Betsy Barnum

Betsy Barnum lives in Minneapolis, Minnesota, where she maintains a patchwork of income sources to avoid full-time employment. Free-lance writing, with a focus on environmental writing and political writing, forms the core of her day-to-day activity if not the mainstay of her living. She also conducts workshops about corporate rule and how to end it, and does occasional presentations on the same topic as well as on voluntary simplicity, bioregionalism, activism, alternative careers, and other topics. She also knits somewhat obsessively and works part-time in a yarn store both to feed her habit and as a counterpoint to political and intellectual work.

Personal statement:
In 1996 I founded the Great River Earth Institute, a nonprofit whose goal is to create a space for questioning consumer values and awakening both connection with the natural world and motivation to protect it. But when the terrorist attacks of 9/11 brought the desperation of the world’s political situation into focus, the Earth Institute work, which connects directly with ecopsychology, came to seem like a luxury for which the world—and I—don’t really have time.

I switched from the very essential but somewhat unfocused work of changing culture one person at a time, to the more politically oriented work of addressing the structures and systems of politics that maintain inequality, powerlessness, belief in American exceptionalism and, last but not least, disconnection from the natural world. I’m studying for a Master of Liberal Studies degree with a focus on how worldviews that lead ultimately to destruction, like the currently dominant one, are created and maintained, an issue that bears on the deeper questions about human nature. Is it possible for us to recreate destructive political institutions to be “generative” rather than “individualistic” (Robert Bellah’s words in The Good Society)? This question needs to be answered for the sake of all of Earth’s life, which now lives at the mercy of our decisionmaking.

Politics and ecopsychology? I think so. I definitely think so.