from: The Voice of the Earth: An Exploration of Ecopsychology (New York, Touchstone, 1993)

In 1990, a conference entitled `Psychology as if the Whole Earth Mattered' was held at the Harvard-based Centre for Psychology and Social Change. There, a gathering of ecopsychologists concluded that "...if the self is expanded to include the natural world, behaviour leading to destruction of this world will be experienced as self-destruction." In one conference paper, Walter Christie, assistant chief of psychiatry at the Maine Medical Centre, observed:

The illusion of separateness we create in order to utter the words "I am" is part of our problem in the modern world. We have always been far more a part of great patterns on the globe than our fearful egos can tolerate knowing. To preserve nature is to preserve the matrix through which we can experience our souls and the soul of the planet Earth.

Sarah Conn, a Cambridge clinical psychologist who had helped initiate a form of `ecotherapy,' put it more dramatically. She contended that "The world is sick; it needs healing; it is speaking through us; and it speaks the loudest through the most sensitive of us."

The environmental philosopher Paul Shepard has invoked this same psychology in speaking of "the self with a permeable boundary...constantly drawing on and influencing its surroundings, whose skin and behaviour are soft zones contacting the world instead of excluding it...Ecological thinking registers a kind of vision across boundaries."

In their effort to dignify the `soft zones' of the psyche as a new standard of sanity, most ecopsychologists draw in one way or another upon the evocative, though highly controversial, Gaia hypothesis. Developed by biochemist James Lovelock and microbiologist Lynn Margulis in the mid-1970s, the Gaia hypothesis began its career as a biochemical explanation for the long-term homeostasis of the planetary atmosphere. Lovelock and Margulis postulated that the biota, oceans, atmosphere, and soils are a self-regulating system that plays an active role in preserving the conditions that guarantee survival on Earth. If their theory had been given a conventional scientific name (like Biocybernetic Universal System Tendency or BUST, as Lovelock once facetiously suggested) it might have passed quickly and quietly into the professional literature as a mildly interesting speculative exercise. But Lovelock wanted something more colourful. Struck by the fact that the biomass, in its long-term self-regulation, exhibits "the behaviour of a single organism, even a living creature", he called the hypothesis `Gaia', borrowing the name of the ancient Greek Earth mother.

The name at once lent the idea an astonishing popular appeal far beyond anything Lovelock an Margulis had wanted. Their brainchild soon became a major talking point among the Deep Ecologists, some of whom saw it as a compelling statement of the vital connectedness of all living things. While some Deep Ecologists express concern that the global perspective of the hypothesis -- the image of the Earth as a single super organism adrift in space -- may undercut a sensuous experience of place, others find in it the basis for a quasi-mystical biocentric ethic.

Some ecofeminists have gone even farther. For them, Gaia represents scientific validation for a legendary `goddess culture' where, once upon a time, the more ecologically sensitive qualities that would later be assigned to women governed the lives of both sexes.

In its search for a theoretical foundation, ecopsychology need not go so far. Gaia, taken simply as a dramatic image of ecological interdependence, might be seen as the evolutionary heritage that bonds all living things genetically and behaviourally to the biosphere. Just that much is enough to reverse the scientific world view and all psychology based upon it. In place of the inevitable heat death, we have life and mind as fully at home in the universe as any of the countless systems from which they evolve. More hypothetically, we have the possibility that the self-regulating biosphere `speaks' through the human unconscious, making its voice heard even within the framework of modern, urban, human culture.

In Search of the Ecological Unconscious

This is the line of thought I have pursued, suggesting than an `ecological unconscious' lies at the core of the psyche, there to be drawn upon as a resource for restoring us to environmental harmony. The idea is speculative, though no more so than Jung's collective unconscious, Rank's birth trauma, Winnicott's pre-Oedipal mother, or Freud's fantasies about the primal horde. For that matter, even the behaviourists' description of the brain as a "meat machine" is no better than a shaky metaphor that obscures more truths than it reveals. Psychology, understood as the deep study of human nature, is inherently speculative; it has no choice but to work from hunches, inspired guesses and intuition. It can never `prove', only persuade.