Seeds for Thought: an Ecopsychology Blog

questions for us all

Nats commented the following and I've created this blog entry for it as it deserved special attention. :)

Hi, I don't know if this is the right place to post, i'm new here...

i was wondering if anyone could share some ideas with me, been thinking this morning, and came up with lots of questions, how is ecopsychology going to stand up to corporations such as tesco, which seem to have naturalised into the majority of peoples lives? how can this knowledge really help when it has limited access across society, and when parts of society may not be open to its ideas...

how can our thoughts avoid being another 'western' idea popularised by those who have the opportunity through their social situation to make direct decisions and lifestyle choices...

how do we consider and understand issues concerning peoples across the globe struggling for survival or forced from their homes as the result of violent conflict?

i guess i'm new to this way of thinking and am finding the enormity of global considerations a little daunting thank you take care x

Alotta Errata

A guest blog entry by melissa

I cried tonight. Somewhere around page 243 of Ecopsychology, about 8 or 10 paragraphs into Joanna Macy's "Working Through Environmental despair," I cried. I cried because she said it was OK. For the first time I felt my frustration, my rage, my crippling pain was justified. Reading her words made me realize that this hole inside of me, this emptiness that sneaks up on me, the unsettling feeling that something is very very out of place, is not caused by the social and environmental distress and disfunction that I see everyday but by the suppression of my feelings about them. Macy States that "Many people, conditioned to take seriously only those feelings that pertain to our immediate welfare, find it strange to think that we can suffer on behalf of hte larger society-and on behalf of our planet-and that such suffering is real, valid, and healthy." I can't agree more.

Stan Cox: The Lawn Racket

Released May 15, 2006

Now that May is here, perhaps you're looking out at your lawn and thinking it needs mowing. Instead, you might want to think about whether you need that lawn at all.

The problem isn't grass. Humans first lived on the grasslands of Africa, and until not so long ago, grasslands covered far greater swaths of North America than they do now.

But landscapes like those bear little resemblance to the classic American lawn — an industrial, shocking-green carpet whose very survival depends on our polluting the environment and disturbing the peace.

Other kinds of home landscapes can grow pollution-free. A natural-yard movement is showing that combinations of rugged plants, including grasses, can be far more interesting than a standard lawn while requiring little mowing, no spraying or fertilizing, and even no irrigation.

Craig Chalquist: Putting Saturn Back Into Christmas

[a guest blogger]

With some amusement I read a news story today about conservative Christians angry at President Bush for sending them generic Christmas Cards. Taking issue with the politically correct "happy holidays" approach to trying not to offend non-Christians, they argued that we should "put Christ back into Christmas." After all, we're a Christian country founded by Christians, aren't we? Never mind the millions who espouse other faiths, or eschew organized religion altogether--or the fact that many of our Founders were deists who feared theocracy more than they feared an unchecked mob.

Chalquist – Katrina and Rita: A Terrapsychological Read

No sooner did New Orleans begin to dry out from Hurricane Katrina than Rita came barreling down on a strip of coast already devastated by the first of what scientists believe will be a long procession of unusually powerful storms raging around the globe, their energies fed by the warming seas.

"Barreling" is the operative word: the first storm having dented an already faltering petroleum supply, the second is aimed straight for another complex of key production facilities.

From the perspective of terrapsychology, the study of the presence, reactivity, or "soul" of the land, the industrial-sized belief that such incidents occur at random is untenable. There is too much symbolic significance, too much obvious meaning, behind such earthly movements--movements which every aboriginal culture understood to be expressions of a spirit or soul of place. A more contemporary, more psychological way of stating this is that psyche is not a brain secretion peculiar only to humans, but a dimension of being, a kind of inner lining to the world. Philosophers refer to this as panpsychism.

Arne Naess: Self-Realization

In Thinking Like a Mountain, Arne Naess writes:

If "self-realization" today is associated with life-long narrow ego gratification, isn't it inaccurate to use this term for self-realization in the widely different sense of Gandhi or less religiously loaded, as a term for the widening and deepening of the self so it embraces all life forms? Perhaps it is. But I think the very popularity of the term makes people listen for a moment and feel safe. In that moment the notion of a greater Self can be introduced, contending that if people equate self-realization with narrow ego fulfillment, they seriously underestimate themselves. We are much greater, deeper, more generous and capable of dignity and joy than we think! A wealth of non-competitive joys is open to us!

Thinking Like a Mountain: Toward a Council of All Beings

From the back cover of the book by John Seed, Joanna Macy, Pat Fleming, and Arne Naess:

CONNECT WITH THE LIVING EARTH!

Thinking Like a Mountain: Towards a Council of All Beings is a collection of readings, meditations, poems, guided fantasies, workshop notes–and exquisite drawings of the Tasmanian rainforest–designed by experienced workshop leaders and activists to help us move beyond the sense of alienation from the living Earth that most of us feel.

Many people intellectually realize that we are inseparable from Nature, but few of us really experience our intimate connection with Nature. When we develop empathy for the Earth, when we realize that its pain is our pain, that its fate is our fate, we find new clarity, inspiration, and commitment.

Thinking Like a Mountain helps us remember our deep connection with the Earth, reassess our patterns of consumption, rediscover our needs for intimacy and support, and redefine our priorities for action.

A portion of the proceeds from the sale of this book supports the work of the Rainforest Infomration Centre.

Theodore Roszak's Eight Principles

Each of us shares the whole of life's time on Earth. Salt remnants of ancient oceans flow through our veins, ashes of expired stars rekindle in our genetic chemistry. The oldest of the atoms, hydrogen whose primacy among the elements should have gained it a more poetically resonant name is a cosmic theme; mysteriously elaborated billions-fold, it has created from Nothing the Everything that includes us.

Seagulls Dancing?

This morning as I walked home along the canal from the beach I saw something that i'd never seen before. Yes, I saw seagulls dancing. Well it looked like dancing. They were stepping up and down rapidly on the spot, stirring up the estuary mud to bring up some 'tucker' (Australian slang for food). I like the notion of birds dancing. Usually we think of brolgas and cranes and other gorgeous birds performing their beautiful and magical mating displays but here were the local seabirds out for a feed, but dancing.

Earlier as I ran along the shore I found something very sad. A baby shark lying dead on the sand. So beautiful. So placid. I tried pushing it back into the waves but the tide kept trying to wash it back in.

Breathing Through with Joanna Macy

Basic to most spiritual traditions, as well as to the systems view of the world, is the recognition that we are not separate, isolated entities, but integral and organic parts of the vast web of life. As such, we are like neurons in a neural net, through which flow currents of awareness of what is happening to us, as a species and as a planet. In that context, the pain we feel for our world is a living testimony to our interconnectedness with it. If we deny this pain, we become like blocked and atrophied neurons, deprived of life's flow and weakening the larger body in which we take being. But if we let it move through us, we affirm our belonging; our collective awareness increases. We can open to the pain of the world in confidence that it can neither shatter nor isolate us, for we are not objects that can break. We are resilient patterns within a vaster web of knowing.

Because we have been conditioned to view ourselves as separate, competitive and thus fragile entities, it takes practice to relearn this kind of resilience. A good way to begin is by practicing simple openness, as in the exercise of "breathing through," adapted from an ancient Buddhist meditation for the development of compassion.

Follow the exercise