Seeds for Thought: an Ecopsychology Blog

exiles, incomers and tourists

I love Ann's posts, they always make me think, and often I come to no conclusions.

This week it seems to have occupied my mind to the degree that I can't think of what I was going to blog about. certainly a lesson for environmental activists in how not to behave!

My first and formative experiences of bullying were when my family was moved by my father's work, a common enough scenario. So that's how I associate it, bullying as exclusion by the in group. Margaret Atwood described it harrowingly well in Cat's Eye.

Well I got off lightly, we moved back home two years later, I remember the amazing discovery that  maybe I wasn't going to be hated for the rest of my school days.

The Space Between

Friend and ICE colleague Robert Greenway suggests that ecopsychology’s true helpfulness will be in understanding the ‘space between’ - in this case, he was speaking of the space between culture and wilderness. Following this premise, I recently saw a quintessentially ecopsychological art exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art in San Jose, California. Called Brides of Frankenstein, after Mary Shelley’s novel from the early 1800s, the all-female multi-media exhibit explored the creative edge between biology and technology in a number of arresting and disturbing videos, sculptures, paintings and interactive installations, there through October 30.

One of the two that really stood out for me was a 3D computer animation video of a huge cabbage rose, blooming and contracting, furling and unfurling, to the beat of a slow human breath...

High Bottom vs. Low Bottom Addicts

To continue with the idea from last week’s post that our environmental situation may be analogous to addiction (in this case, to consumerism), I thought it might be interesting to contemplate the fact that there are two kinds of addicts: high bottom and low bottom.

AA was formed by low bottom addicts: drunks so sick it was either recover or die – soon. They’d lost jobs, spouses, friends, relatives, doctors. Everyone had given them up as hopeless. And most of the folks who showed up at early AA meetings were just as sick, just as friendless. Their lives had slid ALL the way down before they were willing to do whatever it took to recover.

"Has oil production peaked?"

That's the question posed by the BBC.

Update:On Sunday, the BBC solicited responses from the public and hosted a phone-in show with OPEC's acting Secretary-General, Dr Shihab-Eldin.

To read readers' comments on peak oil or watch the show, go directly to Have Your Say.

I listened to the show.

Burnout

A few weeks ago I wrote about a friend who committed suicide, a kind, compassionate person who was very active in efforts both political and social (and spiritual) to change the world. Aside from the fact that he was a friend, Seth’s self-inflicted death also had a strong impact on me because I see in myself the same tendencies he had, to do too much, to involve myself in too many things, to be unable to say “no” to new requests for my time and input.

I’ve long thought that in my own case, a significant factor in this has been my “Renaissance person” interest in many things, as well as my INFP personality type that doesn’t like to close off options and sees the connections between this and that, and so I want to work on all of it. And there’s plenty to work on, that’s ensured by the ways that power is institutionalized in U.S. culture! And little in the way of structural or cultural balm for the soul of people working, against despair and powerlessness, on campaigns to save the world or various parts of it.

Intimidation 2

Intimidation is one of those things which can paralyse, demotivate, deflate.  It's used by banks and other financial institutions; by tax collection agencies; by school-yard bullies.  It works.

It's also used by some environmentalists.

I've often wondered how some environmentalists think they are going to make progress by using intimidation.  By this I mean the "shame and blame" approach taken towards communities, industry, even individuals.  Close to home this manifests itself in two specific events:

1. the seal hunt, about which I spoke earlier this year and which I will now leave alone;

music and dance

we spent a week in Scotland in an intentional community, a week of music and dance. It was all self taught, people would volunteer or request workshops on anything musical and the organiser would schedule them. nearly always they happened, sometimes as expected and sometimes not. A soul band and a ska band of  8 - 20 year olds both with horn sections. classical 5 part songs, norse dances, electric and acoustic music, accompanied and acapella singing.

Bury my Heart

The HBO series Six Feet Under was, in my opinion, excellent television for a number of reasons, not least their focus on death as a natural part of life. This is a most unusual attitude in mainstream American television and cinema, where media-depicted death is more commonly portrayed as gory punctuation in fear-inducing ‘thrillers’ or ‘dramas’, trivialized and mocked as ‘comedy’, or avoided altogether, as in news coverage of military and civilian deaths on both sides of the current war in Iraq.

Too Stupid To Survive Part 2

The many comments on last week’s post about this topic stimulated more ideas. Are we just too stupid, too ignorant, too uneducated, too helpless to be able to do anything effective to promote our own survival (never mind the survival of the rest of the living beings who are our unfortunate neighbors)? Have we already done too much damage, crossed the “tipping point”?

For me, the last couple of years have been a process of waking up to the full extent of what’s truly going on and what my part in it is. Reminds me of what happens when one joins a 12-step recovery group. Admitting what’s really going on. Ending the denial. Taking responsibility for one’s own behavior.

And maybe that’s an appropiate metaphor – we’re waking up from a nightmare of addictive consumption and stupidity that is destroying our world.

"Costly fuel raises US inflation"

That's the headline from the BBC.

A lot of our products depend on fuel in their making or in their transport. So if the cost of fuel rises, then products become more expensive to make/deliver to customers, and businesses tend to hand off these increased costs to consumers. So then we have inflation.

Inflation is measured by a price index. Which is something like a shopping basket filled with a selection of goods. The government prices all the goods in the basket one month, then checks it again the follow month, etc. to see if the prices have risen.