What is the bond between the human psyche and the living planet that nurtured us, and all of life, into existence? What is the link between our own mental health and the health of the greater biosphere? In this "bold, ambitious, philosophical essay" (Publishers Weekly), historian and cultural critic Roszak explores the relationships between psychology, ecology, and new scientific insights into systems in nature. Drawing on our understanding of the evolutionary, self-organizing universe, Roszak illuminates our rootedness in the greater web of life and explores the relationship between our own sanity and the larger-than-human world. The Voice of the Earth seeks to bridge the centuries-old split between the psychological and the ecological with a paradigm which sees the needs of the planet and the needs of the person as a continuum. The Earth's cry for rescue from the punishing weight of the industrial system we have created is our own cry for a scale and quality of life that will free us to become whole and healthy. This second edition contains a new afterword by the author.
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Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
Our culture is psychotic in its rift between the personal and the planetary, maintains Roszak ( The Making of a Counterculture ). Drawing freely on Jung, Freud and the Gaia hypothesis, the California State University historian posits an "ecological unconscious" in each person, a living record of cosmic evolution capable of linking us synergistically to the natural environment. But this awareness has been repressed, he contends in a bold, ambitious philosophical essay. His sketchy outline of a new discipline and therapy, "ecopsychology," is built around a dense critique of tribal animism, systems theory, Teilhard de Chardin, humanistic psychology, ecofeminism and "deep ecology," the mystical-feminist wing of environmentalism. The tools of Roszak's therapy include communion with wilderness, nature mysticism and traditional healing techniques, coupled with a sizing down of large cities, which he condemns for their inhuman scale.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From Library Journal
In his new book, Roszak explores the correlation between the degraded condition of the earth and the uneasy state of the human psyche that he introduced in Person/Planet ( LJ 10/1/78). He elaborates on the conflict between our devaluation of the natural world--the result of an outdated picture of the universe as mindless matter in motion--and the contemporary model of the universe as a web of open, evolving, and interrelated systems. Humans belong in the universe, he argues, and as microcosms of the whole we carry its history in our collective unconscious. Roszak supports this argument by examining the anthropic principle, Deep Ecology, the Gaia hypothesis, and systems theory. Scientists will be troubled by his teleological reasoning and the speculative nature of his "ecopsychology." Nevertheless, this book makes a thought-provoking contribution to the search for an ecologically sound way of being in the world. For academic and large public libraries.
- Joan Elbers, Montgomery Coll. Lib., Rockville, Md.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
- Joan Elbers, Montgomery Coll. Lib., Rockville, Md.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
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More About the Author
Theodore Roszak (1933-2011) was the author of fifteen books, including the 1969 classic "The Making of a Counter Culture." He was professor emeritus of history at California State University, and lived in Berkeley, California.
Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
29 of 29 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
In its first edition this was one of the best books of the decade, for me. One of his main arguments is that for about three hundred years the main political agenda in the West was the struggle for democracy, freedoms, political equality. That struggle continues in the rest of the world, but in the West a new struggle is emerging, which will dominate society and politics for the coming centuries. This is the struggle for personal meaning: now that we have affluence and rights, we are turning to what makes our lives worth living.
He quotes an early and halting expression of the struggle for political rights from the Putney Debates, in the English Civil War (mid 1600s) - he has beautiful quotes from this. This somewhat incoherent desire for democracy, expressed by lower class people, was reviled by many educated people; but 100 years later the intelligentsia adopted its agenda in the American, French Revolutions etc. Now, he says, the Recovery Movement and similar expressions of desire for personal growth are reviled by many educated people as vulgar 'me first' or 'I'm a victim' self obsessions. But he says this longing for personal growth is a powerful force that will change our societies.
There is much more - his argument that psychotherapy is an urban movement, but that we can never heal ourselves until we reconnect with nature. Or his explanation of the anthropic principle - and his scepticism about the role of random factors in evolution - both of which suggest at least that we should feel more at home in our universe, and not imagine we humans are merely insignificant, randomly generated accidents. Whether he's right about the this I don't know, but it's sure encouraging to read it. There's plenty of food for thought and hope in this book. A good book to read with it is Robert Wright's Non Zero.
26 of 27 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase
This book could easily be seen as one of the most profound wake-up calls for humanity published for the 21st century! This is the stage in our evolution that we'll either continue on our destructive, insane, parasitic and unconscious collective death-wish to oblivion, or we'll heed the loud call heard here to become aware of our life-sustaining, interconnectedness to all life and start to heal our riff not only amongst ourselves, but more importantly, with Earth. To give this outstanding book a 5-star rating is not enough- it deserves 10-stars!
For those who are not familiar with *Ecopsychology*, there is a good description and comparison of it to human-only psychology in the Epilog of this monumental work:
"Just as it has been the goal of previous therapies to recover the contents of the unconscious, so the goal of ecopsychology is to awaken the inherent sense of environmental reciprocity that lies within the ecological unconscious. Other therapies seek to heal the alienation between person to person, person and family, person and society. Ecopsychology seeks to heal the more fundamental alienation between the person and the natural environment." (p 320)
The current state of affairs in the human relationship with the earth is not only ambivalent and dismissive, it is destructive, parasitic and cancerous, and yet, Planet Earth is our only life-support system- our very reason for existence. One might then be inclined to see our current relationship with our home as outright insanity. And indeed, it is! "If we could assume the viewpoint of nonhuman nature, what passes for sane behavior in our social affairs might seem madness." (Preface, p 13) And, of course, our "social affairs", disregarding our relationship to Earth, is riff with pathology and psychosis.
Earth's voice is simply stated in: "The Earth's cry for rescue from the punishing weight of the industrial system we have created is our own cry for a scale and quality of life that will free each of us to become the complete person we were born to be." (p 14)
From the philosopher Mary Midgley in her book, "Beast and Man...": "[she]...finds the doctrinaire dismissal of the physical and biological worlds to be `the really monstrous thing about Existentialism.'" and, "...as if the world contained only dead matter (things) on the one hand and fully rational, educated, adult human beings on the other-as if there were no other life-forms. ...I am sure, not to the removal of God, but to this contemptuous dismissal of the biosphere-plants, animals, and children. Life shrinks to a few urban rooms; no wonder it becomes absurd." (p 66) Indeed.
With science leading us to an awareness of the dynamics of life and Earth's self-regulating life-support systems, we have: "If human conduct were governed by reason alone, what science has taught us about the great ecological patterns and cycles of the planet might be enough to reform our bad environmental habits." (p 95)
This, then leads us to the very fascinating chapter 5: "Anima Mundi: The Search For Gaia- The Many Faces of Mother Earth". In the Anima Mundi, earlier human civilizations felt the wonder and presence of Earth's majestic powers, so when did humanity start to loose it's sense of awe and respect for Earth? Perhaps the advent of citification, social class structures, and certainly, industrialization might have been that point. We became fixated on blinding human concocted regimes apart from the workings and acknowledgement of Nature.
In Part Three- "Ecology" (p 213), there is: "The New Cosmology and our deepening study of ordered complexity provide the raw intellectual material for a new understanding of human connectedness with nature. In time, with enough help from artists and visionary philosophers, this body of fact and theory may mature into an ecologically grounded form of animism. We will find ourselves once again on speaking terms with nature. Within this greater environmental context, sanity and madness take on new meanings."
We will hopefully begin to understand that: "Industrialism, with it's rapacious use of the environment as either raw material or dumping ground, has further entrenched the city's alienation from nature." (p 220)
Therefore, "...the environmental movement is trying to teach us that both economics and ethics must be contained within an ecological context." (p 248) This then, leads to a sane, life-enhancing, and rewarding human existence.
One could go on and on relating the plethora of thought provoking lines found all through this masterpiece of a call to education, realization, and return to sanity in our relation-ship with Earth, but that would be burdensome for a review and this is possibly too long as it is. I highly recommend this book to everyone on the planet, especially to industry, government, and all religious orders.
For those who are not familiar with *Ecopsychology*, there is a good description and comparison of it to human-only psychology in the Epilog of this monumental work:
"Just as it has been the goal of previous therapies to recover the contents of the unconscious, so the goal of ecopsychology is to awaken the inherent sense of environmental reciprocity that lies within the ecological unconscious. Other therapies seek to heal the alienation between person to person, person and family, person and society. Ecopsychology seeks to heal the more fundamental alienation between the person and the natural environment." (p 320)
The current state of affairs in the human relationship with the earth is not only ambivalent and dismissive, it is destructive, parasitic and cancerous, and yet, Planet Earth is our only life-support system- our very reason for existence. One might then be inclined to see our current relationship with our home as outright insanity. And indeed, it is! "If we could assume the viewpoint of nonhuman nature, what passes for sane behavior in our social affairs might seem madness." (Preface, p 13) And, of course, our "social affairs", disregarding our relationship to Earth, is riff with pathology and psychosis.
Earth's voice is simply stated in: "The Earth's cry for rescue from the punishing weight of the industrial system we have created is our own cry for a scale and quality of life that will free each of us to become the complete person we were born to be." (p 14)
From the philosopher Mary Midgley in her book, "Beast and Man...": "[she]...finds the doctrinaire dismissal of the physical and biological worlds to be `the really monstrous thing about Existentialism.'" and, "...as if the world contained only dead matter (things) on the one hand and fully rational, educated, adult human beings on the other-as if there were no other life-forms. ...I am sure, not to the removal of God, but to this contemptuous dismissal of the biosphere-plants, animals, and children. Life shrinks to a few urban rooms; no wonder it becomes absurd." (p 66) Indeed.
With science leading us to an awareness of the dynamics of life and Earth's self-regulating life-support systems, we have: "If human conduct were governed by reason alone, what science has taught us about the great ecological patterns and cycles of the planet might be enough to reform our bad environmental habits." (p 95)
This, then leads us to the very fascinating chapter 5: "Anima Mundi: The Search For Gaia- The Many Faces of Mother Earth". In the Anima Mundi, earlier human civilizations felt the wonder and presence of Earth's majestic powers, so when did humanity start to loose it's sense of awe and respect for Earth? Perhaps the advent of citification, social class structures, and certainly, industrialization might have been that point. We became fixated on blinding human concocted regimes apart from the workings and acknowledgement of Nature.
In Part Three- "Ecology" (p 213), there is: "The New Cosmology and our deepening study of ordered complexity provide the raw intellectual material for a new understanding of human connectedness with nature. In time, with enough help from artists and visionary philosophers, this body of fact and theory may mature into an ecologically grounded form of animism. We will find ourselves once again on speaking terms with nature. Within this greater environmental context, sanity and madness take on new meanings."
We will hopefully begin to understand that: "Industrialism, with it's rapacious use of the environment as either raw material or dumping ground, has further entrenched the city's alienation from nature." (p 220)
Therefore, "...the environmental movement is trying to teach us that both economics and ethics must be contained within an ecological context." (p 248) This then, leads to a sane, life-enhancing, and rewarding human existence.
One could go on and on relating the plethora of thought provoking lines found all through this masterpiece of a call to education, realization, and return to sanity in our relation-ship with Earth, but that would be burdensome for a review and this is possibly too long as it is. I highly recommend this book to everyone on the planet, especially to industry, government, and all religious orders.
19 of 19 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
I re-read this book every few years, but it's only recently that I've come to appreciate Roszak's "exploration of ecopsychology" as a profound assessment of our "biospheric emergency" and a sure prescription for deep healing. In particular, his discussion of "plenitude" (evoking Mumford here), Roszak provides an elegant alternative to our current fascination with mindless surfeit.
The Principles of Ecospychology are sketched in an Epilogue, rooted in the assertion that "the person is anchored within a greater, universal identity" than that which has been presented in earlier psychologies. Here the goal is to "awaken the sense of environmental reciprocity that lies within the ecological unconscious. Other therapies seek to heal the alienation between person and person, person and family, person and society. Ecopsycholgy seeks to heal the more fundamental alienation between the person and the natural environment."
A very useful appendix, "God and Modern Cosmology," provides an annotated bibliography for continued study of the growing convergence between science and religion.
Most Recent Customer Reviews
A brilliant, hopeful book
The founder of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud, did not believe that psychoanalysis would bring men to happiness. Far from it. Read more
Published on May 15, 2009 by Bodhi Gaia
A life-changing book
Read it! This is THE book. The book that gives the explanations as to why we destroy this wounderous planet on which we are all dependent. Read more
Published on August 28, 2008 by Vera
Revolutionary!
This book makes it crystal clear that as a society we are functioning beyond the bounds of (collective) sanity, and that this becomes truer the more aware we become of the mismatch... Read more
Published on February 8, 2008 by David P. Mccobb
A serious transcendental address of clashing ideologies
The Voice Of The Earth: An Exploration Of Ecopsychology by Theodore Roszak is a compelling and thoughtful exploration of the interconnection between psychology, ecology, science,... Read more
Published on April 11, 2002 by Midwest Book Review
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