Where Psyche Meets Gaia

When we think of environmentalism, we call to mind a vast, worldwide movement that deals in imponderably complex social & economic issues on the largest conceivable scale...It includes everybody, because there is nobody the movement can afford not to talk to. Whenever I turn to an environmental issue, I find myself intensely aware that other, nonhuman eyes are upon me: our companion creatures looking on, hoping that thir bewildering human cousins will see the error of their ways...
We are living in a time when both the Earth & the human species seem to be crying out for a radical readjustment in the scale of our political thought...Is it possible that the...personal & the planetary are pointing the way toward some new basis for sustainable economic & emotional life, a society of good environmental citizenship that can ally the intimately emotional & the vastly biospheric?
Until just a few years ago, possibilities like this would have gone unnoticed...
Now there are signs that this is beginning to change from both [personal & planetary] directions.
Recently, in a private letter, the Australian rainforest activist John Seed put it this way:
"It is obvious to me that the forests cannot be saved one at a time, nor can the planet be saved one issue at a time: without a profound revolution in human consciousness, all the forests will soon disappear. Psychologists in service to the Earth helping ecologists to gain deeper understandng of how to facilitate profound change in the human heart & mind seems to be the key at this point."
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There is one more significant current of change that deserves to be mentioned. The biologists have begun to pay attention to the psychological side of human evolution. In a recent work, the Harvard zoologist E. O. Wilson has raised the possibility that humans possess a capacity called "biophilia," defined as "the innately emotional affiliation of human beings to other living organisms."
"Ecopsychology" is the name most often used for [the] emerging synthesis of the psychological (here intended to embrace the psychotherapeutic & psychiatric) & the ecological.
Ecopsychology suggests that we can read our transactions with the natural environment - the way we use or abuse the planet - as projections of unconscious needs & desires. In fact, our wishful, willful imprint upon the natural environment may reveal our collective state of soul more tellingly than the dreams we wake from & shake off, knowing them to be unreal.
Far more consequential are the dreams that we take with us out into the world each day & maniacally set about making "real" - in steel & concrete, in flesh & blood, out of resources torn from the substance of the planet...
I have been calling ecopsychology "new," but in fact its sources are old enough to be called aboriginal. Once upon a time, all psychology was "ecopsychology." No special word was needed. The oldest healers in the world...knew no other way than to work within the context of environmental reciprocity. Some are quick to see elements of sentimentality or romanticism in our growing appreciation of the sacred ecologists that guide traditional societies. There is nothing "mystical" or "transcendent" about the matter...

Theodore Roszak - Ecopsychology: Restoring the Earth, Healing the Mind. Roszak, Gomes, & Kanner