Thanks to my friend Richard for pointing me to this very interesting article about the resurgence of eco-psychology. It set a lot of thoughts churning for me. For one thing, it reminded me of the integral role that a kind of mini-return to nature had on my own life. When I moved my family to a rural setting in Nova Scotia in 2005, I was motivated mostly by a desire to get myself out of my usual academic setting so that I could put down some new thoughts. I didn't realize until fairly late in the game how much the particular setting I had chosen, which resonated with me in strong ways that I still don't understand completely, influenced what happened to me. I don't think it sank in completely until I returned to Waterloo and noticed how miserable I was -- at least for the first few months.
If you read all the way through the article, you'll notice some strong words about the hazards of trying to replace exposure to nature with technology in the form of screens and pixels. This is something that we think about a great deal in my laboratory, especially as we have good evidence, about to hit print, that exposure to digital versions of nature actually can have restorative effects, and pretty powerful ones at that.
Our thinking is that rather than to disparage such possibilities without proper scrutiny, it might be possible to use technology to tap into the deep roots of our attachments to some aspects of ecology, not so much to try to replace ecology with electronics, but to try to understand how best to build an environment that can sustain us psychologically, while making concessions to some of the realities of what we've done. Climate change is here. Overpopulation is a fact. Much of the natural world that was present at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution is gone and it won't be back. So do we just fold up the tents and hunker down for the inevitable doom and misery that lies ahead? Some days that's exactly what I want to do. But not today.
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