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.

Personal Vignettes into my Worldview.... Solastalgia, structural under-employment, Eco-grief and Extinction Anxiety

Decades before I became a therapist, I had aspirations of being a city planner for the City of Duluth in Minnesota.  I had previously interned in the planning department as an urban and regional studies (URS) major.  Duluth was like a life-sized erector and train set scaled-up from the one I had as a boy. This was my dream career but fate would make it my holy grail.

I graduated and after six years of living as an indigent student, my father didn't have to try hard to convince me to return home to decompress, rake-in some easy cash from the summertime economy at the (New) Jersey Shore and then embark on a career back in Duluth.

It sounded good but as I would discover a long-distance job search for public sector employment in a city undergoing an economic shakedown would be a fool's errand.  That was 1988 and there was no internet.

It would be a good year or so before I landed a graduate level job in digital cartography for a map maker and publisher in New Jersey.  I committed to two years, enough experience to become proficient in geographic info systems (GIS), an attractive competency for a Planner 1. 

How wrong I was to believe that my URS degree would get me into the job market!

You are probably wondering why I wasn't shopping the New Jersey job market for planner vacancies.  Well, basically they didn't exist!  That was another setback.  Public planning jobs are political appointments and were scarce.  Planning at the municipal level in New Jersey is a zoning exercise more than anything and outsourced to engineers who happen to be state licensed planners.  

I was what you would call structurally un- or under-employed even though I was working full-time.

When I first got back to Monmouth County, I was aghast at how it had changed in just six years.  Across New Jersey more land went under the bulldozer in the 1980s than in the 200-odd years since it was a British colony.

Monmouth County never had a rush hour before.  The country lanes had become arterial roadways fed by tributary collector streets from sprawling housing developments.  And where did all the farms and apple orchards go?  Every woodland seemed to be for sale.  Locals like me were outnumbered by an unstoppable tide of in-migrants from northern New Jersey and the outer boroughs of New York City. 

Even my hometown felt less homespun.  A reshuffle of the shops on our main street resulted in touristy businesses cashing-in on the cachet of Spring Lake in a reconstitution of the community from one that never advertised a house for sale and townspeople that never flaunted it even though they had it - to one that was tilting toward ostentation and false pretenses.

I felt like an alien.  I was experiencing solastalgia.

One day I was driving my VW Jetta with my beloved Greenland/Siberian husky dog in the back seat and I pulled up to a red light.   The car in front of me had a bumper sticker that read – “The more people I meet the more I like my dog”. 

That hit pretty close to home.

As I waited for the light to change I looked in my rear view mirror at Kodiak and then scanned the view ahead.  No shortage of motorists at the Exxon gas station on the corner.  And across the road another shopping center and housing development was going up. 

What is wrong with this picture!  The Garden State had become the strip mall dystopia.

Well for starters, the animals have no voice and the wildlife that once inhabited that tract of land were more or less massacred and nobody batted an eye.  The Exxon Valdez oil spill that devastated the ecology of Alaska’s Prince William Sound wasn’t two years before.  It was the biggest manmade environmental disaster to date and was entirely avoidable.

There I was boycotting Exxon for two years, a structurally unemployed urban planning graduate amid a frenzy of urban sprawl that was inexorably and irrevocably destroying the quality of life and changing the character of place from town and country to exurbia.

My values seemed so out of sync with the world that was buzzing all around me.  I was suffering eco-grief and I was an insignificant minority interest.  The introduction of the rat race had descended.

Subdivisions were carving-up the land into homogenzied zones that segregated and catalogued where to live, work and play that predictably determined where you were born and where you died and how you were going to drive between them.  

Land use planning can have profound consequences on society.  The Canadian prog-rock band Rush wrote the anthem to the suburban dream gone wrong.  Subdivisions speaks to the urban planner in me and the non-conformist "dreamer" I was in high school.

Fast forward to England a couple decades to the winter of 2018.  The Beast from the East pounded the North Sea coast where I live.  I witnessed the near disappearance of a local beach to erosion and the damage to the sand dune that protected the littoral zone between the fields and the sea. 

I went to see an existential therapist to describe how emotionally impacted I was by this and he discerningly inquired if I identified in some way with the sand dune. 

I did.  I felt personally wounded as if I had merged with the sand dune and I felt emotional pain in my heart.  Over my lifetime I have felt close to nature but I had never experienced such sensation with physical earth.

This was about the time when the last living male northern white rhinoceros died.  He had a name and it was Sudan.  I had become very affectionate for rhinos and keenly aware of the insatiable demand for rhino horn by Chinese herbalists and the consequential poaching of these magnificent, prehistoric creatures.

I linked their looming extinction to that of my own.  It was a sobering introspection.  I was experiencing extinction anxiety.

The photojournalist Ami Vitale covered the death of Sudan (National Geographic 2019).  She said it was like watching her own demise.  After years of working in war zones she had this to say about the human condition, “If you dig deep enough behind virtually every human conflict, you will find an erosion of the bond between humans and the natural world around them”.

 
References

1.  Vitale, A. 2019. Lessons From the Last of His Kind.  National Geographic 10.2019 

2.  Peart, Neil Elwood; Weinrib, Gary Lee; Zivojinovich, Alex, (1982), "Subdivisions", Ole Media            Management.

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.