Conscious Choice: The Nurture of Nature

January 2001

The Nurture of Nature

Healing Ourselves and the World through Applied Ecopsychology

by Ron Logan and Christopher Meuse

"Have you ever sat near a roaring brook and felt refreshed, been cheered by the vibrant song of a thrush, or renewed by a sea breeze? Does a wildflower’s fragrance bring you joy, a whale or snow-capped peak charge your senses?"

This is Dr. Michael Cohen’s response to an interviewer’s question as to how connecting with nature can heal and uplift the human psyche.

From his four decades of living and teaching in natural areas throughout the seasons, Cohen has pioneered "applied ecopsychology," a synthesis of ecology and psychology. Applied ecopsychology was experientially derived from the observed effects of people connecting with sea breezes, roaring brooks, and wildflower fragrances. Cohen noticed that intimate contact with nature puts people in touch with an innate wisdom that affects a deep healing of self and planet.

To make the benefits of applied ecopsychology available, Cohen founded Project NatureConnect, a home study program of the Institute of Global Education and Greenwich University, where he is chair of the Department of Integrated Ecology. His students — most connecting with their instructor through e-mail or telephone — make use of his self-guiding training manuals, Reconnecting With Nature and Well Mind, Well Earth. The manuals provide a syllabus of "107 environmentally sensitive activities for stress management, spirit, and self-esteem."

Bound by Attraction

The great systems theorist Gregory Bateson, once noted: "The major problems in the world are the result of the difference between the way nature works and the way man thinks." Harvard biologist Edward O. Wilson similarly observes that "only in the last moment of human history has the delusion arisen that people can flourish apart from the rest of the living world. Preliterate peoples were in intimate contact with a bewildering array of life forms."

Cohen verifies that distortions in the way humans think have arisen from our loss of contact with nature. As citizens of Western civilization, he notes, we spend more than 95 percent of our lives — 99 percent of our adult lives — indoors, cloistered from nature. "This detachment," says Cohen, "estranges us from creation, and from nature’s wisdom, spirit and love within and about us. "The consequences of our alienation from nature manifest as the myriad of personal, social, and environmental problems which beset the modern world, including many of the insatiable wants that underlie disorders."

Cohen’s analysis of our estrangement from nature begins with his personal experience that the cosmos is bound by attractions, known functionally as connecting forces, but experientially as love. This principle of applied ecopsychology is in agreement with the experience of mystics. "From atoms and molecules to human beings with developed consciousness...attraction is the law of nature," affirms spiritual philosopher, P.R. Sarkar.

Cohen avows that "the universe and all that it includes are wordlessly conscious and connected through attractions. We disconnect from that consciousness by thinking with verbal abstractions." He observes that it is natural and nurturing for humans to seek and experience attractions in natural settings, which produce good feelings in sentient beings. To biologist Wilson, this human tendency seemed so fundamental that he coined the term "biophilia" to signify the "connections that human beings subconsciously seek with the rest of life."

Our expression of biophilia is manifested, according to Cohen, by some fifty-three "natural senses." It is through these senses — from the perceptual senses like smell and touch, to primary drives like thirst and hunger, to subtle feelings like trust and nurturing, to mental expressions like reason and discrimination — that we link our individual being to nature, which runs through and about us. These natural senses are designed to act in congress to bring our being into harmony, fulfillment, and community with the world.

Cohen calls the resultant functioning of the senses "natural wisdom." He finds that natural wisdom arises when we are able to follow freely nature’s callings and connect our complex array of felt senses with the natural world. Disconnect humans from rich and immediate sensory contact with nature, and we lose both our natural fulfillment and our wisdom. Then our need for fulfillment overcomes our sense of reason. We want, and there is never enough. We obtain momentary satisfactions from materials and relationships that we know are environmentally and personally destructive, producing toxic garbage, cravings, mass conflict, stress, depression, and dependency. This defines addiction and madness: it is insane to knowingly destroy our life support system and our biological/psychological roots.

Nature as Therapy

Cohen’s home study Internet course at www.ecopsych.com gets people to reconnect with nature, whether in a backyard or in remote wilderness, for the purpose of nurturing "their ability to make sense of their lives." The techniques presented in the course enable participants "to use a variety of nature-connecting activities to discover, strengthen, and fulfill their natural sensations and feelings."

In an article in The Humanistic Psychologist on the effects of Project NatureConnect, Cohen reports subsidence in personality disorders, increase in cognitive skills, dissipation of violence and prejudice, elimination of dependencies, and reduction of stress. In his own minor victory, Cohen himself has effortlessly broken a fifty-eight-year habit of biting his fingernails — a habit which resisted repeated attempts to overcome — through contact with nature.

If, as Gregory Bateson asserts, the problems of society and environment ultimately stem from our ignorance of how nature works, and if applied ecopsychology effectively puts people in touch with "earth wisdom," then its healing potential could be more than personal in scope. Cohen himself would like to see "people who are trained to connect with this wisdom inject nature-connected learning into every facet of society." To this end he offers accredited online courses and M.S. and Ph.D degrees. They are inexpensive because they incorporate a person’s prior experiences and operate through distance learning ( www.ecopsych.com).

Recently a psychologist who took this program said: "This is the course that every civilized person will be required to take if we are to reverse our runaway disorders." That’s a dramatic claim, and seems to overreach itself. Wisdom is not accessible only through sensory engagement with creation. Many have achieved great depth of wisdom by going within themselves, rather than into wilderness. But it is certainly true, as Edward O. Wilson reminds us, that "wilderness settles peace on the soul." And peace of soul is certainly prerequisite to peace in the world.

Cohen, for his part, has certainly done a service by drawing attention to the detrimental effects of our alienation from nature, and by creating tools for healing this alienation. In recognition of his thirty-five years developing and promoting nature-connected learning, the World Peace University, a United Nations non-governmental organization, honored Cohen as recipient of its 1994 Distinguished World Citizen Award. And if Cohen’s ecopsychology process gets enough people reestablished in natural wisdom, the earth may yet honor him with something more important that awards: a proliferation of creatures, pure streams, and peace among nations.

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