PSYC204

Ecopsychology is a movement that began in the 1960’s with our recognition of our planetary environmental crisis. Ecopsychology pays special attention to, not just the externally measurable aspects of how we are destroying our environment, but to the collective pathological consciousness, or frame of mind, that led to the current self-destructive catastrophe coming upon us. By drawing attention to our culture’s collective misunderstanding of our relation to nature, ecopsychology offers another point of view, based on non-dualist systems theory, that challenges the pathological cultural assumptions of domination and hierarchy that have poisoned our own minds, as much as our relations with others - and especially our relations to nature. In this way, ecopsychologists view the environmental crisis as first and foremost, a psychic crisis. Ecopsychologists affirm that we must first liberate ourselves from our current pathological worldview if we are to ever find our way towards an economically sustainable and biologically harmonic relation to our planetary ecosystem. This course will invite students to a fundamentally new way of viewing themselves, their relations with others, and especially their relations with the natural world, as holistically and systemically interwoven, a worldview that will challenge all our value systems, core beliefs, and assumptions of reality, truth and reason.