EcoPsychology

Environment degradation is an indirect result of humanity feeling collectively unhealthy inside. As a result of this sense of unease we are in this mode of constantly reaching for something elusive but really basic, contentedness and completeness. All the world’s addictions can be explained by the need to feel good about oneself. It has been oddly enough the history of civilization to disorient people so that they lose the ability to take care of themselves emotionally. This cycle of dysfunction has continued to evolve with the help of technology. The majority of people in consuming nations rely on sophisticated power structures that have interwoven themselves around the consumer economy so that they are symbiotically linked to one another. This is particularly evident in the urban societies, where people are disconnected with nature. It is not surprising that people consume at a level beyond that which the earth is capable of sustaining.

The trendlines of the planet indicate an inverse relationship between the rapid human economic development associated with industrialization and the increase in working capital in the global economy and the state of the natural commons - natural capital. As we evolve economically and technologically, not only natural  biodiversity, but human cultural diversity is declining. This may also parallel the decline of the integrity of the human psyche as we are forced to adapt to very dehumanizing modern influences. As economic value in terms of GDP is increasing, the actual application of that energy to effectively solve problems may be decreasing with a larger and larger portion of it being devoted to frivolous and trivial causes.

Western crop monocultures are one of the largest destructive presences on the biosphere, plowing up natural ecosystems to disrupt natural ecosystem function all over the planet. In many cases these intrusions and penetrations into the pristine fabric of nature is not such much driven to feed people but to satisfy increasingly sophisticated human palates. Many countries that export food products to the consuming nations like coffee, oranges or pineapples have to content with malnutrition among their own population. There is a belief that order to preserve our way of life we cannot afford to pay people in non-consuming nations enough money to feed themselves properly, even though they often produce luxury food items for us.

Ecopsychology tells us the monocultures exist not on the farm but are a product of a larger system of social engineering. They are a product of the modern mind and its relentless desire to rationalize everything to the point often that our environments become not only pacified of nature but also of their humanity. That is they become dehumanized. 

The urban consciousness coupled with the monoculture consciousness broadcast to us not only through the corporate owned media but the corporate owned American Drag makes it relatively difficult to raise mainstream consciousness about how our consumer driven lifestyles affects the world around us. Prescott College's Laura Sewall calls this psychic numbing. By the time you are 18 you see 1 million ads. So an overwhelming pressure to consume overwhelms that aspect of our consciousness which is more aware of the consequences of this consumerism on the world. The sorrow in relation to this has to be repressed in order that we can be normal in the consumer society.

Ecospychology has a practical application.

1. Taking people to the wilderness as part of a natural therapy process—ecotourism

2. Practical steps to develop a more sensible and sane socioeconomic model of governance.

3. Develop awareness/empowerment rituals to promote healing and a process of overcoming dysfunctions associated with conventional society.

Ecopsychology is a synthesis of ecological and psychological perspectives of the relationship between humans and the earth. These factors exist on two level individual and the collective. We are of the earth and it gives us life. We create life and we consume it. We can be conscious of the relationships that guide the process of life or we can choose to be distant.

Ecospychology has a practical application

Taking people to the wilderness as part of a natural therapy process—ecotourism

Practical steps to develop a more sensible and sane socioeconomic model of governance.

Develop awareness/empowerment rituals to promote healing and a process of overcoming dysfunctions associated with conventional society.

Ecopsychology is a synthesis of ecological and psychological perspectives of the relationship between humans and the earth. These factors exist on two level individual and the collective. We are of the earth and it gives us life. We create life and we consume it. We can be conscious of the relationships that guide the process of life or we can choose to be distant.

Environment degradation is an indirect result of humanity feeling collectively unhealthy inside. As a result of this sense of unease we are in this mode of constantly reaching for something elusive but really basic, contentedness and completeness. All the world’s addictions can be explained by the need to feel good about oneself. It has been oddly enough the history of civilization to disorient people so that they lose the ability to take care of themselves emotionally. This cycle of dysfunction has continued to evolve with the help of technology. The majority of people in consuming nations rely on sophisticated power structures that have interwoven themselves around the consumer economy so that they are symbiotically linked to one another. This is particularly evident in the urban societies, where people are disconnected with nature. It is not surprising that people consume at a level beyond that which the earth is capable of sustaining.

As we evolve economically and technologically biodiversity is declining and in many respects the integrity of the human psyche is being reduced as well as we are forced to adapt to very dehumanizing modern influences. The result is that as economic value in terms of GDP is increasing, the actual application of that energy to effectively solve problems is decreasing with a larger and larger portion of it being devoted to frivolous and trivial causes.

Western crop monocultures have been the largest destructive presence on the environment, plowing up natural ecosystems but not such much to feed people but to satisify human palates. One need only look at the fact that so many countries that export food products to the consuming nations like coffee, oranges or pinapples have to content with malnutrition among their own population. Basically we feel that in order to preserve our way of life we cannot pay people in non-consuming nations enough money to feed themselves properly, even though they produce luxury food items for us.

The urban conscious coupled with the monoculture consciousness broadcast to us not only through the corporate owned media but the corporate owned American Drag makes it relatively difficult to raise mainstream consciousness about how our consumer driven lifestyles affects the world around us. Laura Sewall calls this psychic numbing. By the time you are 18 you see 1 million ads. So an overwhelming pressure to consume overwhelms that aspect of our consciousness which is more aware of the consequences of this consumerism on the world. The sorrow in relation to this has to be repressed in order that we can be normal in the consumer society. 

People mostly think and relate through words alone without using non-verbal sensual thinking. It has 

been this force that has created the separation of humanity from nature. Nature in it process of creating 

the planet we live on has used this sensory process of relating constructively to reality so as to develop the 

present world of the biosphere. Everything within the nature of the biosphere lies in state of balance. The 

beauty of nature is manifested in its unified web of existence. Life is what defines reality for us and this 

definement is a beautiful experience for us. The beauty of life within nature is a major reason that makes 

life worth living. If we are to surivive on this planet we regain our connection with nature. “Nature’s 

wordless intelligence produces an optimum of life, cooperation and diversity.” 

Society acullurates us to the dictates of modern existence. People are trained to think in ways that remove 

us from the harmony of nature. So as result we act in self-interest of the modern “I” without concerning 

ourselves with the impact of our actions. Paradoxically not only is the modern modes of existence often 

harmful for others and the environment but also on the long-term spiritual, physical and emtotional 

wellness of ourselves.

Our distance from nature alienates us from the healing qualitities of the natural world. Nature is how we 

learn of our inner nature through the development of intuitive feelings of harmony with life. When we are 

ripped from our natural roots and transplanted into an artificial place that is not designed to truly appreciate 

human feelings and emotions we get a place filled with dismal thoughts and eventually despotic and unjust 

acts. This is called a city. The city does not have to be this way but rather it is the lack of consideration for 

the inhabitants that creates alientation in the modern environment. 

Many addictions being psyshcologically based are in effect cultivated in the urban jungles of the rapidly 

growing modern world. The cities are a germ culture for psycholoigcal sickness. They produce harmful 

psychological bonds that create the illusion that we can exist without nature. Bonds of unnatural material 

obsession. The fetish compulsion to consume iconized social object that are produced by the centralized 

economic apparatuses create psychological needs on the part of the individual that cannot be sustained by a 

now distant and alien nature. 

Wodrless intelligence of nature relates to the intiutive part of the mind. All beings of nature know how to 

receive support for others. However this non-verbal ability is constrained by the facilities of modern social 

conditioning which see these natural inuitions as a threat to the new order of humanity. 

Verbally addicted consciosness means that since we are removed from the organic process of giving and 

receiving support within the cyclical rituals—the natural existence of reciprocity receiving from others and 

then giving something back in return—we are unable to properly relate or function as humans in relation to 

the greater worlkd around us.

Much of what is the modern world is little more than energy to satisfy humanity's ambition to exert

power over other parts of the world so as to gain a sense of importance as well as gratification.

Domination addictions­that we are addicted to the idea of dominating and controlling others, relies

on brutality in order to put people in their place, when they seek to reexamine the necessity or

healthiness of this relationship. The juxtaposition of such methods of brutality in modern times

confuses people because they have assumed that in more civilized modern states there is neither a

need or rationale for such policies. They are also contradictory to many of the democratic ideals of

these modern states. For we say that modern world is the culmination of a long ascent from

humanity's more beastly origins. Therefore instead of creating democratic states we instead aspire

to re­create the monolith, who in its pure, unhuman form represents all that which is real in the

universe and therefore necessary to sustaining the universe. Though it is quite noble for humans to

seek to recreate the world, we have not at present, the sense of the essential greater good that

sustains the divine order of the universe.

By striving to complexity in knowledge and the development of that knowledge into machinery

that embodies that physical accumulation of progress, we depart from the biological determinism

which governs the natural world. We exist on a new plane of development as humans and now as

modern humans, and we are broken from nature and from the pre­modern past, so that we are

reborn as something emergently new into the world. The culture emerges as what truly

encapsulates this development, therefore we exist as more mentally malleable beings with the

ability to transcend what has been referred to by Richard Dawkins as our "selfish genes". The mind

exists as a thinking entity within a culture, so that it is able to see the brutality and injustice that

results from it­inconsiderate feelings and passions­and seek to overcome them, instead of being

engulfed by them.

Nature though is not evil­for it is the force that sustains life. Without nature, we would not exist,

for we are of nature. This is only logical you might say and yet humanity in the modern period has

not seen it this way. This is a paradox, since modernity is supposed to be the essence of modern

rational logical thought. The ecosystems of the earth which make up the biosphere are governed by

what science has discovered to be certain operating principles which make life possible and

sustainable within the atmosphere and within the cell. But nature is more than just a logical

machine that sustains as many biologist would assume. It is in fact a system of many organisms

which in many respects behaves like a organism itself: Gaia. Gaia is Greek for goddess of the earth

or planet. Nature is the spiritual manifestation of that which we call the divine and so it is beautiful

and majestic and we are transfixed by it, in ways we often cannot put into words. As a throughly

modern people we have evolved away from a time where many of our ancestors lived close to

nature and intimately associated with it. Not only have we forgotten how to take it in and

appreciate it, we have come to see nature as the enemy which must be conquered and subjugated

so as to enable us grow the economy, which makes it possible for us to live better in a material

sense.

Theodore Rosnak says that there is great gulf between the ecological and psychological within

humanity. The artificiality of the urban landscape (the built environment) that exists within

contemporary cosmopolitan society serves only to confine the people reside in these places to a

disconnected state of unreality from the greater natural world. The cities and their present overly

urbanized culture only serves to further alienate us from our ecological consciousness (Valerie

Harms National Audubon Society The Almanac of the Environment 260). Eco­psychology is

based upon the recognition that the suffering and victimization that we experience as humans, is

part of the reason that we degrade the earth. There is something out of balance with ourselves

which causes us to behave in a way that is disrespectful to others and the earth. In economic terms

this can be explained through externalization. This is refers to surpluses and deficits that

accumulate in a economic system. Businesspeople seek to minimize costs, and they seek to finds

ways to dispense with the industrial and social byproducts of the production and consumption

process without having to be accountable for their creations and that makes it hard to claim they

should pay for their cleanup.

However these economic externalities originally manifest on the small, interpersonal social scale.

We often externalize our feelings of victimization, pain, stress and suffering by putting a strong,

manipulative face on things. This operates in the process of dehumanization and depersonalization

that goes on as we seek to fit others (when we are consumed by intense needs, rage and

desperation) into need little stereotypical boxes which confirm our prejudices about others, who

we need to reduce to a state which allows us to treat them as we would not want ourselves to be

treated. These stereotypes suit our need to typecast people; to judge large sections of humanity

arbitrarily for the sins committed by a few.

This disrespect that we feel towards each other cannot be solved the overcoming of legal,

economic or technological battles, for they result from the intense, simmering personal feelings of

betrayal that reside within all of us to varying degrees. Society's problems must ultimately be

resolved with the psyche, one individual at a time. In material orientated societies people must

often deny their feelings in order to become accepted, normal and successful. Instead of honestly

dealing with these feelings and needs­which we are often conditioned to see as emotional

responses that result from irrational and shameful afflictions and beliefs­we are instead to resolve

the situation through superficial activities that place undue importance on immediate gratification,

which have the effect of distracting one from the real cause of the problem.. The idea of curing

what ails us through immediate gratification is what drives us as humans to the illusion of

betterment in ourselves and cumulatively as a civilization through economic progress.