I read an article in The New York Times Magazine last weekend that sounded like a cliché in its headline (“Is There an Ecological Unconscious?”) but stuck with me.
The article describes the birth of ecopsychology--a branch of psychology that theorizes that our mental health is related to the health of the earth. The main idea there is that our moods and ideas are in fact related to the natural world as it lives or dies around us. In other words, the state of other species impacts the functioning of our own minds. For instance, living in a world without vibrant plant life could—whether it’s because of some genetic tie we have to natural things, or because cities fragment friendships, or for some other reason—drive us crazy. Or: Perhaps our collective murder of other species would leave us with nagging guilt. Raping the earth impacts our sanity. The article goes on to cite a few empirical studies in ecopsychology. In one, researchers found that subjects who took a three-mile walk in the woods exhibited clearer thinking after their walk than those who took a three-mile walk on a busy street.
[The article mentioned some books that ushered in this trend in psychology, including Rachel Carson’s groundbreaking Silent Spring (1962) and Gregory Bateson’s bedrock in psychology, Steps to an Ecology of Mind (1972). I’ve heard both are dense, though beautiful and worth reading even if you are not well-versed in ecology or psychology.]
One useful way of thinking of ecopsychology is by thinking of an older, more famous debate in Western philosophy: the mind-body problem. That debate started most notably with Descartes, who found it necessary to insist that the mind was something abstract and pure, or could be separated from any influence of the body. Descartes wrote his Discourse On The Method in a kick of philosophical willfulness: He went to a quiet cabin, tried to block out the world, and attempted to whittle down the abstract “truths” of the human mind. He thought that certain truths were universal, or existed as if in a vacuum, outside of the influence of this messy thing known as the body, with all of its hungers and jealousies and sexual impulses and decline toward death. Abstract philosophy, he would have said, can be called “abstract” precisely because it exists outside of any contingencies of context. Truth doesn’t change, he argued, depending on the context of individual lives.
Since then, a bunch of philosophers from Nietzsche to Jaron Lanier have vehemently disagreed with him. These modern writers have often argued that our ideas are more practical than fixed. Our ideas are not “forever true” but largely “true” insofar as they are useful in negotiating our present situation. That is, ideas survive through time if they help up satisfy needs like hunger and sexuality and pride. “Abstract” thinking only wants to claim it comes from the gods; it’s really just survival-thinking.
This issue behind the old “mind-body” problem (is “truth” fixed or contextual?) leads to an issue at the center of ecopsychology. In his work, Bateson argued that the human mind is linked to the environment, or that we only have the thoughts we have because of what we know of things around us, like compasses or maps or computers or scales at the gym. That is, we form our ideas based on our knowledge of the world; and as we change the world and change what we know of the world, our “truth” changes. Bateson focused on ecological changes. Perhaps if the fish and rivers and leaves around us are thriving, we tend to think of “nature” (or “truth”) with a tinge of “thriving” in it. Perhaps if these things are dying, we are more in tune with dying. In other words, we don’t just happen to live in nature, but we think the way we do because of how we interact with nature. We might be happier or more optimistic creatures in a healthier environment than we are in a dying one. “When you narrow down your epistemology and act on the premise ‘what interests me is me or my organization or my species,’ you chop off consideration of other loops of the loop structure,” Bateson wrote. “You decide that you want to get rid of the byproducts of human life and that Lake Erie will be a good place to put them. You forget that the ecomental system called Lake Erie is a part of your wider ecomental system--and that if Lake Erie is driven insane, its insanity is incorporated in the larger system of your thought and experience.” We don’t just watch the world, he meant; we change it. In the process, we change our teacher.
What do you think of all this? Have you read Bateson, Carson, or another ecologically minded writer who interests you? If so, what’s interesting about those readings in ecology?
Ilana Simons is a therapist, literature professor, and author of A Life of One's Own: A Guide to Better Living through the Work and Wisdom of Virginia Woolf. Visit her website here.
