Skip to main content

Gratifying Transitions

Maintaining Wellbeing in the Face of Climate Change

Gratifying Transitions cover

Gratifying Transitions

Maintaining Wellbeing in the Face of Climate Change

Description

Concerns for future human wellbeing play a central role in climate change debate and policy making but have received scarce attention in climate change ethics. Gratifying Transitions: Maintaining Wellbeing in the Face of Climate Change remedies this by considering whether and how we can live a good and satisfying life under constraints caused by climate change. Drawing on behavioral psychology and theories of self-cultivation, the author argues that green transition requires that we work actively with wellbeing, as moral beliefs, knowledge about climate change, or new understandings of the relationship between humans and nature are unlikely to bring about the necessary changes in behavior. Contrary to a widespread view, the author further argues that subjective wellbeing rather than basic needs satisfaction is the most appropriate notion of wellbeing for addressing climate change issues. The book contains both detailed philosophical arguments and concrete guidelines for how to foster a transition to more sustainable, but still sufficiently rewarding, ways of living, individually as well as collectively.

Accessibility Information

Additional accessibility information

  • EPUB 3.0
  • Conforms with the requirements of EPUB Accessibility Spec v1.1
  • WCAG level AA
  • WCAG v2.2 compliant
  • accessibility@bloomsbury.com

Hazards

The publication contains no hazards

Support for non-visual reading

  • No accessibility features offered by the reading system, device or reading software are disabled or otherwise unusable with the product
  • Has alternative text descriptions for images

Visual adjustments

Appearance of the text and page layout can be modified according to the capabilities of the reading system (font family and size, spaces, as well as color of background and text)

Navigation

  • Page list to go to pages from the print source version
  • Elements such as headings, tables, etc for structured navigation
  • All or substantially all textual matter is arranged in a single logical reading order
  • Content is enhanced with ARIA roles to optimize organization and facilitate navigation
  • Purposes of all links are made clear

Rich content

Language tagging provided

Table of Contents

Chapter 1: Introduction
1.1 The role of wellbeing in responding to climate change
1.2 Wellbeing and change
1.3 Wellbeing, motivation and action
1.4 Views on the relationship between climate change, climate action and wellbeing
1.4 Why not gamble on green growth?
1.5 Why not just politics?
1.6 Wellbeing for whom?
1.7 An interdisciplinary, philosophy-driven approach

Chapter 2: Life in the Future
2.1 The ubiquity of change
2.2 Change for better or worse?
2.3 Going through changes
2.4 Quantity and quality of change
2.5 Living with climate change
2.6 Living with mitigation

Chapter 3: A Theory of Wellbeing for Green Transition
3.1 A plethora of theories and a provisional assessment
3.2 Problems with subjective wellbeing? Immeasurability, growth ideology and adaptation
3.3 Virtues of subjective wellbeing
3.4 Growth ideology and individualism?
3.5 Why not a needs approach?
3.6 Genuinely basic needs?
3.7 Adaptation for good and for bad
3.8 Richer and poorer lives
3.9 Getting the most out of it: Cultivation as the key?
3.10 Putting it together: A theory of wellbeing for green transition

Chapter 4: Living with Change
4.1 Remaining, losing and becoming yourself
4.2 The shape, meaning and management of life
4.3 Temporal styles and agents of change
4.4 Keeping the good things alive – variation as the key to wellbeing?
4.4 Values and impacts of personal change

Chapter 5: Shaping behavior: Self-control, cultivation and emulation
5.1 The bad news: How not to change behavior
5.2 The (somewhat) better news: How we might change behavior
5.3 Limits of behavioral design
5.4 Bildung to the rescue?
5.5 Getting it right: Bildung and the situationist challenge
5.6 Bildung and behavior change as social process
5.7 Return of the environmental humanities?

Chapter 6: Acceptable Transitions
6.1 Only soft interventions?
6.2 Goodbye to liberalism?
6.3 Harm and sustainability
6.4 Learning from the pandemic
6.5 Realism, but not too much: Balancing feasibility concerns and the role of hope
6.6 Moral aesthetics
6.7 Unjustified interventions?

Chapter 7: Changemaking: Gratifying transitions and strategies for green transition
Coda: Living with change in an uncertain world

References
About the Author

Product details

Bloomsbury Academic Test
Published Jan 22 2026
Format Ebook (Epub & Mobi)
Edition 1st
Pages 240
ISBN 9781978764149
Imprint Bloomsbury Academic
Series Key Issues in Climate Change and Sustainability: Ethics, Politics and Policy
Publisher Bloomsbury Publishing

About the contributors

ONLINE RESOURCES

Bloomsbury Collections

This book is available on Bloomsbury Collections where your library has access.

Related Titles

Environment: Staging