In this ClimateGenn episode I am speaking with cofounder of the Climate Psychology Alliance (CPA) and author of Paradise Lost, Paul Hoggett. Paul’s book was published in 2023 and is more relevant today than it was a couple of years ago, given the ongoing tragedies and violence we are all being subjected to and forced to respond to.

"There's that kind of coldness, that cold indifference in the face of inhumanity and suffering is something I think has been a very powerful element in the way in which, for example, oil companies and oil company professionals and executives have functioned."

Paul Hoggett - Author of 'Paradise Lost' 2023

For more information visit: https://genn.cc/a-blank-and-pitiless-stare-confronting-the-inhuman/

Paul refers to the work of the poet WB Yeats, in particular, one poem, ‘The Second Coming’ written in 1919 in the aftermath of the first world war. Given its resonance in the context of our lives today, I have pasted below for those who have not read it:

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

Source Wikipedia

I definitely recommend Paul’s book, Pandora’s Box too if you want to explore the issues that we discuss in this episode. I have found it fascinating.

W.B. Yeats – The Second Coming

“The world is as delicate and as complicated as a spider’s web, and like a spider’s web, if you touch one thread, you send shudders running through all the other threads that make up the web. But we’re not just touching the web, we’re tearing great holes in it . . .” Gerald Durrell, 'Catch me A Colobus' 1972.Important Links For This episode:https://durrell.org – find out more about the Durrell Wildlife Conservation TrustOrder 'Myself & other Animals' – https://amzn.to/3KtSePjVisit the main page for this interview on https://genn.ccSign The national Emergency Briefing Letter To Prime Minister Kier Starmer – https://www.nebriefing.org/The quote is from his earlier book, Catch Me A Colobus, published in 1972. Although it stayed with me, I didn’t comprehend it’s true depth and meaning until many years later, by which time Gerry was long gone and his nightmare visions of what we are doing to this planet are more advanced. For a bit of disclosure, I am related to Gerry Durrell via my grandmother, Margo Durrell, as satirised in his books, including My Family & Other Animals. This new posthumous autobiography provides a vivid flashback to the animal obsessed boy, riddled with curiosity and affection for the natural world. However, in this new book, Myself & Other Animals, a serious Gerry also emerges– reflective, at moments melancholy and deeply enraged by the destruction we humans are inflicting on the Earth. Despite his writing these texts in the 1980’s and early 90’s, his commentary is as fresh and relevant today as it would have been then. That’s not to say there is nothing to do – if anything there is far more to do. In this conversation with Lee, we traverse many topics including Gerry’s inner world, his enormous empathy for all living beings, including people, and of course, the fabulous work today of the Durrell Trust, that has worked with over 100 critically endangered species in captive breeding programmes and has rewilding projects going on all over the world, including a young project underway in Scotland.

Activist Clare Farrell’s current framing of the climate crisis– on confronting political paralysis and urging radical collaboration between grassroots movements for a just, democratic response to rising global threats.Hansen In Helsinki (including Clare farrell's interview): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D2abyXGvELI

Main website with transcript: https://genn.cc/clare-farrell-interview/This episode, with Extinction rebellion cofounder, Clare Farrell, was recorded in late October at the ATLAS25 conference in Helsinki, following Dr James Hansen’s keynote and their subsequent discussion. A link to that recording is in the notes.Hansen placed great emphasis on the role of aerosols in masking extra heating from global warming and how recent spikes in the earth’s temperature are linked to a reduction in aerosols over the oceans. He also stressed the need for more research on solar geoengineering citing evidence for how historic volcanic eruptions, not only cooled the planet by reflecting the suns energy back to space but also stimulated carbon sinks creating a greater uptake of carbon dioxide.Here Clare reflects Hansen’s findings as well as on a range of issues emphasising the need for humility in facing the enormity and complexity of the climate crisis. She also stressed the dangers of arrogance or over simplistic binary thinking.