From The New York Times Magazine
Albrecht’s philosophical attempt to trace a direct line between the health of the natural world and the health of the mind has a growing partner in a subfield of psychology. Last August, the American Psychological Association released a 230-page report titled “Interface Between Psychology and Global Climate Change.” News-media coverage of the report concentrated on the habits of human behavior and the habits of thought that contribute to global warming. This emphasis reflected the intellectual dispositions of the task-force members who wrote the document — seven out of eight were scientists who specialize in decision research and environmental-risk management — as well as the document’s stated purpose. “We must look at the reasons people are not acting,” Janet Swim, a Penn State psychologist and the chairwoman of the task force, said, “in order to understand how to get people to act.”
Yet all the attention paid to the behavioral and cognitive barriers to safeguarding the environment — topics of acute interest to policy makers and activists — disguised the fact that a significant portion of the document addressed the supposed emotional costs of ecological decline: anxiety, despair, numbness, “a sense of being overwhelmed or powerless,” grief. It also disguised the unusual background of the eighth member of the task force, Thomas Doherty, a clinical psychologist in Portland, Ore. Doherty runs a private therapeutic practice called Sustainable Self and is the most prominent American advocate of a growing discipline known as “ecopsychology.”
There are numerous psychological subfields that, to one degree or another, look at the interplay between human beings and their natural environment. But ecopsychology embraces a more revolutionary paradigm: just as Freud believed that neuroses were the consequences of dismissing our deep-rooted sexual and aggressive instincts, ecopsychologists believe that grief, despair and anxiety are the consequences of dismissing equally deep-rooted ecological instincts.
From my Masters thesis at Naropa University linking ecopsychology to archetypal astrology:
Ecopsychology is a term coined by Theodore Roszak in his 1992 book, The Voice of the Earth, meant as an appeal to environmentalists and psychologist for dialogue regarding the human-nature relationship. An interdisciplinary approach to the interrelated issues of environmental destruction and human psychological well-being (Roszak, 2002, p.1). It is a psychological theory that seeks to understand and address the maladies and/or psychopathologies associated with the human psyche’s disconnect from the natural world. Through the principles and praxis of ecopsychology one can begin to explore their own story as a journey toward reuniting spirit, soul, and the natural world. In so doing, the ecopsychologist gains insights and skills to assist others in their personal effort toward psychological wholeness.
Astrology becomes a useful tool for the ecopsychologist who relies on depth psychology and earth-based healing modalities to enlighten the search for meaning and a way forward in these somewhat desperate times. Ones cosmology directly impacts their ability to overcome the modern state of alienation created by the industrial growth society. Astrology can offer a cosmology that integrates the individual into earth’s seasons and rhythms in a particularly personal way (through birth chart analysis) that is also connected to the collective through world transits and generational archetypal dynamics.
Much of this is covered in Tarnas’ Cosmos and Psyche, but also in the collected works of Jung and Hillman. While not specific to astrology, the archetypal dynamics Jung and Hillman describe should inform the astrologer’s analysis of planetary aspects.
Thanks for the discussion! The field is only a couple of decades old and emerges from Transpersonal Psychology, which is also less than 50 years old. We’re all grabbing for language and philosophy that unifies while building a paradigm that could offer a sane way froward out of the existing chaos of our times.
Lorrie
Excellent post, thank you Eric.
David Abrams is another name that comes up – ‘The Spell of the Sensuous’ is a worthy read.
I’m not surprised some of this thinking is coming out of Portland – the city planning and open space officials have very coherent plans for maintaining a relatively high level of landscape health (for an urban area). I did some work for them, evaluating potential open space land acquisitions for ecological health and/or restoration potential.
There’s a threshold of connectivity that will shift everything for all of us – I think we are just beginning to understand it.
Half De Witte- I’ve considered your comment about Native Americans myself. I learned within the last year that the super abundance Europeans found when they arrived here and assumed was untamed wilderness left to waste by natives was actually an ecologically balanced permaculture oasis from sea to shining sea where forests and gardens were woven into a seamless web of life. I think after what Europeans and their descendants did to the civilization that thrived here until we attempted to wipe them all out in a genocide that would have made Hitler proud we at least owe them the right to have substantial input on how to repair the damage we’ve done to our world.
Empires are lucky to survive a couple of centuries because they have no concept of Saturn: enough is enough. So then Saturn comes crashing in when, as in Rome all the people you pissed off with your arrogant expansion, intrusion into their lives come and cash in their grudges all at once. In contrast the civilization of Turtle Island maintained human culture in harmony with its environment for over 10,000 years. That is, until Columbus unleashed the flood of racism and arrogance that I believe is the uncorking of the bottle of repressed desires festering for centuries under the hateful gaze of the absolute autocracy (at least in public) of the Catholic Church.
One very simple thing I learned from Native American traditions could free American farms from the need to get government subsidies to sustain the horribly wasteful and destructive aggro-culture practice of growing nothing but corn or soybeans in vast fields of uniformity that have to be artificially fertilized.
The trick is what they called the Three Sisters: corn, beans, and squash.Instead of chemical fertilizers (which are related to the war industry- nitrogen is the key ingredient-) you plant beans that use your corn stalks to climb. The beans also give nitrogen to the corn because they fix nitrogen to the soil which corn needs in abundance to grow. To save water in the hot growing season and repel certain pests you plant winter squash whose large broad leaves shade the ground and prevent moisture that falls from evaporating quickly while their spiny vines repel many pests that would otherwise terrorize your corn and beans. Of course you couldn’t harvest these kinds of farms with giant combine machines, but then a whole bunch of small farms is a lot more energy efficient than growing all our food out in the countryside where few people live and then trucking it into the city where it’s already starting to loose vitality by the time it reaches the distribution warehouse let alone the grocery store.
wandering_yeti the discipline has remained largely a corpus of theoretical perspectives. I suspect that this is because of our cognitive grounding in the traditions of the Enlightenment – i.e. exemplifying our Western roots. This is why the needle gets stuck on analysis, interpretation and comprehension – our endemic psychopathology.
It would probably be beneficial to remember the alive-and-well Shamanic traditions that have an unbroken heritage of many thousands of years practice based upon the core ‘ideal’ that health amounts to balanced relationship between all living things. It’s funny that this view that all things are connected seems like an archaism we need to re-discover when it has been there all along – but we suppressed it.
I can just see the U.S. Government eventually approaching the Native American population and asking if they can show them the blueprint! Not all contemporary situations are amenable to such cross-cultural perspectives. But ritual is largely a swear word in our ‘rationality’. Enactments have become detached from meaningful contexts.
The basic ideas of Ecopsychology are not new. But the challenge will remain one that Jesus outlined when he lamented metaphorically the attempt to place new wine in old wineskins. The issues of transformation are to be understood on a vibrational level rather than on one where we continue actively to affirm the Enlightenment project; retaining it alive and well with a few tweaks.
Most people do not know how to maintain a sustainable balance between a garden and a wilderness and this is where we need a perspective radically discontinuous from our Western dis-ease.
If we merely focus on healing interiority then we miss the point and replicate the schism. The issue is one of alignment per se, or at core. This is not the approach of acquiring spectacles to restore faulty vision that we may adjust and so retain our insane values – it is about retrieval of something lost and a decision not to lament the fact that we are in darkness while we continue to choose to live in a cave.
I’m not sure we are ready for the key ritual, the ‘Ecopsychological’ activist punchline…..
“Lazarus, come forth!”
Len: Yes.
and there are others….. for years I searched out thinkers who knew about this dynamic, they do exist…. interesting this interface between the individual and planetary bodies is now getting a respectable voice. I hope that does not mean the sounding of a death knell as it so often seems to….. forgive me, I am quite quite cynical about certain things.
this is a fascinating development. One of the things I appreciate about Eric and PW is that such items routinely show up here.
😉
Two words: Gary Snyder
“to understand what it is to be whole, we must first explain what is broken.”
Wilhelm Reich already did some primary research on this which is published in a book called The Mass Psychology of Fascism. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mass_Psychology_of_Fascism
“Suppression of the natural sexuality in the child, particularly of its genital sexuality, makes the child apprehensive, shy, obedient, afraid of authority, good and adjusted in the authoritarian sense; it paralyzes the rebellious forces because any rebellion is laden with anxiety; it produces, by inhibiting sexual curiosity and sexual thinking in the child, a general inhibition of thinking and of critical faculties. In brief, the goal of sexual suppression is that of producing an individual who is adjusted to the authoritarian order and who will submit to it in spite of all misery and degradation. At first the child has to submit to the structure of the authoritarian miniature state, the family; this makes it capable of later subordination to the general authoritarian system. The formation of the authoritarian structure takes place through the anchoring of sexual inhibition and anxiety.”
I submit that the breaking of our head’s link to everything below the neck, in particular clear sensations in our genital regions is the internal state that corresponds with exterior behavior that is no longer informed by its direct contact with our environments but only by the noise generated by alpha mammals controlling the flow of propaganda through the media technology available. Basically when you’re armored you can no longer feel the truth of the connection between the stuff of our bodies and the stuff of the “environment”. Put a human in a vacuum and it pops. Human includes many other life forms that we can’t do without, in particular plant life and the whole web if interrelated critters and fungi that sustain them. From the ideas I get out of the article it seems like the people researching this are still blinded to the broken inner connection, the nitty gritty physical reality of frozen muscles holding emotional postures long after a traumatic experience. They talk about restoring the connection between people and “nature” but they miss the physical level of the interior all together. You don’t get out of the armor by changing the way you think. You have to remember how to breathe, then how to sense your whole body from the inside out. Then the connection is no longer a theory but the stuff of the universe in which you live move and have your being.
Yes…in the years long process of learning to relax enough to calm the storm of thoughts aroused by the noisiest human civilization ever I went through a phase where the sound of cars that add up to an incessant hiss audible almost everywhere in a big city caused anxiety, like I could feel the planet burning. My practices have deepened in the years since then so I don’t get overwhelmed so easily, but yeah, of course our bodies (geniuses who have been cultivating their craft for billions of years) know what our fear of relaxing (the actual result of holding onto a fear of death) is doing to the planet. How could our bodies not be aware of the largest mass extinction going on right now that has no equal during the past 65 million years? Especially when it’s our own species committing the murders. That’s got to be part of why so many people are afraid to turn off the TV, get out of the car and feel the ground under their feet. This is why I’m trying to spread the practice of Taiji Chuan and Qigung to as many minds as I can. They develop sensitivity and grounded attention at the same time so that you don’t flip out from all the horror going on when you relax your armor. If techniques of breathing and internal sensitivity were more widely known we’d have a much healthier society because more people would be able to pause, take a few deep breaths and ground themselves to prevent emotional eruptions that cloud judgment and lead to wars, little or big. The wars outside in the world’s theater are sustained by the wars inside. Taiji is an ingenious way of undoing the wars inside.