The One Earth

Tony Cartwright

Book review of Our Only Home: A Climate Appeal to the World by His Holiness the Dalai Lama with Franz Alt

December 2020

I was moved by an interview with the Dalai Lama on Britain’s Channel 4 News the same day this book was published. I have never actually met the Dalai Lama but, as for many of us, it’s like we have, so engaging and well-known is he across the whole globe. People flock to his teaching events. Now he is 85 and has more or less retired to his residence in Dharamsala in North East India. He looked physically older and frailer and I suddenly realised he is mortal after all, so accustomed are we to thinking of him as a permanent world teacher, a sort of planetary father figure.

The Experience of Dreams

Tony Cartwright

Book review of Social Dreaming, Associative Thinking and Intensities of Affect by Julian Manley

March 2019

Timothy Morton described climate change - he prefers the term global warming - as a hyperobject, an example of a phenomenon that is too big and complex for our cognitive and emotional minds to grasp - we are, so to speak, contained in it rather than it in us. 1 If that is the case, I wonder whether we could somehow aspire within ourselves to be more than the human subject we assume ourselves to be - a hypersubject, as it were. We might then begin to understand something of this ‘hyperobjective’ universe of which we are an integral part. Perhaps the experience of social dreaming is a good place to start, somewhere we could begin to realise that liberated sense of self we need to understand and combat the ecological crisis that so alarmingly besets us.

The Map and the Territory

Tony Cartwright

Book review of Gaia, Psyche and Deep Ecology: Navigating Climate Change in the Anthropocene by Andrew Fellows

August/September 2019

In this detailed, impressively comprehensive book Andrew Fellows, as his title suggests, writes about the integration of psyche and planet - particularly urgent now in this age of the Anthropocene - by documenting and exploring the correspondence between James Lovelock’s theory of Gaia, Jungian Analytical Psychology and the perspective of Deep Ecology. He is also very aware, as both a trained physicist and Jungian analyst, of the importance of bridging the gap between the two cultures of science and the humanities, which underlies the problematic dualisms of much of our thinking - spirit/matter, mind/ body, nature/culture, individual/society, etc;

Fire and Falter

Tony Cartwright

Book review of ON FIRE: The Burning Case for a GREEN NEW DEAL by Naomi Klein and Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out? by Bill McKibben

October/November 2019

Klein and McKibben are two of the most prominent and passionate climate warriors today. They have both published books this year. Klein’s On Fire is both an urgent warning and a call to act. McKibben’s Falter is a call to act but also an elegiac warning that we may not achieve the goal. But he also insists this is no time for either simple hope or hopeless despair but for out-and-out engagement.