Ecopsychology Can Save You And Your World
By: Christyl Rivers
Tags: Equality, Belonging, Wisdom, Climate Change, Social Justice

Ecopsychology Can Save You And Your World

Einstein may have been a sexist jerk, sometimes, but he was mostly right about your place on the planet

Stockphoto image

Ecopsychology says that what you breathe, eat, live in and work with, all comes from your environment.

It also says that you have a body that feels, thinks, emotes, and has needs dependent upon your environment.

To me, any other psycho therapy is close to gibberish. How your Elektra or Oedipal complex originated doesn’t affect you as much as your next breath. What your Jungian, archetypal, tracking charts show you doesn’t matter as much as access to clean water. What birth order, or primal screaming, or toddler recall hypnotherapy, reveals about that bad day when you were six, is not as crucial to your life as a view of nature that shows you the world is supportive, beautiful, healing, inspiring, and resilient.

We need biodiversity to survive. We cannot live without oceans, or insects, or food sources, or hope. We can’t live online, at least not entirely, until we are smarter, faster, cyborg robots. Even then, the raw materials have to come from whatever planet is closest and convenient.

The human tribe is ONE tribe, one race. Further, that race itself belongs to an even larger family, our shared DNA throughout the planet.

Ecopsychology is about hope. At its core, ecopsychology is optimistic. It tells us that you belong to the world. You have a place in the human tribe. The human tribe is ONE tribe, one race. Further, that race itself belongs to an even larger family, our shared DNA throughout the planet.

The survival of our race depends not upon conquest, superiority, or domination. In fact, it depends entirely upon sharing, caring, and increasing our circle of compassion, ever outward: to include not just our fellow human beings, but the very micro to macro organisms that make all human beings — and all life — possible.

Being of one race in such tumultuous racist, and sexist times, may sound unrealistic, or naive. There are people who will constantly whine about “Us versus Them.”

Those people, some are supremacists, some are sexist, and some are just bitter and impoverished. They may feel threatened by the possibility of losing “our way of life”. They may tell you it is because we “can’t even take care of our own.”

They hear the rabble at the city gates and lose track of the fact that people are people. We can’t expect refugees to just evaporate, because the trickle and continuing, fall out of Climate Change, and possible Nukes, is just beginning.

Those people are also we people. Those of us who feel fear about the “out-group” are, as Einstein so eloquently put it suffering, “under a delusion.”

Here is Al’s entire quote on your belonging to nature via your physical, mental, emotional, spiritual ecopsychologically wired person-hood:

“A Human being is part of a whole, called by us “universe,” limited in time and space. He/She*experiences the self, our thoughts and feelings, as something separated from the rest — a kind of optical delusion of our consciousness.”

In other words, it is up to all of us who do recognize our racial, and gender equality, one-ness to get the memo circulated to all of those suffering under the sad thought that “some of us don’t belong.” We all belong.

Another reason ecopsychology is of infinite value is that it does not focus on the doom and gloom of our total trashing of our planet. It looks instead, at your personal, perpetual power. You can choose empowerment of reusable bags. You can choose the empowerment of buying less plastic crap. You can choose the empowerment of planting a tree. You can choose any number of influential habits that you exercise hundreds of times in a day. You have some say, with each and every choice you make.

You don’t need more stuff and complication in your life so much as you need to reconnect to the pre-industrial relationship our species evolved within. You need to examine your values, and when people do, they realize that cooperation is always better than competition.

We invented money, and nations, and borders and the one percent. How do your values say that is working out for you? Why invest in ignorant, outdated, systems that don’t benefit your life? A system that only works for a few, while fouling the biosphere elsewhere, does not bode well for an entire species.

We are a social species, and as such, we need one another. Sociobiology says so. Common sense says so. Your being in the world — ecopsychology — says so.

In an era of climate change, corrupt capitalism, droughts, famine, floods, fires and refugees, taking more than your share doesn’t make you a prince, or a genius, or a rich, celebrity, role-model looked up to by the fawning serfs. It just makes you an inconsiderate jackass.

However, bragging about owning an oil well, or coal mine, with particular influence in Washington DC, due to lobbying influence, doesn’t make you an inconsiderate jackass.

That just makes you a tone-deaf, and foolish, inconsiderate jackass.

More optimism of ecopsychology is found in the woods. Or the mountains, or the prairies, or the oceans — white with foam. Beauty, and diversity as nature teaches it to our race is remarkable, rejuvenating, remedial, refreshing, rewarding, reconnecting, and reinvigorating. And that is just a few of the “R” words.

Actually, the more you know about nature’s powers, the better human being you are because you realize both the significance and insignificance of your existence. You can look up at the sacred, stars at night, you can see the forest, for the trees, and you can hear the piper calling you to join him.

(We’re so sorry Uncle Albert, we know your 21st century, updated version would likely include as many gender pronouns that are considered polite to the enlarged circle of compassion.)