ABSTRACT
This chapter talks about ‘therapy thinking’ and climate change, with reference to the question of ‘mainstreaming’ political actions and ideas in this area. It discusses salient aspects of green politics and looks at the political desirability and advocacy of sacrifice in the service of the planet by those able to manage it and set this in an economic context. The snowball of industrialism, Enlightenment and modernity introduced a profound anxiety in European cultural consciousness, to the point of neurosis, over what was being done by civilised humans to the natural world. Between 1500 and 1800, massive doubts emerged over the changes brought about by science and technology in the ways the natural world was perceived. There were many romantic and artistic expressions of this counter-cultural sentiment. Climate change and planetary degradation inspire images of an apocalypse which one would imagine to be horrid, but which may be oddly pleasing and reassuring.
