EECO Team: Jenny Freeman, Merle Conyer, Akansha Vaswani-Bye and Peggy Sax
Featured Resource
Regeneration
We want to highlight various initiatives and resources that can help you and your clients answer the question, “What can I do?” – no matter how big or little – to respond.
Toward Storying a Life-Sustaining Future
“Climate change (global warming) is just a symptom, like a fever, and not the disease itself. The underlying problem is the ecological emergency, the destruction of our ecosystems, the destruction of our home.” Dr Linda Theyer GTEC reader
Considering ourselves ‘citizen therapists,’ part of a ‘global citizen’s movement,’ we are called to jump outside of the box of ‘business as usual’ practices, to invite awareness and engagement. In these changing, challenging times, how do we find ourselves responding? What frees us from immobilizing feelings or denial, what sparks generative action? We, our clients, and our communities can contribute to the kinds of transformation needed through our circles. As we awaken from ‘the disconnect,’ the trance of the eco-cidal, what does it mean to be eco-sourced instead? Let’s explore counter-stories, liberative narratives, visions of possibility and engagement.
Tuned into our natural surroundings, as we breathe into the work of our times, we find each of us has stirrings and unique gifts to offer. What calls us? What do narrative and collective narrative practices offer?How can we open spaces for inspired resistance, effective protest, regenerative action? Let’s connect with wider circles of environmental and social justice responders. Marginalized and liberative narratives uplifted can shape a world that’s life-sustaining for all and all species. Earth’s calling invites gratitude, grief, curiosity, creative courage, connectedness, fierce love! Here we are!
Getting Inspired
Latest from one of our NT community
David Page is the founder of boycottpollution.org. He retired from the San Francisco Department of Public Health in 2015 after a career as a therapist/social-worker. Since then he’s been active in various anti-pollution efforts.
Around the world, our narrative colleagues are speaking up and taking action. Here are some illustrations:
- Questions for our Times: Narrative responses to climate change by Jenny Freeman
- Eco-Narrative Practices: Re-Storying Our Relationship with the Earth by Ken MacLeod (End of Year Project Paper)
- Narrative therapist, writer and activist Merle Conyer interviewed by Nicole Gruel
- Supporting regenerative activism” group using The Tree of Life with Merle Conyer in Australia (Youtube video and further description are in the EECO Playlist):
- Psychotherapy Networker Blog with Jenny Freeman
- Climate Change, Mental Health and Collective Action: An Interview (Akansha Vaswani with Jennifer Freeman)
- Climate justice and mental health – Think globally, Panic internally, Act locally
- The Rise of Eco-Anxiety by Lauren Docket (P
sychotherapy Networker) - Taking Care to Change Trajectory: Exploring an integrated process of Collective Narrative Practices and Strategic Sustainable Development Masters Thesis
- The Seventh Story: Counter-stories to The Big Six (a Francophone gathering of coaches and therapists working with narrative ideas)
- From our colleagues in Canada, Arden Henley, Mary Kean, and Colin Sanders, here is the Green Technology Institute Reader with free access online. A note from the editor Mary Kean: “I hope you and your colleagues will subscribe with the objective of building out our international village.”
Resources for Our Envisionment and Activism
“A racist system that values some lives over others creates the sacrifice zones that fuel climate chaos. Only by ending that system can we create a new economy that prioritizes the health of all over the wealth of a few, an economy that doesn’t depend on destroying the ecosystems that humans and wildlife need to survive.” Hop Hopkins, Sierra Club
Organizations for Professionals
Training
For us, our clients, and communities
- The Work that Reconnects
- Good Grief Network
- Queer EcoJustice Project
- Climate Cafe
- Climate Coaching Alliance
- One Earth Sangha
- How to talk to kids about climate change
- Boycott Polution
Books
- Active Hope; How to face the mess we are in without going crazy, by Joanna Macy and Chris Johnstone
- more by Joanna Macy et al
- Choosing Earth by Duane Elgin
- Climate: A New Story by Charles Eisenstein
- Journey to Earthland: The Great Transition to Planetary Civilization by Paul Raskin
- Regeneration, Paul Hawken, audiobook
- Blessed Unrest: How the Largest Movement in the World Came into Being by Paul Hawken
Articles & Blogs
- What causes are you called to?
- Work that Reconnects
- Various, Hop Hopkins, Director of Organizational Transformation for the Sierra Club
- But the Greatest of These is Love Mary Heglar
- Embodying the Climate Crisis and Climate Stress Lives in the Body by Emily Wright
- Climate Psychology Alliance primer
- Australian Psychological Society. 101 things you can do to help address climate change
- How to Stop Freaking Out and Tackle Climate Change New York Times
Podcasts
- Indigenous Insights Healing Land and Sky
- Dismantling white supremacy to address the climate crisis: Leah Thomas & Hop Hopkins at The Sierra Club.
- Climate Anxiety: How to Turn Worry into Compassionate Action with Renee Lertzman
- Bayo Akomolafe, eco-philosopher, on sacred activism, post-truth and reality
- Climate Change and Happiness with Thomas Doherty and Panu Pikhala
- Climate Conversations: (Climate Psychology Alliance)
Videos
- Leah Thomas, on The Intersectional Environmentalist: How to Dismantle Systems of Oppression to Protect People + Planet.
- New York Times Climate Change Collaborative Climate Action for Exponential Change
- Nature is Everywhere: we just need to learn to see it: TED talk by Emma Marris
- For teens: to talk about Climate Change
Music videos: New river theme
- River under the River by Ma Muse
- Dotan – Let The River In – Dressing Room Sessions
- Ibeyi-River https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lHRAPIwsS5I
More Music
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February 21, 2021 Collab Salon: Community-based Practices as Response to Earth’s Environmental Crisis and Opportunity
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March 29, 2020 SPECIAL Collab Salon: Together Enduring COVID-19
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February 16, 2020 Collab Salon: Narrative Ideas for Inspired Responses to Earth’s Environmental Crisis
What do narrative approaches have to offer these wild, uncertain times? How can we contribute? Can ceremonial and community practices…
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