Customer Reviews

Ecopsychology: Restoring the Earth, Healing the Mind

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

Page 12, "if the self is expanded to include the natural world, behavior leading to the destruction of this world will be experienced as self-destruction". I think I have been somewhat of an ecopsychologist for some time now, but haven't realized it. This book brought to an organized sense, ideas, thoughts and feelings I already had. More importantly it introduced me to MANY new insights and thoughts about our planet and how we view it and treat it as NOT ME, when in fact, not only is it part of ME, but moreso, we are part of it. This is a very comprehensive book that takes us from theory, into practice, then to cultural and political issues, and onward with over 150 titles of suggested reading. Ecopsychology is a growing somewhat underground movement, a movement however, that many believe will come to fruition in this day and age of our concrete jungles, addiction to science and technology, and our general detachment from our original mother, the Earth. There are approximately 25 contributors to this book, a few, I must admit offer very dry reading. Overall however, this is one of the most enlightening books I have read. If you have even a general interest in Nature or Psychology, you would enjoy this book.

This book has provided me with a greater scope of how we are affected by the Earth and how we affect it. I am sad to see it is out of print, because the information it presents is vital for the future of us and our planet. I intend to pass on this book to friends and relatives to make them aware of the spiritual power that becoming more acquainted with the Earth provides. I feel like in this day and age we seemed to have lost interest and respect for our surroundings and our roots. What this book tries to do is get us back to those roots to get a deeper understanding of life, which, I'm sure, many of us have often wondered about. It celebrates the mystery, wildness and beauty that nature holds.

Assembled here are some of the leading lights of ecopsychology, with papers and excerpts from the books they've written: Roszak himself, Aizenstat, Hillman, Gomes, Glendinning, and on and on. A rare collection of important voices.

The idea of ecopsychology is to open up awareness to the unheard voice of the Earth. "Animism" is a 19th century assumption that assumes the world lives only to the degree we project into it. The authors here realize that animism is a reductionistic and outdated concept that only serves to justify the ongoing rape and dematerialization of the natural world--a world that in fact projects her presence into those of us who can learn to hear her.

This is not a back-to-nature project but a necessity if we are to preserve what's left of the Earth from our greed, haste, and the global warming of the psyche endemic to a society of rapacious and immature consumers too bent on private advantage to do what our ancestors did for a million years of history and prehistory: recognize and respect her personhood. And today, we can do so with all our critical faculties intact and a bit of help from green technics.

This book is a must read. Full of insightful articles by the leading forward thinkers in the field of psychology. Looks at the big picture in explaining the pathologies of our modern post-industrial society. Covers many different aspects of the eco-psychology discussion. Don't miss this book!

If the environmental movement is to make any headway, it needs to distance itself from cranks like the authors of this unfortunate book. Roszack and team pose as experts and write with the presumptive arrogance of leading the benighted human race out of its fallen state to some as yet to be defined Promised Land. After all, we seem to be a conglomerate of `false consumer' agents with little capacity to determine what our best interests are.

Lest there be any doubt, Roszack and company attempt to save us from ourselves and make the earth healthy again by advocating a California roll of pop-psychology and New Age spirituality in lieu of presenting solid scientific evidence, psychological research or documented facts of any kind beyond simple assertions that the planet is dying. Interestingly, there is not one citation of an ecological monograph or peer reviewed study by a psychologist in the entire book.

Although Roszack makes it clear in the introduction that he did not intend to play excessively on the readers' fear and sense of guilt. What follows in the succeeding chapters, however, is a long series of albatrosses that get draped about the reader's shoulders, one after another, in enough layers to tip over a giraffe.

In one essay, the author is a practicing psychotherapist who admonishes a client for having any personal issues whatsoever when, after all, Mother Earth is grasping for her last breath. How dare she have personal angst in a situation like this! I wonder if the members APA Ethics Committee would raise any eyebrows over this sort of thing. I also wonder why the author of the essay chose to be a therapist in the first place, given the dire ecological straights we occupy.

At any rate, for the sake of brevity, I'll limit the rest of this discussion to a few comments. If I'm not mistaken, the first tenant of Ecopsychology is that the mind is somehow fundamentally ecological in its make-up, according to Roszack. What he means by ecological is hard to pin down. The word `ecology' itself did not exist until the 1860s when some German scientist coined it to describe the overall operations of nature in terms of a machine -- a metaphor widely used in the Victorian Era. 'Ecology' entered the popular lexicon a century or so later around 1970. As such, it represented a synthesis of radical politics, the Thoreau style nature worship of the Counterculture and a branch of the life sciences that usually went by the name of Environmental Biology. Needless to say, ecology in the general understanding became a value laden cultural production that is peculiar to a period of recent history. Whether or not the evolutionary processes conspired with the creator to imprint all this on the engrams of the first humans (Adam-Eve or Alley Oop) is something of a long shot.

For the record, since the 1970s, Environmental Biology shed its moorings in positivism and tossed the mechanistic view of nature in favor of a more eclectic one involving Information Theory, Chaos Theory, Systems Theory and so on. The solid state theory of environmental equilibrium that the authors use as the gold standard throughout the book no longer holds (see Discordant Harmonies: a New Ecology for the Twenty-first Century by Daniel Botkin).

Other tenets of Ecopsychology have to do with establishing the society of the future along the lines of `primary cultures' while doing away with 'patriarchal power structures' endemic to the modern West. For the record, not all `primary cultures' engaged in ecologically sound practices. The Easter Islanders, Maya and the Anasazi brought about major league destruction of their respective habitats (see Collapse by Jarred Diamond).

Also, I wonder how Roszack proposes to maintain the order of any future Ecotopia without power structures, patriarchal or otherwise. It is equally mysterious how he proposes to make the new social order a political reality. Herd people Khmer Rouge style into agricultural communes, perhaps? Maybe Ecopsychologists could set up a lobby in DC and push their watered down variant of green anarcho-primitivism in the corridors of power. Meanwhile, the authors do not address how their social designs would effect the global population. How will six billion souls fare without agriculture of scale? What will they do for clothing, shelter and other necessities without the present means of production?

An especially fun chapter in this book was written by Chellis Glendinning outlining a Twelve Step Program for recovery from Western Culture. It is not very clear where and how people will find refuge from a civilization gone bad while working the program. It would be just as logical to have an AA group meet in a bar where it's always Happy Hour. Why drink light beer when the world is coming to an end? Anyhow, it would be interesting to learn if any of the contributing authors in the book actually forswore things like tenure at a university, book contracts or a lucrative private practice to actually live the dream in someplace like the Alaskan outback. Judging from her picture on-line, Chellis is well coiffed and smartly attired. No bacon grease pomade or hand me down clothes are to be found on this lady.

My negative review here should not be interpreted as a flippant dismissal of the environmental movement or the many sane people who have contributed so much over the years in developing-implementing sound environmental practices. Tree hugging is fine and good. So are common sense and academic de rigueur - qualities altogether lacking in Ecopsychology. The book in essence amounts to nothing more than a long, tedious temper tantrum directed at `the establishment' by leftover radicals from the 60s who still don't understand why they're not given all the power to achieve their grand designs for the human race, either with or without popular consent. Ecopsychology is a pseudo-science. It may pass scrutiny in Marin County or the Bay Area where the politically correct passes for critical thinking. However, the authors seem unaware that their ideas are loaded with cultural and scientific assumptions of a bygone era that no longer have currency. Also, long winded screeds or this sort tend to be counterproductive over time. Sound environmental policy is best left to those who know what they are talking about how translate workable ideas into reality.


The review here was not intended to challenge the importance nature has as a boon to psychological health. I fanatically believe that appreciation and respect for the nature, along with a daily practice of environmental ethics are the mark of an evolved an extremely healthy mind. On the other hand, the authors conflate such a conscientious approach towards nature with the cultural politics of their heyday as a rationale to binge on the messianic urge.

A good book, however, that does address the psychological importance of nature is The Earth Has a Soul by Carl Jung. You can also go bird watching. A morning spent on the nature trail is worth more than a hundred books written by so-called pundits who have probably spent most of their lives at a comfortable distance from the wild.

Traditional psychology posits a strict distinction between me, in here, and everything else, out there. While such a paradigm has a long history, it was Freud who established such duality as dogma and insisted that a theory of human behavior must be based on scientific observation. Good idea, Sig. But science marches on. Now that physicists believe that experimental results depend as much on the observer as the observed, the old "in here/out there" dichotomy is falling on hard times. Further, evolutionary theory has embraced the idea that ecosystems evolve as much as individual species, and psychology continues to reveal the constant interplay between who we are and where we exist. Enter "Ecopsychology," a framework for rethinking the causes of environmental despoliation and its impact on personal growth. The growing field includes ecofeminists and deep ecologists, Buddhist and Native American psychologists, Harvard Psychiatry professors and architects. Why are we, as a specie, so willing to foul our own nests? How does that effect us? We evolved as widely dispersed hunter-gatherers intimately connected to the natural world and now often live in close proximity to thousands of other humans largely insulated from the living system that supports us. Who can reasonably claim that this would NOT have profound impacts on the psyche? Along the way, ecopsychologists surmise that there still exists a deep connection to nature that environmentalism would do well to tap. They suggest that joyful celebration of our interdependence will touch hearts turned off by scare tactics that constantly iterate impending doom. This book is an excellent overview of a new direction for psychology and the exciting convergence of post-Darwinian, post-Einsteinian, post-Heisenbergian, post-Toastian (isn't this fun?) thought.

I'm not a psychology major-I'm sure I would get more out of the book if I was, but I am very interested in the relationship of the human psyche to nature. Some of the essays are easier to read than others,

To those who are environmental activists, this explains much of what the lay person thinks. This book I don't feel was meant to be a textbook of sorts, but it helps people who are trying to open up the minds and hearts of the human race to realize that we each as an individual can control how much and in what way we impact mother earth. Fact upon fact have been given out to try to convince people of the terrible acts we commit against Mother Earth and yet some people still don't feel they are responsible. I enjoyed reading the book. Honestly, I didn't rad the book to critique what the authors believe or rate their knowledge or intelligence, I read it for information on how to help! I feel it will help me to present my views to people in ways that they may understand and I will understand more of how people perceive them.

This is a highly informative book. It tells about people's different points of view on the highly volatile and up-and-coming field of ecopsychology. This book is a great source of information and knowledge of the field as well as it's a pretty easy read. I used this book as a jumping off point for research for my undergraduate thesis. If you are interested in environmental issues and psychology, read this book.

DON'T BUY THIS BOOK. I was looking for research purposes into the psychology of environmental issues. This WAS NOT it. there is almost no psychology in it and very little science, the subject seems to have been hijacked by a bunch of flakey new agers. DO believe the others who rated this a 1. There is a good book out there on the psychology of environmental issues, this is not it. This book has no practical applications, it will waste your valuable time and show you nothing at all. If you find a copy of this book: DESTROY.