{"id":22883,"date":"2010-02-18T20:04:26","date_gmt":"2010-02-19T01:04:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/?p=22883"},"modified":"2010-02-18T20:04:26","modified_gmt":"2010-02-19T01:04:26","slug":"ecopsychology","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/daily-astrology\/ecopsychology\/","title":{"rendered":"Ecopsychology"},"content":{"rendered":"

From The New York Times Magazine<\/a><\/p>\n

Albrecht\u2019s 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 \u201cInterface Between Psychology and Global Climate Change.\u201d 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 \u2014 seven out of eight were scientists who specialize in decision research and environmental-risk management \u2014 as well as the document\u2019s stated purpose. \u201cWe must look at the reasons people are not acting,\u201d Janet Swim, a Penn State psychologist and the chairwoman of the task force, said, \u201cin order to understand how to get people to act.\u201d<\/p>\n

Yet all the attention paid to the behavioral and cognitive barriers to safeguarding the environment \u2014 topics of acute interest to policy makers and activists \u2014 disguised the fact that a significant portion of the document addressed the supposed emotional costs of ecological decline: anxiety, despair, numbness, \u201ca sense of being overwhelmed or powerless,\u201d 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 \u201cecopsychology.\u201d<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

From The New York Times Magazine Albrecht\u2019s 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 \u201cInterface Between Psychology and Global Climate Change.\u201d News-media … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"generate_page_header":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22883"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=22883"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22883\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=22883"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=22883"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=22883"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}