Margaret Klein Salamon

Grief calls climate activists to embrace the most difficult challenge: to fight to save as much life as possible and—hopefully—to restore some of what’s gone.

Margaret Klein Salamon, PhD, is Executive Director of Climate Emergency Fund. She is a clinical psychologist turned climate activist whose work helps people to face the truth of the climate emergency and transform their despair into effective action. She addresses the question of “What Could Possibly Go Right?”

Three leaders of The Climate Mobilization discuss the recent controversy around the New York Magazine piece, “The Uninhabitable Earth” and the role of fear and other emotions in the climate movement. Should we tell the whole, frightening truth? Can they handle it? We argue that, when combined with a potential solution—WWII scale climate mobilization—the truth can be intensely motivating.

As I argue in The Transformative Power of Climate Truth, it’s the job of those of us trying to protect humanity and restore a safe climate to tell the truth about the climate crisis and help people process and channel their own feelings — not to preemptively try to manage and constrain those feelings.

Emergency mode is the mode of human psychological functioning that occurs when individuals or groups respond optimally to existential or moral emergencies.

The Paris climate talks are over, and the postmortems on the final agreement are flooding in. Here’s our take…