faith. We operate in
a mutually-constructed web of symbols
and relationships formed from a million
simultaneous assumptions, like a castle built
of matchsticks. Who’s to say if the insane
mind might not just be the healthy one, a
flint showering sparks of light which could
take down the whole edifice? Einstein said it
best: “Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very
persistent one...”6 and Helen Keller said it even
better: “I proclaim the world good, and facts
range themselves to prove my proclamation
overwhelmingly true. To what is good I open the
doors of my being.... Doubt and mistrust are
the mere panic of timid imagination, which the
steadfast heart will conquer, and the large mind
transcend.”6
So gather up your courage, dear heart, and
approach that dull imposing portico of reality
that sits so stubbornly in your path, its words
woven and meshed into barbed wire fences.
Julia Macintosh
Cross its threshhold and witness the exquisite
interior of the outlandish and the speculative,
with its vivid colours and rich textures
concealed behind an everyday facade. I am
waiting for you, here, in my pyjamas and
slippers, as nurses behind me hand out
prescription tablets and paper cups of water.
And I greet you from the other side, saying
welcome to Doors Open Day.
“When we are no longer able to change
a situation – we are challenged to change
6
ourselves.”
(Viktor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning, 1946)
References
1. Margaret Wheately, Leadership and the
New Science, 2006, p64-6
2. 97 year-old dies unaware of being violin
prodigy, The Onion, website:
http://bit.ly/2HKqgcU
3. Jay Griffiths,Tristimania, a Diary of Manic
Depression, 2016.
4. Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
Chaos_theory
5. A guide to why your world is a
hallucination by Anil Ananthaswamy,
New Scientist 24 April 2017.
6. Quote from Albert Einstein.
7. Helen Keller, The World I Live In, 2009,
p130-131.
151
 Image: Runes by Janet Lees

152
tasks & resources
Tasks
In asking people to respond creatively and
imaginatively to the theme of Climate Minds, we
did not wish to promote or highlight a particular
worldview or approach. There were, however, a
couple of things that we had in our (climate)
minds.
First, we were aware that conversations
about climate change/crisis/emergency are
strangely difficult, even now when there is
almost complete acceptance that human activity
has and is affecting the climate systems of the
Earth – and hence, will affect the future lives of
human and non-human lifeforms on this planet.
Second, we had faith that there are voices,
stories and ideas that could make thinking and
talking about this most sticky and intractable of
issues, if not easier, then more imaginative and
creative. And that these ideas and stories will
be helpful to us (as humans) in working out
how we are to live into whatever future is being
created by and for us.
In this section, we will outline some creative
tasks that might stem from the work contained
in this anthology (though these are only starting
points and there will be much more to say). We
will also highlight some resources that might be
helpful in exploring this further in our personal
and collective journey towards Climate Mind.
Steve Thorp &
Julia Macintosh
Task 1: Talking about the climate crisis
Many people just don’t want to talk about it
very much. It’s the biggest threat we humans
face, and yet conversations in and out of the
media are preoccupied with Brexit,Trump,
Russia or the private lives of footballers and
minor celebrities. This may, as Pegi Eyers
points out in her piece in this magazine,
be due to decades of conditioning by the
consumerist, capitalist empire – and/or it may
be because people are just dead scared and
don’t know how to respond!
There’s an analogy with my (Steve’s) own
work as a counsellor and psychotherapist. In a
therapy room, whatever else is going on, both
the therapist and the person they are helping
are usually agreed that what needs to happen
is a difficult conversation – that is, one person
is helping and facilitiating the other person to
talk about what is most troubling for them –
and this carries a recognition that sometimes
we would rather NOT talk about these things.
The point is that if we choose not to talk
about troubling things (whether experienced
inside us or in the world or both), the trouble
still remains. And as a number of writers here
have emphasised, the crisis is both practical/
political and psychological/spiritual. The
implication of this is that even if we are able,
as a species, to do the practical things that
might alleviate the effects of the crisis, there is
153
 still a deep spiritual malaise at the heart of the
Climate Mind that needs paying attention to.
The analogy of psychotherapy or counselling
might, again, be a good one. The troubled
person arrives in the therapy room asking for
practical solutions to their problems (“give
me the tools to make me less stressed/anxious/
depressed and/or help me to solve this life
problem”), but soon begins to realise that their
problem might be deeper and more intractable.
Perhaps the first task is to have conversations
about climate change/crisis/emergency that
recognise the existential reality of the problem
at all levels – the psychological, spiritual,
ecological, social, economic, political, cultural –
and so on.
Where do we start? Many people begin by
addressing a problem in the world with passion
and zeal as activists. They go straight for the
political jugular. But the nature of politics is
that it is basically oppositional. Where I see
green, another person sees blue, or red, or grey.
Activism – in the way that most of us regard
it – is necessarily divisive, whereas the reality
of spiritual and psychological wellbeing is that
these (and the by-products of happiness and
joy) emerge from connection, collectivism and a
shared sense of ‘common-wealth’.
Once we dissolve the parameters from around
our entrenched positions, we create a space
in a less intractable and more inquisitive form
of conversation may take place. An excellent
guideline has been suggested at Story by the
Throat (storybythethroat.wordpress.com/
tell-ask-listen) whereby dialogue follows the
following rules: 1) Tell your story; 2) Ask a
question; 3)Listen generously.
154
From there we might consider Dave
Hicks suggestions in The Climate Change
Companion. We should, he writes, facilitate
these converaations gently and with curiosity
and compassion, and we can do this anywhere
and anytime – in our families, schools,
communities – even online:
• When I imagine the world we will leave our
children, it looks like...
• One of my worst fears about the future is...
• The feelings about this I carry around with
me are...
• Some ways I can use these feelings are...
Dave takes us on an imaginative, conversational
journey in four questions, that ends with a
suggestion or an invitation to take some action.
Is this enough? Some would say not. If things
are as bad as the worst-case climate scenarios,
we will need much, much more. Others, even
more pessimistically, might say we should just
accept the reality that there is nothing that can
be done except to find new ways of living with
what will come.
Let’s assume that our climate conversations can
take us somewhere? We may not need to know
where, but we do need to have them. Even
those who don’t talk about the problem, are
aware of it on some level or another. Even the
denialists have to consider the issue – and at
least they are having the conversation!
The sustainable change agency Futerra, is
challenging how climate change has been talked
about, and puts forward a different way of
thinking about this task:
“People have been asking for a new message on
climate change. Around the world, wherever we
ask, the answer is repeated again and again.

Steve Thorp & Julia Macintosh

We’ve tested how far to ‘turn up the dial’ on the
problem, showing the threat of climate change
to our children, our lifestyles and our lives.
Doesn’t make any difference. We’ve appealed
to both logic and ethics. It doesn’t shift a thing.
We’ve tried to change values. That just makes
people angry and justifiably so. But one simple
narrative actually makes a climate change focus
group a nice place to be. It cuts straight through
apathy and into enthusiasm”:

vision choice plan action

Start with a vision, and you have people’s

attention; a vision that is visual (imagined in
the mind’s eye), local, desirable and not
tied up with fact and figures: “Put all the
targets together and imagine what the world
would be like if we met and exceeded them:
that’s a vision”.
Then follow up with choices, plans and
actions. These will need to address the hellish
scenarios we are familiar with, but only in the
light of this vision of how we want to live. And
out of all this, perhaps, come the stories...
Task 2: Hearing and telling new stories
Unpsychology Magazine was intended as a
forum for responses to and conversations
about our culture’s psychology – and what
some people call ‘wild mind.’ We recognised
that many of the stories we tell ourselves –
about our development, our dis-ease (of mind
and body) and our relationships with each
other and the Earth – are cultural. They are
also, to an extent, ‘all in the mind’ narratives
created out of a set of conditioned ideas
about what is normal.
Yet as Julia points out in her sparkling essay,
madness might just be the antidote to the
insane ‘normality’ we have been living with
these past few decades.
We need to remind ourselves that many
of our stories are good ones: in relation to
human health and wellbeing, scientific and
artistic endeavour and our understanding of
the world. However these have come at a
great price which we seem unwilling to pay.
Often the people who have new stories of
mind are the poets and artists, storytellers
and singers. That’s why Unpsychology
goes into these cultures, not just into the
psychological communities of professional
helpers. Artists and poets get madness,
because their imaginings bring up aspects
of human (and non-human) mind that are
non-linear, counter-cultural and sometimes
downright surreal.

155
 Perhaps everyone has this creative madness
within them? Maybe tapping into the poetic
and artistic ‘image’ is what we all need, in
order to imagine our way through this stuff?
That was always James Hillman’s message: stick
with the imaginal and don’t get too literal. In
his introduction to the collection of Hillman’s
writings, Blue Fire (1989), Thomas Moore tells a
wonderful story about this:
“A city council asks James Hillman to comment
on its plan to build a recreational lake. Hillman
understands the immediate concerns, but he lifts
the question out of its literal context and considers
the need of this city for moisture of soul. It has
no pool of reverie, he says. It tends to concretize
whatever fantasy comes along. there is little
swimming in fantasy, no fluidity of imagiination, few
authentic aphroditic sea pleasures. The place’s soul
is parched. It needs a more profound and more
subtle water than a lake may provide”.
Our global concern may be far greater, but
the same principle applies. We have a massive
problem that our species has created (and it’s
worth noting Zhiwa Woodbury’s point that the
global warming we are facing now is not the
result of today’s carbon emmissions but those
that were being churned out 40 years ago!) and
we keep reaching for literal, practical solutions
to what just might be an insoluble problem.
“Only a poetic mind could penetrate the
literalism”, comments Moore, and I, in turn,
wonder whether the writers and artists here
know that they might just be the ones who
have the vision to take us forward – the ones
holding the torches that light the way for the
rest of us?
The point is that no-one really knows the
way, but these artists and poets may have the
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courage (or the madness!) to trust that they
can step out into a tenebrous future protected
only by a circle of flickering light. As they walk,
they can invite others to take on the torch – to
write, draw and imagine our Climate Minds.
So what tasks can we set for this imaginal
journey? The idea of archetypal psychology
– the psychology of world, mind and self – is,
writes Moore, “to see every fragment of life and
every dream as myth and poetry”.
And so we might ask:
• What comes to mind / to hand / to body /to
breath / to page when you think of climate
change / crisis / emergency?
• the world’s soul may be parched, and it may
also be drowning – what does this mean to
you? To us?
• what stories would you like to tell about our
future (and our present and past) – this
small, wonderful and overly grandiose human
race of ours?
And so back to my analogy of therapy, for it
is here in the shelter and safety of the healing
space that new stories can be told. Yet this is
only for an hour or so – after we have been
playing with our dreams and our wishes, we
must go out into the world and live again.
And that is both an unbearably hard and
beautifully mad thing to have to do.
Resources

Steve Thorp & Julia Macintosh

In developing this section, we could have produced a list of books and resources on Climate Change and
Climate Psychology. It would have been long – and possibly quite tedious to wade through. Instead we
decided to each write something that reflected our own journeys on the road to the Climate Mind, and
the books and resources that have been important to us. After all, every vision in this anthology is personal
– and we are only going to get to have the imaginative, realistic and creative conversations about this is-
sue, if each of us has faced the climate shadows in our own mind. So this is not a comprehensive overview
– for which we apologise – but we will post a more extensive list of resources for those who would find it
useful on unpsychology.org – go there and click the Climate Mind Resources link.

Julia: for instance his most recent book, The

Like any journey, I have reached ‘climate mind’
through a thousand small steps across many
years. The first milestone for me must surely
have been Erich Fromm’s The Sane Society.
Written in 1955, Fromm essentially defines
modern industrial society as insane. I read this in
my twenties; until then I had mainly read fiction,
but Fromm inspired a taste for non-fiction
which has never abated. To Have or To Be? is
another Fromm title that has meant a lot to me.
Then about fifteen years ago, a friend
recommended Free to Be Human by David
Edwards, which elaborates on the work done
by Chomsky and Hermann in Manufacturing
Consent. The latter offers a Propaganda Model
of political discourse, proposing that mainstream
media conforms to and reproduces the values
of corporate capitalism. Edwards furthered the
model to explore how “the same filter system
distorts our understanding of many personal,
ethical and spiritual issues.”
Jerry Mander’s In the Absence of the Sacred
then fell across my path, and with it his
incredible Four Arguments for the Elimination
of Television. He has also been a vocal critic
of globalisation in a number of projects, as
Capitalism Papers. Mander’s activism with
First Nations people brought Viola Cordova
onto my radar. Cordova was a Jicarilla Apache
philosopher and her posthumous collection
of writing, How It Is, articulates the subtleties
of the North American indigenous worldview.
with its unique ways of thinking about matters
such as time, space and personhood.
Lynn Margulis and Judith Rich Harris also
inspired me greatly with their alternatives to
conventional thinking. Margulis co-developed
Gaia Theory with James Lovelock, based
upon her work as an evolutionary biologist.
Her books include Symbiotic Planet and
Dazzle Gradually, in which she advocates
passionately for the rights of bacteria.
Meanwhile Judith Rich Harris (The Nurture
Assumption and No Two Alike) critiqued our
sacred cows about child development. Both
women challenged male-dominated academic
orthodoxies and weathered significant
backlash for their questioning of received
wisdoms.
Around this time I also discovered Derrick
Jensen. Endgame Volume 1 and Volume
2 herald the end of civilisation as a real

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 likelihood. Jensen positions civilisation as the
manifestation of violence in many forms –
domination and exploitation being its drivers.
Jensen has written several books, but I most
prefer his dialogues with other thinkers and
activists in a series which includes the titles
Truths Among Us, Resistance Against Empire,
and How Shall I Live My Life?
Another writer who, like Jensen, looks collapse
square in the eye is Carolyn Baker. Informed
by her work as a ‘collapse coach’, Baker writes
extensively about facing the dark truths of
our times; carolynbaker.net/books lists her
bibliography, which includes Navigating the
Coming Chaos and Collapsing Consciously:
Transformative Truths for Turbulent Times.
Getting to grips with mortality/collapse (be
it self or civilisation) certainly played its part
in my experience of breakdown. In the wake
of my psychotic adventures, my reading led
me not to conventional work around mental
health but rather brought me full circle to
Fromm’s premise: that contemporary society
is insane, and the experience of breakdown
a fundamentally healthy response to its
dysfunctions.
Books I’ve been exploring on this topic include
Rethinking Madness (Araoz, Alves, Jaworski
eds), Breaking Down is Waking Up by Russell
Razzaque, Spiritual Crisis by Fransje de Waard,
Rethinking Madness by Paris Williams, Cultural
Perspectives on Mental Wellbeing by Natalie
Tobert, and The Spiritual Gift of Madness by
Seth Farber.
I also recommend the Icarus Project, an
online community that situates madness
within a contextual framework of oppression
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and liberation. Their free resource, Madness
and Oppression, can be downloaded from
theicarusproject.net.
Meanwhile Steve brought to my attention
the Spiritual Crisis Network, a group of
practitioners and activists who seek a broader
understanding of psychological crisis. SCN
has also been instrumental in promoting the
work of Phil Borges whose documentary
film Crazywise – crazywisefilm.com –
considers how culture shapes our ideas about
psychological states and what they mean.
And I will end with Rebecca Solnit’s Hope in
the Dark, a beautiful little book which reminds
us that “Paradise is not the place in which you
arrive but the journey toward it.”
Steve:
The climate mind – my climate mind – has,
I realise, become a crucial part of my ‘self ’
(though like all parts of the self, this is not
always fully integrated and sometimes pushed
away!). It has emerged through an evolution
of awareness, resting on the foundation of a
number of voices that, since the early 90s, have
shaped my mind and my life.
Millenium – Tribal Wisdom and the Modern
World by David Maybury-Lewis is a stunning
book of wonderful imagery and quiet insights. It
fundamentally changed my world-view; steering
me towards ecological themes and a view
of indiginous humans as carrying something
essential that modern ‘civilisation’ has lost.
Alongside this, there has always been Alice
Walker’s voice of freedom. Her novels are
fine things, but it is her poetry and essays that
have had the most lasting impression on me, in
particular her collection of ‘Earthling Poems’,
Her Blue Body Everything We Know, with
it’s deep ‘womanist’ poetics and rhythms, and
paeans to her people and the planet:
“We have a beautiful / mother / Her green lap
/ immense / Her brown embrace / eternal / Her
blue body / everything / we know”.
Walker has much to say on our troubled times
in We Are the Ones We Have Been Waiting
For. Here she brings together political, spiritual
and ecological sensibilities in a series of talks:
“I remember distinctly,” she writes, “the joy on
the faces of my parents and grandparents as they
savored the sweet odor of spring soil or the fresh
liveliness of wind.”
Around that time I also came across the voice
of Ursula K LeGuin, and her masterpiece,
Always Coming Home, a gentle, shining book
of hope for what the human race might be
capable of becoming. It has a rare psychological
wholeness and carries a vision of human
sustainability and balance that might be essential
in a world on the brink (perhaps) of ecological
and cultural collapse.
These ‘foundation’ stone books and voices –
along with others like Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy
of the Oppressed, June Jordan’s essays and
poems and Schumaker’s book, Small is Beautiful,
brought me to edge of my own ‘unpsychology’:
the point at which I began my journey as a
counsellor and therapist.
Then new worlds opened: the humanist voices
of Irvin Yalom and Carl Rogers, together with
Jungians Harry Wilmer, June Singer and Michael
Fordham, and particularly James Hillman, whose
book The Soul’s Code has been the single most
powerful influence on my psychological thinking,
on ‘unpsychology’ – and on my climate mind.
Steve Thorp & Julia Macintosh
Hillman’s genius was to bring together the
material, the political, the spiritual and the
psychological in an imaginal frame – one that
elegantly avoids the fallacies of both scientific
positivism, clinical thinking, whilst leaving room
for realism, creativity and joy.
And all the while, an awareness was growing
in me that there was something deeply wrong
in our culture and our world. A growing
shadow that psychology seems to turn away
from. In his book with Michael Ventura, We’ve
Had a Hundred Years of Psychotherapy &
the World’s Getting Worse Hillman sums this
up with a sweep of his arm, “What’s left out is
a deteriorating world.”
The climate mind rests on this truth: that the
reason we can’t get out of the trouble we are
in with therapy, is because, “psychotherapy is
only working on that ‘inside’ soul. By removing
the soul from the world and not recognizing
that the soul is also in the world, psychotherapy
can’t do its job anymore”. Which is a tragedy,
because now is a time when good, deep,
imaginal, connected therapy could be helping
us all through.
When does the ecological mind start to
realise that it must be a climate mind? I
think there’s often a turning point, like for
photographer Joel Sternfeld who recorded
the responses of delegates at the 2005
Montreal Climate Change Conference
(published as When It Changed in 2007) as
the enormity of the truth about the crisis
began to sink in.
For me, there were two seminal moments.
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 The first was when I first read the Dark
Mountain Manifesto with its stark reminder of
how impermanent and ephemeral civilisation
in the shadow of climate change might be: “The
pattern of ordinary life, in which so much stays
the same from one day to the next, disguises the
fragility of its fabric”. We cannot stave off climate
change, say Dougald Hine and Paul Kingsnorth,
just find new stories with which to live with it
into the future.
The second was when I went down a rabbit
hole, discovering the Near Term Extinction
advocates, with their intellectual figurehead
Guy McPherson: guymcpherson.com. It was,
I see now, essential for me to read this, as this
was the moment I realised that the shadow of
climate change needs to be there, alongside all
the other shadows, in the psychology of our
culture and in any self-respecting therapy room.
Since then, it’s been a little easier on my mind.
Work like David Abram’s The Spell of the
Sensous and Becoming Animal have taken
me deeper in the ecological sensibility that
lies at the heart of the ‘climate mind’. Hope
also emerges from the work of Joanne Macy,
in particular her book with Chris Johnstone,
Active Hope; and Satish Kumar, with his eternal
faith in simple ways of living with Soil, Soul
and Society and the ever hopeful Resurgence
Magazine that he edits.
I’ve seen LeGuin’s legacy live on in the work
of Sylvia Linsteadt whose Tatterdemalion,
illustrated by Rima Staines, is visionary and rich.
Other novels by writers like Margaret Atwood
(The MaddAddam trilogy) and Barbara
Kingsolver (Flight Behaviour), and poetry by
Mary Oliver, Helen Moore, David Whyte and
Susan Richardson, alongside many others, have
160
also sustained and nourished my often troubled
climate mind.
The final piece missing, it seemed to me, was
the climate mind itself. There are a growing
number of books and reports on climate
change (increasingly bleak), climate denial
and the effects of climate change on human
psychology (among the best of these being,
What we think about when we try not to
think about global warming by Per Espen
Stoknes, and Margaret Klein Salamon’s report
The Transformative Power of Climate Truth
but few, if any, explore what can be done in
therapeutic and equivalent spaces to take up
James Hillman’s challenge of therapy becoming
something that could make the world better.
The nearest I’ve come to finding this is an
online book written by one of the contributors
to the this magazine, Zhiwa Woodbury. A
therapist himself, he draws on the reality of
climate crisis and threads together a way of
thinking and talking about the climate mind,
he calls Planetary Hospice. His book, Climate
Sense: changing the way we think and feel
about our climate in crisis is essential reading,
I think, for those of who believe that therapy,
albeit the ‘unpsychological’ sort, can be a force
for good in what emerges as our future.
Note: All the books mentioned by Steve and Julia are
hyperlinked: just click on them to find them online.
Image: Storm by Janet Lees

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 contributors
Jenny Arran: At the centre of my practice is an interest in the idea that we are imprinted by the forms and energy
of the landscapes we grow up in or connect to. The work is about the listening and the conversation, the call and
response. Landscape as language, as reciprocal encounter, and as an inner, as much as an outer, place. I studied
Sculpture at Brighton University and at the Slade School of Fine Art and live and work in East Sussex. Website:
www.jennyarran.co.uk

Dr. Irv Beiman’s journey includes: research in stress management, consciousness and climate change; thought
leadership in leadership and strategy execution; and methodological innovation for creating alignment of intention
with purposeful action. He has published research in behavioral science and cost management, plus two books on
strategy execution. His free noncommercial website is a give back. It presents a method for combining movement,
breath and aspirational goals for application to: global warming/climate change/resilience; food/water; health/wellness;
energy/environment; and politics/media. Learn more at: www.ReadyForBetterMethod.com and on Facebook.
Contact: irvbeiman@gmail.com.

Fiona Brannigan is a sustainability professional, mindfulness teacher and artist. She has held a variety of
programmatic and advisory roles in the public and non-profit sectors. She has undertaken a number of research
projects including an investigation into the neuroscience of environmental behaviours. Her current work focuses on
the relationship between wellbeing and environmental sustainability and how contemplative practices and ways of
being such as mindfulness, compassion and insight can help us to make the deep inner transition to a more sustainable
world. Find out more about her work by visiting greenerbetter.org and yourmindfulself.org.uk.

Toby Chown is a writer, poet and dramatherapist. He is author of Haunted Evaporations, a project centred around
12 poems that explore mythic dimension in the everyday, and the links between the imaginal and the ecological. He
works with socially excluded children families in Brighton and Hove, using story, dialogue and action techniques as
therapeutic tools. Toby has lectured on active imagination, the healing poetics of symbolic action and therapeutic
approaches to the Orpheus myth. He is currently conducting research into narrative patterns in the individual therapy
of children affected by parental drug and alcohol problems. Toby believes that gardening is the truest art form. You can
find out at: hauntedevaporations.wordpress.com and listen to his original music at: lupinecollides.bandcamp.com

Rachael Clyne lives and works as a psychotherapist in Glastonbury. She is a popular reader on the poetry circuit.
Her prize-winning collection, Singing at the Bone Tree, is published by Indigo Dreams, and concerns our relationship
with, and loss of connection with the wild. Recent work focuses on family background and relationships. Her work
appears in anthologies and Magazines including: Tears in the Fence, Rialto, Shearsman, Under the Radar, Interpreter’s
House’and Lighthouse: rachaelclyne.com

Elizabeth Cotton is a writer and educator in the field of mental health at work. She writes academically about
precarious work and the impact on our states of mind and is Editor-in-Chief of a progressive sociological journal
Work, Employment & Society. She has recently published the results of a national survey of working conditions in
mental health: www.thefutureoftherapy.org, and a book and free resources for frontline healthcare workers: www.
survivingworkinhealth.org.  She blogs at www.survivingwork.org.

Monica Dragosz was born and raised in the Canadian Rockies, and has been a lifelong child of nature. She is
currently living in the foothills of southern Alberta, Canada and is a practicing psychotherapist. Personal interests in
depth psychology and cross cultural shamanic principles converge with her trauma-informed and somatically-focussed
work with clients. All this and an abiding attachment to wildness recently found a home in the field of ecopsychology,
the study of which she is currently immersed in as both a soul-making and culture-making project. Her website is:
www.monicadragosz.ca

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 contributors
Pegi Eyers is the author of the award-winning book Ancient Spirit Rising: Reclaiming Your Roots & Restoring Earth
Community, a survey on social justice, white studies, intercultural competency, neurodecolonization, nature spirituality,
sacred land, the ancestral arts and the holistic principles of sustainable living. Pegi self-identifies as a Celtic Animist,
and is an advocate for the recovery of authentic ancestral wisdom and traditions for all people.  She lives in the
countryside on the outskirts of Nogojiwanong in Mississauga Anishnaabe territory (Peterborough, Ontario, Canada),
on a hilltop with views reaching for miles in all directions. Website: www.stonecirclepress.com.

C.G. Frederick is a new voice in fiction, using storytelling for a deeper look at our consciousness, universal
connection, and innate potential. She made the controversial choice of loving both cats and dogs (oh, and birds), and
lives in a house that’s full of sunlight, even on a cloudy day. Her first novel In Flames, a coming-of-age story combining
mystery and fantasy, is now available as an ebook. For information, visit www.cgfrederick.com or connect on Twitter
@cgfwrites.

Jane Glenzinska works within the broad lens of ecopsychology as an environmental educator, group facilitator,
researcher, human ecologist. She is a malcontent seeking to effect change through instigating transformative processes
and conversations around redefining our perceptions of sanity, success and soulfulness. She is a grief-tending, dog-
walking, soul-searching, tree -hugging, academi- misfit who writes the occasional something. She is currently offering
courses in Ecopsychology at The Centre for Ecotherapy (www.centreforecotherapy.org.uk) in the South Downs
National Park and Grief Tending Rituals in Sussex.

Dave Hicks: Formerly professor in the School of Education, Bath Spa University, Dave has worked over many years
with students, teachers, educators and others. He is widely recognised for his ability to make complex contemporary
issues more understandable for relative beginners. His current work is a wake-up call to the consequences of climate
change and the leadership schools and communities can offer in helping create a more sustainable post-carbon
future. These matters are refreshingly explored in Educating for Hope in Troubled Times: Climate Change and the
Transition to a Post-Carbon Society and A Climate Change Companion: For Family, School and Community. More
details of these books and other works can be found on his website at
www.teaching4abetterworld.co.uk

Meg Hollingsworth: A scientist by training and artist by nature, Meg has explored and personally processed the
naturally complicated and conflicted human emotional and spiritual response to genocide, global warming, and
species extinction for twenty years. Her graduate work in Environmental Studies focused in restorative justice, grief
studies, and creative communication. In 2012, Meg initiated Extinction Witness, to support those who “live in a world
of wounds” and amplify the compassionate response to human suffering at the root of intraspecies and interspecies
exploitation. Extinction Witness project work has included an eighteen-month revolving creative witness with the
extinct and critically endangered, including languages. Current project work includes Mass Extinction Grief & Creativity
Forum and RIGHTWORK, a series of character profiles exploring rightful work, or what is done naturally, by individual
community members and whole communities for everyone’s benefit. her website is www.meganhollingsworth.com

Margot Lasher is a playwright and psychologist. Her plays include Intake, in which an older woman and a young
psychiatrist face death together; Other Minds, about a journalist and her dog discovering the meanings of safety;
and I Belong Somewhere, which looks at the effects of human war on a small group of people and animals. She is
currently working on a play about climate change from the viewpoint of an octopus and a dog. She lives in Vermont,
US, with her dogs, Shiro and Holly. Her website is www.margotlasher.com

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 Janet Lees is a poet and artist working primarily with text, photography and film. Her poetry has been widely
published and anthologised, and she has won prizes in many different competitions. Her poetry films have been
selected for a wide range of international festivals, including Filmpoem and the Aesthetica Art Prize. The images in the
magazine are from her series Anthropocene Prophecy. She is currently working on a collection combining her poetry
and images. She shares some of her visual work and poetry on instagram: janetlees2001. Her website is janetlees.
weebly.com

Alex Lockwood is a writer based in the north of England. He is the author of The Pig in Thin Air published by
Lantern Books, a hybrid memoir/study of the body in new animal advocacies. He has published widely in both fiction
and nonfiction for The Guardian, Earthlines, Compassionate Man, Zoomorphic, Like the Wind,, SWAMP, The Dodo,
The Millions and more. He has just been commissioned by The NewBridge Project to produce a series of eight
aural narratives that are explorations of our responses to climate change, which you can download and listen to at
shiftandsignal.space. His novel The Chernobyl Privileges will be published by Roundfire Books in 2018. Connect on
Twitter @alexlockwood.

Julia Macintosh grew up in Chicago and moved to the UK in 1997. She currently lives in Edinburgh. Julia has worked
in educational publishing, events, communications and training, mainly across the third sector in Scotland. Spring 2018
sees the launch of her new project, Journal Midwife (www.journalmidwife.com) which supports women in their
personal and professional development through the use of creative and reflective journaling. Julia’s work has appeared
in Unpsychology Magazine, Earthlines and elsewhere. She blogs at: www.juliamacintosh.uk.

Sarah Mahfoudh is a writer, editor, personal trainer and dance teacher, living in Oxfordshire with her husband and
two beautiful little girls. Sarah loves to write about adventures, and hidden mysteries, and magic. Her writing is often
inspired by the ever-changing weather and by rugged, untamed landscapes, and her obsession with the power of
nature and its relationship with people is evident in much of her work. This includes Faces in the Water, a YA fantasy
novel about a people who can talk to and manipulate the elements, and Lily Mae, an illustrated children’s book about
a little girl who controls the weather. Her writing has appeared on the website www.mindbodygreen.com and her
blog: clovesandginger.wordpress.com Her website is: www.sarahmahfoudh.com

Rachel McDonald lives in Shropshire in a small cottage in the grounds of a manor house built for royalty. Her work explores
soul-making, being heartwise, wonder and the gentling of our lives. Contact her b email at: bettygarble@yahoo.com

Zara Mhofu is a full-time educator and existentialist. Her background is in science, education and advocacy. Her
writing is rooted in intersectional and liminal spaces; she writes compulsively and has a penchant for Ray Ban frames.
She has written opinion pieces for The Zimbabwean newspaper on the theme of diaspora activism, expression and
culture. Some of her poetry can be found on her blog (www.zazmho.com), Medium (medium.com/@zazmho) and
more recently on almostwriters.

Emma Palmer: Word-weaving has been an essential part of my life since starting to write poetry at seven. I
moved on to long stories and worked as a junior reporter and book reviewer for our regional newspaper. Long
stories progressed into books and I have authored Meditating with Character, Other than Mother, and Bodywise.
My current foray is into fiction inspired by ancestral events. I’m a regular writer for Somatic Psychotherapy Today
in the US and book reviewer for Psychotherapy and Politics International. I practice as a body psychotherapist,
ecopsychologist, supervisor, facilitator and Buddhist. www.kamalamani.co.uk

Hello, I’m Carissa Tanton, a 28 year old illustrator and tea lover based in North Wales. I fell in love with drawing
whilst living in Paris for a couple of years. I love to travel and I hate plastic. If you’d like to say hello or see more of my
drawings the best place to find me is Instagram, I’m @carissatanton.

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Vanessa Thevathasan is Founder and Director of Between Borders: betweenbordersinternational.org a global

contributors
research organisation connecting forced displacement and mental health. She manages Between Borders’ partnership
platform, the Forced Displacement and Mental Health Consortium (displacementmhpss.org) aimed at promoting
knowledge sharing, learning and collaboration on mental health, psychosocial support and displacement caused by
conflict, disasters, development, and climate change. Vanessa works to facilitate research and co-impact initiatives
between partners and open spaces for public engagement on mental health in crises. Alongside Between Borders,
Vanessa continues her work as a freelance journalist highlighting the impact of armed violence, statelessness, youth-
focused peacebuilding, and sustainable development. She is a board member of Grassroot Diplomat. Vanessa has a
background in Law (LLB, SOAS) and International Relations (BA, Cambridge). Twitter: @BetweenBorders

Ruth Thorp is an illustrator and designer based in Bath. She has a degree in Architecture from The University of
Bath; has published three picture books; created cover art, book illustrations and editorial artwork for a range of
publications; and designed websites and branding for a number of small independent businesses. Inspired by the
natural world, she likes to play with colour, bold graphics and minimalist layouts to create beautiful pieces that
make people smile. She loves coffee, dancing, great design, beautiful spaces, reading and beach walks back home
in Pembrokeshire where she feels most creative! Website: ruththorpstudio.co.uk. Twitter: @RuthThorpStudio.
Instagram: @ruththorpstudio.

Steve Thorp is a writer and therapist. He works in Pembrokeshire offering integral coaching and psychotherapy
– and also provides online coaching and e-courses on soul-making and deep wellbeing. HIs poetry and writing is
published by Raw Mixture Publishing. His books include Soul Manifestos and Pieces of Joy (2014), Soul Meditations
(2016) and Blue Marble (2017). His work has appeared in Earthlines, The Interpreters House, Dark Mountain issue
3 and elsewhere. He edits Unpsychology Magazine.His website is www.21soul.co.uk and you can find more of his
writing on psychology, ecology and culture at: medium.com/soul-making. Find him on Facebook: twentyonesoul

Becca Warner lives in London and is a freelance writer and strategist, working with mission-driven companies and
charities. Her study and writing of poetry - which began during her English degree at Oxford University, but has since
come to life during time spent in the UK’s wild places – has led her through a frustration at the limits of language, to a
celebration of what cannot be said. In words: @beccawarner. In pictures: @becca_warner .
In 140 characters: @beccawarner

Helen May Williams formerly taught at the University of Warwick and has written extensively on twentieth-century
poetry. She runs the Poetry Society’s Carmarthen-based Stanza and offers poetry surgeries and workshops in West
Wales. Her chapbook, The Princess of Vix, is published by Three Drops Press and her full-length book of mainly haiku,
Catstrawe, is due for publication by Cinnamon Press in 2019. She blogs at: helenmaywilliams.wordpress.com and
edits ‘Penfro Poets’ at: poetsandpainters.rhosygilwen.co.uk/poems

Sarah Wint is a gardener and earth lover. She is co-creating a garden on the very south west tip of Wales near St
David’s with the help of her husband William, two donkeys and Gaia. The garden is open to the public and the website
is: www.daisybusgardens.com. Jean Thomas is an artist. Her website is: www.smithyart.com

Zhiwa Woodbury is an ecopsycologist, dharma practitioner, eco-defense lawyer, editor and contributor for
Immanence: The Journal of Applied Mythology, and author of the book CLIMATE SENSE: Changing the Way We
Think & Feel About Our Climate in Crisis. He is also an occasional contributor of essays on the climate crisis for
‘Truth-Out’ independent news. Zhiwa blogs at Ecopsychology Now and you can connect with him on FB at Planetary
Hospice: Overcoming Climate Trauma or the Climate Sense Support Group page.

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 unpsychology magazine

No. 4 - Spring 2018

INFORMATION

unpsychology 4 was edited by Steve Thorp. & Julia Macintosh

Art editor on this issue by Ruth Thorp.
Front, back and inside cover illustrations by Jenny Arran

Feeling the way forward is adapted with permission from Dave Hicks’ book:
A Climate Change Companion: For family, school and community (2016),
which is available now from Amazon and other outlets.

The song lyrics quoted in Bobcat in the watertime are from

It’s been a long time coming, by Sam Cooke, 1964.

Published by Raw Mixture Publishing, 2018: www.rawmixture.co.uk

The Granary, Middle Tancredston, Haverfordwest, Pembrokeshire, SA62 5PX.

If you would like to support this publication through financial contributions, sales or distribution
support, please contact Steve Thorp (see below). No-one gets paid for their work on
unpsychology at present; so many thanks to all our contributors and supporters – and to
everyone who has helped us get to a fourth issue!

Contact and submissions: steve@unpsychology.org

CLIMATE MINDS 2018 and beyond: an afternote by Steve Thorp

Climate Minds is the theme of this magazine, but it will also be the focus of a new
project looking at the (un)psychology of climate crisis over coming months and years.
I’d like the creative responses in this magazine to be the beginning of something – a
conversational movement that addresses the stark but hopeful questions we have
asked here: what is? what might be? and what can be done?
I hope that my own professional community of counselling and psychotherapy will
begin to address the question of the Climate Mind in therapy rooms and other
spaces – and that wider conversations about what climate change (and related crises
and challenges) means to ALL of us, can also take place in communities, schools,
political forums and beyond. This is not something we can afford to be partisan or self
righteous about. To address this issue for our children’s, children’s children we need to
be wise and gentle, consensual and sharing, imaginative and creative – as well as facing
up to the future with resilience and courage.
If you’re interested in being involved in any of this, please contact me, Steve Thorp, by
email: steve@21soul.co.uk

166
 It is late
It is late. I write for freedom –
a word or two on survival.
I write songs for the future
and poems to chart fate.

It is time. To wake up.

To live our dreaming
and face the fearsome truths
we have been storing underground.

It is awful, this truth we have not faced.

Yet, I will dedicate my song to its unravelling.
This is for you, my darling children.

steve thorp
 unpsychology magazine
climate minds anthology
“I drink tea and write about Climate Change. My pen finds its
way to despair swiftly this morning (blood, gore, the shriek of
a lone crow. Tea, that’ll fix it. Maybe cake)”.
Emma Palmer, Faltering, 2018

Poetry, essay, illustration and fiction by

Janet Lees, Helen May Williams, Emma Palmer, C.G. Frederick,
Zara Mhofu, Zhiwa Woodbury, Becca Warner, Rachael Clyne,
Monica Dragosz, Toby Chown, Carissa Tanton, Alex Lockwood,
Ruth Thorp, Dave Hicks, Rachel McDonald, Sarah Mahfoudh,
Jenny Arran, Jane Glenzinska, Margot Lasher, Irv Beiman,
Meg Hollingsworth,Vanessa Thevathasan, Pegi Eyers,
Fiona Brannigan, Sarah Wint & Jean Thomas, Elizabeth Cotton,
Julia Macintosh, Steve Thorp.