Becoming and Being: A Response to Chalquist's Review of Ecopsychology: Science, Totems, and the Technological Species

W e would like to extend our appreciation to Craig Chalquist for his thoughtful review and willingness to engage in this dialogue. And to Thomas Doherty, editor of this journal, whose idea it was. Chalquist writes as both an urbanite and deep ecologist. He resides inside the hermeneutic circle, and outside, and espouses Gadamer even as he is critical of such jargon that can do more to obfuscate than clarify. And what this means for his review is that he seems at once both supportive of our book’s thesis—and himself provides further evidence of it—even as he seeks to call into question our entire enterprise. Thus somehow, by the end of his review, he has given us everything and nothing to take issue with. Our thesis is relatively simple. For tens of thousands of years, our species coevolved with nature and developed a deep kinship with the more-than-human world. It’s what we refer to in our book as our totemic selves. Elizabeth Marshall Thomas (2006) calls it the Old Way. We are part of the Old Way. Its patterns and needs are with us still, although noticeable now in often-disjointed aspects of our lives. For example, we travel long distances to vacation in spots of natural splendor. We enjoy walking along the ocean’s edge, romping with our dog in a nearby park, or partaking of some wine and cheese as the sun sets from a bluff-top venue. Home prices are almost always higher when there is natural beauty out the window. Water views are especially valued. We enjoy gardening. Birding. We send flowers to people to cheer them up and to celebrate. A profound experience of our totemic selves is the encounter with a wild animal Other—perhaps with a turtle or a bear or a gray whale. Such an encounter can stay in one’s memory for a lifetime. Paul Shepard (1996) has written of how such encounters made us human and that the need for such encounters is with us still. But with the destruction of wild habitats and the loss of so many wild animals, these encounters happen too infrequently for too few people. Thus that totemic desire gets repressed and finds perverted forms of expression. You may have witnessed, for example, people throwing pebbles or bits of food at a wild animal imprisoned in a cage at the zoo, despite signage asking people to refrain from such behavior. The zoo visitors are not trying to hurt these animals but are trying to get their attention—to have that encounter such that the wild animal sees them, eye to eye, as they see the animal. To flourish, as individuals and as a species, we need to find healthy expression of our totemic selves: our kinship with a more-thanhuman world. And at times we need to experience the wild—that which is big, untamed, unmanaged, not encompassed, and selforganizing—to be fully human. That totemic self, which includes the wild, needs to be central to any vision of ecopsychology. But today’s vision of ecopsychology needs more than that. For as we argue in the book—and as the contributing authors show—we have created a scientific culture, which embodies, fosters, and provides a formal structure to this beautiful part of who we have become: inquisitive, creative, investigative, analytic, reflective, and self-reflective,