Ecopsychology: Restoring the earth, healing the mind, edited by Theodore Roszak, Mary E. Gomes and Allen D. Kanner, Sierra Club Books, San Francisco, 1995.Mary Catherine Bateson:
“The self does not stop at the skin nor even with the circle of human relationships but is interwoven with the lives of trees and animals and soil; that caring for the deepest needs of persons and caring for our threatened planet are not in conflict.”From Ralph Metzner, ‘The Psychopathology of the Human-Nature Relationship’, p. 59.
“Like autistic children, who do not seem to hear, or see, or feel their mother’s presence, we have become blind to the psychic presence of the living planet and deaf to its voices and stories, sources that nourished our ancestors in preindustrial societies. This situation can be remedied only by a new mode of mutual presence between the human and the natural world.”
From Alan Thein Durning, ‘Are we Happy Yet?’ p. 72.
“The consumer society fails to deliver on its promise of fulfillment through material comforts because human wants are insatiable, human needs are socially defined, and the real sources of personal happiness are elsewhere. Indeed, the strength of social relations and the quality of leisure – both crucial psychological determinants of happiness in life – appear as much diminished as enhanced in the consumer class. The consumer society, it seems, has impoverished people by raising their incomes.”From David Abram, ‘The Ecology of Magic’, p. 315.
“Caught up in a mass of abstractions, our attention hypnotized by a host of human-made technologies that only reflect us back upon ourselves, it is all too easy for us to forget our carnal inherence in a more-than-human matrix of sensations and sensibilities. … We are human only in contact and conviviality with what is not human. Only in reciprocity with what is Other do we begin to heal ourselves.”
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