Beyond the reality principle - ecological conception of sanity

Sierra, March-April, 1993 by Theodore Roszak

THIS IS THE LINE OF THOUGHT I have pursued in my recent book The Voice of the Earth, suggesting that an "ecological unconscious" lies at the core of the psyche, there to be drawn upon as a means for restoring us to environmental harmony. The idea is speculative-but then, psychological theories never set out to prove, only to persuade. They are best seen as commitments to understanding people in certain ways. Under the influence of the environmental movement, ecopsychology commits itself to understanding people as actors on a planetary stage who shape and are shaped by the biospheric system. Even if that commitment never qualifies as more than a hypothesis, it can make a significant political difference.

Like all political movements, environmentalism is grounded in a vision of human nature. What do people need, what do they fear, what do they love? What makes them do what they do: reason or passion, altruism or selfishness? Questions like these set the tone and shape the tactics of political action. Start from the assumption that people are greedy brutes, and the tone of all you say will be one of contempt. Assume that people are self-destructively stupid, and your tactics are apt to become overbearing at best, dictatorial at worst. As for those on the receiving end of the assumption, shame has always been among the most unpredictable motivations in politics; it too easily laps over into resentment. Call someone's entire way of life into question-- as environmental activists are prone to do--and what you are apt to produce is defensive rigidity..

The time is at hand for the environmental movement to draw up a psychological impact statement. Ecopsychology has a role to play in that project. If psychology needs ecology in order to find an adequate image of human nature, ecology also needs psychology in order to find more sensitive ways to address the public it wishes to persuade. In this effort, the environmental movement has other means to draw upon besides shock and shame. Ecopsychology holds that there is a sympathetic bond between our species and the planet that is every bit as tenacious as the sexual and aggressive instincts Freud found in the depths of the psyche. The "greening of psychology" begins with matters as familiar to all of us as the empathic rapport with the natural world that is reborn in every child, and that survives in the work of nature poets and landscape painters. Where this sense of shared identity is experienced as we most often experience it person to person, we call it love. More coolly and distantly felt between the human and not-human, it is called compassion. In either case, the result is spontaneous loyalty.

Even some militant environmental activists are coming to see the importance of integrating that instinctive "call of the wild" into the basic psychology of the movement. Dave Foreman, one of the country's most prominent "ecowarriors," reminds his colleagues that the greater goal of all they do is to "open our souls to love this glorious, luxuriant, animated planet."To forget that is "counterproductive, and . . . damaging to our personal mental health."