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EarthPsyche

“The context for defining sanity in our time has reached planetary magnitude” Written in1995 by Theodore Roszak in his introduction to “Ecopsychology”, the essays in the book by diverse authors emphasize the need to take the planet into account in our psychology. I discovered the book in 1998 on a bookstore remainder table. Almost thirty years later we haven’t begun to integrate our dependence on our environment into our approach to our psyche What has it done to our personal psychology to repress our connection to our home planet for so long, collaborating with a system that leaves a stand of trees in front of a clearcut forest. In one of the essays psychologist Sarah Conn suggests that our “materialistic disorder” grows from our loss of relationship to a larger context creating an emptiness that needs filling. Our environment flows through us all the time in the food and air and water but also the many processes that unfold in and around us. The imbalance in our world is visible. Air quality today is 243. Unhealthy begins at 150. A dirty orange thickness of smoke flows across the street dusting the green with pollutants. We can see the distress in the air. In our lungs and in our mood, we feel the planets distress. We have to breathe. Studies since the 70s have shown that crime goes up, depression and anxiety all go up with the rise in air pollution. We have allowed our individual selves to think we’re separate too long. Maybe we should consider ourselves as a where. William James referred to ‘I‘ as a pronoun of location. Our dependence on our earth habitat underscores how much a part of our being it is. Without gravity we’d float off into space. Instead, we’re held by the earth, systems within systems. This kind of complexity needs to be shown not explained. Visual philosophy refers to the use of imagery to show the important relationships. Balance and imbalance, harmony and proportion can be seen and tie us to a larger context. We’re never free of the world around us. We breathe it, feed ourselves, move around on it. Gregory Bateson once said that the unit of survival was not the individual but individual in environment because without the environment, we won’t survive. Lewis Thomas thought of “fittest” as referring to what fit best into the environment. Our psychology should include our relationship to the earth, starting with where we are. Fire, floods and monster storms won’t let us ignore the planet any longer. We need to extend our psychology to include our relationship to the earth. What is it now and how might it evolve in harmony with the ecosystem? Seeing the many ways our ebb and flow is part of the larger ebb and flow enables us to harmonize rather than disrespect the cycles, patterns a resources of our home planet.