Ecotherapy: Healing With Nature in Mind [Paperback]

There is a reason that parks and gardens exist in urban areas, and that our psyches have become more fragmented the more estranged we become from nature. Studies prove that even a glimpse of wildlife, forest, sea or sky can send our human hearts soaring. Nature provides a profound healing energy that helps reduce our symptoms, cure our wounds and worry, and breathes into us creative life. In Ecotherapy: Healing with Nature in Mind, author/editors and breakthough therapists Linda Buzzell and Craig Chalquist provide a clinical and common sense approach to how nature influences and why we should care about the human-ecology connection. It provides therapists of many disciplines an enhanced methodology to more insightfully treat their patients. Given our current, global state of environmental crisis, this book is a must-read.

The new book ECOTHERAPY: Healing with Nature in Mind edited by Linda Buzzell and Craig Chalquist (with a Foreword by David Orr) is quintessential reading for anyone concerned about personal AND social change AND recognizing the emerging patterns that are on the cutting edge of our new conversations. Im so glad that this book is out. But why, with all of our new technology, did it take 3 years to put this together, is my only complaint.

Finally a bridge has emerged to fuse the two seemingly separate worlds of psychology and ecology. Yes indeed a breakthrough. Psychology needs to get out of its head and navel gazing and move into the world AND the world of NATURE where we are intricately interconnected. And ecology (and environmentalism, per se) needs to get out of complaining about our woes and forgo the many guilt trips to discover a way for humans can actually feel and comprehend and act in the world from a centered place of our earth-natured human-ness.

The contributors of this excellent anthology are not merely academic in that stodgy sense but intellectuals who have heart AND are active in their communities. Just to give you some contributor names of outstanding people doing excellent work in real personal and social change (and who are preparing the foundation for whats coming down the pike) include deep ecologist Joanna Macy, peak oil activist Richard Heinberg, Transition Town leader Linda Buzzell, Robert Greenway, Transition Town activist Sarah Edwards, former mayor of Sebastopol Larry Robinson, Bill McKibben, famed Simplicity activist Cecile Andrews, farmer and Vet activist Shepherd Bliss, eco-spiritual publisher Lauren deBoer... and of course the famed one who started it all almost 20 years ago, Theodore Roszak, who initially got my attention decades ago with his excellent Makings of a Counter Culture, as well as the FIRST and seminal work titled Ecopsychology: Restoring the Earth, Healing the Mind.

If you sense that either of these main structures (psychology or ecology) are ill equipped to take us on a journey of a life time, trust that intuition and then take a look at these pioneers who feel nature running in their "soil"ed veins who are courageously offering their new interpretations and stories that use BOTH to give us something different.

It reminds me of when I was at Bioneers a decade ago. I heard a speaker say that we are living here as if we dont need an Earth. That simple statement was an epiphany for me. It radically altered and restructured my direction. The ecopsychologists appeared around the same time and their work has created a movement, a foundation to keep that epiphany alive for myself and many others.

What also blows me away is that many of these contributors of this anthology have been included in the pages of HopeDance (wwww.hopedance.org). I must be an ecopsychologist!

Bob Banner, publisher of HopeDance: Radical Solutions Inspiring Hope and the new edibleSanLuisObispo.

Applied ecopsychology embraces a range of nature-based methods of psychological healing and this book packs in essays by leaders in the field, from Theodore Roszak to Mary Watkins. Links between spirituality, community development and psychological healing make for a powerful mental health pick recommended for both college-level and general public libraries strong in alternative psychology.

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