Daniel Smith's recent The New York Times Magazine article describes the birth of ecopsychology, a branch of the field that theorizes that our mental health is related to the health of the earth. Ecopsychology essentially argues that our mental health is dependent on how the natural world lives and dies around us.
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 relationships, or for some other reason--drive us crazy. Or: Perhaps our collective murder of another species would leave us with real guilt. The article mentions a few empirical studies. In one, led by Marc Berman at the University of Michigan, 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.
Smith's article gets readers thinking about psychology through the lens of philosophy. He suggests that one useful way of thinking of ecopsychology is by thinking of an older, more famous debate in Western philosophy, which is the mind-body problem.
The mind-body 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 Friedrich 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 important work from the 1950's to the 70's, Gregory 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 in his Steps to an Ecology of Mind. "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 or another ecologically minded writer who interests you? If so, what's interesting about those readings in ecology?
