Publications — AI, People & Planet
https://www.aipeopleplanet.earth/publications

AI, People & Planet

Rapid advances in artificial intelligence not only pose opportunities for biosphere based sustainability, but could also create unexpected social-ecological risks. How can we make sense of both evolving risks and opportunities?

A joint initiative of the stockholm resilience centre at stockholm university, THe beijer institute of ecological economics at the royal Swedish academy of sciences, the Princeton Institute for International and regional Studies and, the Urban Systems Lab at the New School

steffi bednarek

Who needs to change? Reflections on the complex relationship between climate change, mental health and the profession of psychotherapy
https://www.taylorfrancis.com/chapters/edit/10.4324/9781003111511-11/needs-change-steffi-bednarek

What does it mean for the psychotherapy profession that more and more countries declare a climate emergency? In a time of demise of our ecosystem that supports human life on Earth, this chapter explores the role of psychotherapy at this important threshold moment and asks who needs to change – the individual clients we see, therapy itself or the culture at large? The chapter argues that in order to face the climate emergency, change is needed at a scale that goes beyond the personal and individual focus. Climate change is a global systemic problem that affects the whole system. What can the therapy profession contribute to individual and collective processes of change? The chapter suggests that we urgently need to develop ways to re-ensoul a culture that is costing us the Earth. It proposes to widen psychotherapeutic theories and explores the conditions that may be needed to develop a psychology of the environment. As a practical starting point, it suggests reviewing aspects of the profession that reflect problematic ideologies of anthropocentrism and individualism.

TADEAS:

2018 CO-ANXIETY, TRAGEDY, AND HOPE: PSYCHOLOGICAL AND SPIRITUAL DIMENSIONS OF CLIMATE CHANGE
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/zygo.12407

This article addresses the problem of “eco-anxiety” by integrating results from numerous fields of inquiry. Although climate change may cause direct psychological and existential impacts, vast numbers of people already experience indirect impacts in the form of depression, socio-ethical paralysis, and loss of well-being. This is not always evident, because people have developed psychological and social defenses in response, including “socially constructed silence.” I argue that this situation causes the need to frame climate change narratives as emphasizing hope in the midst of tragedy. Framing the situation simply as a threat or a possibility does not work. Religious communities and the use of methods which include spirituality have an important role in enabling people to process their deep emotions and existential questions. I draw also from my experiences from Finland in enabling cooperation between natural scientists and theologians in order to address climate issues.

Library Genesis: Roger Duncan - Nature in Mind: Systemic Thinking and Imagination in Ecopsychology and Mental Health
http://libgen.rs/book/index.php?md5=9262111143135C0BCAB4B1D74785673D

The book compares the work of Gregory Bateson and Henry Corbin and shows how an understanding of the "imaginal world" within the practice of systemic psychotherapy and ecopsychology could provide a language shared by both nature and mind. This book argues the case for bringing nature-based work into mainstream education and therapy practice. It is an invitation to radically reimagine the relationship between humans and nature and provides a practical and epistemological guide to reconnecting human thinking with the ecosystems of the earth.

planetary finance

2018 Finance and the Earth system – Exploring the links between financial actors and non-linear changes in the climate system
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0959378018300360

Financial actors and capital play a key role in extractive economic activities around the world, as well as in current efforts to avoid dangerous climate change. Here, in contrast to standard approaches in finance, sustainability and climate change, we elaborate in what ways financial actors affect key biomes around the world, and through this known “tipping elements” in the Earth system. We combine Earth system and sustainability sciences with corporate finance to develop a methodology that allows us to link financial actors to economic activities modifying biomes of key importance for stabilizing Earth’s climate system. Our analysis of key owners of companies operating in the Amazon rainforest (Brazil) and boreal forests (Russia and Canada) identifies a small set of international financial actors with considerable, but as of yet unrealized, globally spanning influence. We denote these “Financial Giants”, and elaborate how incentives and disincentives currently influence their potential to bolster or undermine the stability of the Earth’s climate system.

- Financial capital plays a key role in economic activities around the world, as well as in efforts to avoid climate change
- We develop a methodology that link financial actors to industries modifying tipping elements in Earth’s climate system.
- We identify “Financial Giants” who through their ownership have considerable influence over climate stability.
- We assess the incentives of “Financial Giants” to collaborate and use their influence to help stabilize tipping elements.

2022 Towards an Ecopsychotherapy
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Towards-Ecopsychotherapy-Mary-Jayne-Rust/dp/1913494128/ref=cm_cr_arp_d_product_top?ie=UTF8

Psychotherapy invites us to tell the story of our human relationships; ecopsychotherapy expands this to include our earth story, the context or continuum in which our human relationships sit. Ecopsychotherapy is not simply a technique to be applied in therapy: it involves a change in perspective. While practising therapy outdoors is a radical shift that can support and facilitate the healing process, it also acknowledges that our relationship with the earth is both inside and outside ourselves. As climate chaos quickens and increasing numbers of people are waking up to the seriousness of our environmental crisis, we are becoming more aware of our dysfunctional relationship with the earth - the body on whom we depend for everything. Ecopsychotherapy can help to support our reconnection with nature and to discover hope in turbulent times.

2015 States of Emergency: Trauma and Climate Change
https://www.liebertpub.com/doi/10.1089/eco.2015.0024

This theoretical paper briefly summarizes some of the current literature on trauma with a particular focus on dissociative processes and trauma's effects on the brain. These developing theories are described as they may relate to working with climate change on individual and collective levels, pointing toward the importance of a cogent understanding of trauma within the context of the climate change discussion

2022 Scorched Earth: Discourses of Multiplanetarity, Climate Change, and Martian Terraforming in Finch and Once Upon a Time I Lived on Mars
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/362245546_Scorched_Earth_Discourses_of_Multiplanetarity_Climate_Change_and_Martian_Terraforming_in_Finch_and_Once_Upon_a_Time_I_Lived_on_Mars

This contribution discusses the current surge of Mars colonization narratives both in science and culture, and the ways these narratives are received and circulated in current ecocritical debates on a multiplanetary future of humanity. This analysis in this contribution takes its cue from the representation of the California wildfires of 2020 as an anthropogenic spectacle that is foreboding of a post-apocalyptic future in which Earth becomes Mars-like, and discusses how this discourse is reproduced in the Hollywood movie Finch and Kate Greene’s popular science memoir Once Upon A Time I Lived on Mars. As texts of quasi-science communication, they produce a contact zone between Earth/Mars which serves to legitimize technoliberal fantasies of terraforming Mars into Earth as a solution to climate change. With all paths to all possible futures of human habitation – utopian or dystopian – allegedly leading right through the Red Planet, there is an urgency to critically engage with the idea of planetarity being overwritten by a discourse of multiplanetarity that veils the continuity of extractivist capitalism/colonialism in a narrative of futurity and progress.

2020 Spiritual Life on a Burning Planet: A Christian Response to Climate Change
https://www.amazon.com/Spiritual-Burning-Planet-David-Bradford/dp/1725282127

Spiritual Life on a Burning Planet draws on scientific research in developing religious perspectives on anthropogenic climate change. Its four chapters are entitled Tolling Bells, Burning Planet, Eschatology in the Anthropocene, and The Downward Passage. Tolling Bells introduces the topic of climate change and several of its emotional and biblical implications. Burning Planet provides an overview of the science of climate change and surveys the effects of global warming on human life later this century. The essays in Eschatology in the Anthropocene develop theological interpretations of climate change and examine its moral, spiritual, social, and psychological dimensions. The Downward Passage focuses on Christ's descent, the harrowing of hell, understood as a point of doctrine and an exemplary image of forthcoming challenges as we advance more deeply into the Anthropocene. A spiritual path suited to the Anthropocene is outlined. Its watchword is penthos, a traditional practice with sufficient power to convey a person through the grief and mourning that represent a true grasp of our having forced the earth into a new geological epoch.

2020 Terrapsychological Inquiry: Restorying Our Relationship with Nature, Place, and Planet
https://www.amazon.com/Terrapsychological-Inquiry-Craig-Chalquist/dp/0367859211/?tag=qrsx7-20

Terrapsychological Inquiry is a qualitative research methodology seeking a form of inquiry that takes seriously our intense inner responses to the state of the natural world. Terrapsychology is a theory and practice approach that studies, from the standpoint of lived experience, how the world gets into the heart. Oceans and skies, trees and hills, rivers and soils, and even built things like houses, cities, ports, and planes: How do they show up for us inwardly? How do our moods, feelings, and dreams reflect what happens in the world?

Terrapsychological Inquiry evolved over a decade of experimentation by graduate students, instructors, workshop leaders and presenters, and other embodied creatives to offer a truly Earth-honoring mode of story-based qualitative inquiry, one that changes all involved from passive spectators of the doings of the world into active, sensitive participants. Learn how to use this methodology of reenchantment in a variety of settings inside and outside academia, and by doing so reenter an animate world.

Written in an engaging and accessible style, this introduction to a new research methodology will be of great interest to students and scholars of environmental psychology, ecotherapy, and environment and sustainability studies more generally.

2016 Ecotherapy: Theory, Research and Practice
https://www.amazon.com/Ecotherapy-Research-Practice-Martin-Jordan/dp/1137486872/

In this thought-provoking book, Jordan and Hinds provide a comprehensive exploration of this emerging area of practice. Divided into three parts, the book offers a unique examination of a range of theoretical perspectives, unpacks the latest research and provides a wealth of illuminating practice examples, with a number of chapters dedicated to authors' own first-hand experiences of the positive psychological effects of having contact with nature.

Whilst the idea of using nature to improve mental and emotional wellbeing has existed for many years, growing levels of interest in holistic, reciprocal relationships with nature have led to the development of ecotherapy as an explicit field of research. This is the much needed academically rigorous, yet engaging, introduction for counselling and psychotherapy students new to the subject as well as experienced professionals wanting to expand their understanding of this fast paced area of study and practice.

Earth Emotions by Glenn A. Albrecht | Paperback | Cornell University Press
https://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/book/9781501715228/earth-emotions/

As climate change and development pressures overwhelm the environment, our emotional relationships with Earth are also in crisis. Pessimism and distress are overwhelming people the world over. In this maelstrom of emotion, solastalgia, the homesickness you have when you are still at home, has become, writes Glenn A. Albrecht, one of the defining emotions of the twenty-first century.

Earth Emotions examines our positive and negative Earth emotions. It explains the author's concept of solastalgia and other well-known eco-emotions such as biophilia and topophilia. Albrecht introduces us to the many new words needed to describe the full range of our emotional responses to the emergent state of the world. We need this creation of a hopeful vocabulary of positive emotions, argues Albrecht, so that we can extract ourselves out of environmental desolation and reignite our millennia-old biophilia—love of life—for our home planet. To do so, he proposes a dramatic change from the current human-dominated Anthropocene era to one that will be founded, materially, ethically, politically, and spiritually on the revolution in thinking being delivered by contemporary symbiotic science. Albrecht names this period the Symbiocene.

With the current and coming generations, "Generation Symbiocene," Albrecht sees reason for optimism. The battle between the forces of destruction and the forces of creation will be won by Generation Symbiocene, and Earth Emotions presents an ethical and emotional odyssey for that victory.

Extraterrestrial Intelligence: Academic and Societal Implications - Octavio A. Chon Torres - Knihy Google
https://books.google.cz/books/about/Extraterrestrial_Intelligence.html?id=3Y6_zgEACAAJ&redir_esc=y

What are the implications for human society, and for our institutions of higher learning, of the discovery of a sophisticated extraterrestrial intelligence (ETI) operating on and around Earth? This book explores this timely question from a multidisciplinary perspective. It considers scientific, philosophical, theological, and interdisciplinary ways of thinking about the question, and it represents all viewpoints on how likely it is that an ETI is already operating here on Earth. The bookâ (TM)s contributors represent a wide range of academic disciplines in their formal training and later vocations, and, upon reflection on the bookâ (TM)s topic, they articulate a diverse range of insights into how ETI will impact humankind. It is safe to say that any contact or communication with ETI will not merely be a game changer for human society, but will also be a paradigm changer. This means that it makes sense for human beings to prepare themselves now for this important transition

Frontiers | Toward a Taxonomy of Climate Emotions
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fclim.2021.738154/full

There is a growing evidence that emotions shape people's reactions to the climate crisis in profound but complex ways. Climate emotions are related to resilience, climate action, and psychological well-being and health. However, there is currently a lack of research about the array of various climate emotions. There is also a need for more integration with general research about emotions. This article conducts a preliminary exploration of the taxonomy of climate emotions, based on literature reviews and philosophical discussion. The term emotion is used here in a broad sense, as is common in climate emotion research. Because of the urgency of the climate crisis and the lack of previous research, this kind of exploration is aimed to be helpful for both practical climate work and for future research which would include more systematic reviews of the topic. Research items which discuss at least five different climate emotions, based on empirical observations, are used as major sources and a table about them is provided. Climate emotions are discussed on the basis of interdisciplinary research. The article considers many aspects of the phenomena of climate anxiety and climate grief.