Ecotherapy

Healing Ourselves, Healing the Earth

Howard Clinebell

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781317760542
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Here is a trailblazing book on issues of vital interest to the future of humankind. Ecotherapy: Healing Ourselves, Healing the Earth sheds light on humankind's most serious health challenge ever--how to save our precious planet as a clean, viable habitat. As a guide for therapists, health professionals, pastoral counselors, teachers, medical healers, and especially parents, Ecotherapy: Healing Ourselves, Healing the Earth highlights readers'strategic opportunities to help our endangered human species cope constructively with the unprecedented challenge of saving a healthful planet for future generations. Ecotherapy: Healing Ourselves, Healing the Earth introduces readers to an innovative approach to ecologically-grounded personality theory, spirituality, ecotherapy, and education. The book shares the author's well-developed theories and methods of ecological diagnosis, treatment, and education so professionals and parents, our most influential teachers, can rise to the challenge of saving our planet. Readers will find that the book helps them accomplish this goal as it:

• explores an expanded, ecologically grounded theory of personality development, the missing dimension in understanding human identity formation
• outlines a model for doing ecologically oriented psychotherapy, counseling, medical healing, teaching, and parenting
• describes life-saving perspectives for making one's lifestyle more earth-caring
• demonstrates the importance of hope, humor, and love
• suggests how these earthy approaches may be utilized in a variety of social contexts and cultures A systematic theory and practice guidebook, Ecotherapy: Healing Ourselves, Healing the Earth fills a wide gap in both the counseling and therapy literature and the ecology literature. It offers an innovative model for fulfilling the "ecological circle" between humans and nature with three action dimensions. These are self-care by being intentionally nurtured by nature; spiritual enrichment by enjoying the transcendent Spirit in nature; and responding by nurturing nature more responsibly and lovingly. The theories and practical applications presented in the book come together to explore long-overlooked issues at the boundary between human health and the health of the natural environment. Psychotherapists, health professionals, and teachers; pastoral counselors and other clergy who counsel and teach; laypersons who are parents and grandparents; and individuals and groups interested in environmental issues will find Ecotherapy: Healing Ourselves, Healing the Earth essential for approaching the long-neglected earthy roots of the total human mind-body-spirit organism.

Introduction: Using the Ecological Circle for Self-Care, Earth-Care, and Soul-Care

Teach your children what we have taught our children, the earth is our mother. … This we know. The earth does not belong to humans; humans belong to the earth. This we know. All things are connected like the blood which unites one family. … Whatever befalls the earth befalls the children of the earth. People did not weave the web of life, they are merely a strand of it. Whatever they do to the web, they do to themselves.

—attributed to Native American Chief Sealth (Seattle), 1854¹

The most serious, most dangerous health challenge all of us in the human family face is to reverse the planet’s continuing ecological deterioration. It is the most profound health issue of all times, from a historical perspective. Why? For the first time in the long human story, our species faces a health challenge that if not resolved will foreclose opportunities to solve humankind’s countless other problems, including a multiplicity of health problems. The human species now must be included on the endangered species list. This is the bottom-line health challenge we all face.

For the first time ever, one species—with the questionable self-label the “wise humans”—has the awesome power to threaten the health, perhaps even the survival, of all species.² Using our superb intellectual endowment, this species has created and misused technology, squandered limited natural resources, and multiplied in unrestrained ways so that the earth’s biosphere is being depleted more rapidly than it can repair itself by natural processes. In a real sense, the earth’s autoimmune system is threatened with irreparable damage. Unless we humans devise effective, nonviolent ways to resolve these planetwide threats to the life-nurturing environment, the whole human family and all the animals, birds, and plants have a very problematic future. Therefore, there is no more urgent health issue for all of us to learn to live in earth-friendly ways as earth-carers and peacemakers. Only in this way can we help save the planet as a healthy place for ourselves and for all other living creatures, today and tomorrow.

But, before we are overcome with gloom and doom, remember that this environmental health crisis is also an unprecedented opportunity. Now, as never before in history, the whole human family has the most urgent demand to cooperate across the plethora of social, cultural, political, and language barriers that divide us. The challenge is to turn this global crisis into what philosopher-psychologist William James once called “a moral equivalent for war.” He used this phrase in discussing the remarkable ways that a struggle to defend against a common external enemy unifies and empowers internally conflicted nations. He declared that humanity needs a constructive equivalent for the intense but genocidal commitment fostered by the planet-destroying war system.

Today the human family has unprecedented, potentially unifying or divisive common enemies—global violence, overpopulation, economic injustice, suppression of freedom, and the deadly destruction of the environment. All these problems transcend national, ethnic, cultural, religious, linguistic, and racial boundaries. They can only be solved by international collaboration. In our postmodern world, how these problems impact any country ultimately influences all other countries on our shrinking planet. As the Earth Summit and the follow-up meetings in Cairo and Beijing illustrate so hopefully, it is possible for the leaders of most of the nations as well as countless NGOs (nongovernmental people’s organizations) to join forces in devising and implementing effective solutions to the root causes of the planet’s pain.

Why is it crucial that those of us in the healing, teaching, and helping professions, along with parents, understand the complex interrelationships of personal health and sickness with the wholeness and brokenness of the biosphere, and all the people-serving institutions that impact our personal wellbeing day by day? Doing everything we can to maximize individual and family health obviously is very important. But to focus only on maintaining personal health while ignoring the social causes of much illness in today’s world, is increasingly inadequate. Maintaining high levels of individual health already is a precarious, privatized goal—the luxury of a shrinking minority of those of us who live in affluent countries. It will become increasingly so unless we approach health problems socially, even globally, and work “like miners under a landslide”³ to heal both the individuals and the socioeconomic and cultural causes that breed pandemic sickness around the world.⁴

It is now prudent for all of us to recognize that as Brian Swimme and Thomas Berry declare:

the well being of the ecosystem of the planet is a prior condition for the well being of humans. We cannot have well being on a sick planet, not even with our medical science. So long as we continue to generate more toxins than the planet can absorb and transform, the members of the Earth community will become ill. Human health is derivative. Planetary health is primary.⁵

How can we motivate people to make the difficult lifestyle changes that will be needed to save the biosphere? One key is to awaken widespread awareness of the heavy price our lifestyles are costing us in terms of personal health as well as the environment. These costs will continue to soar until increasing numbers of us change our lifestyles drastically in ways that are simultaneously self-caring and planet-caring. An ecologically aware physician and an environmentalist highlight this point in their book Well Body, Well Earth:

The best measure we have for designing our future technologies is human health. There is nothing that seems more immediate and important than personal health, our own and that of our loved ones. It is here that we feel the greatest urgency to solve problems of environmental pollution, and it is here that the consequences of our actions are the most dramatically demonstrated. … Like radio buoys guiding a ship at sea, disease and health can guide our lives. Steering our course by these signals not only leads to a life relatively free of disease. It can also guide us to the upper limits of personal fulfillment. Again, because of our interconnectedness, the fulfillment of any single individual or system ultimately benefits all systems around it. Guided by disease and health, Gaia, the living Earth, benefits from every person’s human fulfillment.⁶

We humans display blatantly contradictory attitudes and behaviors in our individual health practices and in the ways we treat the environment. In many circles, interest in these interdependent dimensions of health is high, but we continue to send mixed messages by our behavior. For example, Americans are reported to jog twenty-seven million miles each day for their health, but eat three billion gallons of ice cream (mainly fat and sugar), and produce one and a half million tons of toxic waste. Around the world, parents long passionately for children’s well-being, yet collectively we have made wellness impossible for millions of children by doubling the planet’s population twice in the twentieth century.

Awakening to the Ecological Circle

An effective methodology in both ecotherapy and ecoeducation is to offer participants opportunities to tell their ecological story. This means inviting them to recall and verbalize imprinting experiences with the earth, from their childhoods as well as more recent years. This usually involves experiencing and expressing their thoughts, images, and feelings about the earth, including any awareness they have of the perils confronting it. I told a little of my earth story in the preface to stimulate your own recall. Here is an experience I had a few years ago that intensified my awareness of the earth’s pain.

A few years ago, while giving lectures in five South American countries, I arranged to spend a few days at two different places along the Amazon River in northern Brazil. I planned this to provide a relaxed mini-vacation in a hectic schedule as well as to provide a firsthand look at the troubled rainforests. Quite unexpectedly the experience shook me to my depths and had an impact on me as a person searching for some light in the ominous shadows of the global environmental crisis.

Before the visit, I had read extensively about the perilous plight of rainforests around the equator. My “head-level” information came to life vividly during this visit. It was a rude but invaluable awakening to the interdependent agonies of ravished nature and oppressed peoples. Gestalt therapy often uses the technique of asking people to describe incidents and dreams in the present tense; I will use this approach in describing these experiences in Amazonia.

My plane is circling the airport of a city some fifty miles from the Amazon’s mouth. I watch eagerly for my first glimpse of the river and the jungle. It is early evening, but so near the equator, there is plenty of light for a good look. As the plane descends, I feel a wave of disappointment. I can barely see the forest or the river. Everything is shrouded by a pall of smoke from the burning forests.

The next day I am having my first close encounter with the majestic river. As the medium-sized paddlewheel boat traverses the enormous channel, I recall hearing that this river carries eleven times the water that flows in the Mississippi, my country’s largest river. The lush vegetation is nearer and nearer to our boat as we now chug up a tributary into the heart of the rainforest. I fear for the small, brown-skinned boys who are risking their lives swimming to our slow-moving boat and climbing aboard. They try to sell us trinkets they have made from forest materials and ask for handouts. I buy a little box made of palm leaves from a boy who looks about seven or eight.

The crew is tying up our boat at a small dock made from rough wooden planks. We get into a sizable canoe propelled by an outboard motor. Our group of seven, plus a trilingual guide, motors up a small, narrowing creek. We must duck the hanging vines. The beauty and aliveness of the forest is breathtaking. I hear strange birdcalls. The canoe pulls in at a tiny crude dock. Our guide says he will lead us along a path through the rainforest, joking that we are lucky that this is the dry season so we can walk rather than swim.

My excitement rises as the guide takes us deeper into the forest, commenting on exotic plants, flowers, vines, trees, and birds along the trail. After a half-hour walk, we reach a clearing where the trees have been slashed and burned to make a soccer field near a tiny school. We walk to the middle of the field. The guide suggests that we have a close look at the “soil” under our feet. I am shocked as I pick up a handful of dirty sand with almost no topsoil in it.

Our guide is aware of the ecological plight of his rainforest. He comments matter-of-factly: “When the trees and other plants are stripped away and their roots lost, the shallow rainforest topsoil is quickly leeched away by the torrential rains that fall almost nonstop for several months each year.” The result? Within four years the topsoil is too depleted to grow any type of food crops. In about seven years it is reduced to almost pure sand like that under our feet. It can no longer grow even enough grass to pasture cattle.

The suffering of the raped earth is real. What I know in my head comes alive in my whole being, as I hear the sound of the earth crying. My male eyes are dry but I feel inner tears—tears of anger, shame, and grief. Something I have read comes back: The desperate poor from the slums of the cities of northeastern Brazil are pushed into the rainforest to slash and burn them. Why? To produce cheap beef for export to the fast food chains in affluent Northern Hemisphere countries like mine. An unwelcome memory picture intrudes: I see myself buying a hamburger at a fast-food chain that profits from using inexpensive imported beef. With each such hamburger, I see myself causing a magnificent, towering tree to come crashing down. I feel a tightening in my chest as I remember that 40 percent of the oxygen produced on the earth comes from plants in the rainforests. Cutting down the rainforest is like amputating 40 percent of the “lungs of the planet” on which all other living things, including myself and my loved ones, depend for survival.

Now we are returning along the forest trail to our canoe. The jabbering tourists in our party are strangely silent. I can hear the subtle sounds of the forest—the wind swaying the trees and the music from the canopy a hundred feet above our heads, unfamiliar, haunting bird songs. The relative quiet creates space in my consciousness for reflecting on what I have just experienced. I remember why rainforests around the globe are being decimated at the rate of a football-field-sized area every minute of every day. It is not because the people who live there are evil or stupid. They are not. It is because they are very, very poor and trying desperately to raise the level of their families’ well-being.

Now we are back in our canoe going down the widening forest stream. I see the rickety houses on stilts along the banks where the half-Portuguese/half-Indian residents live. I realize why the little boys risk swimming out to the paddlewheel boat. They are from these homes where everyone must do all he or she can to help the family survive. It is no wonder the average child only makes it to the fourth grade in the little schools the government provides.

As my mind struggles to process what I am experiencing, I remember more about why the poor are pushed from the slums into the rainforests. Their government is unwilling to bite the bullet of land reform, redistributing to the urban superpoor some of the good farming land that is held in huge tracts by a tiny oligarchy of wealthy families. The government is also motivated by their “debt trap”—a gigantic debt to the World Bank and other transnational Northern Hemisphere banking institutions. The income the government derives from exporting cheap beef is a vain effort to make a dent in this astronomical debt. But the debt is an impossible trap, so huge that the payments cannot even pay the spiraling interest. If all the vast rainforests of Brazil, the largest in the world, are turned into deserts, their national debt will probably be at least as overwhelming as it is today. An insightful Brazilian leader of laboring people is said to have observed that, if the Amazon is the lungs of the world, then the debt is its pneumonia.

This human and ecological tragedy is compounded by the economic insanity of this exercise in global frustration. When the rainforests in all the countries along the Amazon are gone, the ex-slum dwellers and native peoples who manage to survive will be even more destitute. Why? Because they will no longer be able to harvest nature’s bounty—food crops as well as rubber, Brazil nuts, and coconuts that bring some income to forest dwellers. Through many centuries the native peoples learned to live well in the heart of the rainforests. The average per acre income from harvesting the living forest’s rich, renewable supply of products is around seventy-five dollars (U.S.) a year. In contrast, the average yearly income from an acre of stripped rainforest land is only around thirty-five or forty dollars—during the short time the topsoil lasts.

As our boat passes numerous families in little clearings or on the narrow decks around the front of their stilt homes, I remember that when Europeans first invaded the Amazon basin some four centuries ago, an estimated eight million native people lived here in harmony with nature. Now, as a result of Western diseases and the destruction of their forest habitat, fewer than 300,000 are left. Furthermore, the well-being of many of these tribal peoples is threatened in unprecedented ways by Northern Hemisphere lumbering, oil, and mining companies. The fish on which native peoples depend for food have become dangerous to eat because of the massive pollution of the streams from gold mining and oil exploitation. It is becoming clear why native peoples around the world refuse to celebrate their “discovery” by European invaders (like Columbus) who stole their land and its abundant resources while “Christianizing them to save their souls.”

We are back on the larger paddlewheel boat bucking the Amazon’s mighty flow as we recross it. As I sit alone near the bow, my mind makes a leap to my home. I see the smog damage to millions of trees in the forests above the Los Angeles basin. And I know that, if I had been more aware, I could have had a comparable awakening in many less exotic places closer to home—even in my own back yard. The problems of the Brazilian rainforests are, in different ways, also the problem of the Los Angeles basin where I lived...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• The Haworth Press
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Dedication
• Appreciation
• Prelude
• 1 Introduction: Using the Ecological Circle for Self-Care, Earth-Care, and Soul-Care
• Part One A Grounded Model of Human Development and Healing
• Part Two Methods of Ecotherapy and Ecoeducation
• Postlude: Some Parting Perspectives
• For Your Further Exploration: Books and Earth-Caring Resources
• Index
• Frontispiece