Helping Ecotherapy evolve from Anthropocentric to Ecocentric
Linda Buzzell, MA, LMFT
Adjunct Faculty, Pacifica Graduate Institute, Author, Ecotherapist
(c) 2023 Linda Buzzell
Nature therapy and ecotherapy seem caught between what David Key and Keith Tudor call the Anthropocentric-Extractive approach and the Reciprocal/Ecocentric path. (Key & Tudor 2023, p65) How can the field evolve towards the latter?
For example, here are the goals of the Nature and [human] Health Alliance: "Our goals are to raise awareness of the value of nature for human health and well-being and to incorporate more nature into the lives of all people."
While I applaud the wide human inclusion goals, I also hope that more nature therapy organizations and practitioners will continue to evolve towards a more widely inclusive wellness-of-all-nature (Reciprocal) approach instead of just the Anthropocentric focus on "using" nature for human wellbeing? Perhaps all nature therapies and ecotherapies can progress from what I've called "Level 1 Ecotherapy" to "Level 2" (Buzzell, 2015)?
Resources
Key, David & Keith Tudor. 2023. Ecotherapy: A Field Guide. Bicester, Oxfordshire, UK: Karnac.
Nature and Health Alliance https://www.natureandhealthalliance.org/
Buzzell, Linda (2016). The Many Ecotherapies, in Ecotherapy: Theory, Research & Practice, Martin Jordan & Joe Hinds, eds. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Ecotherapy Training and Ritual Events at Nature Calling
1 年Succinctly summarised, thank you. I’m unapologetic about beginning the ecotherapy training or group work I offer with this distinction made from the outset. Yours, Andy Fisher’s Radical Ecopsychology approach, and the strong commitment to an ecocentric way have helped me to be similarly courageous on this point. We must love the earth as ourselves, no distinction or expectation of gain, but with gratitude in our hearts. I find people respond well, feel like they have permission to dissolve into that nondual experience. So we work together, as a living community of souls with the more-than-human world. Thanks again.
Environmental Journalist and Science writer at Media
1 年I actually never got the impression from the first books about ecopsychology by Arne Naess and Theodore Roszak that the goal was or should be to use nature for our own purposes, and it seems to me that idea that responding to the benefits nature provides for us is just the first step in reconnecting to it. Some of us who were already in tune with nature as a wellness-for-all kind of perception were happy to discover ecopsychology because it gave voice to something we had no words for. Others were not in tune with it and need time and experience to develop a more comprehensive sense of connection to the natural world. Part of the problem, in my opinion, is the lack of language. Different cultures have different experiences and have words to identify the experiences. In order to share experience you need a shared language, and for a variety of reasons, English doesn't have the words. I think that's why reading something about ecopsychology written by someone like Arnae Naess vs Theodore Roszak is like wading through an encyclopedia and gets weary. We need new words, we need new collective experience from which we can create new words that are meaningful to us.