I want to write a blog post about ecopsychology.
Hmm. Should probably first include a basic definition of “ecopsychology.”
Several minutes spent poring through books. Unfortunately, I see that they actually all seem to presume a knowledge of this basic definition.
Open a new tab on my laptop. This happens without thought or even conscious intention.
My computer defaults to DuckDuckGo, something I set up awhile ago because I don’t want my searches to, by default, use AI and extra natural resources.
For a brief moment, though, I start to bring my cursor to the part of the window where you (used to) enter the web address you want to navigate to, but which, increasingly, I just type questions or sentences and the internet seems to read my mind. (I realize I have no idea what the name of this window is! An ever-extendable worm of letters and less-than-half-aware curiosity.)
I am about to switch to Google, because (again, without thinking) I want the AI summary.
I hesitate, noticing what I’m about to do.
I type into DuckDuckGo, “what is ecopsychology?”
This seems as good a place to start as any.
Sometimes patients ask about the word “ecopsychology,” which is on my website. Often, there’s an impression that it has to do with forest bathing, or maybe the wilderness trips troubled teenagers are sometimes sent off on. And these are not incorrect impressions; but they also oversimplify things.
Ecopsychology does indeed have to do with our relationship to what we often call “nature,” “the natural world,” or what I prefer to call the “more-than-human world,” after David Abram. But I wanted to make explicit my little moment with my laptop because it actually encapsulates the separate threads that make up ecopsychology.
For one thing, the ways I interact with my computers and phones demonstrate the seamlessness (e.g., thoughtlessness) we develop with the objects of our lives. I don’t think much about opening tabs on my computer; command + t is an automatic gesture repeated myriad times every day, because the computer is as much a part of my animal body’s reality as my coffee mug and my hair ties.
The eco- in ecopsychology means roughly what you probably think it means; it’s abstracted from ecology (in English, originally oecology, from the German Ökologie). What a lot of folks don’t realize is that eco-, etymologically, doesn’t refer to “nature,” or trees, or anti-pollution activism. Eco- comes from the Greek oikos, and it means something like “home, habitation, dwelling place.” Here is what Ernst Haeckel, the zoölogist who coined the term Ökologie had to say about it:
“By ‘ecology’ we understand the comprehensive science of the relationships of the organism to its surrounding environment, where we can include, in the broader sense, all ‘conditions of existence.’”
Returning to my opening description of typing words into various search bars on my computer, we can see our computers and smart phones and laundry hampers and cars and light switches are as much a part of our conscious “surrounding environment” as are the trees and ocean producing our oxygen.
But that word conscious is doing some very heavy lifting. Because of course, my body needs clean air, and unpoisoned water, and healthy food, and integration with other animal bodies, and time even with plant bodies. My body knows its needs quite well, even if my modern lifestyle has obscured these needs behind a scrim of light and false promises of interactivity.
Psychoecology
Before it was called “ecopsychology,” though, the field of course had to develop. That largely started in the 60s, with Robert Greenway. Greenway, interestingly, first coined the term “psychoecology,” which I find interesting because it re-orients the intention of the word.
One of the things I don’t like about the term “ecopsychology” is that it sounds like it’s just one of many approaches to psychology you could decide to focus on: cognitive psychology, depth psychology, social psychology . . . You know, whatever you like!
But ecopsychology isn’t something in which you or I get to decide whether or not we’re interested. Like the science of climate change, you can be interested or not; but the consequences will impact you, your descendents, and all of the other living creatures of the world.
Greenway’s term points towards ecology and uses psycho as a modifier which, as a description of the actual situation, sounds a hell of a lot more accurate to me. The field addresses the connections between human minds and the natural environment, the human-made world, and animals. But just as importantly, it offers a fairly radical re-orientation to the world. Instead of placing ourselves at the center, and obsessively trying to optimize how the world impacts us, ecopsychology calls that anthropocentrism into question, highlighting the sickness of such self-centeredness.
Earlier, I said this: “our computers and smart phones and laundry hampers and cars and light switches are as much a part of our conscious ‘surrounding environment’ as are the trees and ocean producing our oxygen.” Part of how I see ecopsychology is as a remedy for the unconsciousness most modern people have towards the natural world. It seems like a form of insanity of the highest degree to be captivated by a small rectangle that stresses me out, while ignoring the deaths of species and the efforts of my beleaguered neighbors to save rivers and forests that would meaningfully contribute to my own wellbeing.
How bizarre — how pathological — to be more concerned with my phone’s re-charging speed than I am, say, with the wildly imbalanced populations of deer and large predators out here on the Olympic Peninsula. The deer carry ticks, and they are absolutely everywhere, because we (the humans) have driven their natural predators away. I or my husband or someone else I care about could easily contract Lyme disease as a result of this imbalance. And yet . . . And yet, I do not involve myself with any local efforts to address the deer over-population problem. And yet, I am currently preoccupied with how quickly I can get my phone to re-charge. My phone, which I also spend a strange amount of time trying to get myself off of.
Speaking of which . . .
Sometimes at the end of a post, I offer you a quick invitation to pause.
Maybe consider whether you want to stay on your screen after this. Maybe you do! And maybe it’s time for a break, time to stop scrolling and clicking and reconnect with the real world.