Anthropocentrism or Ecology of Mind?..... acceptance that each of us has everything to do with it

Making connections is a recursive theme of psychotherapy but for ecotherapy the connection is between ourselves and nature.  This connection has been ignored by my profession and yet it is so vital to our wellbeing.

Ecotherapy is called a reconnective practice.  According to ecopsychology our relationship with nature was eroded by a combination of anthropological forces that gained momentum over our evolution until the innate connection was severed.

Our severed relationship has enabled us to reconceptualise ourselves as being in the primary  position of dominance over all living things and a controlling force capable of reshaping the planet to serve our needs and to project our values onto.

Prior to this we were fully integrated with the biotic and abiotic earthly systems in a complex interdependent relationship. 

When we moved out of nature, we took our minds with us and our self-identification followed.  Subsequently, we regarded nature as object and adopted hierarchical systems that prioritized material and mechanistic thought. 

As a consequence we adopted habitual ways of living that rank us rather than link us to each other and social patterns that seek to dominate, control and oppress others.  Our objectification of the other makes it easier for us to exploit the other and the planet.

Anthropocentrism is a human-centric belief that interprets and regards everything in terms of how useful it is to humans and fits with our values.  It is deeply embedded in our society and indeed across much of the world bar many of the indigenous cultures.  It is the dominant paradigm today.

Buffy Sainte-Marie who is an indigenous First Nations Canadian-American singer, songwriter, musician, Oscar winning composer, visual artist, educator, pacifist and social activist has dedicated her life to the causes of Native Americans and First Nations peoples and she has fearlessly challenged the political establishment and the corporations.  This song from a recent album captures her sentiments for uranium mining.

I first saw her perform at the Skagen Festival at the top of Jutland in Denmark in 2013 and I was captivated.  Her music is unifying and she is gifted with the ability to connect cross-generationally.  In 2015, I caught one of her gigs in London and the audience ranged from septuagenarians to teenagers.  As Morrissey is a fan, his followers brought a whole new fan base to Buffy.

We, as a society, may not be thinking of it in these terms but we share the world with myriad other non-human living things and live within an ecological earthly system not upon a purely geophysical or manmade planet.

If you are wondering how we reached a point where we now have to face up to the fact that our earth needs life support then a starting point to this conversation begins with recognition that we are inseparable from the more-than-human world.

I realize this is not easy to do for some people.  Maybe this can help.

Add to that the prospect that our world is falling apart from global heating, environmental devastation and mass extinction of species and you have an overwhelming prospect for some.

My role as a therapist is to help alleviate distress not pile on more sources of it but as Mary-Jayne Rust (2004) highlighted, psychotherapy is not about avoiding fear, it is about exploring it.

“If we do not make these connections to the dilemmas of the wider world, are psycotherapists in danger of relieving peoples’ anxiety, only to place them back within a society that is deeply out of balance?  So the cry of ‘something is terribly wroing’ is seen as just to do with ‘me’, rather than to do with ‘the human community’s relationship with the rest of the world and my place with that’.”  (Rust, 2004, Vol  2 No 1)  

There are ontological alternatives to anthropocentrism.

Biocentrism is a contemporary challenge to human supremacy.  It is an ethical point of view that values the teleological purpose of all living things but refuses to put a value on any individual species.

I find this interesting because when you place a value on any single organism you are looking at it in isolation as opposed to an integral part of an ecosystem.

Another paradigm is ecocentrism.  It extends biocentric principles to include the whole earth system and argues that without the matrix which supports all life, everything else is inconsequential.

I think the ecocentric model is useful for understanding the correlation between the climate emergency, the environmental crisis and the sixth mass extinction that confronts us today.

Gregory Bateson (1972) proposed the ‘ecology of mind’.  It is a relational and ecological system of interconnectedness in which thought becomes intrinsically linked to its environmental context.

“The major problems in the world are the result of how nature works and the way people think” (Bateson 1972).

The following is an abstract from an article in Psychology Today (2012) by Dr Marilyn Wedge in homage to Gregory Bateson:

As ecologist, he taught us that humans are destructive to fragile ecosystems because they don’t see the interdependencies between natural systems and our own lives.

As anthropologist, he taught us that behaviours and words have no meanings outside of cultural contexts.

As cyberneticist, he taught us that change in one part of a system can be manifested in an entirely different part of the system in unexpected ways.

As family therapist, he taught us that pathologies reside not in the individual but in the patterns of relationships between individuals.

As creative thinker, he taught us that the language of complex systems, including family systems, is metaphor.

Bateson believed that civilization is on the road to destruction unless we give up linear and material ways of thinking.  He referred to a double bind and explained that on the one hand we want to preserve our environment but everything we do to grow our economy and preserve our standard of living disrupts the natural environment and our relationships with it.


References

1.   Sainte-Marie, B., (2015), "The Uranium War", Kobalt Music Publishing.

2.   Carstarphen, Victor and McFadden, Gene (1975), "Wake Up Everybody", Harold Melvin and the          Bluenotes.

3.   Rust, M.J. (2004) Creating Psychotherapy for a Sustainable Future.  Psychotherapy and Politics         International 2(1).

4.  Wedge, M. (2012) An Ecology of Mind: Mind and Nature are a Unity. Psychology Today Posted             online 27 Jan 2012.