Mega-fires, mega-denial

Victoria is counting the cost of the worst bushfire season on record; a terrible catastrophe, 189 people (at the time of writing) have died - a figure that is expected to rise - and almost 2,000 homes and businesses have been lost. The landscape is devastated and a thick cloud of smoke hangs over Melbourne.

The Premier John Brumby has stated the communities will rebuild; he has promised a Royal Commission to investigate the fires and there are likely to be a host of new strategies for fire management and new infrastructure; but will it change anything?

The Premier has completely avoided the issue of climate change and the prospect of future mega-fires that could be far worse than the one we have just witnessed. Climate change and mega-fires are a reality, especially in drought ridden, hot climate environments. Is it wise then to continue along the same old paradigm of rebuild and start again?

Old conflicts will surface over the management of the forests - conserve or cut and burn. And the same anger and vitriol between interest groups will find its continuum - shouldn’t we instead try something new? Maybe now is the time to attempt a mass change in human consciousness?

Former US Vice President Al Gore, in his book Earth in the Balance, has likened society’s failure to tackle the ecological crisis to the crisis of a dysfunctional family. Each displays symptoms of denial and a failure to take responsibility. When someone presents to the therapist with a sense of inertia; and/or when someone is in denial or cannot take responsibility there is clearly a problem - a depression leading to a psychosis - and the need for radical mind altering therapy if there is to be a recovery. The therapist and client begin the long task towards personal growth and restoring well being.

However, nothing seems to initiate meaningful growth and well being in our society. The planet is facing a deep ecological crisis that is also a crisis in consciousness. But our leaders are in denial; they will not take responsibility. They will not initiate the necessary changes for human survival. We will have to bring about a change soon or - according to the laws of evolution - humans will become extinct. Change is never easy but maybe we have been looking in the wrong direction.

The psychotherapist listens to peoples’ tragic stories and helps them to rewrite those stories in a more positive and meaningful way. For well being to occur we must be able to live harmoniously with ourselves and our environment. There are a number of theories now that tell us all behaviour stems from internal narratives. We digest information from the external world and play it back in our heads. These are our thoughts from which all action extends.

With this in mind Theodore Roszak, in The Voice of the Earth, calls for a new synthesis of psychology, cosmology, and ecology to save humans from the crisis in consciousness and the planet from a final catastrophe.

We need a new discipline that sees the needs of the planet and the person as a continuum and that can help us reconnect with the truth that lies in our communion with the rest of creation.

Theodore Roszak has called the merging of the three disciplines (psychology, cosmology and ecology) “ecopsychology”.

The core of the mind is the ecological unconscious. For ecopsychology, repression of the ecological unconscious is the deepest root of collusive madness in industrial society; open access to the ecological unconscious is the path to sanity.

In his book he explains “ecopsychology” as a system of principles. The first is the acceptance that the evolution of the mind is not unlike the evolution of the earth and there is a deep relationship between mind and nature. Roszak calls it the “ecological unconscious”. The repression of nature, Roszak believes, is the cause of modern industrial madness.

He goes on to say we can understand all “physical, biological, mental and cultural systems” by retracing our human evolutionary stages in the same way as we examine the cosmology of the universe. In other words, we can explore the brain in much the same way as the palaeontologist explores the fossils on a hillside. Each tells a unique story.

Roszak believes we readily accept the stages of evolution in the natural world but do not like to think of ourselves as primitive or childlike, but all the stages of evolution are actually represented in the gestation period and are built upon at birth. What Roszak is telling us is that we do not come into life as a beginning but as the culmination of all life that has gone before us and if we recognised this more fully we would maintain closer links with nature and not make so many catastrophic mistakes.

Roszak claims “ecopsychology” is one way in which we can make our previous life forms meaningful to our daily experience and he says we need to do this if we are to discover a sense of well being. To be clear, Roszak is not talking about a New Age belief in past lives passed through a single consciousness but a scientific formula for human development and progress. Another way of looking at this is to suggest that we have prioritised material progress and forgotten the value of self development; or “know thyself”. What we need is not more material “stuff” but therapy.

The goal of therapy is to recover the repressed unconscious. Roszak tells us the goal of “ecopsychology” is to awaken the environmental elements that are dormant in the unconscious and/or to acknowledge the difference between the real self and the socially constructed self. That is, who we really are and who we imagine ourselves to be.

We used to understand the real self in religious terms as the soul or spirit. With the demise of religion these entities have disappeared from our vocabulary but Roszak believes they remain with us at a deeper level. Roszak contends the spirit, soul or what he terms, the “ecological unconscious” link us to a crucial stage in the child’s development and an “innately animalistic quality of experience”. He believes the main source of human dilemmas resides in the fact we are constantly searching for these lost entities - the lost spirit and/or the lost child - however one wishes to explain it.

When we come to know these entities Roszak believes we move towards an “ecological ego” and a sense of “ethical responsibility”. He believes that when people feel this move happening they engage in more traditional techniques of healing and they find ways of expressing a mysticism that has generally been expressed in religion and art. He says, these expressions help us to develop the “ecological ego” and this in turn changes the fabric of social relations. We also see changes in political decisions.

One important aspect of the new ecopsychology “is the re-evaluation of certain compulsively ‘masculine’ character traits that permeate our structures of political power and drive us to dominate nature”. In addressing this dominator behaviour “ecopsychology draws significantly on some [not all] of the insights of ecofeminism and feminist spirituality with a view to demystifying the sexual stereotypes”.

Roszak argues that attention needs to be given to the small scale social forms and personal empowerment. Large scale projects, he argues undermine the development of an “ecological ego” and the collective nature-based spiritual needs of the people. We must bring back the “synergy” in order to return to “sanity” and “salvation”. Roszak claims “ecopsychology is post-industrial but it is not anti-industrial in its social orientation”. The focus is on a “synergistic interplay between planetary and personal well being”. Or in other words “the needs of the planet are the needs of the person”.

I do not agree with everything Roszak has to offer but his ideas are worth consideration. Difficult times in history have always drawn the best of idealism, Roszak is no exception. We cannot turn the clock back and “small” is not necessarily good or ethical. However, today, we know a lot more about human behaviour than ever before. We know for instance that humans are on a path of self-annihilation and much of the cause sits with a lack of individual well being.

As the former US Vice President Al Gore has said, “our society’s failure” [and the failure of our governments] “to seriously tackle the ecological crisis” is akin to a “dysfunctional family”. The crisis in nature is also a crisis in consciousness and it is not a move towards long term human survival. We must do something to change this situation.

In the wake of the devastation across Victoria there has been a lot of emotional outpouring from survivors and the public, to which the politicians have had to respond. There has also been some anger and opportunism.

Governments have a wonderful capacity for hope but they are not so good at formulating long term sustainable policy. The rational responses have been few and the willingness to look at the bigger issues of a global ecological crisis has been, generally speaking, negligible. What will it take for governments to have an honest look at the issues of denial, responsibility and inertia and begin the real work of a lasting recovery for humans and for the planet?