Sorry to burden you with yet more books to read, but…

“Coming Back to Life: Practices to Reconnect Our Lives, Our World”, by Joanna Macy and Molly Young Brown (New Society Publishers, 1998)is a good, practical book that analyses and addresses denial and despair in the face of ecocatastrophe, with many suggestions for work with groups.

It’s a rewrite of an earlier book by Macy, “Despair and Personal Power in the Nuclear Age”, which was published (again by New Society) in the depth of the Cold War in 1983, and is in some ways more relevant to our times because it’s much starker in its acknowledgement of dread at the prospects for our common future.

Macy and Brown identify apathy, an indifference born of fear in the face of impending disaster, and which is characterised by “the deadening of mind and heart”, as the greatest psychological block to action. To free ourselves from it we need to acknowledge our pain for the world (“despair work”); in doing so we will unblock our energy and will emerge stronger and more able to engage in the “Great Turning” towards an sustainable society.

This approach seems more relevant to motivating concerned but depressed people (like me) than to winning over people who are hostile or indifferent to problems of climate change, resource depletion, mass extinction &c.

George Marshall’s excellent “Climate Denial” blog has a good article on the psychology of climate change denial at http://www.ecoglobe.ch/motivation/e/clim2922.htm, drawing on the work of sociologist Stanley Cohen.

Also interesting in this connection is an essay from Primo Levi’s “The Drowned and the Saved” which Marshall refers to, and which can be found at http://www.connexions.org/CxLibrary/Docs/CX5018-BeyondJudgement.htm
Levi, a survivor of Auschwitz, addresses the question of why more European Jews – and others threatened by the Nazis – didn’t do more to flee the coming disaster, and links this to our passivity in the face of the threat of nuclear war (he too was writing in the Cold War era).

Keep up the good work

Jeremiah

I agree with driller that some kind of action phase has to be added to the cycle here. The possibility of improving the long-term outcome differs from the Kubler-Ross description, in that there is a possibility that action could partially mitigate the deadly consequences of oil depletion and climate change.

Unfortunately, right now the nature and timing of any possible action phase is so unclear that I sometimes lapse into thinking nothing significant can be done. This seems to be to be due to certain social limitations of our species.

But the coming “long emergency” should strongly select for those who can cooperate and respond constructively in dangerous circumstances.

Being of a tender age, I would give a dollar (no big deal in 2070) to see a world population below 1 billion.

Getting your End of Suburbia moment caught on You Tube – priceless!

I liked Richard Heinberg’s reference to Elizabeth Kubler-Ross’s five stages of grief but I hope that the reaction to the peak supply will be quite a bit different: What we need is one more step which is “ACTION”. We are lost if people just end up in the stage of acceptance or even one step before: depression.
This is exactly the “shock freeze” issue that ian taylor describes in his comment. Recently the same phenomenon had a long article in Time magazine:
http://www.time.com/time/printout/0,8816,1810315,00.html

(or also:
http://www.time.com/time/printout/0,8816,1053663,00.html )

I know this “we can’t stop doom anyway”-attitude well from my German classmates in the 70′s and 80′s concerning environmental pollution.
Fortunately not everyone agreed and there were people who took action.

http://www.cafepress.com/crashdummy/4002007

I say, “welcome to the [Anger] stage of the Kubler Ross Grief cycle” and then hand them the appropriate button.