In the somewhat amateur video above ecopsychologist Sarah Edwards discusses psychological responses to our growing awareness of climate change and environmental catastrophe. The video discusses ‘The Waking-Up Syndrome‘ that transposes the stages of grief from Elizabeth Kubler-Ross’s work with dying hospice patients onto those of us who are beginning to understand that we are living through another kind of dying. I present the video here more for the discussion of these nonlinear and nondiscrete stages in order to emphasise the impact of environmental catastrophe and the discourses and media surrounding it on our mental health- for want of a better term. The discussion of practical responses is very limited oriented as it is to local practices and changes in consumer behaviour. While those may be part of any program of psychic survival it is clearly not enough on its own. Below I will also include a short-clip of an interview with Theodore Roszak, founder of ecopsychology, in order to give some idea of where this discussion is coming from rather than to endorse any idea of ‘the ecological unconscious’.

So- given the effects of our mental health, and given that these effects are likely already playing out, what strategies are available to us for coping? Are the tools of ecotherapy enough? Are they open to modification and embedding within minimalist survival programs and/or the possibility of an ecologically oriented revolutionary movement? Alex Smith of Radio Ecoshock repeatedly talks of many of us undergoing a pre-traumatic stress disorder. What does it mean for the response to trauma to precede the trauma? In this perverse logic of wounding it seems as though we are fated to either a kind of depressive paralysis or a rushing denial of the situation. Our task is to navigate the space of possibility between these two regions, but this is only possible if we are able to deal with the ecopathologies facing us.