ABSTRACT
I conclude with a collection of hopefully inspiring, and a couple of warning, stories, illustrations and quotations from beyond the confines of my thesis, and then summarise the main points established through my research. The focus of the latter is the transformative metanoia that I have insisted from the outset is a necessary, though not of itself sufficient, step towards navigating climate change and other challenges of the Anthropocene as safely as is now possible. An inherent difficulty with a holistic, non-dogmatic worldview is that it can be difficult to convey succinctly, and some aspects of the Psyche–Gaia conjecture in particular are highly speculative. I rely on the notion of consilience to establish as robust a position as can be credibly achieved by pulling together strands of thought and insight from all of the disciplines I have touched upon, together with my own ideas. When gathered together in this way, it also becomes apparent how many social, cultural and academic taboos they break, which suggests that strong defences to maintain our dysfunctional status quo operate, perhaps unconsciously.
