Eco-psychologists and a very strange conference

This is part of a comment that turned up on another part of Harmless Sky:

Robin Guenier says:

March 6th, 2009 at 8:55 am

Here an interesting story: this weekend, the University of the West of England is holding a conference on “Climate Change Denial”, organised by (wait for it) the Centre for Psycho-Social Studies. It will be “bringing together a group of people – climate change activists, eco-psychologists [!!], psychotherapists and social researchers – who are uniquely qualified to assess the human dimensions of this human-made problem”. Professor Hoggett, who is helping to organise the conference, says:

We will examine denial from a variety of different perspectives – as the product of addiction to consumption, as the outcome of diffusion of responsibility and the idea that someone else will sort it out and as the consequence of living in a perverse culture which encourages collusion, complacency, irresponsibility.

http://ccgi.newbery1.plus.com/blog/?p=63&cp=31#comment-12166

Robin goes on to make the point that the usual cause of scepticism is a lack of convincing evidence; a perfectly rational response to uncertainty.

Apparently this has not occurred to the organisers of this conference, who seem intent on treating climate scepticism as a pathological condition. Perhaps they have never wondered whether likening anyone who just happens not to share their convictions to holocaust deniers is altogether normal? And what might they think about Christian fundamentalists who refer to the followers of other faiths as heathens?

But it was the reference to eco-psychologists that really caught my eye. What on earth could that be about? A vegan shrink who rides a solar powered bicycle perhaps?

I had to go no further than the Daily Green website to find out:

Therapists come in handy for all sorts of emotional problems, and worrying about the state of the environment can definitely cause distress. Meet the eco-psychologist, a new form of therapy, according to a recent NY Times article.

Here’s one happy client. Catherine McLendon and her husband went to an eco-psychologist, Dr. Shulmire, to talk about Ms. McLendon’s increasing worry over the family’s consumption habits and Mr. McLendon’s worry about the disappearance of green space.

“Treatments” can include fasts from shopping, emailing and the news, while increasing time spent meditating or gardening or generally hanging out outside.

Some psychologists are skeptical about the approach. Scott O. Lilienfeld at Emory cautions that “there is a fine line between therapy and advocacy.” Lilenfeld also cautions that some worrying about the environment may be due to larger issues like general anxiety disorders, where one may worry about everything.

http://www.greendaily.com/2008/02/16/do-you-need-an-eco-psychologist/

So it seems that even the Daily Green is a little cautious about this new branch of medicine. No doubt Dr. Shulmire is a perfectly respectable practitioner who wouldn’t dream of preying on gullible people, and I suppose that someone has to deal with the casualties of environmental propaganda. It must get pretty depressing if you really believe everthing you’re told about the plight of planet Earth.

I wondered whether Dr Shulmire might be flying over for the conference, so my next stop was the organisers web page:

Keynote Speakers include George Marshall Director of Climate Outreach and Information Centre, Mary-Jane Rust, Ecopsychologist and Jungian Analyst and Paul Hoggett, Professor of Politics, UWE.

Workshops will be led by Zita Cox (Environmental Constellations), Ro Randall (Cambridge Carbon Footprints), Dr Chris Johnstone (The Great Turning Times); Nick Totton (editor Psychotherapy and Politics International) Renee Lertzman (Cardiff University) and Jim Wilson (psychotherapist and consultant).

http://www.hero.ac.uk/media_relations/21869.cfm

Now that sounds like a pretty strong team, although I was rather surprised that it did not include an eco-aromatherapist.. Anyway, I thought I better have a look at the eco-psychologist’s website:

Mary-Jayne Rust

How can we live more sustainably, both socially and environmentally? This seems to me the most pressing issue of our times. The changes we need to make are more than practical ones. I hope for a paradigm shift, which encompasses the personal, the political, the spiritual and the ecological, spanning local to global, challenging our western cultural values.

As a psychotherapist (I have trained as an art therapist and Jungian Analyst) I am particularly interested in two areas:

• How the ‘big picture’ affects the personal (and vice versa)

• How a psychological understanding can contribute to making the sea change towards respecting ourselves, in all our diversity, and our whole earth community.

These are the broad themes of an emerging field called Ecopsychology. It is about acknowledging and valuing our relationship with the whole of life.

To find out more about the courses and writing I offer on these issues please click on any of the side bars.

http://www.mjrust.net/

Well I expect that she explains what all this is about in her courses and her writings. Perhaps she just didn’t have enough time to do so on her website. But I do wonder if she has made up her mind whether she is a medical practitioner or an environmental activist?

Moving on to a site called ecopsychology.org  I discovered that what until then I had thought of as a branch of medicine is nothing of the kind:

Ecopsychology, or eco-psychology as it is sometimes called, is situated at the intersection of a number of fields of enquiry, including environmental philosophy, psychology, and ecology, but is not limited by any disciplinary boundaries. At its core, ecopsychology suggests that there is a synergistic relation between planetary and personal well being; that the needs of the one are relevant to the other.

Their website “enthusiastically endorses the Earth Charter” so here are a couple of recommendations from that website:

a. Take action to avoid the possibility of serious or irreversible environmental harm even when scientific knowledge is incomplete or inconclusive.

b. Place the burden of proof on those who argue that a proposed activity will not cause significant harm …

Which I take to mean that, for the committed environmentalist,  activism takes priority over scientific evidence of actual environmental harm, and that everyone who claims that their activities are harmless is guilty of planet destruction unless  they can prove, to the activist’s satisfaction, that they are innocent.

For a moment I thought that I had taken a wrong turning here, and drifted rather a long way from a conference on the therapeutic treatment of climate denial, but of course I hadn’t. The idea that everyone is guilty until proved innocent, and that those who dissent from the current political orthodoxy must be suffering from some kind of mental problem, have a common sinister antecedence. And this is not unrelated to the Holocaust, Stalin’s purges and the tribulations of people like Solzhenitsyn and so many others citizens of the Soviet block countries.

Robin Guenier’s comment, which I quoted from at the beginning of this post, concludes with this observation:

There’s a serious issue here. There appears to be an attempt to move from labelling those sceptical of the orthodoxy as “deniers” to accusing them of having a psychological disorder. It may be noted that a common practice of authoritarian governments is to categorise dissidents as being mentally ill.

It seemed unlikely that the University of the West of England’s professor of politics would have totalitarian leanings, but I thought that I better check up on that anyway. Here is a sentence from his Staff Profile:

Throughout the 1980’s he worked with radical Labour local authorities interested in decentralising and democratising local government.

http://www.uwe.ac.uk/hlss/politics/staff_pHoggett.shtml

So there seems to be no doubt that this is a man with a strong commitment to democracy, or at least he thinks that he has. And he has a BA in Social Psychology from the University of Sussex too – I wonder if that means that he is a sociologist?. But wouldn’t you expect a libertarian who teaches politics to know something about the authoritarian regimes that have used spurious diagnoses of mental disorder to suppress dissent? And I always thought that freedom of speech and diversity of opinions had something to do with democracy.

Perhaps I’ve got all this completely wrong, and all that Professor Hoggett and his colleagues at the conference want to do is explore the possibility for using eco-aromatherapy as a cure for the mental aberration of climate scepticism. But how would you treat the ‘patients’; as much as sixty percent of the population according to some opinion polls? You would certainly have to process them on an industrial scale. Some kind of gas chamber perhaps?

Hat tip to Robin Guenier for contributions gratefully received.