Ecopsychology: Finding one’s place in the circle of life

By Robin R. Rathbun

Remember learning to ride a bicycle? After a few wobbly starts and unexpected tumbles, it worked. Exhilarating!

That "I did it" is experiential learning, the heart of discovery. When we finally figure it out for ourselves, we really Get It, and we don't forget it.

This concept is the core of ecopsychology, a multi-disciplinary perspective that entered the academic arena in the last five years. Since the 1970s a similar-sounding field, environmental psychology, studied people’s living spaces and how people felt and thought in those spaces. But there's a big difference between the two disciplines, ecopsyschology and environmental psychology.

Bring to mind an experience in nature; something that either happened when you were a child, like your first camping adventure, or a moment of tremendous awe, like seeing the Grand Canyon or the ocean for the first time. Can you remember the smells? How you felt? The colors around you?

Through a variety of experiences like wilderness quests, eco pilgrimages and sacred passage retreats, people are given time to be in nature, to simply be with the world. As Elias Amidon, co-director of the Boulder Institute for Nature and the Human Spirit, says, "The word 'ecopsychology' has an academic ring to it, but it is, in fact, something very personal and intimate. It's about our sense of belonging—or not belonging—on this earth."

Thus, ecopsychology is not just theory. It is about feeling one's place in the world. Some ecopsychologists say human beings are a part of this planetary existence—not above it, or in charge of it, but a part of the web of life.

Ecopsychology, however, is more than just a new take on the environmental movement, although the roots began growing from ideas expressed by Rachel Carson, John Muir and Albert Schweitzer. Ecopsychology may, in fact, have been started in the mid-'70s by a Norwegian philosopher named Arne Naess who looked at ecology in an ethical framework. Rather than protecting the earth's resources for our future gain, i.e. being good "stewards" for the planet, he suggested that we should save the planet because of a reverence for life, all living beings. This became known as "deep ecology."

It wasn't until the early '90s that the Ecopsychology Institute was established at California State University. Its mission, as outlined by Director Theodore Roszak, was to facilitate international dialogue between environmental scientists/activists and psychologists/psychotherapists. Roszak believed that the environmental movement urgently needed better ways to persuade people than using fear, guilt and punishment.

"Ecopsychologists believe there are positive, more enduring and reinforcing motivations for good environmental citizenship," the Institute literature states. The Ecopsychology Institute seeks to draw environmental lawyers and policy-makers into our dialogue and to make our research and expertise useful to them as expert witnesses in courts of law and before congressional committees and as consultants in shaping environmental priorities.

"We (at the Institute) believe there are many roles for ecopsychology professionals in our society: as advisors to environmental organizations, as consultants in environmental litigation, as mediators in environmental disputes, as therapeutic practitioners, as environmental educators who emphasize the emotional, motivational, and psychological aspects of environmental issues."

Animal-assisted therapeutic specialist Cook Rodgers is creating a farm-based healing center in Boulder. Since domesticated farm animals have been a part of our everyday human lives for thousands of years, Rodgers feels that they can bring humans closer to the healing forces of Earth.

"Recently researchers considered the human/companion animal relationship worthy of scientific study," she says. "We know that petting an animal or even watching fish can lower blood pressure, and that animals help the elderly and people with disabilities talk more freely with each other. We can now begin to explain some of the healing effects of sharing our lives with animals that humans have known about intuitively for thousands of years."

Along a similar vein, Rebecca Reynolds, an ecotherapist, talks about the "Animals as Intermediaries" program, which is a therapeutic program bringing nature into contained environments. She finds that when program leaders bring a montage of rocks, plants, water and animals, both wild and domestic, into classrooms, jails, nursing homes and other specialized living and learning centers, participants respond to the "healing" nature of these interactive gifts.

Human health is affected by a toxic environment. Some obvious examples are farm workers dying from pesticides, coal miners suffering with black lung disease, or children with birth defects after parents were exposed to radiation. A toxic environment undoubtedly effects mental health as well, but how and to what degree has yet to be extensively tested in controlled studies. Studies have shown, however, that if people stare off at a grassy field or across the ocean, their moods are elevated. If people look out their hospital window at a park scene as opposed to another brick-walled building or a congested highway, they heal faster after surgery. A review of more than 300 studies of participants in wilderness experience programs found that the most significant pattern emerging from these experiences was increased self-esteem and sense of personal control.

The Ecopsychology Institute says that a redefinition of mental health requires a "consensus among psychologists and therapists that balanced environmental relations are a significant emotional factor in people's lives. Conversely, there must be a professional consensus that dysfunctional environmental relations can harm the mental health of individuals, communities, neighborhoods, children or the human species at large."

Dr. Ante Lundberg, who is with the Washington, D.C., Commission on Mental Health Services, explored the impact of environmental trauma on psychiatric patients. In a 1994 letter to the Ecopsychology Institute he wrote, "A deteriorated environment has vast psychosocial consequences... Manifestations of toxic pollution are often insidious and delayed.

"Impairment of the central nervous system is the most important direct medical effect of pollution. We are exposed to a huge number of potentially neurotoxic substances, only a handful of which has been well studied. Neurotoxins have been shown to cause most types of psychiatric symptoms.

"Furthermore, many studies show a therapeutic effect of exposure to animals and nature, including reduction in violent and antisocial behavior... Ecopsychology is a movement among psychotherapists that rests on the premise that human sanity requires an ongoing, sustainable relationship with the natural world."

John L. Swanson, a Gestalt psychologist who has written a book about personal growth through communing with nature, says, "There is plenty of evidence that human nature and Mother Nature resonate to a common order that is physically, psychologically and spiritually wholesome."

"So much is implicated in ecopsychology: science, religion, sociology, history," says Amidon. "Our own culture as well as the other cultures that are rapidly becoming industrialized have predicated development on the basis that we humans are separate from nature. Different. We must move to a point where we view nature as Self."

At some level in our psyche, we do get it. People in developed countries are searching for connection and fulfillment. There's a sense of hopelessness that shopping at the mall or partying at the pub can't remedy.

"We are weaving our own insanity," says Elizabeth Roberts, the co-editor of Earth Prayers, Life Prayers and Prayers for a Thousand Years. "The answer to the environmental malaise isn't just a technical solution. It requires more because we are in a psychological and spiritual crisis, a crisis of culture and character."

E.O. Wilson, renowned ethnobiologist, coined the term "biophilia" to describe our innate need to interact with the living world. The loss of this contact may undermine emotional health. Metro State's John Davis says that he feels the sense of disconnection and alienation is pervasive today. "It's a sense that 'I don't belong,' a sense of loss to our natural world and our community. But this is a delusion because we are not disconnected. When the earth is in trouble, we are in trouble, too."

Amidon and Roberts teach a course through The Naropa Institute called, "Waking Up Together—The Practices of Ecopsychology." The reason for the course, and the nine-day wilderness quests they lead, is to reconnect people to the earth. "The expanding global culture is suffering from a very real separation from nature," Amidon says.

"But how can we not be connected?" Roberts asks. "This is in your cells, the pulse of our earthly connection, and it comes right up to meet you when you take time to sit and be with nature."

Dominie Cappadonna, Ph.D., has practiced in the field of transpersonal psychology as a psychotherapist and professor for 30 years. She decided to combine her work in healing with her love of nature. In 1981, she created "Mystic Journeys Under Sail," taking co-journeyers to the Galapagos Islands and Hawaii. Since then she has lead other inner search/outer explorations, which she has called, "Healing in the Amazon and Andes," "Wolf Wisdom, Arctic Vision" and "Southwest Pilgrimages."

"'Announcing your place in the family of things' is the prize I pray one might receive and own for themselves through their experience in nature," says Cappadonna.

Sacred Passage's founder, John Milton, undisputedly one of the accomplished founders of the environmental movement, saw the same need for establishing deep, personal connection with the earth. While many individuals grasp environmental concepts intellectually, in our predominantly urban society with a 7-11 on nearly every corner, people are being deprived of a direct connection with nature. Even making reservations to stay at a national park campground has become an arduous effort in phone-menu patience.

Through small group and wilderness solo experiences, Milton facilitates an intimate awareness of the environment. Many of those who study and work with him share his perspective that while protective environmental legislation remains important, personal, spiritual connections with Nature are essential.

The problems we and our entire life-support system face are enormous. Our options are that we can "come at the environmental problems with a sense of burden, shame, guilt, fear and sacrifice, or we can come at it with optimism and joy, doing the work that needs to be done with devotion and love," says John Davis, a psychology professor at Metropolitan State College in Denver and author of soon-to-be-released The Diamond Approach: An Introduction to the Teachings of A.H. Almaas.

"If we wake up to our connection with the Earth, then we see we are the Earth, and taking care of it is taking care of ourselves."