Conversations about Climate Justice: How do we speak about the climate and political crises of our times and what can group analysis contribute?

The question I get asked most is, what can I do about climate change, as just one individual? And I say, stop being an individual and join a group.

Rebecca Solnit, Not Too Late (2023)[1]

What times are these, in which
A conversation about trees is almost a crime
For in doing so we maintain our silence about so much wrongdoing!

(from ‘To Those Who Follow in Our Wake’ by German poet Bert Brecht, translated by Scott Horton. Written between 1933 and 1938 in Danish exile)

Introduction

Brecht’s poem starts “Truly, I live in dark times” and our times are dark, with constant news about environmental and social disasters, extreme weather events, wars, corporate and political corruption, and terrible human violations and suffering at home and across the globe. There is also an increasing urgency that can feel quite overwhelming.  This text is a dialogue, a conversation begun between Marion and Marci to reflect on why it is so hard to have conversations about climate justice. To explore why we are continuing to destroy our life support systems and ourselves; what we are defending against when we are turning a blind eye to this reality; and how we get to a place where we can mourn the losses already incurred and those to come in this trauma foretold.

Group analysis, as part of psychological practices, is ‘human-centred’: we are concerned with human minds and emotions and the meanings and realities we create together. It’s almost as if the more-than-human world did not exist and we did not depend on it. The denial and disavowal of what our action and inaction are causing seem grounded in a feeling of powerlessness. What can I do, as one voice in a society that keeps consuming and growing as if endless growth were physically possible, and not a destructive fantasy more akin to a cancer than to healthy development? It’s a fantasy I want to believe, because it promises me freedom to follow my desire without having to think about the consequences of my actions.

We asked ourselves, what conversations can we facilitate, for ourselves and with others? Can speaking enable thinking about our fear of dependency and helplessness, our fantastical omnipotence, our disregard for the harm we cause when we act without activating our ‘capacity for concern’ in Winnicott’s words? The current silence on climate justice in group analysis feels like a wall, a wall made up of feelings that remind us that the social unconscious is beyond the control of any one of us, and that our actions are extremely limited by our context.

For us it’s not so much ‘what can group analysis say about climate justice’ but rather, what group conversations can we begin to have ourselves, and learn to facilitate for others? Below we develop two areas for collective conversations as starting points: what can we do with the feelings aroused by climate justice? And how can we face the conscious and unconscious losses and damage? These are only two of the many urgent conversations that we have in mind, and we hope others will join us with theirs.

Beginning where we are

Marion’s journey to climate activism (and admittedly, I am a late starter) has three roots. First, a love of nature and concern for the environment passed on by my mother, as well as experiences of bliss in wild landscapes. Thus, I have been environmentally conscious and aware of climate change all my adult life and have tried to do my bit in different little ways – eating vegetarian, cycling, recycling, reusing and refusing; flying as little as possible; going to the odd protest; and trying to resist the many trends of consumerism. But over the last decade or so, a gnawing mix of anxiety, dread, guilt, and anger has gradually become stronger. And a growing sense that everyone doing their bit wasn’t enough and would not bring about the change we so desperately need. The Paris agreement seemed to give some hope but when in 2018 the IPCC report warned that we had only 12 years to make or break our future on planet Earth, and I felt woken up – there was no more hiding, no more telling myself that it would all be fine. The same autumn, the school strikes movement and the inauguration of Extinction Rebellion with blocked bridges in central London galvanised an intense feeling that it wasn’t enough to be worried and conscious but that I had to get active if I wanted to live with myself and look my children in the eye, and that we needed to stop pretending business as usual was ok. There began my journey into climate activism. This was also a journey of much learning about the intersecting crises that fuel the climate, ecological and social emergency, the links between our racist and colonial past, and our exploitative and abusive present, both towards peoples and planet.

The second strand in my journey comes from my social heritage as a third-generation descendant of Nazi Germany. My grandparents were not directly involved in any Nazi atrocities, but they would probably count as bystanders, those turning a blind eye to the reality that could be seen. I have grown up with what Wilke called the ‘psychic inheritance of guilt, shame and responsibility’ (Wilke, 2007; p.431)[2] when he examined second generation perpetrator symptoms and proposed that our ancestral unprocessed trauma (of being simultaneously perpetrators, and victims during WWII) is passed on as transgenerational transference phenomena. I have often felt an enormous burden of this history, of making sure it will never be forgotten and never repeated. Learning about the concept of the social unconscious in group analysis gave me a language for this sense of guilt and responsibility that has always felt both personal and part of a collective cultural heritage.

I have often asked myself, what would I have done if I had lived through the Nazi era? Would I have stood up, spoken up against crimes and injustice? And I always hoped that I would not have been amongst those who turned a blind eye. But I never really thought I would be put to a test in peace time Europe (well aware that there are atrocities and injustices going on in many countries around the world but feeling powerless to do anything about those). More recently though, I have felt strongly that if there was ever a time to speak up, then it is now, and here.

I feel I must wake up. I must look up. I must speak up. And I am fortunate that for me to speak up is not dangerous, as it would have been for opponents of the Nazis, as it is now for many environmental defenders in the global South. It is uncomfortable, it is hard and most of all it is heart breaking to make myself see with all my heart, mind and eyes what we are doing to the planet and its peoples and the other-than human environment. But I live in comfort and privilege and that makes it even more of a duty to see and to speak up.

There have been examples of psychotherapists and psychoanalysts who have spoken out in the past. Psychoanalyst Hannah Segal is well known for raising the alarm over the threat of nuclear catastrophe where she not only contributed to the understanding of the unconscious destructive impulses and projections, driven by paranoid-schizoid anxieties on both sides of the nuclear arms race. But she also made a plea for the psychoanalytic community to ‘contribute something to the overcoming of apathy and self-deception in ourselves and others’. In her 1985 paper ‘Silence in the real crime’ (words borrowed from Mandelstam’s, Hope against hope, 1971), she warned that the silence of the psychoanalytic community outside of Germany during the Nazi era must not be repeated. She wrote, in words that ring true now:

‘We are at a crossroads. We must try to find means to mobilize our life forces against the destructive powers. To do that we must confront those powers and dangers without denial, hoping that the realization of what we are about to do to ourselves will mobilize our life forces and our reality sense. What role can we, as analysts, play in this tragic drama? I think first we must look into ourselves and beware of turning a blind eye to reality.’

And she urged that ‘we psychoanalysts who believe in the power of words and the therapeutic effect of verbalizing truth must not be silent.’[3]

Where we stand now

As psychotherapists and group analysts, we work with and believe in the power of facing our feelings, challenging our defences, and speaking truth to each other. We trust in the power of groups to enable difficult conversations, deepening dialogue and meaningful discourse across or divides.

Foulkes had hopes for group analysis to better humanity. He wrote ‘that through group psychotherapy mankind (sic) can achieve a better understanding and a more harmonious and less destructive pattern of relationship’ (Pines, 1983)[4]. His idealised way of holding onto a reparative and creative vision was perhaps an antidote to the atrocities and destruction of the two world wars he served in, and the Holocaust, and protection against survivor’s guilt. We are in dire need of a creative and reparative vision now, yet it also needs to emerge from being able to see and to speak about what we want to turn away from.

“Once you know” is a beautiful documentary about one young filmmaker’s waking up to the reality of the climate emergency, and his quest for a way of living with it. He describes how you will never quite be the same once you know, and how you can’t go back to blissful ignorance[5]. So, before we can think about what feelings we are defending against, I believe we must face the truth, we have to know. Here is a fraction of the truth.

Since 2018, consecutive IPCC reports[6] have made clear that we have very few years left to turn things around if we want to avoid climate catastrophe. More and more extreme weather events, in the UK and across the world have demonstrated that the climate crisis is happening now, not in the future, and in many countries across the global south it has long been a devastating reality. Keeping global heating below 1.5 degrees has all but become wishful thinking. Instead, in the words of UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres, ‘we are on a highway to climate hell with our foot still on the accelerator’[7] and may have already passed 5 climate tipping points of irreversible damage[8].

Interconnected with a heating climate and the destruction of our life support systems is a global social justice crisis. Just over half of the cumulative global CO2 emissions since 1750 stem from the last 30 years, mainly driven by the overconsumption and addiction in high-income countries to high carbon lifestyles. The richest 1% of the global population are responsible for more than twice the carbon emissions of the poorest 50%[9]. The impacts of the climate crisis are also unequally distributed, affecting poorer, more vulnerable communities most, both globally and locally, including children, communities of colour, indigenous peoples, and individuals with chronic mental and physical health conditions.

Our exploitative, extractive, globalised economic system fuels both the climate and ecological crises as well as social inequality[10], and continues racist and colonial domination in the global south[11]. Colonialism and neoliberal capitalism have concentrated historic and current wealth and privilege (largely) in the global north but are founded on the exploitation and destruction of those deemed of lesser value – peoples and communities in the global south and the natural environment. Psychoanalyst Sally Weintrobe writes about three forms of climate change denial:

“’Denialism’ (…campaigns of misinformation…funded by commercial and ideological interest)”. ‘Disavowal’ (turning a blind eye whilst minimizing its significance). And “Negation” (the denial of reality to protect oneself from the pain of loss and anxiety)”, (Weintrobe, 2021)

Weintrobe embeds these processes in a ‘culture of disavowal’ – disavowal of our own destructiveness but also of the guilt and pain about our destructiveness at the level of an individual, a group or culture[12]; as well as a ‘culture of uncare and ’neoliberal exceptionalism’ describing a ruthlessly extractive mindset that is driving the environmental collapse.

Structures of power, domination and ideology and their representations in our social unconscious serve as some of the most powerful forms of social control (Dalal, 2001[13]; Blackwell, 2018[14]) and keep hidden what is being done to people and planet. Over the past decades fossil fuel companies and those with a vested interests have systematically hidden the truth about climate change and about the impact our exploitative, globalised system. The environmental columnist George Monbiot[15] has written about the deliberate obfuscation and distortions of the news about climate change by the media.

In this context, it is disturbing that the UK government is attempting to silence and criminalise environmental protests with laws[16] that have led human rights organisations to warn of authoritarian threats to civil liberty[17], whilst these laws also entrench racialised policing and lead to the criminalisation of refugees and minorities[18]. In parallel, judges forbid protesters to mention ‘climate’ in their defence in court, and the government uses defamatory language against protesters, stoking division, and twisting the narrative to blame the messenger and distract from their own failures and contentious policies.

Meanwhile, government are selling new fossil fuel licenses, subsidising fossil fuel extraction with billions in tax money, energy companies are raking in billions in profit without paying tax, whilst environmental laws are watered down, health and education systems are stretched to their maximum, and many are thrown into poverty and hunger, further increasing health and wealth inequalities and societal divisions.

Why do we let them lie to us?

Nitsun (2014)[19] suggests that we ‘turn a blind eye’ to the reality of climate change out of a sense of helplessness. Hopper (1996)[20] views denial as a defence against feelings of powerlessness that arise from ‘increased insight into social facts and forces’, and protection against helplessness related to early annihilatory anxieties. The climate crisis with its increasing global catastrophes may be activating fears of real annihilation and thus act as a powerful trigger of defensive processes.

Disavowal and denial defend us against the guilt and shame that arise because the painful reality is that most of us in high-income White Western countries are benefitting from this system – even though we may not want to. We benefit with our comfort, our privileges, our everyday purchases, whilst feeling powerless to change it – when we buy a new phone or car, strawberries in winter, a garment from Bangladesh, or when we jump on a plane for the weekend. We are caught up in the system, socially unconscious to the ideological and political power structure. But we also turn a blind eye because we don’t want to give up our privileges and we need to defend against the intergenerational pain and guilt from centuries of colonialism, slavery and domination that have largely built our societies’ wealth, and that continue to feed our consumerist lifestyles.

Psychoanalyst and philosopher Donna Orange, drawing on intersubjective and systems theory, suggests that as long as the memories of the trauma of violence and crimes inflicted on others are silenced and remain unconscious, we will continue to repeat and will be prevented from really tackling climate injustice. Orange locates the denial in a ‘shared historical and narrative unconsciousness’ (2017, p.37)[21] about our ancestors’ crimes of slavery and colonialism which leaves us blind not only to our own (White) privilege but also with a distorted perspective that does not see and feel the plight of those suffering from our consumerist lifestyle. She suggests that we cannot tackle the climate crisis until we collectively confront this shared history.

But how do we confront our collective history and our current (in)action? How do we talk about our fears, our sorrows, our anger and our losses and also about our collusion, our privilege, our denial, our guilt and shame? How do we have those difficult conversations in a way that allows compassion, creativity and dialogue? How can we hold on to a thoughtful and compassionate position when the world is getting more divisive, and social stresses fire up unconscious defensive processes?

As psychotherapists and group analysts we have experience in helping others contain and digest overwhelming feelings and experiences, in order to move from defensive reacting to more flexible thinking and acting. We are also uniquely placed to contribute to the understanding of the unconscious forces that are at play in these multiple crises, to prepare for the trauma that is unfolding at a massive scale and enable the mourning of losses already incurred and those to come. Our skills in having difficult conversations, of finding a way of challenging defences and making space for different perspectives is something we can act on.  

Facing Loss and Damage

Loss and Damage is the name of the fund[22] created by the last United Nations’ Climate Conference (COP27) in 2023 to support vulnerable low-income countries to face the unfolding impacts of climate breakdown. The creation of the fund is a first acknowledgement that high-income countries produce the bulk of emissions that wreak havoc in countries with fewer resources, and whose contribution to climate crises is minimal. The fund represents the recognition of the huge inequalities in the causes of emissions (fossil fuel consumption by the richest) and the disastrous impacts on those who consume a tiny proportion of the planet’s non-renewable resources.

What losses and damage come to your mind in relation to the climate? Does it sound like taking climate change seriously means you are being asked to give things up? Stop flying you read. Stop eating meat people say. Check packaging for palm oil. Don’t use your car. Avoid plastic. The sum of all this ‘not doing’ sounds like giving up on modern life, overwhelming in that it affects every area of our lives. It feels like denying ourselves an easy life and it’s easier to be in denial about why others think we should consider these actions.

The notions of abstinence and sacrifice have fallen out of favour in consumerist cultures where all the social norms encourage more acquisition, and to hell with the cost. After all, that is how our production is organised: we take natural goods that are freely available and process them into products we sell at a profit, as Nestlé does with water[23], and the waste created is dumped back into nature – be it toxic sludge from chicken farms or mines. And the fact that our work, products, and consumption are created to be ‘throw away’, to some rubbish dump out of sight, contributes to the feelings of powerlessness and helplessness – how can any of us opt out of our pervasive social system? It feels impossible.

But perhaps we can begin to think about and learn to imagine different narratives, to see with different eyes. Our convenient modern lifestyle is also the leading cause of our mortality. In high-income countries the main cause of death is coronary heart disease. Heart disease is the result of too much food, too much sugar, too little movement. We are dying of ‘affluenza’. More symbolically we might wonder why affluent Westerners die of ‘heart problems’ – how do they link to the anxiety and depression all around us, the loneliness and emptiness of the long-term consumer?

Paraphrasing Marx and Engels, as consumers we ‘have nothing to lose but our chains.’ What if, as Rebecca Solnit eloquently argues[24], we could think not about ‘giving up’ but about a new conception of wealth, a new understanding of abundance? What if we valued clean air more than dying of respiratory illnesses and children suffering chronic asthma? What if we joined up the evidence that shows that being in nature, and being physically active, are two effective ways to prevent a whole range of chronic dis-eases and emotional distress? What if we designed our communal spaces for walking and cycling and not for cars? If your mind went to Amsterdam, where cycling and public transport are the way people travel – the city was gridlocked by car traffic in the 1970s and the move away from motorised traffic had to be chosen over and over. It is hard to hold on to the thought that we can change our environment for the better, that it does not have to be in the interests of a few, but to the benefit of all. We already have the solutions[25] to abandon fossil fuels and lead healthier lives. But we have allowed wealthy minorities to become wealthier at the expense of the collective good and we need to find more ways to revoke our consent to giving a free hand to the market at our expense. As Solnit writes,

‘We are hemmed in by stories that prevent us from seeing, or believing in, or acting on the possibilities for change. Some are habits of mind, some are industry propaganda.’[26]

Surely as group analysts we have a good grasp of how to work with damaging habits of mind. Even if we don’t know what is industry propaganda, we recognise ‘affluenza’, and we encounter the effects of traumatic stress, of social exclusion and violence, of despair in young people who see that humanity is on a path to extinction. We bring people together in groups so that the different voices, the different ways of seeing the world might be expressed and affect each other. Can we do that to include seeing our interdependence with the rest of the living world?

There are many ways of seeing with different eyes, of recognising that our own internal map of the world is not the territory, that the maps we are given by our social context define what and how we see. A concrete example of noticing our assumptions about the Earth is to think of real maps, of our shared pictures of where we stand. I wonder what comes to mind if you think of a map of the world? The first image that comes up for me is a political map, one where nation states are drawn with lines around them; where ex-colonies are recognisable by their straight lines, drawn far from the territory they trace. A political map of nation states is an idea barely three hundred years old. It is a real depiction of power relations in the world that simultaneously hides the physical reality of a complex web of life. Of course these realities intersect: conflict areas on the political map often correlate with power struggles over natural resources. Can we imagine different ways of mapping the Earth? Here’s one different way of seeing our world:

These are bioregions[27]. Do you know what bioregion you live in? And closer to home, do you know where your drinking water comes from, where your food was grown? That bioregions are a ‘new’ way of seeing the world makes me think of Bateson’s words, ‘the major problems in the world are the result of the difference between how nature works and the way people think.’[28]

What losses and damage do I mourn?

I, Marci, was born in a part of the world where the earth is mother, Pachamama, and the mountains are elders and humans are a small link in the chain of life that revolves around the sun. Perhaps this is why I find the idea of the foundation matrix of group analysis to be very culturally specific and somehow disconnected from what I might share with others in terms of unconscious connection. For most of history, and still today, the majority of humanity has shared an animistic sense of the world: that is, that all is alive, and that human beings are part of the living world, not separate and somehow in charge. Marshall Sahlins, an anthropologist who vividly questioned the manufactured scarcity of capitalism by showing that nomadic people living connected to nature had more than enough to sustain a rich cultural life[29] has summed up a lifetime of reflecting on the psychology of economic systems by writing of the value of living in an ‘enchanted’[30] world; where rationality is an attack on linking, an attack on linking human life and the rest of nature.

My understanding of the foundation matrix is that it is the social and encultured understanding of the world that we receive from our context via language and social habits, including our understanding of our place in nature and our relationship to other living beings. The fact that our ‘foundation’ does not include extensive mention of the body and the land feels strange to me. These historically specific ways of understanding myself in relation to my physical self feel rooted in an industrial, urban, over-thinking Western culture where time is money and soil is ‘dirt’.

I am going to define ‘Western’ as frontier pushing, settler, genocidal, dualist, patriarchal, hierarchical power dynamics of domination rooted in a belief that a superior rational way of thinking justifies obliterating other ways of understanding relationships and the world. I feel personally called to unsettle Western assumptions because I was born in the ‘Western hemisphere’, feeling the pull of cultures I was told were extinct while being educated in European values. Much of Argentina’s national identity is based on a conflict between ‘civilization and barbarism’[31], the belief that Europeans were the saviours of ignorant indigenous peoples. I have an embodied sense of what it means to be linked up to the earth – probably my response to a social unconscious that includes the Mapuche, one of the still numerous indigenous peoples of Argentina and Chile who are ‘people of the land’ as they call themselves in their own language. But for me it is a felt sense that has no words, because my education gave me none. I was told in primary school that ‘there are no Indians in Argentina’, when nearly one million people identified as indigenous in the 2010 census, the first time they were asked. I was also in school at a time of military dictatorship, where the ruling generals described their terror campaign of forced disappearances, murder and stolen babies as a ‘National Process for defending Christian, Western civilization’.

What losses do I personally feel? What damage makes my heart ache? I feel the damage done when I can only think of the history written by the conquerors; I feel the losses of all the stories ‘disappeared’ by the winners. More specifically, I feel the damage done by the Western conviction of ‘bringing progress’ and ‘defending civilization’. When it comes to social and climate justice, progress looks to me like destruction and hubris.

I feel the loss of land, as a source of connection to place. There are many personal reasons why rootlessness matters to me, why I yearn for a place that connects me to life. But I have also transmuted that longing into trying to understand how land, and all of nature, went from being ‘commons’ to being private property, and what it means for us now. The fences that line the road for 1,000 kms from the port city of Buenos Aires, where I was born, to the Andean range are the same straight lines of colonial maps. The fences mark the ‘pampas’ – some of the most fertile soil in the world, plains where two harvests grow in a year without irrigation. And what pains me are the great expanses of land owned by very few, excluding of all. Personal, private ownership of land is the root source of inequality[32]everywhere, a tangible marker of accessing resources by force and domination rather than shared use as needed.

The enclosures of common land in Europe[33] contributed to forcing people into cities and into waged work and pushed them to migrate in search of new land. Only in the 100 years between 1840-1946 over 55 million Europeans left for the Americas[34]; it is hard to come by aggregated figures for all those who left Europe after the 1500s to all continents colonised by European countries; but we know the United Kingdom encouraged and forced poor people, orphans and convicts to emigrate to its colonies[35] in their millions. These migrants thrown off their land went in search of new land and in their turn displaced the indigenous people already living in the territories they arrived in. Can connecting to these ancestral losses help us understand today’s migrants and think differently about the lethal barriers we put in their way in Europe?

When I see fences I see displacement and dispossession, and the imposition of a social system based on domination and exclusion and the erasure of the ways of life where people and land were linked. How does this relate to the losses and damage of climate justice? The enclosure of land was a process of dispossession that set in motion a chain of brutal displacement: of the rural poor in Europe, of the indigenous people they pushed off their land, of the African people who were enslaved to replace the indigenous populations that perished of disease and exploitation for European resource extraction. We need to de-colonise[36] our minds by linking up what is known and disowned.

The idea that a few people can ‘own’ nature that now extends to all forcible extraction of natural ‘resources’ regardless of the consequences is deranged. Yet questioning the brutal inequality and commodification of what we all need and none of us created seems absurd in global capitalism – it is the current belief system. Yet as Ursula Le Guin reminded us,

‘We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings.’[37]

The reality of vast monopolies of land ownership damages us all. It normalises the idea that cows out to pasture for a few to eat beef while many go hungry is right when the climate crisis has helped us to quantify that pasture is the least efficient, most unequal use of land. It is good to have new ways of seeing, but we already knew: the destruction of forests in Brazil to pasture cows was the original reason I became a vegetarian in 1985, having glimpsed some of the links between damage far away and social inequality.

I am not suggesting there is an ideal past to return to, that’s not the loss I feel; the loss I want to mourn with others is the damage done by Western ways of knowing and organising human society and my part in it. How I learnt European sociology and the origins of capitalism only to find that many ideas in political economy are ways of justifying pillage and greed; how I was shaped by ideas of economic growth that form current ‘common sense’ but are utterly disconnected from the physical reality of the natural world that it lays to waste with impunity. Economics is a way of looking back and working out what creates capital, that is, profit; and profit is extracted from ‘surplus’ that is not creating abundance, but a dispossession of others’ labour and nature’s bounty. I have been trying to learn new ways of thinking about my part in nature, and how we manage ourselves as humans in the commons that we do not create, but only destroy. How do we learn to use what we need that is within the rhythms of nature? How do we un-learn ‘growth’ as good?

The damage the Western mindset of ‘progress’ is doing is not abstract, but physical and tangible. Are we able to collectively put down our ideas of economic growth and progress? Growth is utterly at odds with the way nature works in cycles of regeneration and complexity and interdependence. Can we bear to lose these ways of being? (I acknowledge ‘we’ is a problematic pronoun, and in this context I am using it to mean White, Western Colonial Capitalism as a set of assumptions about how the world works which can be held by people who do not identify with those descriptors).  Can we bear to see the damage the ‘development’ mindset imposed in the last 500 years on the whole planet does? Can we mourn the loss of ‘being right’? Can we let go of taking natural resources by force by colonising, extracting material and labour by dehumanizing others through slavery, and dispossessing others of their land?

Are we able to question our habits of mind, re-think our system of accounting, so that we think like nature, in cycles and adaptations and regeneration? Timotée Parrique, an economist and critic of growth narratives, felt that the key word in the IPCC Synthesis Report[38] just published was ‘sufficiency’. What is enough? What is enough for me? Can I be content with what is sufficient? And can we create a collective culture where extremes of wealth and dispossession are not acceptable? Can we really look at our consumption as societies and ask what is enough? Can we start conversations that create new narratives of belonging for the rootless individuals of European rationalism (‘westerners’) that connect us to land and life?

Movements of landless rural workers are still active in Latin America, as they have been for centuries. In the 1960s, when land reform was a rallying call in Chile, the songwriter Victor Jara[39] wrote ‘A desalambrar’: ‘let us take down the fences’. He was brutally tortured and murdered for his politics by the Pinochet regime. Are we able to take inspiration from his song and his death to take down fences in our minds? I have found my way into feeling my own experiences of struggling for autonomy and connection through feminist organising and by breathing into and trying to live in the awareness of my body as territory, a way of linking experience brilliantly articulated by Moira Millán[40], a Mapuche weychafe (warrior, guardian). She expresses ideas long buried by European thinking and yet widely shared in Latin America, a reciprocal sense of Earth as mother, and bodies as extension of territory. It is a vision that enlivens me, that reminds me of Solnit’s call:

‘we can and must summon what people facing disasters have: a sense of meaning, of deep connection and generosity, of being truly alive in the face of uncertainty. Of joy.’[41]

Resources and further reading

We are planning workshops and meetings so please get in touch if you would like to continue this conversation with us or would like support to begin conversations where you are. We have referenced a wide range of resources in the article with links. You can reach us via email at: climatejustice@playen.net.

[1] Solnit, Rebecca and Young Lutunatubua, Thelma (Eds) (2023) Not Too Late. Changing the Climate Story from Despair to Possibility. Haymarket Books.

[2] Wilke, G. (2007) The 31st S. H. Foulkes Annual Lecture: Second generation perpetrator symptoms in groups. Group Analysis 40(4), 429-447.

[3] Segal. H (1985), Silence is the real crime. In: Psychoanalysis, Literature and War. (1997) Papers 1972 – 1995. Routledge London.

[4] Pines, M (1983) The contribution of S.H. Foulkes to group therapy, in The Evolution of Group Analysis. London: Routledge

[5] https://www.theguardian.com/film/2022/apr/20/once-you-know-review-must-watch-essay-on-climate-change-that-tells-us-its-already-here

[6]  https://www.ipcc.ch/report/sixth-assessment-report-cycle/

[7] https://www.un.org/sg/en/content/sg/speeches/2022-11-07/secretary-generals-remarks-high-level-opening-of-cop27

[8] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/sep/08/world-on-brink-five-climate-tipping-points-study-finds

[9]  https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/sep/21/worlds-richest-1-cause-double-co2-emissions-of-poorest-50-says-oxfam

[10] Naomi Klein on Climate Justice, https://www.theguardian.com/books/2023/feb/13/its-inequality-that-kills-naomi-klein-on-the-future-of-climate-justice

[11] Weintrobe, S. (2021). Psychological Roots of the Climate Crisis: Neoliberal Exceptionalism and the Culture of Uncare. New York: Bloomsbury Academic.

[12] Weintrobe, S. (2012) Engaging with Climate change: Psychoanalytic and Interdisciplinary Perspectives. London: Routledge

[13] Dalal, F. (2001) The Social Unconscious: A Post-Foulkesian Perspective. Group Analysis, 34(4), 539–555.

[14] Blackwell, D. (2018) Cultural transition, negation and the Social Unconscious. Group Analysis, 51(3), 304–314.

[15] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/oct/09/polluters-climate-crisis-fossil-fuel

[16] https://www.libertyhumanrights.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/Libertys-briefing-on-Government-amendments-to-the-Public-Order-Bill-January-2023-.pdf

[17] https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2023/mar/16/hostile-authoritarian-uk-downgraded-in-civic-freedoms-index

[18] https://www.libertyhumanrights.org.uk/issue/the-policing-bill-what-happened-and-what-now/

[19] Nitsun, M. (2014) Beyond the Anti-Group: Survival and Transformation, London: Karnac books.

[20] Hopper, E. (1996) The social unconscious in clinical work, in Hopper, E. The Social unconscious: selected papers. London: Jessica Kingsley Publishers

[21] Orange, Donna M. (2016) Climate Crisis, Psychoanalysis, and Radical Ethics. United Kingdom, Taylor & Francis.

[22] What you need to know about the COP27 Loss and Damage Fund, https://www.unep.org/news-and-stories/story/what-you-need-know-about-cop27-loss-and-damage-fund

[23] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/oct/29/the-fight-over-water-how-nestle-dries-up-us-creeks-to-sell-water-in-plastic-bottles

[24] https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/03/15/rebecca-solnit-climate-change-wealth-abundance/

[25] Manifesto from Peoples of the Global South https://fpif.org/manifesto-for-an-ecosocial-energy-transition-from-the-peoples-of-the-south/

[26] https://www.theguardian.com/news/2023/jan/12/rebecca-solnit-climate-crisis-popular-imagination-why-we-need-new-stories

[27] https://www.oneearth.org/bioregions-2020/

[28] Bateson, Gregory. ([1972]2000) Steps to an ecology of mind. Germany, University of Chicago Press.

[29] Sahlins, M. (2017). Stone Age Economics. United Kingdom: Taylor & Francis.

[30]  Sahlins, M. (2022). The new science of the enchanted universe: An anthropology of most of humanity. Princeton University Press.

[31] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facundo

[32] Land ownership and inequality, https://www.oxfam.org/en/research/uneven-ground-land-inequality-heart-unequal-societies

[33] https://www.thelandmagazine.org.uk/articles/short-history-enclosure-britain

[34] https://www.nationalgeographic.com/culture/article/160424-refugee-migration-immigration-history-eastern-europe-jews-ngbooktalk

[35] https://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/help-with-your-research/research-guides/emigration/

[36] https://www.greeneuropeanjournal.eu/why-we-need-a-decolonial-ecology/

[37] From Ursula K Le Guin’s acceptance speech for the National Book Foundation’s 2014 Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters.

[38] IPCC Synthesis Report, March 2023 https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/syr/resources/spm-headline-statements/

[39] Victor Jara, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ppcqWpZUrK4

[40] https://lab.org.uk/indigenous-leader-moira-millans-battle-with-benetton/

[41] https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/03/15/rebecca-solnit-climate-change-wealth-abundance/

Marci López Levy is an Argentinian group analyst and sociologist who has worked for many years with social justice movements across Latin America, learning from the ways in which they understand protest and solidarity. As well as convening therapy groups she works in organisations focusing on communication and on developing new ways to facilitate collective learning, creating reflective spaces to support difficult conversations about power dynamics and structural violence. She work in the NHS to link up reflective spaces with recognising collective traumatic stress to bring more psychosocial perspectives to clinical work.

Marion Neffgen is a German psychiatrist and medical psychotherapist working in an NHS psychodynamic psychotherapy service, with a special interest in trauma, and working with groups and individuals. She is an associate member of the Institute of Group Analysis in London interested in harnessing the power of groups for having difficult conversations around the climate and social crises. She has been an environmental activist for some years, with Extinction Rebellion and in her local community, and wants to focus more on organizing reflective spaces for climate conversations.

Marion Neffgen m.neffgen@gmx.de

Marcela López Levy mlopezlevy@playen.net