Preventing and Healing Climate Traumas - A Guide to Building Resilience and Hope in Communities (Hardcover)

As the new UN IPCC climate report issued on August 9 states, humanity is in the midst of a civilization-changing event. The book will offer hope, inspiration, and a positive path forward to billions of people in North America, the EU, and worldwide who already are, or are certain in the near future, to experience severe mental health and psycho-social-spiritual problems due to being directly impacted by climate change-related disasters, emergencies, and toxic stresses. It will also offer hope, inspiration, and a positive path forward to the millions who are experiencing intersectional traumas, vicarious (or secondary) trauma, and eco-grief (or eco-anxiety) resulting from seeing climate impacts from afar or worrying about what the future holds for their children and them. The book will challenge the thinking and approaches that dominate the mental health, disaster management, and human services fields today by describing why individually-focused clinical treatment, disaster mental health, and direct service programs--which are crisis and illness, not wellness and resilience focused--are woefully incapable of preventing or healing climate change-generated individual and collective traumas. It will also describe a proven empowering and hopeful alternative: a public health and prevention science approach to organizing community-based, culturally-tailored, population-level wellness and resilience building initiatives for relentless adversities in every community and region of North America and worldwide. The book will offer a practical how-to guide that civic, community, and government leaders can use to organize, fund, facilitate, evaluate, and continually improve community-based mental wellness and resilience initiatives that prevent and heal individual and collective traumas and help people find meaning, purpose, and realistic hope even as the global climate emergency worsens.