Transformational Resilience: How Building Human Resilience to Climate Disruption Can Safeguard Society and Increase Wellbeing - Softcover

Doppelt, Bob

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1783535288 ISBN 13: 9781783535286

Publisher: Routledge, 2016

Synopsis

This book calls on all climate programs to expand beyond emission reductions and physical adaption, to focus on assisting individuals and groups to learn skills to use the adversities caused by climate change to learn, grow and flourish. It urges mental health, education, and faith leaders to expand beyond post crisis-treatment to emphasize building preventative personal and psychosocial resilience skills. Failure to proactively help people deal constructively with the harmful mental health and psychosocial impacts of climate disruption will seriously impair the safety and health of individuals as well as the security and social wellbeing of organizations, communities and whole societies for generations to come. It will also delay or completely block efforts to reduce the impacts of climate disruption to manageable levels.Doppelt begins by describing how natural human psychobiological reactions to the traumas and toxic stresses generated by climate disruption damage the psychological, emotional, and social wellbeing of individuals, organizations, communities and whole societies. Using numerous examples, including his own organization's Transformational Resilience program, the author describes methods and skills that may be used to build capacity within all levels of societies to avoid self and socially harmful reactions and use the traumas of climate change as catalysts to find new meaning, direction, and hope in life.Using the author's extensive experience of advising public, private and non-profit sectors on using behavioral and systems change knowledge and tools, this book applies an important new perspective to the question of how to successfully respond to climate change.

About this title

Review:

"Doppelt is right. Young people have been dealt a bad hand, but there is no merit in hand-wringing or blaming others. We still reside on the planet of most remarkable life and beauty. We must use the challenge of preserving this for future generations to overcome any feelings of regret or despair."--Dr. James Hansen, Professor, Department of Earth and Environmental Science, Columbia University, Former Head of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies

"The planet--and all of us who ride on it--will go through the crucible of climate change in the next decades. How we respond--as individuals and societies--will shape the world to come, as surely as the rising oceans. Here's one recipe for making that response constructive and generous."--Bill McKibben, author of "Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet"

"While most companies are now taking action on climate change in some form, very few are actually preparing their workforce and their communities for the impacts of climate change. Doppelt provides the first ever tool for organizations and communities to do the hard work of pursuing the type of culture we will need in an era of climate change. I hope that organizational and community leaders will heed his advice!"--Keya Chatterjee, Executive Director, US Climate Action Network

"At a time when individuals, communities, organizations and others are already struggling with the emotional impacts of stressors from climate disruption, which are only on the increase, this book is a timely intervention. With the populations with whom I work who disproportionately suffer from loss of life, livelihood, home and hearth and who suffer from cultural erosion, the teachings in this book are critical to our efforts to strengthen local resilience. Taking the reader from deep work on individual resilience to ways that organizations, communities, and society can work collectively, this is a critical resource for us all in this time of increasing climate crises."--Jacqui Patterson, Director, Environmental and Climate Justice Program, NAACP

"Climate change impacts all of us in ways we might not be aware. Bob Doppelt s book on Transformational Resilience pinpoints that impact succinctly and offers solutions in order to build resilient communities, nations and globally. Written clearly and with great understanding for the challenges we will face whether we like it or not, the 'Resilient Growth Model' allows us to explore choices and options to be fully prepared. Resilience can be learned by the individual, the community, and for all of us having a human experience." --Cheryl S. Sharp, MSW, ALWF, Senior Advisor for Trauma-Informed Services, National Council for Behavioral Health"

"In this exceptionally important work Bob Doppelt appeals to the head and the heart as he urges us to face the science and the emotions needed to respond to climate change - and to the deeply traumatic psychological changes they bring to us individually and to society. But he doesn t stop there. A true teacher, he shows us that we have the capacity to channel the power of our minds, drawing from our deepest and most powerful cores - to heal our personal wounds and the planet with a renewed capacity for fundamental change through Transformational Resilience. Open the book like I did to begin an essential journey." --Dr. Lise Van Susteren, Psychiatrist,Center for Health and the Global Environment at Harvard Medical School and The National Wildlife Federation "and co-author: "The Psychological Effects of Global Warming in the United States" ""

Now the work to do in the face of climate chaos, and the proper uses of mind and will, become refreshingly clearer, as Bob Doppelt respects us enough to assume we want to face the music--and thereby find our greatness and a future. I learned a lot from this excellent book and hope it will be read by millions. --Joanna Macy, Scholar of Buddhism, Founder, The Work That Connects and author: "Coming Back to Life: Practices to Reconnect Our Lives, Our World""

About the Author:

Bob Doppelt is Executive Director of Resource Innovations and the Climate Leadership Initiative in the Institute for a Sustainable Environment, and Courtesy Associate Professor in the Department of Planning, Public Policy, and Management at the University of Oregon.

About this edition

• Publisher: Routledge
• Publication date: 2016
• ISBN 10: 1783535288
• ISBN 13: 9781783535286
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 368