By Linda Buzzell / Source: HuffPost

I’m re-reading Ralph Metzner’s 1999 ecopsychology classic Green Psychology and am amazed how little has changed in the field of psychology since it was written. The foreword is by legendary cultural historian Theodore Roszak (1933-2011) — he coined the term “counterculture” — who also wrote an essay for Craig Chalquist’s and my anthology Ecotherapy: Healing with Nature in Mind (Sierra Club Books, 2009). It was clear to us in speaking with him at that time that he was deeply disappointed that the field of psychology hadn’t opened up to the important message of ecopsychology more rapidly. In many ways, of course, that opening has still to happen, in spite of the urgency of our planetary situation.

As a cultural historian, Roszak had a deep understanding of how resistant cultures are to change:

Cultures keep secrets; they illuminate some things and suppress others… There is a sense in which every culture is a conspiracy, a coordinated effort to open a few doors of perception and to close others… The environmental disconnection of modern psychology is indeed a conspiracy: a centuries-long collaboration among the best and most authoritative minds of our society to keep human nature as distant, different, and disengaged from nature as possible.
Roszak also observed that:

Over the past decade [1989-1999] an increasing number of more adventurous psychologists have sought to create new, ecologically relevant forms of therapy… psychologists are finally, if belatedly, responding to the influence of the environmental movement.

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