In the coming decades, humanity is faced with a series of serious challenges that will have a dramatic impact on our everyday life and utterly change our civilisation These challenges include climate change, resource scarcity, economic instability, and bio-diversity loss. The central cause to these problems is the unsustainable economic path we are following which is depleting the natural world, causing a dangerous climate and creating huge social inequality.
How we will collectively manage in the future depends largely how on will we prepare now for these changes and how quickly we can adapt to the forthcoming problems. Our most important collective task is to move to a more sustainable path that is fairer and within natural limits and which preserves the natural world on which we all depend
Prof. John Sharry has been writing on the psychological factors that have shaped our responses to these problems thus far. In his writing he explores how to support a resilient response and positive community adaptation and has written a series of articles on hope and community adaptation. In 2019, he wrote the ‘Changing World, Changing Minds’ series in the Irish Times which explores our emotional response to the climate emergency and biodiversity collapse that surrounds us and in Nov 21 he wrote on how we can overcome inertia.
Part 1: Eco-anxiety
Part 2: Denial and Acceptance
Part 3: Channelling anger
Part 4: Coping with grief
Part 5: Talking to children
The Psychology of Climate Change: Overcoming inertia
John is a member and currently a trustee of the of FEASTA – (Foundation for Sustainable Economics) and also a member of GIY (Grow It Yourself) in his local community. He has published a chapter Cultivating Hope and Managing Despair in the Feasta book Fleeing Vesuvius – Overcoming the risks of economic and environmental collapse as well as the paper below that was presented at the Social Justice Ireland Policy Conference on 19 November 2013. The subject of the Conference was “A Future Worth Living For”.
Read more about John here.