Book description
'"Vital signs" are, of course, the basic physiological
measures of functioning which health practitioners use to assess the
gravity of a patient's predicament. This anthology focuses not so much
on our physical predicament, with so many of the Earth's systems
severely stressed and beginning to fail - there are plenty of other
places to read about this Instead we focus on our psychological
predicament, as news of the situation slowly penetrates our defences and
we struggle as individuals and as a society to find an adequate
response. By "vital signs" we also mean signs that such a
response is beginning to take shape: signs of hope, signs of healing. We
feel that ecopsychology in Britain has a distinctive voice and unique
contributions to make. In doing so, we hope to facilitate debate and
dialogue within the field, in the hope that this will lead eventually to
more developed theory and practice. Things are still at quite an early
stage in the construction of ecopsychology as a discipline, and the
articulation of relationships of compatibility or incompatibility
between various approaches. It will take time for the field to reach
maturity, to agree on terminology (or agree to use different
terminologies), and to develop organisational forms. This is a familiar
process for any new way of looking at things. At the same time as
recognising this slow maturation, we are of course equally aware of the
extraordinary urgency of the external situation which it is one of the
missions of ecopsychologists to address. While there would in theory
still be an important role for ecopsychology if we were not facing
environmental meltdown - exploring the complex relationships between
human and other-than-human, and the therapeutic value of bringing the
two together - in practice ecopsychology has been completely shaped by a
sense of catastrophic loss, of the irreversible destruction of
complexity and the impending threat to the systems which sustain life on
this planet. From this point of view, ecopsychology is part of a much
larger movement seeking to develop awareness of climate change together
with all the other developing ecological crises (pollution,
over-consumption of resources, destruction of habitats, etc). What
distinguishes ecopsychology from many of the other players in this
larger movement, however - apart from the psychological focus itself -
is a very widespread perception of human beings as just one element in
the global ecosystem; and an agreement, both ethical and practical, that
humanity cannot save itself by throwing other species out of the sledge.
The ecosystem stands or falls as a whole, human, other-than-human, and
more-than-human; and a failure to recognise this is itself a symptom of
our culture's dissociation from its place in the larger whole, which is
one of the causal factors leading to our current situation. Among people
who have been working in this area for some time, there is a growing
question: what if we fail? What if our society does not manage a
transition to a carbon-free economy - and all of the other
transformations of culture and practice which are required alongside
this? In all probability time is getting extremely short; considerable
damage to global ecosystems is already certain, and runaway
"tipping point" effects are predicted by many scientists.
Although awareness of this crisis is far greater than it was a decade
ago, there is still little sign of a serious shift in public attitudes.
Indeed in the UK, and elsewhere, ecological concerns have been eclipsed
by the recent economic crisis with seemingly little recognition that of
course ecological, social and economic crisis are completely interwoven.
While the future can never be predicted with certainty, there is not
much concrete basis for optimism. What then?'- From the Introduction
