33: Thinking About Climate Change with Paul Hoggett

Edgy Ideas

Paul brings deep insights into climate change drawing on psycho-social thinking. This conversation explores climate anxiety, climate denial and climate delay, and how we as ‘moderns’ find it very difficult to escape deeply embedded ideas that entrap us. Paul relates this thinking back to our founding myths from Judeo-Christianity that throws humanity outside of the Edenic garden, and outside of nature, and is always looking for external salvation. He reflects that “Us moderns live in a kind of cocoon, continuing in our everyday routines, of living in our comforts, which means that we are able to live in this world, where because of mass media and now social media we know about all these terrible things going on and yet somehow or other remain unaffected”

The conversation moves to how to engage with climate change and the anxieties it raises, and at the same time retain ‘radical hope’. Finally Simon and Paul reflect with caution, on some real changes taking place.

Bio: Paul Hoggett is a psychoanalytic psychotherapist and is Emeritus Professor of Social Policy at UWE, Bristol where, with Simon Clarke, he was a Director of the Centre for Psycho-Social Studies. In 2000, with Larry Gould, he was founding editor of the journal Organisational and Social Dynamics, a forum for those working within the Tavistock Group Relations tradition. In 2012, with Adrian Tait, he founded the Climate Psychology Alliance (CPA) and was its first chair. He recently edited a collection of CPA research papers, Climate Psychology: On Indifference to Disaster (2019, Palgrave Macmillan). Previous books have included Politics, Identity and Emotion (2009, Paradigm) and Partisans in an Uncertain World (1992, Free Association Books).