Why climate cafés are needed now more than ever
As a new season of monthly Climate Cafés commence in Lewes, co-facilitator and member of the Climate Psychology Alliance Guy Gladstone considers why a safe place to explore and share our thoughts, feelings and concerns about climate change is now so critical.
“Anything strange?” This was how Tommy Jennings, an upright old man with weather-beaten features, would greet me whenever we passed each other. That was 30 years ago on a bog road in County Mayo, the West of Ireland. He would give me a piercing look, as he was reaching out to be informed. I knew that day by day very little changed in his lonely bachelor life, but for sure he was alert to the slightest changes in the weather and what that meant for his land and the animals thereon.
Had I then known about the significance of the climate crisis for patterns of weather and remarked on the need for citizens and their governments to act, he would assuredly have chatted on for half an hour. And best of all, he would have regularly interjected, in supportive astonishment: “Well, why wouldn’t you?!”
So when will the storms and floods that we are increasingly experiencing become a central preoccupation of daily life? When will they become a central conversation among both strangers and friends and family? Fast forward 30 years, as our grandchildren struggle in the planetary ruins of life on earth, will they not ask us: How did you talk about this? Didn’t you see it coming?
The climate predicament
Today – unless the person you are speaking with happens to be an activist or perhaps a nature lover – a sustained conversation about the Climate and Ecological Emergency will more than likely be most unwelcome and cut short by a change of subject. Anything strange? Note, this is exactly how power and business as usual wants it to be.
The truth is that the Climate and Ecological Emergency is becoming such a profound existential threat that the anxieties it evokes are extremely unsettling. Why? Because the continuance of our whole way of life here in the UK and other “developed” economies can no longer be taken for granted. Greening the shopping list, avoiding plastic and taking the bus or train rather than getting into the car (even the electric one) simply doesn’t cut the mustard, even as we reassure ourselves we are doing our bit. Alternatively, we might blame others or project the problem into the distant future.
Is the Climate and Ecological Emergency a problem? Dougald Hine points out in ‘At Work in the Ruins’, that it’s actually a predicament. A problem can be fixed and then it no longer exists. A predicament is something you have to live with.
In a growth-fixated world – financialised, debt driven and in the grip of capital – the representatives of governments and the scientists bringing the facts for them to consider are paralysed by lobbyists from Big Oil and Big Agriculture. The outcome of the annual COP Climate Conferences is ‘symbolic policy making’ i.e. a set of practices designed to make it look as if the political elite are doing something while yet again doing next to nothing.
The 29th session of COP has just gone by, the goal to keep global warming within 1.5 degrees of pre-industrial levels is now dead in the water. The Ship of Fools is now on course to sail past the critical 2 degrees warming threshold set at COP in Paris 2015.
A space to talk
How do you feel reading this? The minimisation, the greed, the narcissistic individualism; our ambivalence, our complicity, our endless distractedness. Surely a space is needed to talk about these trends?
Here I am homing in on a collective evasion within everyday life. As people around you scurry to and fro, propelled by business as usual, in siloed communion with their hand-held screens, maybe you view yourself as an outsider. Or perhaps as someone bearing the burden of climate concern, you might more aptly consider yourself an insider.
The main contemporary defence against the Climate and Ecological Emergency is known as disavowal. The term refers to a split between knowing and feeling what that knowledge means. With a merely intellectual knowledge there is little motivation to act. Motivation requires emotional connection. Where the Climate and Ecological Emergency is concerned this is likely to involve fear, grief or anger. To bring thinking and feeling together a secure container is needed.
Telling the Truth
Enter the Climate Café, where facilitators support an active listening circle where anyone can voice their true feelings about the predicament we face safely, supportively and without judgement – whether it’s fear, helplessness, anger – or even tentative hope.
The Climate and Ecological Emergency is a double crisis, both an objective crisis and a crisis of subjectivity. The Climate Café addresses the latter. Extinction Rebellion’s first demand of politicians and the media is ‘Tell the Truth’. What about us in our own backyard – isn’t this equally imperative? Can we not speak our truth with each other? “Well, why wouldn’t you?!”
Climate Café – Winter/Spring 2025 dates
All Climate Cafés take place at the Studio at Depot Cinema, Bar & Restaurant on Pinwell Road, Lewes. There’s no need to book – but if you have any questions, call Guy on 01323 891097.
- Tuesday 21 January, 6.30pm-8pm
- Tuesday 11 February, 6.30pm-8pm
- Wednesday 12 March, 6.30pm-8pm