What is it all about?.... the underlying message and impetus to do something and the benefits

I don’t want to flood this with facts and statistics.  I also don’t want to sidestep the inconvenient truth that we need to act rapidly, intelligently and collaboratively to avert disaster because we are at crisis point in terms of global heating.

I realize this may be construed as anxiety inducing language coming from a therapist whose job it is to alleviate distress in others.  However, the genie is already out of the bottle.  Collective anxiety is all around us.  The messages are raw, direct and palpable:

            “There is no Planet B” (Berners-Lee 2019)

            “There will be no healthy women on a dead planet.”  (Tompkins 2019)

            “Conserve what our children deserve.” 

I love a vast array of music and am given to lyrical metaphor and often employ it in the course of dialogical therapy with my clients.  I encourage those who are so inclined to bring a piece of music to our sessions that captures the otherwise ineffable.  

So here I am going to add to those "raw, direct and palpable" messages above with one that is musical, uplifting and empowering.  I turn to a very special person.  Her name is Buffy Sainte-Marie an indigenous Canadian-American singer-songwriter, musician, Oscar-winning composer, visual artist, educator, pacifist and social activist.

"Treat the earth well: it was not given to you by your parents, it was loaned to you by your children.  We do not inherit the Earth from our Ancestors, we borrow it from our Children".  (Saint-Marie 2015)

Click here to "Carry It On" 

Some of us are in denial, some are galvanized and some are overwhelmed.  Our collective response mirrors the individual stress response fight, flight or freeze.  However we respond there is no way to disentangle human health from planetary health.

The fact of our existence is inseparable from the life giving earth that we seem intent on destroying.  Ecopsychology asks the question why.  It also looks beneath that inquiry at the psychological causes. 

A summary of the big story of our severed connection with the natural world begins with early civilization and culminates in the military industrial complex, the consumer age, the gig economy and globalization.  

Our evolution has followed a trajectory in which we abandoned the ecosystem and set on a course in which we dominated, domesticated, colonized, isolated, subjugated, exterminated, individuated and eradicated everything that challenged our control.

This has engendered hierarchical thinking that reinforces power, condones oppression and inculcates beliefs that sustain a worldview in which humans stand apart from the other-than-human world and everything is valued in terms of how it serves us or how we can project our values onto it.

Anthropocentrism is so embedded in our culture that it has infiltrated how we relate to ourselves and others and the way we govern, finance, educate, trade and even recreate.  It has climaxed only because we have exceeded the limits of what the earth can give and dumped more back into it than it can take.

Quite simply globalization, consumerism and neo-liberal capitalism are a triad for unsustainable living that has proved devastating.  Our planet is on life support.

We need to think of earth as subject not object because when we objectify we reduce the other.  If the other is a person, we rob them of their humanity and if it is the other-than-human, we commodify it.
  
Ecotherapy is the applied practice of ecopsychology that is an immersive and reconnective therapy to heal the human – nature relationship.

When we learn to give up some of the control, to harmonize with the more-than-human and explore our relationship with nature we can begin to understand our human relationships better.  When we allow ourselves to be immersed in the web of life we enable our psyche to connect with the nourishing natural world around us.  It can be holding, securing and stabilizing.

Psychotherapy can help us to find lost pieces of ourselves and to integrate the whole.  Ecotherapy can help us to retrieve the lost part of our psyche that we left in the ecosystem.
 
When we fully embody nature in a holistic way we can learn to trust ourselves, our instinct, and our intuition.  We can then respond to stimulus hungers that have been previously unrecognized and learn to be at peace with oneself in moments of inactivity.
When we have joined the web of life that is the more-than-human world we will have joined an inseparable community and mended an innate attachment relationship.

That is something worth fighting to preserve.


References

1. Sainte-Marie, B. 2015.  Carry It On.  Power In The Blood. True North Records.

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.