Books
My goal with Radical Ecopsychology (2002/2013), was to present ecopsychology as an inherently radical field. Ecopsychology was at the time being defined using various slogans (“the needs of the person are the needs of the planet,” etc.) and presented using a generally popular format. I wanted to offer a text to help put some scholarly legs under the field and demonstrate its radical nature. In other words, I wanted to go beyond the slogans to show that the various contributions being made to ecopsychology could be organized into different tasks that together bring a coherent radical project into view. I also wanted to show that there are intellectual traditions other than those of mainstream psychology that the field can draw on to build itself on its own terms.
The book has continued to find readers and in 2013 SUNY Press published a second edition. I wrote a long, new chapter for this edition to reflect on developments in the field over the previous decade, including the launching of an avowedly mainstream “second generation” of ecopsychology. While I wrote Radical Ecopsychology as a provocation to what is now being called the “first” generation, it was largely the second generation to which I was responding here. If ecopsychology is inherently radical, then a mainstream ecopsychology is plainly a contradiction in terms. I therefore used the new chapter as an opportunity to further refine my argument about the need to keep the field radical.
I think Radical Ecopsychology remains an important book for the history it provides and for the critical and philosophical arguments it makes to show the field’s unique character. Since writing it, however, I have become increasingly aware that it is not radical enough (the further in you get with ecopsychology, the more radical it becomes). There is, moreover, a growing sense of dissatisfaction from many quarters about ecopsychology’s mainstream limitations. The argument has been made, for example, that ecopsychology needs to be “unsettled” because its practices often repeat patterns of settler colonialism or fail to align with Indigenous decolonization. It has also from the start been criticized for its “whiteness” problem. To help get behind a new, third generation of the field that can speak to a world evermore on edge, I am therefore in the process of writing Ecopsychology as Politics: Reconnecting Psyche, Nature, and Society in Fiery Times.
Volume 1 of the book, Do We Have to Say “Capitalism”?, places ecopsychology on anticapitalist footings. If capitalism—with all the modern injustices structured into—is necessarily hostile to life, continually making a “death-world,” then I suggest that ecopsychology cannot be true to itself unless expressed as an anticapitalist politics. This volume, then, presents ecopsychology as a reimagining of the theory, practice, and methodology of psychology for the sake of a post-capitalist world or ecologically rational society. I suggest that if ecopsychology were taken up widely in this manner, then it could itself play a crucial role in the kind of planetary politics that many are now calling for.
Volume 2, The Human-Ecological Condition, places anticapitalist ecopsychology back on eco-spiritual footings. Capitalism represses those modes of experience that connect us to life—all of which could broadly be described as “spiritual”—in producing the alienated character structure required for smoothing the everyday violence of capitalist society. In standing for a recollecting or de-repressing of these vital modes of experience, ecopsychology provides a crucial subjective ground largely missing in current anti-capitalist politics. The goal of this volume, then, is to articulate a specifically-ecopsychological politics for deepening into other possible worlds and being in solidarity with the resurgence of Indigenous worlds. This is not psychology as we have come to know it but rather an ecologized and politicized psychology shaped for our fiery times.
On another note, while working as a psychotherapist I was the lead author of a guidebook for group therapy with men sexually abused in childhood, Men and Healing. It is still available here.