Nature's Path To Inner Peace

The term "ecopsychology" was coined 25 years ago by Theodore Roszak, Ph.D., author of The Voice of the Earth (Simon & Schuster, 1992) and a history professor at California State University at Hayward. It is grounded in the notion that people experience what renowned ethnobiologist and Harvard University professor Edward O. Wilson, Ph.D., calls "biophilia," an innate need to interact with the living world of which we're a part. But as humankind becomes increasingly reliant upon modern technology and less in tune with the natural environment, this disconnection from our roots instills feelings of restlessness and alienation and may undermine emotional health.

Research in ecopsychology is solid and steadily growing. In the early 1970s, University of Michigan researchers Stephen Kaplan, Ph.D., and his wife Rachel Kaplan, Ph.D., studied an Outward Bound-like wilderness program. For 10 years, they followed 27 groups through the nine- to 14-day program. After completing the course, participants reported experiencing a sense of peace, wholeness and the ability to think more clearly. In another of their studies, presented to the American Psychological Society in 1993, the Kaplans surveyed more than 1,200 employees at various corporations and state agencies. They found that office workers with a window view of nature—trees, bushes or even a large lawn—experienced significantly less frustration and more enthusiasm for their jobs than those workers without windows.

As these later findings suggest, reaping nature's psychological benefits doesn't require living in the wild, and other studies support this concept. One, published in Science, examined patients recovering from surgery and the effects of having a window view of trees in full foliage versus one of a brick wall. Roger S. Ulrich, Ph.D., director of the Texas A&M Center for Health Systems and Design, found that patients with a nature view had shorter hospital stays, fewer complications and required less pain medication than those who stared at a wall. And in another study at Chicago's Robert Taylor Homes—the world's largest public housing development—Frances Kuo, Ph.D., and Bill Sullivan, Ph.D., cofounders of the University of Illinois Human-Environment Research Laboratory, investigated residents' quality of life based on the extent of their contact with trees. The researchers learned that residents living near trees felt happier with where they lived and better adjusted to their environment than those with no trees growing nearby.

Despite findings like these, garnering support from some skeptical professionals has been difficult. But proponents such as Sarah Conn, Ph.D., a psychotherapist and ecopsychology professor at Harvard Medical School, are convinced by the positive results they see in individuals. Conn, a cofounder of the Ecopsychology Institute of the Center for Psychology and Social Change in Cambridge, Massachusetts, focuses on the "self-world connection," the idea that improving mental health is impossible without also considering the world in which we live.

"We tend toward 'pathological individualism,' thinking of ourselves as self-contained," Conn explains. "But we don't live on the earth; we live in it. So I look at not just what's going on in individuals' lives, but at the ways they're affected by cultural stress and what connections they have with the natural world." To help patients recognize those connections, Conn moves people into our "larger body," or the earth, by asking them to meditate near a rock, tree or other natural being. "I use body-based methods as a mindfulness practice to help people get in touch with their particular connection to the more-than-human world."

Like Conn, most ecopsychology practitioners believe that reconnecting with our natural roots requires a physical shift to facilitate a mental one. Michael J. Cohen, Ed.D., author of Reconnecting with Nature (Ecopress, 1997), is a leading expert in the field who helped develop OB's life-renewal program. Cohen has created more than 130 reconnecting activities that he teaches through the Institute of Global Education in Washington state, and he suggests that society's disconnection from nature is so "scary" that many of us have become "eco-zombies."

"Most of us are so deadened that we can't recognize what has really happened to us; it's as if we've been aborted from planet Earth," Cohen says. "You can't psychologically reconnect with an abstract idea. You have to actually make contact with nature, and that's unheard of—insurance won't cover it, it's not academic. So it's been a real challenge to get anywhere with this on a popular basis."