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Voice of the Earth: An Exploration of Ecopsychology

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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.

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.

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.

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, and nature. Individual chapters address such issues as the true essence of mother earth/Gaia, Psychology vs. Cosmology vs. Ecology, and much more in this serious transcendental address of clashing ideologies of the planet we know best. The Voice Of The Earth is strongly recommended for readers with an interest in the philosophy of nature and the impact of human psychology upon the ecological environmental.

The founder of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud, did not believe that psychoanalysis would bring men to happiness. Far from it. In his view, his theory of psychoanalysis was the "third outrage" in humankind's long, arduous march from superstition to civilization. The first was Copernicus' discovery that our Earth is not the center of the universe; the second, the Darwinian revolution in biology which robbed man of his sense of being specially created by God, relegating him to having descended from animals, implying an ineradicably animal nature in him; and the third, Freud's own theory of the unconscious, wherein the "ego" of each person is presumably not even the master of his own house.

When Freud was writing at the turn of the century, a pessimistic, brooding atmosphere pervaded the intelligentsia. Darwinism and entropy were the dominant strains of cosmological theory. Freud was a doctrinaire materialist. He saw man as a body with a reservoir of instincts, and psychoanalysis was essentially an inquiry into "the demands made upon the mind in consequence of its connection with the body." Ultimately, however, Freud's search for the physical foundation for the psyche reached a dead end. Roszak writes:

[Freud's] vision of a lifeless, uncaring universe was so grim that it proved to have no future in psychiatry. It yielded an image of the human psyche trapped in the desolation of an infinity where it finds no consolation, no remorse, no response to its need for warmth, love and acceptance. (58)

Roszak, a Professor of History at the University of California at Berkeley, argues that Freud's despairing vision of life continues to haunt the major schools of psychiatric thought. As such, modern psychiatry "has...cut itself off from nature at large and [ministers] to the psyche within a purely personal or social frame of reference . . ." The consequence is that psychiatry and psychotherapy occur within an unacknowledged, negative context in which the universe is considered alien and hostile to human consciousness.

According to Roszak, the underlying assumptions of the psychoanalytic worldview are themselves a major source of neurotic suffering, severely limiting any curative help available through psychoanalysis, or, for that matter, psychotherapy. Existentialists did not get beyond Freud's essentially negative vision of nature, but merely added layers of their own analysis to it. The natural world is described by Existentialists as one to which the individual is "thrown"; existentialists tend to see the environment (Umwelt) as little more than the sum of thwarting physical necessities. Roszak writes:

What we have here is a denatured environment precisely as we might expect urban therapists and their clientele to know it: a blank, characterless, somewhat bothersome background to "real life," which is social and personal (65).

In virtually every school of contemporary psychiatry or psychology, from Freudian to the post-Freudian Object Relations school to Existentialism and Humanistic Psychology, we find the concept of the environment either reduced to mean the social environment, or depicted as alien to human beings, a place where man is uprooted and abandoned. Roszak quotes Mary Midgley:

The impression of desertion or abandonment which Existentialists have is due, 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 (66).

In cogent, persuasive language, Roszak calls for a new psychology--"ecopsychology"--which sees human beings as inseparable from the natural environment, part of a continuum which includes plants and insects and animals. From the viewpoint of nonhuman nature, he writes, sane behavior (as described by psychologists and psychiatrists) might seem madness. "But as the prevailing Reality Principle would have it, nothing could be greater madness than to believe that beast and plant, mountain and river have a `point of view.'"

The book is divided into three sections: Part One, Psychology; Part Two, Cosmology; and Part Three, Ecology. Part One explores the psychological aspects of a world divided into overdeveloped, overpolluting industrial nations and "developing" nations anxious to join the industrial club. Roszak asserts that the world's environment cannot handle many more industrialized nations living at the level of U.S. consumption. The solution to Third World poverty, then, is not adoption of the wantonly wasteful consumerism of the U.S., since such a situation would lead to worldwide environmental catastrophe.

Roszak claims that one reason the environmental movement is ineffective is that it is splintered into so many different groups, each fighting one urgent issue, that it exhausts the public keeping up with the latest crisis. He also says that the corporate elites are busily typecasting all environmentalists as misanthropic subversives bent on destroying our way of life--a replay of the 50s "Red Scare" only now the "Green Scare."

In part two, Roszak essays the new physics, making a compelling case for purpose and design in the universe, and challenging the Darwinist orthodoxy, prevalent among modern scientists, that all life on earth evolved to its present state by purely random causes. Randomness, according to Roszak, has become a dogma among many scientists; and theories which accept teleological arguments are taboo.

The acceptance among most scientists of the validity of the Big Bang theory, including the notion that the universe is 4.5 billion years old, has caused the old notion of everything evolving randomly to be highly questionable. Given an infinity of time, it is not hard to see how any number of complex systems could come into being randomly; given 4.5 billion years, however, there is a point at which the probability that such complex systems as the spiral nebulae and life on earth unfolding by chance becomes virtually zero.

Roszak discusses developments in the Gaia hypothesis, the notion that the earth is a single, self-regulating organism; the parallels between the Deep Ecology movement and feminist spirituality; systems theory and the new deism, and much more.

In the final section Roszak argues convincingly that a convergence of the newly emerging cosmology of Deep Ecology, Systems Theory and the Gaia Hypothesis--what he calls the New Deism--may, aided by enough artists and visionary philosophers, mature into an ecologically grounded form of animism.

Within this new context, sanity and madness take on new meanings. The urban-industrial "reality principle" represses much that is essential to our well being: wild places, spontanaeity, the organic, the feminine. How, Roszak finally asks, does the planet respond to the "reckless monkey cunning" of its troublesome human children? He poses a question: "what if the `narcissism' we see emerging in the high industrial societies has a creative role to play in taming our Promethian delusions?"

This book is deep and complex. It is difficult if not impossible to adequately review it succinctly. But despite its philosophic complexity, it can be grasped by the lay reader. For all who are concerned about the fate of the earth at the end of the twentieth century, it is must reading.

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. This is also the book that gives you hope, a sense of meaning, and importance in this infinite universe. This is absolutely no "new-age"-book, but a serious, fact-filled investigation in our own position and role in the web of life on this planet. But this book, written by Theodore Roszak, a professor in history, could really be a starting point for a new age, the ecologically balanced age of a reinchanted world.

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 between our way of life and the inherent limits of our biosphere. For individuals to be mentally healthy, we must leap the fences of conformity and help invent a group relationship to the biosphere that can nurture our grandchildren.