Ecopsychology (1995) is a collection of essays, edited by Roszak, Gomes, and Kanner, focused on ecopsychology, a new field at the crossroads of ecology and psychology.
A Psychological Foreword by James Hillman
[psychology is] the study or order (logos) of the soul (psyche) (xviii)
The cut between self and natural world is arbitrary. (xix)
The “bad” place I am “in” may refer not only to a depressed mood or an anxious state of mind; it may refer to a sealed-up office tower where I work, a set-apart suburban subdivision where I sleep, or the jammed freeway on which I commute between the two. (xx)
[J.J. Gibson locates] memory as much in the world as in the interior brain of the subject. Landscape affords information to an animal; it is not simply stored in the mind. (xxi)
We cannot be studied or cured apart from the planet. (xxii)
Where Psyche Meets Gaia by Theodore Roszak
Neither ecological nor psychotherapeutic problems can be fully solved, if at all, within the boundaries defended by the nation-state, the free-trade zone, the military alliance, or the multinational corporation. (1)
Ecology is the study of connectedness. (8)
If the self is expanded to include the natural world, behavior leading to destruction of this world will be experienced as self-destruction. (12)
The illusion of separateness we create in order to utter the words “I am” is part of our problem in the modern world. (12)
Nature and Madness by Paul Shepard
Why does society persist in destroying its habitat? (22)
[The American is] the full embodiment of Western, classical, Christian human, enabled by the colossal richness of an unexploited continent to play out the wrenching alienation that began five to ten thousand years ago, with the advent of agricultural practices. Careless of waste, wallowing in refuse, exterminating enemies, having everything now and new, despising age, denying human natural history, fabricating pseudotraditions, being swamped in the repeated personal crises of the aging preadolescent: all are familiar images of American society. They are the signs of private nightmares of incoherence and disorder in broken climates where technologies in pursuit of mastery create ever-worsening problems — private nightmares expanded to a social level. (35)
The private cost is massive: therapy, escapism, intoxicants, narcotics, fits of destruction and rage, enormous grief, subordination to hierarchies that exhibit callow ineptitude at every level, and, perhaps worst of all, a readiness to strike back at a natural world that we dimly perceive as having failed us. (35)
Technology, Trauma, and the Wild by Chellis Glendinning
We are so entrenched in our technological world that we hardly know it exists. Yet widespread radioactive contamination, cancer epidemics, oil spills, toxic leaks, environmental illness, ozone holes, poisoned aquifers, and cultural and biological extinctions indicate that the technological construct encasing our every experience, perception, and political act stands in dire need of criticism. (42)
It is doubtful whether a species having both an advanced technology and this strange polarized way of looking at its world can survive.
— Gregory Bateson (45)We are socialized and required to participate in the system. (45)
Technology has become our environment as well as our ideology.
— Michiel Schwarz (45)A hallmark of any addiction is the presence of denial. (47)
Addicts need to control their world to maintain access to the source of their obsession. (48)
The presence of nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons in a nation’s arsenal not only controls that nation’s enemies; it also frightens and intimidates, and thereby controls that nation’s own citizens. (49)
This grandiosity insists that mass technological society is superior to all other social arrangements. It implies that human evolution is always linear and always progressive. (49)
Every subject we learn in school seems unrelated to the others. (50)
Mass technological society is structured “top-down,” its fragmented nature keeping most of us from grasping an understanding of the whole. (50)
The very psychological qualities so earnestly sought in today’s recovery, psychological and spiritual movements; the social equalities for which today’s social justice movements struggle valiantly; and the ecological gains sought after by today’s environmental movements, are the same qualities and conditions in which our species lived for more than 99.997 percent of its existence. (52)
The hallmark of the traumatic response is dissociation: a process by which we split our consciousness, repress whole arenas of experience, and shut down our full perception of the world. (53)
In Nature and Madness, Paul Shepard describes this process as the initiation of a heretofore unheard of tame/wild dichotomy in which all things considered tame (domesticated seedlings, captured animals, and the mechanical and controlling mentality required to keep them alive) are prized and protected, while all things considered wild (“weeds,” wild animals, and the fluid, participatory way of being human) are considered threatening and to be kept at bay. (53)
This split between wild and tame lies at the foundation of both the addictive personality and technological society. Ultimately, such a split imprisons us in our human-constructed reality and causes all the unnecessary and troublesome dichotomies with which we grapple today — from male/female and mind/body, to secular/sacred and technological/Earth-based. (53)
Are We Happy Yet? by Alan Thein Durning
Mutual dependence for day-to-day sustenance — a basic characteristic of life for those who have not yet achieved the consumer class — bonds people as proximity never can. (72)
The All-Consuming Self by Allen Kanner and Mary Gomes
Narcissism is characterized by an inflated, grandiose, entitled, and masterful self-image, or “false self,” that masks deep-seated but unacknowledged feelings of worthlessness and emptiness. (79)
The Rape of the Well-Maidens by Mary Gomes and Allen Kanner
In patriarchal cultures, it is common to find patterns of domination and control aimed at both women and the land. (112)
The Wilderness Effect and Ecopsychology by Robert Greenway
Our culture seems to have inflated “distinction making” until it dominates not only Ego but our entire consciousness as well. (131)
The experience of separation is an essential context for domination; domination is the root of exploitation. And thus we destroy our habitat, the very basis of our survival as a species. (131)
I have found it useful to posit a gradient between the polarity of culture and wilderness. (132)
Therapy for a Dying Planet by Terrance O’Connor
The planet is dying because we are satisfied with our limited relationships in which control, denial, and abuse are tolerated. (151)
If this is not my planet, whose is it? If this is not my family, whose is it? If not my responsibility, whose? I am both the victim and the victimizer. I am the cause and I am the cure. When I act out of this realization, I act not out of guilt but out of self-love, a love that includes my family, which includes my planet. When I look, I see. When I educate myself, I break through my denial and see that humankind is facing an absolutely unprecedented crisis. When I act from this knowledge, I act not out of obligation or idealism, but because I live in a straw house and I smell smoke. I realize the truth in Krishnamurti’s words, “You are the world, and the world is on fire.” (153)
Shamanic Counseling and Ecopsychology by Leslie Gray
There are many models of sustainable indigenous societies. There are no models of sustainable industrial societies. (182)
The Way of Wilderness by Steven Harper
You didn’t come into this world. You came out of it, like a wave from the ocean. You are not a stranger here
—Alan Watts (186)He saw that his life had become void of living things, to the point where he was afraid of almost any human contact. (189)
Outside familiar cultural boundaries and within wilderness, there are noticeable and sometimes radical shifts in the perception of time and space. (192)
Space, instead of being measured in linear distance, is measured in experienced distance. (192)
[In Okanagan] there is no word for “wilderness.” (194)
The word wilderness occurs approximately three hundred times in the Bible, and all its meanings are derogatory. (194)
Working Through Environmental Despair by Joanna Macy
Until the late twentieth century, every generation throughout history lived with the tacit certainty that there would be generations to follow. (241)
That certainty is now lost to us, whatever our politics. That loss, unmeasured and immeasurable, is the pivotal psychological reality of our time. (241)
As a society we are caught between a sense of impending apocalypse and the fear of acknowledging it. (242)
And so we tend to live as if nothing has changed, while knowing that everything has changed. (243)
Pain for the world is repressed not only out of embarrassment and guilt, but out of compassion as well. We are often reluctant to express the depths of our concerns because we don’t want to burden or alarm our loved ones. (246)
For centuries the dominant Western white-male culture has erected a dichotomy between reason and emotion. Assuming that reality can be apprehended in an “objective” fashion, it has accorded higher value to the analytical operations of intellect than to the “subjective” realm of feelings, sensations, and intuitions. (248)
We all need to unblock our feelings about our threatened planet and the possible demise of our species. Until we do, our power of creative response will be crippled. (250)
Information alone is not enough. (252)
We need to process this information on the psychological and emotional level in order to fully respond on the cognitive level. We already know we are in danger. The essential question is: can we free ourselves to respond? (252)
What is it that allows us to feel pain for our world? And what do we discover as we move through that pain? To both these questions there is one answer: interconnectedness with life and all other beings. (253)
The old mechanistic view of reality erected dichotomies, separating substance from process, self from other, and thought from feeling. (254)
What had appeared to be separate self-existent entities are now seen to be so interdependent that their boundaries can be drawn only arbitrarily. (254)
The old concept of power, in which most of us have been socialized, originated in a particular worldview. This view saw reality as composed of discrete and separate entities: rocks, plants, atoms, people. Power came to be seen as a property of these separate entities, reflected in the way they could appear to push each other around. Power became identified with domination. (256)
In such a view, power is a zero-sum game. (256)
From the systems perspective, this patriarchal notion of power is both inaccurate and dysfunctional. That is because life processes are intrinsically self-organizing. Power, then, which is the ability to effect change, works from the bottom-up more reliably and organically that from the top-down. It is not power over, but power with; this is what systems scientists call “synergy.” (256)
We can see that our planetary crises are impelling us toward a shift in consciousness. Confronting us with our mortality as a species, they reveal the suicidal tendency inherent in our conception of ourselves as separate and competitive beings. (258)
Ecopsychology and the Deconstruction of Whiteness by Carl Anthony
About the time that slavery was introduced, the first English settlers called themselves “Christians,” and they called the populations that they encountered “pagan,” or sometimes “savage.” As more Europeans arrived, they called themselves “English” or “Dutch” or “French.” But then came Bacon’s Rebellion in 1676. A group of indentured servants and African slaves organized a rebellion in order to kick the aristocratic elements out; this was a precursor of the American Revolution. And the colonists realized that if the indentured servants ever got together with the black people and the native people, they wouldn’t have a future. That’s when the word “white” was invented as we use it. What “whiteness” did was to unify all the Europeans who were coming here. (269)
“Whiteness” was very effective in creating a sense of solidarity. (269)
We take our definition of race to be a real hard line; we take it to represent some real division among the people of the world. Actually, it is not that at all. It’s an ideological and equivocal concept that has very little biological basis. So then you have to ask yourself, if that’s true, what is really going on here? (270)
Do you know what a “wetland” is? It’s a swamp that white people care about. (275)
The Politics of Species Arrogance by John Mack
Actually we (by “we” I mean, by and large, citizens of Western and other industrialized nations, for many native cultures experience and avow a very different relationship to their environment) do have a psychology, or at least a prevailing attitude, conscious and unconscious, toward the Earth. We regard it as a thing, a big thing, an object to be owned, mined, fenced, guarded, stripped, built upon, dammed, plowed, burned, blasted, bulldozed, and melted to serve the material needs and desires of the human species at the expense, if necessary, of all other species, which we feel at liberty to kill, paralyze, or domesticate for our own use. (282)
Keepers of the Earth by Jeannette Armstrong
We never ask a person, “What do you think?” Instead we ask “What is your heart on this matter?” The Okanagan teaches that emotion or feeling is the capacity whereby community and land intersect in our beings and become part of us. (321)
Book Notes
When Matthew R. Jamnik asked me about publishing an Animals Are People book review in The International Journal of Ecopsychology, it felt random — but only because I’d never heard of ecopsychology. I soon learned that I share worldviews and ways of seeing with the folks in this field; and there’s a lot of information architecture in ecopsychology.
As I work on Natural Information Architecture, I’m sharing notes and quotes from my sources of inspiration and provocation. As always, your questions and suggestions are welcome.