Ecopsychology: Science, Totems,and the Technological Species

摘要

Ecopsychology is not a stroll in the park along well-worn paths. It is a wild romp through briar patches and forests, deserts and open ocean-places with no sure guide. Ecopsychology researchers cannot always reach for a handy set of proven tools because their subject is decidedly ambitious and mysterious: the aspects of mind that bind the whole cosmos together, the deepest recesses of the human-nature relationship. Responding to a shared conviction that the human-nature relationship has gone woefully awry, ecopsychologists pursue a radical agenda of "turning the psyche inside out" (p. 82). The urgency and scale of this task require that theorists summon wisdom and methods from a broad range of intellectual and spiritual sources: psychotherapy, phenomenology, Buddhism, feminist psychology, cosmology, environmental philosophy, cultural studies, theology, nature writing, and so on. Ecopsychology grapples with major ontological questions around human identity, epistemological questions concerning the role of the senses, and moral questions about how we treat nature. It cannot be a positivist science.