Integral Ecology: Uniting Multiple Perspectives on the Natural World (original) (raw)
Related papers
2007
Abstract After clarifying some principles of an integral notion of development, I discuss the 'integrative project' as a significant phase within the development of Chiron Body Psychotherapy. I describe it as a quantum leap beyond Chiron's original 'habitual therapeutic position' which was built on disavowed 'medical model' assumptions, and describe 'integration' in terms of the multi-dimensional bodymind whole. Touching briefly on the two phases that followedthe 'relational turn' and the 'fractal self' -I prepare the ground for a considerations of the deficiencies and critiques of the 'integrative project' within the Chiron context. I suggest that drawing from a diversity of modalities, approaches and paradigms does not necessarily alert the integrative practitioner to enactments which occur a) via therapeutic thinking, feeling or action or b) when switching between modalities, and that an 'integral' awareness of parallel processes may be required to do justice to the client's unconscious construction of the therapist and the therapeutic space.
Integral Transformative Practice: A Participatory Perspective
2003
Most psychospiritual practices in the modern West suffer from favoring growth of mind and heart over physical and instinctive aspects of human experience with many negative consequences. Michael Murphy and Ken Wilber have each made excellent contributions in offering prescriptions for ''Integral Transformative Practice'' (ITP) which include various physical and psychospiritual disciplines. Their prescriptions, however, can easily perpetuate the mind-centered direction of growth characteristic of the modern West in that they inherently ask one's mind to pick and commit to already constructed practices. Needed is an approach that will permit all human dimensions to co-creatively participate in the unfolding of integral growth. As one possible solution, the author presents a program of ITP developed by Albareda and Romero in Spain. Their Holistic Integration is based in group retreats to practice ''interactive embodied meditations,'' which involve co...
Worldviews: Global Religions, Culture, and Ecology, 2010
present Integral Ecology: Uniting Multiple Perspectives on the Natural World, a groundbreaking book that is dazzling in the breadth and depth of its engagement with ecological and environmental issues. This book is particularly innovative and ambitious insofar as it proposes a meta-framework for ecology, that is, an "ecology of ecologies" that honors and includes the multiple (and even contradictory) perspectives with which beings relate to the natural world (p. 486). For instance, a tree appears quite differently from different perspectives, such that "there is simply no such thing as 'one tree'! Rather, there are different layers of trees enacted by each perceiver" (p. 180). A beetle, a bear, a photographer, a lumberjack, a mystic, an economist, an ecologist, and an environmental activist would each disclose a facet of a tree. Furthermore, this tree would appear differently for different ecological theorists, including those working with biophysical sciences, social sciences, and the humanities. A researcher working with models of population ecology would articulate this tree differently than would a researcher working with landscape ecology, and these scientific approaches are distinct from the more humanities-oriented perspectives of environmental ethics and eco-phenomenology, which would focus on the values and meanings of the tree. Sustainable solutions to environmental problems can be more comprehensive and more effectively implemented by embracing these (and many more) perspectives on the natural world, particularly insofar as these perspectives can collaborate and coordinate with one another. To facilitate sustainable solutions and bring multiple perspectives into dialogue with one another, Esbjörn-Hargens and Zimmerman propose their model of "Integral Ecology," a framework with which to include as many perspectives as possible in ecological theories and practices.
My review of Tim Ingold and Gísli Palsson (Eds.), 2013, Biosocial Becomings: Integrating biological
Associazone Nazionale Universitaria Antropologi Culturali, ITALIA
, 2013, Biosocial Becomings: Integrating biological and social anthropology, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, pp. 281. Old beings new becomings: Neo-Darwinism and Descartes dualisms are dead-again! Biosocial Becomings advances the integration of the "two radically separated subfields of biological-physical and social-cultural anthropology" (p. vii), dissolving tensions between gene and meme theory and avoiding the colonisation of one over the other. The contributors explore how the study of life could be extended, by rejecting past dualisms and assuming worlds of becoming rather than being. Fields such as cultural studies, psychology, and sociology have wrestled long with the questions of becoming and being, and the dissolution of Descartian dualisms by mapping the space between the bio-nature/socio-culture binary. What editors Ingold and Palsson present in this collection, is a substantive and diverse account of concerns in the current state of play in twenty-first century anthropology, and related fields. As Ingold"s opening says, "The scale of re-thinking we are calling for here can scarcely be overestimated" (p. 9), human becoming is contingent on "laying the Cartesian dualism finally to rest" (p. 88). Yet, Ingold seems somewhat unaware that other disciplinary streams have previously declared dualisms dead, such as French post structuralism, Latour (Bruno Latour, 1993, We Have Never Been Modern, Cambridge and Massachusetts, Harvard University Press), and Haraway"s (Donna Haraway, 2003, The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People and Significant Otherness, Chicago, Prickly Paradigm Press) work on nature/cultures. Perhaps combined disciplinary pronouncements of the death of the dualism may indeed render it an archaic motif and enable the integration of anthropology and its trans-disciplinary affiliates, to grow this work. The concepts of becomings, biosociality, and multiple agency have garnered active epistemological reflection across fields, provoking a genuine shift in approach from the natural selection ideals of traditional anthropology. Yet it is natural enough for the neo Darwinian paradigm to act as a referent to the disruption of traditional anthropological theory. As Ingold"s opening proclaims: "Neo-Darwinism is dead" (p.
2008 The "cultivating self": health, ecology and spirituality
This paper discusses the practices of self-perfection and care for the environment, intended to the health and to the physical, mental and spiritual well being. It focuses on the points of intersection between ecological and religious practices that engender processes of "sacralization of nature" and the "naturalization of the sacred". The empirical field of interest is the religious practices of ecological groups and the ecological practices of religious groups. As methodological and theoretical references, we have elected the contributions of Merleu-Ponty's philosophy of perception, Bateson's ecological psychology, Thomas Csordas' phenomenological anthropology and the ecological epistemology of Tim Ingold, in a way that these perspectives are joined together with the intention to collapse the dualities between mind and body, subject and environment, nature and culture. When considered as the body of the world, we find in the landscape concept a point of convergence of these different approaches. Thus, the hypothesis that we suggest is that the landscape, while the body of the world, may be taken as the soil of culture, in the sense that the human subject, in his/her corporal condition of a being in the world, is not only implicated in the landscape, but that the landscape is his/her very condition of engaging in the world and in culture.
The Importance of Psychotherapy as an Eco-systemic Activity
The Psychotherapist - United Kingdom Council for Psychotherapy (UKCP), 2008
We've had a hundred years of ecology and the world's getting worse! The links with Hillman and Ventura's famous claim (1992) are not trivial. The word 'ecology' was first used in 1866 by biologist Ernst Haeckel, about thirty years before Freud coined 'psychoanalysis'. Ecology is "the study of the relationship of plants and animals to their surroundings and to each other ... of the structure and function of nature" (Park, 1997: 447). Psychotherapy is also concerned with the structure, function and relatedness of aspects of nature, human nature. There are, then, some clear links, conceptually and concretely, between psychotherapy and ecology. This article aims to explain and illustrate 1. what some of these links are, 2. how recognising and incorporating them is necessary to holistic practice, and 3. why it is urgent that we do so. Homo sapiens is having a more profound and rapid impact on Earth's life-support systems than any other species in the history of the planet. Directly as a result of our influence, the ecosystems of the planet are becoming corrupted (in its original sense of rupture), broken down and disintegrated. (This is, of course, from our perspective. As human ecologists often emphasise, the planet will continue but may do so having shifted to a new equilibrium which cannot support human life). It follows that the human psyche is the root origin, cause and catalyst of these changes. In other words, it is not so much the physical eco-systemic changes that are the 'problem', as usually presented. These are merely symptomatic of deeper causes rooted in the human unconscious, in unfulfilled desires and strivings, as expressed and acted out through everyday behaviour. These deeper dimensions of eco-systemic 'problems' have been neglected for decades by both the environmental 'movement' and by psychotherapists. Yet, treating The Psychotherapist Issue 40 Winter 2008-9 pp. 31-33 The Importance of Psychotherapy as an Eco-systemic Activity (Paul Maiteny)