Saving the Earth

Ecopsychology

The developing field of ecopsychology posits that there is a post-industrial alienation between human beings and the natural world; that part of being truly sane is having the consciousness that each of us is but a part of a much larger Whole. Continue reading "Ecopsychology" essay »

The books recommended below celebrate the wonder of the natural world, and call us to awaken our consciousness to act as responsible citizens of the planet. They explore the intimate connection between the human spirit and Nature and show how the health and vitality of the human spirit is related to one's connection with the Earth.

Recommended Books on Ecopsychology

Between Species: Celebrating the Dolphin-Human Bond
Toni Frohoff and Brenda Peterson

This interesting collection brings together essays by writers, scientists, poets and even musicians, all of whom claim some ambassadorship to the cetacean world. Fascinating and thought-provoking.
2003, Sierra Club Books

The Dream of the Earth
Thomas Berry

Berry explores human - Earth relations and seeks a new, non-anthropocentric approach to the natural world. He says that our immediate danger is not nuclear war but industrial plundering. He urges movement and education toward a "biocracy" that will heal the earth. "This volume quite possibly is one of the ten most important books of the 20th century." Dr. Donald B. Conroy
2006, Sierra Club Books

The Earth Has a Soul: The Nature Writings of C.G. Jung
Meredith Sabini, ed.

In these writings from his Collected Works, pioneering psychoanalyist C.G. Jung speaks for the natural mind, the source of the evolutionary experience and accumulated wisdom of our species. Through examples from his own life, he shows how healing one's living connection with Nature contributes to a sense of wholeness. In this book Jung shows us what we have lost and how we might find it again.
2002, North Atlantic Books

Ecopsychology: Restoring the Earth, Healing the Mind
Allen D. Kanner

This pathfinding collection shows how the health of the planet is inextricably linked to the psychological health of humanity, individually and collectively. Ecopsychology is both a new beginning for environmentalism and a revolution in modern psychology.
1995, Sierra Club Books

Evening Thoughts: Reflecting on Earth as Sacred Community
Thomas Berry

Noted cultural historian Thomas Berry opens our eyes to the full dimensions of the ecological crisis facing us, framing it as a crisis of spiritual vision. Applying his formidable erudition in cultural history, science, and comparative religions, he forges a compelling narrative of creation and communion that reconciles modern evolutionary thinking and traditional religious insights concerning our integral role in Earth's society. While sounding an urgent alarm at our current dilemma, Berry inspires us to reclaim our role as the consciousness of the universe and thereby begin to create a true partnership with the Earth community.
2006, Sierra Club Books

The Great Work: Our Way into the Future
Thomas Berry

The future can exist only if humans understand how to commune with the natural world rather than exploit it. Berry says, "Already the planet is so damaged and the future is so challenged by its rising human population that the terms of survival will be severe beyond anything we have known in the past." Berry reveals why we need to adore our blessed planet, while also examining why we are culturally driven toward exploiting nature.
2000, Harmony/Bell Tower

Green Psychology: Transforming our Relationship to the Earth
Ralph Metzner

According to ecopsychologist Metzner, the greatest environmental threat that we face is the depletion of the human spirit. Since Western culture is not based on living harmoniously with the earth --seeking dominance instead of partnership with nature --we have created a pathology that has led to a massive destruction of the human spirit and a frightening worship of consumerism to fill the void. This book upholds the need for an ecological ethic based upon deep interaction with nature and the timeless wisdom of indigenous cultures.
1999, Park Street Press

Meeting the Tree of Life: A Teachers' Path
John Tallmadge

Tallmadge was a child of the late sixties with a Yale doctorate in comparative literature under his arm and an empathy for nature in his soul. Meeting the Tree of Life is a graceful, erudite compendium of natural history, travel, literary interpretation, and personal adventure as Tallmadge recounts the years after he left the army at age 26, until he became a dedicated English professor at age 40. He takes us along on his hikes to the High Sierra, Katahdin, and the Deeps and Canyonlands where, like some knight-errant, he proves himself over and over. If his teaching tenure is denied, Tallmadge realizes he has learned nature's lessons: just as water overcomes through nonresistance and the jack pine needs fire to release its seeds, man endures through spirit and faith.
1997, University of Utah Press

Nature and Madness
Paul Shepard

Nature and Madness examines the human animal in relation to the natural environment, showing the kinds of psychic disjunctions and troubles that have developed over the generations that humans have been seeking to distance themselves from the world. Shepard locates the source of much of those troubles in the invention of agriculture, an act that gave humans the false idea that nature can be controlled and micromanaged - an idea that has found expression in such things as dam-building and genetic engineering. Environmental destruction, writes Shepard, is a "mutilation of personal maturity," a failure of emotional development; continuing the metaphor, he adds that "the only society more frightful than one run by children ... might be one run by childish adults." Shepard calls on his readers to establish a meaningful, mature connection with the earth, to cultivate a sense of stewardship and responsibility.
1998, University of Georgia Press

Nature and the Human Soul: Cultivating Wholeness and Community in a Fragmented World
Bill Plotkin

Psychologist, eco-therapist, and wilderness guide Plotkin presents a new model of the whole of human life and spirituality for a world in dire ecological need, spoiled by patho-adolescent society. Nature and the Human Soul calls us to a fresh conception of individual and collective evolutionary life genuinely reconnected to the wild of nature. Using the indigenous template of the four compass directions, Plotkin describes eight stages on the wheel of spiritual development - the Innocent, Explorer, Thespian, Wanderer, Soul Apprentice, Artisan, Master and Sage. The Wheel is a deep-structure portrait of nature-and-soul-oriented cultures, a portrait that encompasses child-raising practices, core values, stages of growth, rites of passage, community organization, and relationship to the greater Earth community. Graceful prose is counterbalanced with diagrams and clear chapter structure. Plotkin offers an essential, weighty book for our perilous times.
2007, New World Library

The Power of Trees: The Reforesting of the Soul
Michael Perlman

This founding text in ecopsychology goes beyond the psychological interpretation of trees in myths and legends. It is a beautiful, lyrical inquiry into the place of trees in the everyday soul, a heart-rending lament for the lost forests, and a brilliant reportage of the after-effects of hurricanes and other disasters, both natural and man-made. Published shortly after Michael Perlman's death, The Power of Trees is an extraordinary testimony to his passion for the planet.
1994, Spring Publications

The Psychology of Environmental Problems
Deborah DuNann Winter and Susan M. Koger

Psychologists Winter and Koger apply psychological theory and research to environmental problems as they call for psychological and lifestyle changes as well as technological and social change in working toward the goal of creating a sustainable world. They demonstrate why it is critical to address environmental threats now, and offer ideas on how psychological principles can contribute to building a sustainable culture.
2003, Lawrence Erlbaum

Radical Ecopsychology: Psychology in the Service of Life
Andy Fisher

Personal in its style yet radical in its vision, Radical Ecopsychology offers an original introduction to ecopsychology -- the emerging field that ties the human mind to the natural world. Drawing masterfully from humanistic psychology, hermeneutics, phenomenology, radical ecology, nature writing, and critical theory, Fisher shows how the human psyche still belongs to Nature. This daring and innovative book proposes a psychology that will serve all Life.
2002, State University of New York Press

Soulcraft: Crossing into the Mysteries of Nature and Psyche
Bill Plotkin

For millenia, ceremonies and initiation rites have helped societies survive and thrive by marking life transitions. Soulcraft restores Nature ritual to its rightful place as a crucial part of personal growth and self-empowerment. Drawing on ancient traditions immersed in the natural world, the vision quest ritual serves as a modern rite of initiation that helps people find their life purpose.
2003, New World Library

The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World
David Abram

David Abram's writing casts a spell of its own as he weaves the reader through a meticulously researched work, gently addressing such daunting topics as where the past and future exists, the relationship between space and time, and how the written word serves to sever humans from their primordial source of sustenance: the Earth. "Only as the written text began to speak would the voices of the forest, and of the river, begin to fade."
1997, Vintage

The Unequal Hours: Moments of Being in the Natural World
Linda Underhill

In these jewel-like essays, Underhill invites readers to practice the difficult art of stillness. Quiet, small, transcendent moments of illumination that restore us to ourselves and to a sense of connection with all things can occur, she insists, while watching the rain, or sweeping the porch, or sitting and looking at the backyard. To commune with nature, she reassures readers, it's not necessary to emulate Thoreau, to leave home and go live in the woods. Unequal Hours is a series of elegant meditations in the tradition of Wendell Berry, sprinkled with references to poetry, myth, science, Taoism, ecology and ancient customs.
1999, University of Georgia Press

An Unspoken Hunger: Stories from the Field
Terry Tempest Williams

Williams makes it clear that we lose an essential part of ourselves when we neglect the Earth. She writes, "There is no defense against an open heart and a supple body in dialogue with wildness. Internal strength is an absorption of the external landscape. We are informed by beauty, raw and sensual. Through an erotics of place our sensitivity becomes our sensibility."
1995, Vintage

The Voice of the Earth: An Exploration of Ecopsychology
Theodore Roszak 

Our culture is psychotic in its rift between the personal and the planetary, maintains Roszak. He finds a correlation between the degraded condition of the earth and the uneasy state of the human psyche. Roszak believes that each person has a repressed "ecological unconscious," a living record of cosmic evolution capable of linking us synergistically to the natural environment. He invites the reader to the healing power of communion with wilderness.
2001, Phanes Press

Woman and Nature: The Roaring Inside Her
Susan Griffin

In this famously provocative cornerstone of feminist literature, Susan Griffin brilliantly ponders the place and role of women in a predominantly patriarchal society. Her evocative explorations of far-ranging elements of human experience expose the hypocrisy of standard assumptions about gender and the environment. "Woman and Nature is about memory and mutilation, female anger as power, female presence as transforming force . . . Griffin has collected an extraordinary collage which becomes an intense physical experience." Adrienne Rich
2000, Sierra Club Books