GOOD JUMPING-OFF POINTS...

All We Can Save, Force of Nature and Tipping Point are each brilliant climate and mental-health organisations, with lots of resources for learning about and joining communities of action and care, as is the Climate Journal Project (which is largely for young people); The Resilience Project is a similar, UK-based, project that also provides internationally applicable guidance for practical help (see the Resources tab on their website); The Climate Psychology Alliance and The Climate Psychiatry Alliance offer online peer-support spaces and therapies with climate-aware practitioners (as well as directories of therapists); The Good Grief Network has a 10-step support program, avail- able online from anywhere in the world (although it’s not free); Project Inside Out offers a fresh perspective on all of this, encouraging us to process despair by becoming ‘guides’. More academic but still action-based networks include COP Squared, Land Body Ecologies and Climate Cares; Britt Wray’s Generation Dread newsletter has become a brilliant and lively community for the likeminded climate and mental health aware. Gen Dread and All We Can Save also pulled together a list of tips and resources for addressing climate change emotions (see: allwecansave.earth/emotions), similar, but distinct, from the ‘eco-emotions’ guide offered by Climate Cares. (There is more on explicit mental-health support towards the end of this section.)

Organising networks, strategies and toolkits are everywhere. First and foremost, please put this down at the end of this sentence and check out the utterly astonishing material from Beautiful Trouble and Beautiful Rising. The collective skill, experience and love involved, let alone their prodigious output, deserves everyone’s attention. The site, and the books/cards/trainings etc, will point you to organisations all over the world, such as The Resistance Hotline, where activists are invited to call an 0800 number (US), or post questions online for help with nonviolent direct-action tactics, advice and trainings.

There’s also the online repository Community Tool Box, a wonderful Organising School from Tipping Point and Changemakers, as well as online courses from the Workers’ Educational Association. Lots of the ideas covered (and not covered) in this book’s Chapter 10 ‘Remedy’ can be researched further using online platforms like Participedia, Evonomics, The Alternative, and through organisations like the New Economics Foundation and The Democracy Collaborative, especially the latter’s Next System Project, plus Centric Lab and Dark Matter Labs if you like systems work. The likes of Little Sis, the Autonomous Design Group, The CreaTures CoLaboratory and Hacktivist collectives like Guacamaya (who published two tera- bytes of mining-company emails in 2022) are also great sources of practical ideas and possible collaborations.

To learn by doing, together, Healing Justice London hold free, open events online as well as in-person in London, UK, as does the Nigeria-based The Eco-anxiety in Africa Project. Civic Square in Birmingham, UK, is place-based, providing physical space for community visioning and action, plus shareable open-use tools available on their site. In addition to those mentioned in the book, some umbrella groups worth flagging include Climate Action Network, Indigenous Climate Action, the Global Campaign to Demand Climate Justice, Earth Guardians and 350.org. All can help you find local groups, and pointers to others. Generally, community-organising outfits, climate justice and mental health- aware direct-action groups and mutual-aid networks are good to search for (i.e. outward facing, healthy collective action).

For individual and collective mental-health support, the charity Mind (UK) provides supported spaces, online and IRL (see their Peer Support page), as do outfits like the Hearing Voices Network, the free worldwide app Koko, and spaces like #Psychosischat on Twitter. If you don’t know where to look locally, odd as it may sound, it’s worth approaching healthy- looking mental-health communities and organisations on Twitter, Reddit, Instagram etc; Mentally Aware Nigeria Initiative and She Writes Woman provide Africa-wide support. Many of these organisations have lots of useable material on their websites, plus links to other organisations and therapies covering different parts of the world. I have personally found recovery coaching (solution-focused pragmatic, structured help that’s lighter on the hyper-analytical chat) as well as trauma therapy and somatic therapy, immensely helpful. Everyone’s needs are different.

I was helped by learning about liberation psychology, systemic therapies and (cautiously) the whole universe of anti- psychiatry and associated, but often distinct, campaign work of psychiatric patients and disabled allies. The books The Politics of Trauma, Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice, and Pleasure Activism, as well as The Body Keeps the Score, Inflamed: Deep Medicine and the Anatomy of Justice, and Rest is Resistance were of great help. They provided me with safety tips, visioning and drive. For autobiographical insights from inside madness, I also value and recommend (if you’re feeling resilient enough): Jay Griffiths’ Tristimania, Esmé Weijun Wang’s The Collected Schizophrenias and Zoe Thorogood’s graphic novel It’s Lonely at the Centre of the Earth.

If utopias are just for ‘walking’, they nonetheless have immense utility. Real utopian ideas make up an ecosystem of different, inter-related visions that draw us towards systemically better futures. Whether or not they agree on key features is less important than the process of diverse visions contributing to multifaceted experimentation. We learn as we go. These can also help secure our confidence that we are not mad (in the derogatory colloquial sense), but justified in our anger, disquiet and despair. I have been helped by the illuminating ambition and clarity of books like Envisioning Real Utopias, Becoming Kin, Angela Y. Davis: An Autobiography, To Struggle is Human, Mutual Aid (Dean Spade’s and Kropotkin’s), Capitalist Realism, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Black Skin White Masks, Planet on Fire, Half-Earth Socialism, Planetary Politics, Degrowth and Strategy, Endgame, Beyond State Power and Violence, Rules for Revolutionaries, The Three Ecologies, PARECON, The Ecology of Freedom, The Divide, Fully Automated Luxury Communism and Wobblies and Zapatistas. The podcasts Movement Memos, UpStream, For The Wild, Mother Country Radicals, Climate Crisis Conversations, Green New Deal Media, ACFM, and Liberty Tactics are also great sources of inspir- ation, support, comfort and further connection. My fellow activists Tori Tsui and Mikaela Loach both have incandescent new books out: It’s Not Just You and It’s Not That Radical, respectively. Finally, I gained a lot of much-needed and relevant reflective space from Leo Tolstoy’s Resurrection, and NK Jemisin’s Broken Earth series, which I read in hospital. The novels explore themes of moral, economic, ecological, spiritual and emotional justice, from the personal to the universal, and all the inevitable fuck-ups that ensue. We’re only human. See you out there . . .