Gaia by Alex Grey, 1989, alexgrey.com

“The major problems in the world are the result of the differences between how nature works and the way people think.” –  Gregory Bateson

When I moved to New York 30 years ago, a part of me died. It didn’t happen all at once; for the first few months I was so distracted by the glitz and glamour of my new life in the biggest city in the most powerful nation on earth that I didn’t even feel the malaise creeping into my soul. But little by little I realized that I just wasn’t feeling ‘right’.

Surrounded by towering monoliths, asphalt, and mind-numbing, incessant noise, I began to miss the natural world I’d known in rural Maine and Nova Scotia. I tried to recreate my connection with the earth by planting things: lettuce and peas on my tar paper rooftop (my landlord quickly nixed this effort), and tree seeds I collected on my walks around the city and planted in pots that I kept on my windowsill. And I spent as much time as possible in the city’s parks, but all my efforts to offset the negative effects of urban life came up short.

I soon came to understand that few of my new friends shared my deep connection with nature. My best friend who grew up in suburban New Jersey thought carrots grew in bunches. When I asked her to draw a picture illustrating this most efficient agricultural phenomenon, she drew a line representing the earth, and just a bit below it, she drew several carrots, some next to each other and some below the first ‘row’, all connected by a single root. I was incredulous, but she was perfectly serious. Having only seen carrots in the supermarket, she just assumed that they came straight out of the ground as she saw them  – in bunches.

Man’s alienation from the natural world has only increased with the advent of technology. Urban shaman Mama Donna Henes who has spent the last 30 years in New York creating meaningful ways for city people to connect with each other and with the cosmos talks about ‘disaster’: dis – to be separate from + aster – the stars.  She tells a story about taking a busload of “big, bad teenage boys” to the country to participate in a nighttime nature ritual. When they reached their destination, she couldn’t get them off the bus; they were afraid of the dark.

In response to increasing dissociation believed to be related to the degradation of the environment, a sub-field of psychology emerged in the 1960’s. Dubbed ecopsychology by Theodore Roszak, Professor of History and Director of the Ecopsychology Institute at California State University, Irvine, this field of study focuses on the connection between the human mind and the natural world. Roszak believes that we cannot heal ourselves until we reconnect with nature. In the introduction to his book, The Voice of the Earth, Roszak questions our sanity. We know it’s madness to abuse our planetary home, yet when looking for help with the grief, despair and anxiety common in modern life, most psychotherapies ignore the ecological realities – “as if the soul might be saved as the biosphere crumbles”.

So what to do? Peter H. Kahn, Jr., Associate Professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Washington, who has been conducting research on the impact of the degradation of the natural world and the pervasiveness of technology, suggests that we rewild the psyche. Just as conservation biology works to restore ecosystems by reintroducing predatory key species, Kahn is challenging us to revamp our psyches by exposing ourselves to wildness: nature that’s “unencumbered and unmediated by our artifacts and technologies”. But with opportunities for such experiences quickly vanishing, we may have to look for another way to reintegrate our mind/body/spirit.

British anthropologist and social scientist Gregory Bateson, believed that mind and nature work together to create what we perceive as reality. His studies of animal communication, social psychology, comparative anatomy, and psychiatry confirmed his ideas about the interdependence of mind and nature. And he came to believe that the way we think about nature can change the world.

Can we save ourselves and the planet by changing our minds? Futurist, visionary, and author of Conscious Evolution: Awakening Our Social Potential, Barbara Marx Hubbard has been on a 30-year quest to understand and encourage man’s collective potential to evolve. Believing that we’re in the midst of a positive quantum change, she sees our current crises as the genesis of the next stage of our evolution. By aligning our higher consciousness with the creative use of power, we can transition from our planet’s current “high-technology, polluting, overpopulating phase” to a system that fulfills its collective potential. And by seeing ourselves as co-creators in this process, we not only take responsibility for our actions, but by acknowledging our unlimited capabilities, we empower ourselves to bring about this transformation. As the title of Hubbard’s book suggests, what we need more than anything is an evolution in consciousness.

Note: Many thanks to Daniel B. Smith for his inspiring article, “Is There an Ecological Unconscious?”