“Utterly brilliant – engaging, thrilling, disturbing, revelatory, explosive”

︎ George Monbiot, Guardian Journalist & Author of Out of The Wreckage

"This extraordinary book, written with startling honesty and vulnerability, traces Charlie Hertzog Young’s remarkable journey from deep despair to resistance, reconnection and remedy. If you are ready to channel grief within into action in the world, read on." 

︎ Kate Raworth, Author of Doughnut Economics

"Spinning Out is a salve, weaving togetherthe intricacies of madness underscored by the backdrop of a changing climate. It's an essential and insightful resource in the fight for climate justice."

︎ Tori Tsui, Author of It’s Not Just You & Founder of Bad Activist Collective

"This is an utterly necessary book, written into the heart of the moment: so generously intelligent, richly thoughtful, both deftly expert and devastatingly personal."

︎ Jay Griffiths, Author of Wild & Why Rebel?

“Spinning out takes the conversation of climate emotions a notch higher. It is raw, intense and inspiring! There’s so much to learn about diverse lived experience of climate and mental health issues from all around the world. I recommend it highly”

︎ Jennifer Uchendu, founder of The Eco-Anxiety in Africa Project 

“English is not my mother tongue so I beg your pardon if I am not able to express my feelings about this book. We are living in a world where every individual is crushed by the pain of existence and their social, economical surroundings. For us in a country like Pakistan, the pain becomes manifold when we take political chaos, backwardness and rise of Islamofascism into equation. Climate change is also wracking havoc.

Charlie Hertzog Young has brought our stories, stories of people who are never heard in the first world. It is not just an academic or journalistic endeavour. It is also a journey of a person who has not only defeated his sufferings and traumas, but also become a source of inspiration for depressed people of the east. A story from personal suffering to collective deliverance”

︎ Fahad Rizwan, founder of GreenSquad

“Charlie is an inspirational activist, thinker and researcher delving deep into the depths of the climate and mental health crisis that most peopel find easier to ignore. The climate crisis has created a generation in despair without the tools required to cope. This book is brave, creative and utterly necessary for understanding what is happening to us psychologically as a result of climate and societal breakdown.”

︎ Joe Ryle, Director of the Four Day Week Campaign

"This book is a brilliant, compassionate account of the intersection between climate change and mental health, rooted both in a deep appreciation of the indivisibility of psyche and environment and in the author's own struggles. The book spans continents (Mexico, Nigeria, Pakistan) in a wide-ranging and empathic analysis of the traumatic effects of climate change on the lives of those suffering its effects but also takes us on Young's personal journey through madness, despair and grief.

Complex analyses of the toxic effects of colonialism, individualism and and extractive capital are woven together with descriptions of how the permeable membrane that holds each of us safely in the world can be disrupted, breached and shattered by the experience of knowing what climate change is and what it will do.

Hertzog Young's message is optimistic however. He is an activist and a resister and an organiser with a huge breadth of knowledge about the climate movement and a clear view of the pitfalls of burnout and exhaustion.  In his three categories of Resist, Reconnect and Remedy he offers pathways, suggestions and options that are collective, personal and practical.

Anyone struggling to work out how get involved or how to make their involvement sustainable will find much to reassure, enlighten and encourage them. This is a book that deserves to be widely read, borrowed, shared and discussed by anyone who cares about the climate."

︎ Ro Randal, founder-member of the Climate Psychology Alliance

"Above all else, responding to climate emergency is a battle over our minds. Charlie Young had a natural entry point to this perspective through his own experience- and the consequences are radical. If we are able to wrestle and work with our psychology, we may be better able to relate to each other and planet of which we are part. The upshot could be a whole new way of being human. And Spinning Out is a gateway to that possibility."

︎ Anthony Painter, author of Left Without a Future? Social Change in Anxious Times

"It is many decades since EO Wilson pointed out that the problem of humanity lies in the fact that we have palaeolithic emotions, mediaeval institutions and godlike technology. In the time since, the technology has hit the singularity of an exponential growth curve while the human capacity for emotional literacy appears to have stalled. There’s a pretty strong case that this particular combination is what has brought us to the brink of species level extinction. What we need, then, are people of profound emotional intelligence who are willing to embrace and explore the reality of our self-inflicted catastrophe and the impact on our deeper selves.

Charlie Herzog Young is one of these people and Spinning Out is the book our era needs. Written with profound emotional fluency, and excoriating self-awareness, this is an exploration into one man’s walk to the brink of being, and his subsequent shift from unwilling any longer to live in this world to not refusing to live in *this* world. Charlie was always an activist, but what we learn in his roam around the globe to find other people who are walking the same knife edge (although most of them don’t now have two prosthetic legs as a result of their crash with untenable emotional pain) is that the intersection between the climate emergency, the social and cultural crisis and mental health is a place of generative growth. This is not to reduce the pain - nothing in this book flinches from the reality of profound distress - but it does show that it’s possible to take agency in places where that agency has been systematically smothered; that it’s possible to connect in ways that heal when harm has been deliberately inflicted for generations; that community is the seed of renewal and those communities are rising in Nigeria, Mexico, Pakistan - and in the white, western, industrialised world.

At heart, this is a paean to emotional honesty, and it gives us the language we need to acknowledge our own terror in the face of what’s coming, and enough tools to Resist, Reconnect and Remedy. If every politician, media mogul and industrialist on the planet read this - if their children read it and responded with the honesty this requires, our world would change overnight. So read this, and share it, and let’s see if we can move out of the emotional flat line to something we be proud to leave behind." GAP Initial, informal: "'this is absolutely, gloriously, heart-rendingly, heart-stoppingly glorious ... we should get a copy to every single MP. And media outlet. And the heads of industry.”

︎ Manda Scott, Author of the Boudica trilogy & host of Accidental Gods