BOOK REVIEW
in
Health, Fitness & Dieting
November 11, 2026
From Avoidance to Agency: Synthesizing Psychotherapy and Wisdom Studies to Address Climate Inaction
by Dr. Dave MacQuarrie, MD PhD
Book Browse Reflection
MacQuarrie’s professional formation is unusually suited to this synthesis. He practiced as a physician-psychotherapist for roughly 25 years while pursuing a PhD in Wisdom Studies, and his work explicitly bridges psychology, spirituality, and culture.
In psychotherapy, the clinical task is to help a person notice defensive patterns—denial, avoidance, blame, numbness—and develop a more honest relationship with difficult feelings. In Wisdom Studies, the task becomes broader: to ask how insight, compassion, responsibility, and contemplative awareness can guide individual and collective life. MacQuarrie’s book joins these aims by arguing that climate inaction is both a symptom of personal avoidance and a cultural failure of wisdom.
Acedia is the conceptual hinge between the two fields. In therapeutic terms, it resembles a cluster of defenses: fear, resignation, procrastination, self-pity, and self-righteousness. In wisdom terms, it is a failure of discernment and authentic engagement—a turning away from reality when reality is painful.
This lets MacQuarrie avoid two reductive explanations:
• A purely clinical explanation, which might treat climate paralysis as individual anxiety or depression.
• A purely moral explanation, which might condemn people as lazy, selfish, or irresponsible.
Instead, he treats avoidance as understandable and protective, while insisting that people must still transform it if they are to act responsibly. The psychotherapeutic movement in MacQuarrie’s work is inward: identify the feeling, name the defense, tolerate the discomfort, and recover choice. The Wisdom Studies movement is outward: once people can face their own fear and grief, they become more capable of responsibility, compassion, and action in the world.
That sequence matters. MacQuarrie does not argue that people should simply be pressured into climate action. He argues that guilt, alarm, and moral condemnation often intensify avoidance. A wiser response begins with psychological honesty: acknowledging fear, grief, helplessness, and self-protective blame before trying to convert them into engagement.
Reviewed by Book Critic Claire Kim