Sight and Sensibility : The Ecopsychology of Perception [Hardcover]

Laura Sewall (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 4, 1999

In the tradition of A Natural History of the Senses, an esteemed expert in ecopsychology shows how expanding the way we see the natural world can improve the way we relate to it.

In recent years, there has been a surge of interest in the connection between the human psyche and the natural environment. Fueled by a growing awareness of worldwide ecological degradation, an entirely new field of study, called ecopsychology, has emerged. At universities across the country, scientists are learning how the decline of our planet's environment affects not just our physical health but also our minds and emotions.

Laura Sewall, Ph.D., is one of ecopsychology's pioneers and an expert in the study of the visual process. In combining these fields, she has determined that the sense of sight is key to understanding and potentially reversing the effects of ecological destruction. In Sight and Sensibility--the first book on ecopsychology for lay readers--Sewall draws on her fieldwork studying the visual behavior of baboons and teaching vision improvement to trace the evolution of human sight and the cultural development of different ways of seeing. She shows how we can restructure the neural networks that determine how we see, awaken to visual patterns and depth perception, and learn to see more of the world around us.

A contemporary companion to John Berger's classic Ways of Seeing, Sight and Sensibility is a dazzling blend of science, psychology, and poetry.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Sewall calls herself "a kind of mystic scientist" (she holds a Ph.D. in psychology and the neurophysiology of vision from Brown), a characterization that could easily apply to her field, ecopsychology. Her focus is on research that indicates that visual experiences can alter the structure of neural networks in the brain's neocortex. Because we selectively filter visual information through these memory-laden channels, Sewall believes that our perceptual habits mold and perpetuate our worldview, unless we consciously choose to attend to what we've overlooked. Swinging between lyrical introspection, epiphanies in nature, sociocultural commentary and analysis of the psychology of perception, she attempts to nudge the reader toward making that perceptual shift. Readers who can get past her New Age effusions may otherwise appreciate her style, which hovers somewhere between Annie Dillard and Ken Wilber, and will find some stimulating nuggets. A professor of ecopsychology at Prescott University in Arizona, Sewall points to a host of factors that blunt the average person's sensory awareness, including TV, fragmented lifestyles, ego-based projection and the mind/body disconnect bequeathed to us by Plato. Much of her inquiry flows from engagement with the ideas of James Hillman, John Berger, environmental philosopher David Abram and others. In Sewall's upbeat scenario, many people will adopt new ways of seeing and meditating that will awaken them to the interdependence of all living things. How exactly this will solve the global ecological crisis, as Sewall hopes, remains an open question. Illustrated. Agent, Anne Depue.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About the Author

Laura Sewall, P.h.D., is a professor at Prescott College in Arizona, where she teaches ecopyschology and chairs the human development program. She lectures across the country at universities and other venues, including Esalen, the California Institute of Integral Studies, Common Boundary, and the Colorado Institute for a Sustainable Future. She lives in Prescott, Arizona.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 302 pages
• Publisher: Tarcher (October 4, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0874779898
• ISBN-13: 978-0874779899
• Product Dimensions: 8.7 x 6.2 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #448,268 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

17 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Countless stars, actually..., November 2, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Sight and Sensibility : The Ecopsychology of Perception (Hardcover)

...I've just started to read this book and am enthralled. Essentially, the author writes about the deep wound that we in Western culture have created with our objectification of life, rather than our full participation in it. We need to re-engage with our miraculous senses, and with Creation -- it is only through this awakening to our relatedness with our intrinsic, wild & innocent nature that we will love this world enough to cease our destruction of it...and of ourselves.

I'd put it up there with Thom Hartmann's "The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight" and Daniel Quinn's books. The writing is fluid, elegant, sensual, and full of love for the countless miracles of life that are evident in every form and season.

I'm reminded, too, of Rainer Maria Rilke's Eighth Elegy, as translated by Stephen Mitchell: "With all its eyes the natual world looks out / into the Open. Only *our* eyes are turned / backward, and surround plant, animal, child / like traps..."

This book invites us to dissolve the cages that we've constructed around our souls.

19 of 21 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars She walks in Beauty..., September 26, 2000

By 

Gregory Nixon (Prince George, BC, Canada) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Sight and Sensibility : The Ecopsychology of Perception (Hardcover)

Of the many books I have read this long summer, only this one would I call truly beautiful. It is not just a read but an encounter with a deeply inspiring being who seems to become an actual presence herself--someone to guide us back toward awakening to the wondrous, sensuous world around us. Far beyond the information purveyed or even the stories told, Laura Sewall herself emerges from her luminous prose as though to point with a gentle smile to the doorway which will lead us from our self-made enclosures, from the prison of our own device. This prison seems to consist of our habit-routines which bind our perceptions. Her special field of expertise is sight. She shows how we have lost our "depth-perception" by seeing everything in terms of our own culturally constructed self and its illusory security. We have learned to see only objects in terms of their potential use or threat to us. We do not see into them or their unified relations or our relationship with them (and through them): "The canon that our Western worldview posits is that the healthy, well-adjusted adult is autonomous and independent, not interdependent" (247). Instead of seeing the living world and knowing we are part of it, we see a dead world reduced to "resources". But her tale is much more than a position or an argument. She shows the reader both through her own experience (including a powerfully transcendent moment of awakening on the East African veldt) and, more subtly, through her expressive prose and prose-poetry. Reading this book is itself an experience which approaches such transcendent moments. For Laura Sewall, "perception is the dynamic ground of our many relationships with the world" (17) which "may become the ground for a sensuous, even ecstatic relationship with the world" (18). And this is the kind of many faceted text which can remind us of that. Nearing the end, as the author called for the courage of new consciousness, I feared for a time that we were going to leave terra firma and go soaring into the airy-fairy realms of New Age spiritualism. But I was wrong, and relieved to be so. This fine author stayed firmly on our dusty planet: "My prayer is that we *get down*, that we get down and dirty" (274). When I was finished, I closed the book and whooped for sheer joy.

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Beautiful vision, richly and accessibly expressed., April 24, 2000

By 

John D. Daniels (Reno, Nevada) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Sight and Sensibility : The Ecopsychology of Perception (Hardcover)

Ken Cohen in TAOISM, relates the body's meridians to Earth's energy fields through Feng Shui. In SIGHT AND SENSIBILTY, Laura Sewall relates Human Potential to Ecology through the neurophysiology of vision. She incorporates ideas not only from Eastern and Western philosophies, but also Native cultures in expressing her vision.

Justifiably critical of modern civilization, her message remains guardedly positive. For instance, early in her study of Vision, she recognized that visual processing in adults was more malleable than recognized by establisfed science. She also postulates that by employing the senses fully, we can learn to love the Earth. In other words,to improve things for the next generation is in Pema Chodron's: START WHERE YOU ARE.

Laura Sewall stresses, as the teacher who inspired me many years ago did, "bridging gaps", integrative methods, and sharing. The ideas in this book like D'Arcy Thompson's: ON GROWTH AND FORM will inspire people for many years. Her book is also a good example of what is meant in Buddhassa Bhikkhu's: MINDFULNESS WITH BREATHING: "We can use any bodily activity as a basis for (mindfulness). The more necessary and central to life that activity is, the better."

Not only has this book connected to ideas that interest me, it has provided many interesing new ideas to explore. One measure of how well she writes is, how easy it is to check the page notes and bibliograpy during the course of reading.

I believe anyone who reads this book will have a comparable experience, although in perphaps quite different areas of endeavor.