Terrapsychology: encountering the soul of place.

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Questions fielded by Craig Chalquist, PhD.

Why is it important to bring psychology to bear on the environmental crisis?

Psychology originated as the study of the psyche, and the psyche is at the root of both the crisis and its healing. Nothing short of profound transformations of consciousness can help us at this dire stage.

Aren’t ecology and environmentalism already addressing the crisis?

They don’t go far enough. In fact they perpetuate the very enchantment with technology and quick fixes that put us at odds with the planet to begin with. We can’t fix something until we understand our dysfunctional relationship with it. Therapists routinely ask new clients, “What things have you tried?” because they know that solutions without insight make things worse. Our dealings with the environment need the same kind of assessment. Trying to fix things is a defense against understanding in depth our relationship to them. If we understood ourselves and what we were doing better, and why we were doing it, there wouldn’t be an environmental crisis.

Why aren’t more therapists and psychologists out doing this?

Since Freud psychology has focused primarily on what happens inside people—in other words “psychic reality.” Even family members are referred to as “internal objects.” Therapists like to think that treating someone for an hour a week is all one need do, even though global warming or mass extinctions won’t be discussed except as symbols for the client’s inner chaos. There is not a shred of research evidence that working with clients has any positive impact on ecological integrity at all. In short, mainstream psychology is ideologically incapable of rising above its role of adjusting clients to the status quo. It’s too busy convincing them that their alienation, outrage, and despair are purely internal matters. The psychology industry as it now perpetuates itself depends financially on convincing people of that.

Didn’t behaviorism focus on the environment?

Only insofar as it impacted human behavior. The environment had no reality for the early behaviorists except as a source of stimuli, reinforcers, and punishers. The world was all sticks and carrots to them. No wonder B. F. Skinner had to curl up in a womb-like box at night.

Aren’t there exceptions—therapists for instance who reconnect people to the planet?

There are. We think of them as ecotherapists: practitioners who ally themselves with nature as a therapeutic partner. Some of them have written for our upcoming anthology Ecotherapy: Psyche and Nature in a Circle of Healing (Sierra Club Books, 2008). But they are exceptions that prove the rule. When I present this information publicly, the people who have the biggest negative reactions to it are always members of the psychology industry. They don’t want to look at their part of the problem. It’s often difficult for healers to do that.

What have you found at the roots of the environmental crisis?

Since the Fertile Crescent 11 – 8 thousand years ago, when the Agricultural Revolution began training us to see Earth as a resource, we’ve been experiencing ourselves as more and more separate from the environment. Belief systems that emphasize another world over this one, the age of Empires starting with Sargon I’s capture of ancient Sumer, the rise of the machine paradigm of reality, and the Industrial Revolution have all encouraged us to feel separate from everything else: land, sea, sky; plants, roots, other animals. Some say that this psychological distancing was necessary for our cultural evolution, but if so, it has gone too far and now represents a dangerous overdevelopment.

Is this what scholars mean by our “Judeo-Christian” ecological heritage?

That should be our “Greco-Romano-Christian” ecological heritage. The Hebrews possessed a remarkably lucid feel for nature and sacred places. For that matter so did the ancient Greeks, Romans, and Christians, but their habit of thinking in abstractions, of building empires, and of seeing matter as either unreal or dead paved the way for the industrialists and the mechanists.

Give an example of how this plays out politically.

Conquerors tend to be privately timid people who don’t feel at home in the world. They build artificial environments like technoscapes, corporations, sects, and empires so they can belong somewhere. It’s never just about money or territory: it’s about control. Fearing the world and trying to control it. Think of the poisonous envy they must feel toward the earth-based cultures they uproot. It’s probably a law of human nature that people with unhealed wounds of displacement inflict displacement on other people too.

Governments won’t behave sanely until citizens force them to.

Surely. But there’s a deeper issue here. The work of Janet and Freud and Jung with the unconscious took away “I didn’t know any better” as an excuse for misbehaving. When people refuse to relinquish destructive behavior, it’s because there’s a core of rage or hatred somewhere within them. Polluting rivers and ripping up mountains are not simply acts of greed or ignorance: they are symptoms of a deep and largely unconscious hatred of Earth. That hatred needs to be brought out in the open and discussed or our efforts to confront its power to shape policy and landscapes will remain ineffectual. Nor will we be able to keep such people from dangerous positions of political authority. It’s always a bad sign when someone really wants to hold high office. In a psychologically aware society, hoping that the world will die so that souls can soar into heaven would be a definitive disqualification for ever wielding power over anyone.

What is terrapsychology?

Originally the fieldwork and research approach now known as “terrapsychology” called for the deep study of the presence or soul of place, including the things and creatures within its ambit. To the original terrapsychological emphasis on finding a contemporary language to describe the aliveness of locales once thought inhabited by a specific spirit or genius loci we add the task of drawing on environmental psychology, conservation psychology, ecology, geography, and related empirically based approaches insofar as they support embodied, storied, intimately registered resonances with the places we investigate and dwell in.

How has this been received?

On the whole, very well. People are hungry for the kind of information and perspectives that help them understand their resonance to what happens to the places where they live. The reception in academia has been mixed, however. I've been turned down for teaching opportunities at two supposedly progressive schools for not walking their party line. Others have invited me to present and to teach.

What’s your new slideshow called and what’s in it?

“Planetary Psychology: Sanity in the Balance” provides a summary of the research showing how connected our sanity is to what happens to the environment, particularly in the industrially advanced First World, where the numbers on mental health are plummeting. It then discusses what makes for a psychology of effective green activism and public education, including education for critical thinking, and offers some specific suggestions for how to bring more healing to our dealings with the world.

Is the intention to reach the masses?

“The masses” are how the Mustafa Monds and Grand Inquisitors of the world think of people. They feel contempt for the larger portion of humanity because they secretly hate themselves and are looking to justify their paternalism. Scratch someone determined to save or sell things to “the masses” and find a poorly hidden dictator. On the other hand, there are people who prefer TV to reality, people on the verge of getting concerned about their relationship with the world, and people becoming aware of that relationship. The last two are my intended audience.

Do you have a psychological tip for environmental activists?

Yes: don’t shame or frighten the audience. They only tune it out, and nobody needs a 21st-century Puritanism that treats driving an SUV or failing to recycle like sins. Tell people what they can do to make a difference.

What do you think of Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth?

Overall I think he and the filmmakers did a splendid job of presenting the issues clearly and without undue melodrama. (I wish he’d skipped over the parts about losing the election; they didn’t fit well with the rest.) One of our jobs is to address the psychological aspects more thoroughly than he had room to do.

Are people ready for the kind of information you present?

The responses have been enthusiastic. If you want some numbers: in 2001, 59% of a sample of the population thought protecting the environment more important than producing energy (CBS News poll, 9/4/2001). 52% of a different sample said protecting it was more important than encouraging economic growth (ABC News poll, 8/1/2001), and 61% of another sample agreed that “protecting the environment is so important that requirements and standards cannot be too high and continuing environmental improvements must be made regardless of cost” (CBS/NYTimes poll, 3/13/2001).

This probably sounds like a Mustafa Mond question, but do busy Americans really care about all this? We’re famous for being shopping and entertainment addicts.

I think we care so much that we numb ourselves to the pain of understanding it more fully. It’s typical of the addict to use whatever substance he can get without caring about the quality. Our entertainment industry bears this out, from sitcom actors with ludicrously exaggerated yuk-yuk expressions to every other Hollywood film poster showing a man with a gun: a juvenile delinquent’s idea of power. More and more people are turning off the tube and staying out of the theaters because they can’t take the gladiatorial bear-baiting vulgarity of it anymore. When I get sick of it I go camping.

But many still think that owning more things can make them happy.

There’s a difference between owning things and behaving like a consumer toward them. Consuming them only increases the sense of inner emptiness and the craving to fill it. Some research shows that above the poverty level, reports of personal happiness are completely unrelated to financial income or material possessions. That makes sense. Happiness is more a byproduct of valuing relationships with one’s embodied self, with other people, and with the world, and being willing to act on them as life priorities in a community context.

I understand you’re planning some fund-raising. If you had funding, what would you use it for?

To purchase equipment and facilities to train people in the terrapsychological way of gathering and presenting information about our close psychological ties to the world’s health and illness. Eventually we’ll need our own journal and film production capability. Ultimately I’d like to see a foundation fund this kind of work.

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