Ecopsychology: Whole Earth Mental Health
(Page 2 of 2)
January/February 2013
The seeming simplicity of this question obscures its underlying radicalism. “Psychology, as part of the Western tradition, is a Cartesian enterprise,” says Doherty. “It consciously tries to separate humans from the rest of nature.” The widely accepted rift between nature and humanity has supposed roots as broad and deep as the advent of language, of agriculture, the legacy of the Enlightenment. Ecopsychology endeavors to explode the nature-culture, mind-body binaries that for centuries have informed how we measure sanity and health. This bifurcating tendency doesn’t preserve civilization from savagery, but rather is at the murky core of modern pathologies, like anxiety, substance abuse, and compulsive shopping. In other words, it is only because we are at such a remove from nature that we can behave the way we do: using resources with no regard for consequence, consuming goods with no thought as to their production. Doherty asks “what if we were to reinvent psychology so that at its heart it was an ecological discipline?” Could changing our relationship to nature hold the key to mental health?
A conversation with R. Murray Schafer. Originally published in the July-August 2005 issue of Utne R…
Read the rest of this article at www.guernicamag.com.
Katherine Rowland is a journalist currently based in New York. Her work has appeared in Nature, the Financial Times, the Independent, OnEarth and other publications. Excerpted from Guernica (September 20, 2012), an award-winning online magazine of arts and politics.
Read more: http://www.utne.com/mind-body/ecopsychology-zm0z13jfzros.aspx?page=2#ixzz2NkZf9vn9
