On Restoring the Earth and Healing the Mind

Book Review of Theodore Roszak, Mary E. Gomez, and Allen D. Kanner, eds., Ecopsychology: Restoring the Earth, Healing the Mind. San Francisco, Sierra Club Books, 1995. Soft bound, $15.00.

This book is a collection of 26 rather well-selected essays by authors who are psychologists, environmental writers, or both, on the ways in which psychology and ecology relate to each other. The first section offers some theoretical perspectives, the second provides clinical insights, and the third section offers some cross-cultural perspectives and some voices advocating political engagement by psychologists. Many of the essays contain stimulating ideas and unusual perspectives, but the collection as a whole is far from presenting a unified point of view. This is probably unavoidable and not to be deplored, but it does make the reviewer’s job more difficult.

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Some of the essays present historical analyses to greater or lesser extent. Ralph Metzner begins his article with an excellent statement of one problem: “How to identify the historical transition that accounts for human beings’ peculiar capacity to distance themselves from their habitat especially as that distancing has been exaggerated in the religious and scientific beliefs of Western society (p. 55).” He proceeds to give a useful brief survey of various attempts to trace the psychological roots of our ecological crisis.

One of the most important of these attempts is by Paul Shepard, who gives a summary of the argument in his book, Nature and Madness (1982). He maintains that modem destructive behavior toward the environment is the result of a series of stages in human history that serially amputated the maturing process in individuals and societies. This can be seen most clearly in the history of childhood, which shows that treatment of children produced an increasingly dysfunctional relationship to nature as tribal societies moved to agriculture, patriarchal monotheism, and industrialism.

In his essay, Theodore Roszak traces tendencies in psychotherapy that ignore the wider setting and even interpret feelings generated by environmental imbalance only in terms of the individual psyche. Environmentalists, however, do not escape criticism for their habit of using fear and guilt to motivate actions they see as important to save the environment.

Two of the most prevalent theoretical perspectives presented in the volume need careful assessment, since they seem to lead in different directions, at least initially. One, represented in many of the essays, holds that individuals should be encouraged to expand the boundaries of the self so as to include all of nature: animals, plants, rivers, mountains, and even stars. As James Hillman puts it in his foreword, the question is, “Where does the ‘me’ stop? (p. xvii)” Theodore Roszak quotes approvingly Walt Whitman’s lines, “‘Was somebody asking to see the soul? / See your own shape and countenance, persons, substances, beasts, the trees, the running rivers, the rocks and sands (p. 17).’” But Sarah Conn, noting deep ecologist Arne Naess’ call for an “ecological self,” a broadening of the self through identification with all beings, even with the biosphere as a whole, asks whether the individual might not be in danger “of being swept away by the larger whole (p. 163).”

The other perspective sees humans as intimately involved in the various kinds of relationships that result from being part of the ecosystems that make up the Earth. This point of view is articulated by Joanna Macy in an essay that acknowledges fear and despair as feeling components of those relationships. She sees the modem historic past as characterized by analytical, mechanistic thinking, and contemporary science as offering “a way of seeing (p. 253),” namely general-systems theory, that places humans within natural communities and allows interactions that produce value.

The collection in this book is not dominated by theory, however. There are a great number of suggestions for techniques that might be used in practice to allow people to relate to nature, and to express their feelings about relating to nature. These vary from recalling childhood memories of experiences with other species to wilderness journeys and work in restoring habitats. Laura Sewall’s training in perceptual skills seems especially promising to this reviewer. Explaining the goal of her work, she quotes Erazim Kohak, “‘Set aside the learned ways of perceiving the world as dead matter for your use and see if you can recover again your actual perception of the world as a community of beings to whom you are meaningfully related’ (p. 201).”

The final section of the book includes several authors who relate the historic process of the exploitation of nature with other processes that were going on at the same time, and which they believe related psychologically to the former. Carl Anthony points out that the exploitation of humans, especially people of color, and nature happened at the same time and reflected similar attitudes. Blacks and pollution were relegated to the same parts of the cities, for example, because the dominating group treated both as “impure.” Betty Roszak gives a new slant to the familiar observation that “the marginalization of women and the destruction of biodiversity go hand in hand. (p. 299, quoted from Vandana Shiva)” If women maintain that they have a special relationship to nature that men cannot share, she asks, do they not accept the male projection of responsibility to save the

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world onto women? A good-spirited analysis of Euro-American culture as “insane,” and its contrast with the [North American] Okanagan [Indian] psyche, comes from Jeanette Armstrong. John E. Mack relates Japan’s destruction of the world’s rainforests to the decline of animism in the Japanese attitude to nature.

The most delightfully written piece in the book is the penultimate one, “The Ecology of Magic,” by David Abram. Abram went to live among the shamans of Bali not as a psychologist, environmentalist, or anthropologist, but as a skilled magician. He found that while they talk about shifting out of normal consciousness to reach the “spirits,” the shamans actually make contact with other species on their own terms. Abram found that he could do so, too, but that he gradually lost the shamanic sense of other creatures after his return to America. He reflects on this loss:

Our bodies have formed themselves in delicate reciprocity with the manifold textures, sounds and shapes of an animate Earth; our eyes have evolved in subtle interaction with other eyes, as our ears are attuned by their very structure to the howling of wolves and the honking of geese. To shut ourselves off from these other voices, to continue by our life-styles to condemn these other sensibilities to the oblivion of extinction is to rob our own senses of their integrity, and to rob our minds of their coherence. We are human only in contact and conviviality with what is not human (p. 315).

This disparate but balanced collection is well worth looking through, sampling, and in many cases studying. This reviewer can almost guarantee that the reader will not agree with, or even like, all the essays, but will find many of them original and stimulating.

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