Acknowledgement: The Story of Catalina Park

Everything written and spoken in Australia must begin with an acknowledgement of country, not the scripted text, spoken as a token, but a true acknowledgement of our status as settlers and recognition that the land was stolen and never ceded by First Nations peoples. We will begin therefore with a story that serves both as a fact and metaphor for this paper, that of Catalina Park, known before white settlement as the Gully, just 10 km from where we are now writing in Wentworth Falls, The Blue Mountains, New South Wales. The Gully is a stretch of bushland and swamp, near the main centre of Katoomba, once a summer camp for the Gundungurra and Darug people, and then a permanent community by 1950 due to white settlement at the foot of the mountains and the flooding of the Burragorang Valley. The peaceful existence of this community was soon shattered in 1957 when a group of local businessmen decided to build a race track on this land, forcibly removing the traditional owners. The land was given back in 2002 and is now the largest Aboriginal Place in NSW. The racetrack is growing over, with native trees and grass encroaching on the bitumen so you can only just ride your bicycle around it.

Introduction: Psychology and the Climate Crisis

The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the eyes of others only a green thing that stands in the way. Some see nature all ridicule and deformity... and some scarce see nature at all. But to the eyes of the man of imagination, nature is imagination itself.

― William Blake (Letters, 1909/1980)

Climate distress, “the chronic fear of environmental doom” (APS, 2020), is arguably the most significant emotional issue of our age, particularly among young people, who are disproportionally affected, with up to 70% reporting significant distress, including a growing hesitancy about having children of their own (Hickman, 2020; Wu et al., 2020). In Australia we have experienced an explosion of distress after the Black Summer Bushfires of 2019–2020, one of the worst fire seasons in our national history, with 18,983,588 hectares burned (Filkov et al., 2020) with over 1 billion animals killed including mammals, birds and reptiles (Dickman & McDonald, 2020).

Clinical psychology is poorly equipped to respond to these types of emotions, focussed historically on intrapsychic problems, particularly those seen as resulting from cognitive distortions and emotional dysregulation (Beck, 2011). This kind of psychology, private, focussed on the individual, pathologizing is ill-suited for endemic affect, grounded in the materiality of the natural world.

The American Psychological Association guidelines for coping with the climate crisis suggest that we stay resilient and optimistic, through emotional regulation, staying connected to each other while enhancing disaster preparedness (Clayton et al., 2017). The Australian Psychological Society guidelines ask us to recognise climate-related emotions, take climate action and cultivate hope for the future (APS, 2020). These positions, however, remain tokenistic given the fact that the field has yet to challenge itself at a paradigm level. We need to challenge the continued dominance of the individualistic-cognitive model and recognise the natural world as integral to our understanding of the mind.

The aim of this project is to explore an alternative paradigm for psychology from a variety of perspectives: personally, methodologically, professionally and most importantly ontologically.

  1. 1.

    How might the psyche be re-imagined in the light of eco-psychology and post-humanist philosophies?

  2. 2.

    Can we avoid apocalypticism and develop a narrative typology that leads from dread to climate action?

  3. 3.

    Can we learn to think, be and act with other species?

Methods

This research was conducted as part of an eco-psychology retreat in Wentworth Falls, The Blue Mountains, which is approximately 100 km from the City of Sydney Australia and only 3 km from the fire front during the Black Summer fires. The aim of the retreat was facilitated by Paul Rhodes and conducted with seven practising psychologists with the aim of introducing them to contemporary ideas in eco-psychology. All were residents of Australia with many nationalities represented including Ireland, the UK, Chile, New Zealand and Finland.

The event involved a combination of biophilic experiments and short lectures, followed each time by an open dialogue, a process of slow listening adapted from the work of Scandinavian network therapists (Aaltonen et al., 2011). These exercises will be described in detail later and draw on a variety of influences: the narrative therapy of White (2011), the place-based biographies of Albrecht (2019), Haraways’ sympoiesis (2016) and psychogeography. On day 1, there were two events: a definitional ceremony based on sumbiography and a short lecture on theory. On day 2, there were three events: a vegetal thinking exercise, a bush psychogeography and a short lecture on practice. Participants were given time to make diary entries after each event and were invited to do drawings or paintings, with materials provided. All journal entries were included in this paper except those that were not fully legible or were deemed too short (less than two sentences), or did not contain material directly reflecting the exercise in question. Only a small selection of art works were selected, given most were doodles, with many unfinished.

This research falls within the traditions of collaborative writing and New Materialist inquiry. The paper is a form of collective writing (Wyatt, 2017), in that those involved are authors as well as participants. Their diaries are not presented as data in the sense of traditional qualitative inquiry, but rather as text, forming part of this written work. In this sense, there is no process of data analysis in this paper, simply the inclusion of their work as authors. Clearly in this sense, the work can be considered to fall within the New Materialist tradition, where method is looser, post-qualitative (Lather & St. Pierre, 2013), and given here as a form of multi-textual bricolage (Yardley, 2019). It blends third and first person writing, with some of our artworks.

The Poetics of Open Dialogue

This process involves sitting together, slowing down, tolerating uncertainty and speaking in the present, as a form of becoming that can only occur when witnessed. The horizontal voices of participants, sitting circular, are joined by the vertical voices within, and in our case, we welcome the many creatures in the garden outside, the parrots, fruit trees, sorrel, banksia, snails, soil and apples from the garden just outside. At each episode, we wait and watch for what might emerge next, which words, sense-making, lines of flight, mulch and dirt.

Writing, of course, is also a method, not of dissemination, but for discovery and knowledge production (Fig. 1). Here we blend all our human voices and attempt to capture the assemblage of things. Each participant kept a journal, and these entries form part of this paper. Journal entries were made after extended open dialogues.

Fig. 1
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Writing as discovery

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We call this project Worlding (Stewart, 2012), breaking down the hard boundaries between subject and environment, semiotics and material and species and concepts to create something new. This project serves not as a reflection on eco-psychology, but instead a diffraction (Barad, 2007; Haraway, 2004), an entanglement of the researchers with the researched, intra-acting with the natural world.

Day 1 Sumbiography/Definitional Ceremony

A ‘sumbiography’ is the term I use to explain the cumulative influences on my life, from childhood to adulthood, that have culminated in my views on the relationship between humans, other forms of life and nature. This term is derived from the Greek sumbiosis (companionship), sumbion (to live together) sumbios (living together) and, of course, Greek bio (life) and graphy (from the Greek graphein, to write). (Albrecht, 2017).

White (2011) definitional ceremony was developed as a community therapeutic practice, aimed at thickening the stories of the oppressed through collective amplification. One person is interviewed by another, sitting in the centre of a circle, a community of concern, strength-based careful questions about narratives lost, resisting dominant stories, while the others listen. After 30 min or so, the audience is asked to remember their own stories, joining, in solidarity, an outsider-witness.

Blending Glenn Albrecht and Michael White we do the same, asking about place-based attachments over the lifespan, staying close to place, plotting plots, memories of landscapes. One person was interviewed, a performance, and the following are the journal entries of many of the witnesses, written after the dialogue (Fig. 2).

Fig. 2
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Gumtree

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Reflections of Sumbiographies: Excerpts from Journal Entries 12.6.21 11.00am

I am Like a Qumtree

I'm writing this from a transitional -and maybe transcendental- moment in my eco-biography. I'm from Chile, but I’ve been living in Australia for the last two years. For 26 years my “home” and “place” was in Chile, with my family, playing with my more-than-human friends, walking in its big mountains, and swimming in its freezing Pacific Ocean. Now, in Australia I’ve been immersed in the difference, in the unknown, with smells I don't recognize, with birds that I can't yet identify, with a language that sometimes I can't even understand. It is not only about making new friends, it is re-defining my sense of identity, allowing my body to explore again as if I was a child, and letting myself feel in different ways. It is like being a big gumtree growing in the middle of the planet with some roots in Chile and some others in Australia. That's how I think about my “sense of place” now, it's not much about the actual and direct landscape or natural environment that I connect with, or my current “home”, it is about the always changing, growing, and emerging relationalities in between my past, present, and future. Relationalities that are deeply embodied in my everyday actions and emotions within place: when I walk in the woods in the mornings and feel calm, work with the soil and its veggies and feel grounded, play with the animals, and feel happy, and swim in the ocean and feel free.

Sap in my Veins

I feel enlivened being in the mountains again, here, together. My plans to move up here every-closer. Sap runs through my veins. A family farm formed my roots. Nearby coal mines, planetary warming and a recent 10-year drought; felt by animals, crops, plants and humans. Yet, I couldn't have imagined the varied effects of displacing myself (for 28) years into the urban sprawl of Sydney (15 years of this as a psychologist). My life was uprooted again; losing my brother to suicide. Moving between places; working even harder, nestling in family sanctuaries and long-distance hikes into wild places. I was every-place and no-place; lost and found in each footstep and breath. Leaves fall. Branches fall. Eventually all life falls away. Yet new life begins.

Places that Have Made Me

I get the sense of a bare line map being filled in with its topography. Moor, cold air and sea rush in to paint the landscapes of her life. A stranger is also painted, painted as someone known, as she transports us to her world. On the moors, with the wind cold against her face, we are there. Then I am transported elsewhere. To the places where I, too, have been cold. To the places that have made me. Whitestrand, a small and sacred beach at the bottom of a hill on the west coast of Ireland. There we spent our summers. All of them more rain-washed than sun-baked, but livelier for the freshness of the sea, the violence of the wind, the warmth of the tea. Ennis, where we spent the other months. Its medieval streets and flower-lined rivers, drab in comparison to the Atlantic’s edge. In a housing estate at the edge of town, breathing comes less easy when not taken from the sea breeze. So, I run and within strides I am in the country, on the back roads through farms, the smell of cattle sharp against the bitter air, everything damp, always, the sun overhead (intermittently), my hands cold. That feeling of being unsettled driving me to run further. First Australia, finding love at Coogee.

An Anchor Stone

Te Punga o Te Waka a Maui, the anchor stone of Maui’s canoe and Rakiura, Glowing Skies is my beginning place & the cornerstone of my being, commonly known as Stewart island it is the anchor of Aotearoa New Zealand and the anchor of my life. Whenever I am away from it I notice something missing and I have been away from it for most of my life, living in 20 other towns & cities across four countries. Rakiura is a place where mind and nature merge because nature is in the majority when it comes to the collective unconscious, it’s where tides and winds arrive from all over the planet, washing up. The emotion of this, of trying to put my connection to place into words, of trying to make written something that is actually the core of my life experience as I continually look over my shoulder to the last place I left, to the one before that and the one before that all the way back to the beginning to home - it’s like a baby being snatched from its mother with both forever searching for each other. It’s unbearable to write about something so visceral and alive - it’s like my life story - actually the core element that has travelled in me since I left the place of my birth, it’s what travelled in my mother since she left the place of her birth, what potentially travelled in my grandfather since he left the place of his birth.

At Home with Birds

Reflecting on my own sense of place and connection to the natural world. A bookish childhood indoors, Canberra winters comfortably heated from home to car to school and back again. Remembering as a teenager my trust in a technological panacea. The dawning recognition of my gullibility. Then falling in love with the bush, my connection to nature deepening in lockstep with my devastation at our assault on the natural world. Breathing in the cold, dry air of the Blue Mountains, so familiar, so similar to a Canberra winter. Watching the birds of my childhood - sulphur crested cockatoos, crimson rosellas, king parrots. 20 years after leaving Canberra, I feel at home among them. Realising that connection ran deeper than even I knew, even then.

Day 1 Short Lecture of Theory: We Welcome Theorists into the Assemblage

Roszak coined the term eco-psychology in the early 1990s in his manifesto The Voice of the Earth (1992). There he criticised mainstream psychology for limiting the concept of mental health to the intrapsychic world of people living in industrial cities. For Roszak human brokenness was not simply a product of childhood traumas but a breakdown in the relationship between the mind and the natural world. Roszak developed the concept of the ecological unconscious, the repression of which is the core of our collective distress in the manufactured world. Sanity comes not simply from shifting cognitions or relations within this world but rather awakening us to the animistic awareness of ecological reciprocity that we once had as children (Fig. 3).

Fig. 3
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Bird picture from day 1 in the garden

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Over time the ecological ego can grow, maturing towards reciprocity and responsibility. This does not imply, however, that the ecological unconscious resides in our own bodies, but rather we are inside the psyche of the world. Fellows calls this the Psyche-Gaia conjecture (Fellows, 2019), arguing that we need a “metanoia”, an ontological paradigm shift, one which reflects a harmony and partnership in nature, rather than the projection of our ego-dominance and its destruction. Norwegian philosopher, Arne Næss, who coined the term “deep ecology” uses a similar term, the ecological self. He lambasts mainstream psychology for excluding nature: “Our immediate environment, our home (where we belong as children), and the identification with nonhuman living beings are largely ignored” (Næss & Sessions, 1995). We are part of the natural world, and peace can come from learning to dwell within it.

Similar ideas can also be found in the philosophical tradition of critical post-humanism and New Materialism, developing from the 1990s, and challenging the dominance of social constructionism in the humanities. Critical post-humanism implies a challenge to anthropocentric conceptualisations of subjectivity in favour of those that are inclusive of the digital, bacterial, plant and animal lives (Braidotti, 2013). New materialism is aligned with critical post-humanism, share the same philosophical precepts but emphasises the vitality and agency of matter (Frost, 2011). For thinkers such as Deleuze and Guattari (1972), we can no longer rely on human rationality and anthropocentrism but must instead take our place within the assemblage of things (Fig. 4). Thus, a more emergent, fluid version of systems theory appears that includes both ideas, inanimate objects and non-human species.

Fig. 4
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A flatter ontology)

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Post-humanism Affect Theory

For psychologists the post-humanist take on affect is most fascinating, given the radical shift from mainstream conceptions of emotion. Affect is a pre-subjective event situated outside of subjectivity, a second-order emotion that is always different and cannot be controlled. This form of affect happens to bodies, not in them, as a form ontopower (Massumi, 2015) which might later be distilled, distorted and branded by the psychology machine. Vermeulen (2014) suggests that after the demise of prescribed feelings comes a new form, second-order feelings, a mixture of both terror and subliminity (Hayles, 2014). This, as we cede our own sovereignty, a disorienting meta-emotion we have not before recognised.

Post-humanist thought and affect theory, it seems, are ideal for considering the relationship between the psyche and the crisis. De-privileging human interests in favour of those of non-human species allows for the “a re-grounding of the subject in a materially embedded sense of responsibility and ethical accountability for the environments s/he inhabits” (Braidotti, 2005). Our emotion, rather than being a personal response to climate change, grounded intrapsychically, becomes one part of the affectivity of all things. This includes living and non-living, subjective and objective, one part of the vital materiality of things (Bennett, 2010). If anxiety, grief and despair are symptoms of our insistence on anthropocentrism and our dissociation from nature, how might we respond? Since we have threatened nature itself and risk its dissolution, how might we be, and act, given this scenario?

Warning 1: Against Despair

Haraway (2016) warns against the twin futurisms of global “technofixes” or apocalyptic inevitability, and while sympathetic to the latter urges us to “stay with the trouble”. “Neither despair nor hope is tuned to the senses, to mindful matter, to material semiotics, to mortal earthlings in thick copresence” (p4.). With strange bedfellows, both human and non-human, animate and inanimate and flesh and machine, we can still work together towards the resurgence of situated flourishing worlds.

Hope too is also provided by Albrecht (2019), the originator of the term solastalgia, the homesickness we feel when beloved landscapes are threatened due to climate change. He responds to the risks of nosology by developing such a wide range of psychoterratic terms that they become impossible for psychology to colonise. He coins the term “Symbiocene”, a new age where human and non-human species engage in symbiotic connections, supported by science and indigenous knowledge in new and creative ways. The solution, for Albrecht, lies with Generation S (Symbiocene), to take us back to a biophilic co-existence with non-human beings.

It is important to recognise that neither Haraway nor Albrecht are proposing a Green Revolution, the greening of the economy or policy change. Both require ontological, not political change, a more radical questioning of what it means to be human.

Warning 2: Remaining Human

Of course a commitment to the post-human does not imply the abandonment of humanism. As Brinkmann (2017) points out, the humanist ideals of justice and moral responsibility can be embraced after post-humanism and in this context be applied to multiple species. Barad (2007) diffraction does not abandon old modes of thought in favour of the novel but instead reads them through each other, building diversity; hence, we will revisit existentialism, for example, from a New Materialist perspective.

Oddkin and Compost

Two additional concepts were introduced in this lecture informally, both from Haraway:

  1. 1.

    Oddkin. “Kin is a wild category that all sorts of people do their best to domesticate. Making kin as oddkin rather than, or at least in addition to, godkin and genealogical and biogenetic family troubles important matters, like to whom one is actually responsible. …What must be cut and what must be tied if multispecies flourishing on earth, including human and other-than-human beings in kinship, are to have a chance?” (Haraway, 2016, p2.)

  2. 2.

    Compost. “we are all compost, not posthuman” (Haraway, 2015, p. 159).

Reflections on Theory: Excerpts from Journal Entries 12.6.2021 2:00 pm

A New Lineage

Welcome to theorists! and to all the questions and emotions that they provoke on me. Bringing them in, acknowledging the lineage as alive…depleted by the lived reality of being a front line mental health worker for 25 years, day to day sitting with people’s distress, have I been missing out, how can I have done all those years of academic study and yet no memory of any of these, no mention of nature, or our relationship to nature - excited connections ricocheting around my memories - sad for time lost, brain tired from the wrong kind of learning, sad, tears flowing, rage, wanting to scream for it all to stop, all the wasting of my time when the truth has been there all along.

What is Nature?

The question that was in my mind the whole time was: What is “Nature”? What is to be human? Why are we so inclined to perceive “Nature” as something out-there, separated from humanity, some abstract, general, undefined place that goes beyond our human nature? Why don't we shift into a way of thinking and feeling ourselves as part of that chaosmosis (Guattari, 2000) that we call “Nature”?

Note: Chaosmosis is a term Guatari coins to refer the emergence of a new osmosis, a new configuration of things, after chaos, or what he refers to as a spasm. There are parallels with Albrecht’s idea of Symbiocene, given both offer hope in a coming meaningful reworking of human-nature relations (Fig. 5).

Fig. 5
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Theorists as Pollinators

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A Welcome Earthquake

Of course, I get terrified when I realize that is not an easy task, that this colonial cartesian dualism is deeply internalized in my own epistemology and ontology of the world. However, these terror and defeated emotions mysteriously remind me of Chile’s Earthquakes. These powerful and sometimes highly de-constructive tectonic movements, can also provide the space to re-evaluate our foundations and therefore, re-construct them. I think that maybe this is similar, the terror and vertigo of re-evaluating our relationalities with ourselves, others and the broader ecology, can be felt as an internal earthquake. So, I welcome all of the emotions that are triggered by these shaky questions. I welcome my fear, my anger, and all those waves of psychoterratic distress that appear when I feel that I'm asking myself these questions too late. Finally, I welcome the little and fragile light inside of me that turns on when I write, feel, and think about this. Growing confidence to be more radical.

Ideas are Good for the Compost

Composting strikes me as a fascinating concept. There is no hierarchy in the coming together of weeds, flowers, newspapers, and vegetable trimmings. Where they come together, the potential for growth is born. This is the same with ideas and viewpoints. When humans don’t double down on their ideologies and egos but come together to seek an organic path forward, great things can happen. Even bad ideas can be good for the compost heap, allowing for novel reactions.

Haraway’s Odd-kin

Odd-kin positioning my life experience as there were few other kin, sense making, relief to know my way of belonging is a thing, odd-kin - my whole life is full of them, not recognising myself in the images of who and what I thought I should be, hanging out on the fringes. It’s so extraordinary to hear a word for the first time - a simple combining of words - oddkin - that carries the essence of my relationships, communities, orientation and way of being - I was this before I heard this word yet here it is - a real thing - Haraway naming it, making it real, does this make me real, my experience real? I take a deep in-breath - someone else knows, see’s, this Haraway, this unknown woman - she knows.

Day 2 Vegetal Thinking

Haraway (2016) described sympoiesis as a becoming-with other species, thinking-with, making-with and being-with, and so this task involved us spending time in the garden as a member of the multi-species environment. Her concept serves as a response to the idea of autopoietic, self-generating, and instead positions creation as less predictable, collaborative, loose, dynamic, unpredictable, without closure (Žukauskaitė, 2020). Our task was to wonder, looking for plants that resonated, researching them if we liked, until we found a plant-kin. We pay tribute in this task to Margulis (2010), the influence behind Haraway and Albrecht, a woman who helped position evolutionary biology as symbiotic, not competitive. We are trying to do the same with psychology (Figs. 6 and 7).

Fig. 6
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The garden where we found our plant-kin

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Fig. 7
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Lavandula

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Reflections on Vegetal thinking: Excerpts from Journal Entries 13.6.2021 9:00am

Lavandula

Lavandula is a very common plant, but it was time to invite me and her to try a different relationality experience. That excitement of getting to know someone for the first time. The act of presenting yourself as-you-are-being, raw, and jumping to the unknown waters of being acknowledged by other. I felt how she was carefully exploring me, as I was discovering her, being both held by a harmonious and sweet complicity. I was astonished by how beautiful her shape and curves were, and how strong her body was, supporting thousands of growing processes. But mostly, I was impressed by her resilience; imagine living in this on-going changing world. But there she was, confident, elegant, stunning. And despite all the difficulties, she still provided -from her very depths- this beautiful scent, nurturing and soothing others that may need some calm.

Bad Banksia Men

Inviting May Gibbs as I explore my Odd-kin with the Bad Banksia Men and feeling challenged by the beauty and ‘badness’ of Banksias. Image three banksia beauty vs Image four banksia ‘badness’. Staying with the trouble – perhaps inviting the trouble??? Looking for the beauty in the ugly. I only see the beauty, and even the ugly bad banksia men are interesting, complex and vital. Recalling how scary I found them as a child.

Lichen

I like lichen. Moss is my mate. Algae is A-ok. I’m just a fun-ghi.

Some lichen are a threatened species, somehow thriving. So too, I’ve felt hurt by various forces (displacements, suicide bereavement, ecocide and resulting bushfires). I was even caught in a 10-day silent retreat in the mountains during the 2020 Blue Mountains wildfires, placing all my trust in the management of the retreat. Waking up coughing and sweaty in an un-air-conditioned room. Lichen relies on two processes (algal, photosynthesis, and fungal, enzymatic), thus more hardy and adaptable. I have dual characteristics too; part bush man (needing light and movement), part city man (digesting ideas online and in communing with others). Some are medicinal. Speaking to the healer in me (and the ongoing need to be healed).

Pittosporum

Pittosporum, New Zealand native planted on foreign soil, thriving, came ungrounded, lost, unconnected, grow tall and evergreen, recognition, connection, smell connecting to memory,

Jacaranda

I recognise only one species of tree - the Jacaranda…this one doesn’t bloom. Apparently, they only do it in the right conditions. It can grow tall and strong in many places but only reaches its full, purple potential when the conditions are right. I feel the same as this South American being. I was drawn to Sydney because it has the right conditions for me. Before coming out, I grew strong and achieved. But I always fell short of the full potential of my happiness. Even after coming out, I didn’t let myself bloom, still constricted by the wrong soil which I had internalised and brought with me around the world. On the Sunny Coast, I trained hard but lived small. It took coming to Sydney, walking on favourable soil, to unfurl into my own full purple authenticity.

Grevillea

I study the grevillea, from the family proteaceae. Named after Proteus, the shape shifter, for its many shapes, colours and sizes. Thinking about my own history of shape shifting, fitting in, acclimatising. The dangers and opportunities that arise when we transplant ourselves. Sometimes I’ve been too adaptable, stayed too long in gardens I didn’t belong to. I’m learning to recognise when I’m no longer enriching or enriched by my environment.

Day 2 Bush Psychogeography

Psychogeography is a literary movement and a research practice, with its roots in urban dawdling, strolling. Flânerie (Coverley, 2006), originated by French Intellectuals, but we aim here to apply it to bush-walking, down St. George’s Parade, up to the lake, through the bushtracks, round the swampy areas, weaving in and out of streets and bush-tracks, back down to the water’s edge and home; letting the mind and body wonder together, not just with each others but with the other species of which we are a part. The key to this kind of walk is to go slow, perfect the art of observing, drift, semi-detached but stop and look at the detail. Allow one’s attention to follow as it will. The aim of our walk was to take the ideas we had encountered so far and put them to work, seeing what they might do beyond the dialogue circle and garden (Fig. 8).

Fig. 8
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Wentworth Falls Lake

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Reflections on Bush Psychogeography: Excerpts from Journal entries 13.6.2021 1:00am

Walking Like Oscar

The bush walk was more a psychogeographical derive for me, where I totally lost the sense of time and space. I was walking with nature, being nature, with no other guide or purpose than just being present and affected by the process. Just like my floating body, my thoughts flowed like water, in an on-going movement, passing through and engaging with different human conversations. Flowing and moving around, without any preconception, guide, rule or structure, just like Oscar when he goes for a walk: he just moves and goes wherever his intuition and nose tell him to go in that present moment.

We are the Human Part

After two days of perspective-shifting, openness, and composting, I feel primed for the walk. I begin by talking to Sarah about the act of walking. She tells me that walking is the speed at which we were designed to experience the world. Human speed. This feels right.

Then I stay out of conversations, trying to sense rather than think. Wanting to avoid being too cerebral. Then wondering if even thinking this is being too cerebral. I give into the pull of conversation. Fall into step with Paul, talking about podcasts, poetry, and CBT. And then with Damian, more talking about walking. I realise that our “inability” to just walk around the lake, taking in and sensing, is because we are being true to ourselves. Just as the bird flies and the grass grows, we talk - human instinct. We are part of the assemblage, but we are also human. We are the human part. Talking and walking returns us to nature.

No Boundaries

Deep breaths as the path becomes less structured, more into bush. I am more able to engage in dialogue, feeling more able to converse, connect with the group. The water, the bush are calming. I think about the group’s conversations about boundaries, where are our boundaries? Are we not part of nature?

Day 2 Short Lecture on Paradigms of Practice

Beyond traditional psychology, new terms for distress are being developed, contextualising the psyche in place. The climate crisis threatens our well-being by altering our physical experience of home, including the weather, landscapes and associated extreme events. This distress can be seen as psychoterratic (Albrecht, 2019), with distress tied to Mother Earth rather than just mother. Other terms are ecological grief (Cunsolo & Ellis, 2018), pre-traumatic stress (Gifford & Gifford, 2016), eco-anxiety (Pihkala, 2018) and eco-trauma (Woodbury, 2019). Glenn Albrecht, eco-philosopher, calls it solastalgia (Albrecht, 2019), the feeling we have of missing the home we are currently living in, a longing for the place we are standing on. While these terms are evocative, Woodbury (2019) warns us not to develop a new lexicon of pathology to treat in the therapy room. For Woodbury these are not psychological conditions but ecological ones. We mirror the earth’s distress because we are part of it. Indeed in the psychology industry, a focus on nosology is likely to result in the development of new syndromes and disorders, with eco-anxiety disorder finding its way into the DSM-5. In this sense, these lexicon require deconstruction and the recognition that the earth, Koalas, platypuses and plants are also anxious. This is at the heart of the call for new paradigms in psychology.

Australia is an obvious place to develop new practice paradigms for psychology, not simply because of the direct trauma of warming and bushfires but because of the indigenous knowledge that has been here for thousands of years. Pat Dudgeon, our first Aboriginal Psychologist, calls for decolonisation. For Dudgeon (2017), the Western concept of mental health can be replaced with that of social and emotional well-being, one which recognises how the self is embedded in community, kinship and place. Dislocation from country is central given that country is alive and has history and consciousness. Country consists of people, animals, plants, dreamings, underground, earth, soils, minerals, waters and air. People can speak of country in the same way as a loved one: “sing to it, visit it, worry about it, feel sorry for it, and long for it” (Rose & Australian Heritage Commission, 1996, p.7). For Westerman (2004) “depression”, can be recast as ‘‘longing for, crying for or being sick for country” in indigenous terms.

Given the power of Aboriginal knowledge, one might ask why a re-engagement with eco-psychology and post-humanism is necessary to develop new practices for psychology and why can we not simply indigenise therapeutic methods for this purpose. Our own position, however, is that we must look to hidden threads in our own Western traditions, ones that may resonate with Aboriginal ones, but do not risk further colonisation of indigenous knowledge systems.

Albrecht (2019) draws on the Western concept of existentialism in consideration of practice. In eco-existentialism we fear not our own mortality but the sustainability of the planet and the potential for an eco-apocalypse. This despair is psychoterratic, in that it no longer refers to an intrapsychic state but rather one that relates to our relationship to the earth. In the existentialist tradition (Albrecht, 2012), he proposes both inauthentic and authentic positions, the first Anthropocene and the second Symbiocene. The first invokes climate denialism, planetary-death denial and an identity based on materialism. The latter invokes self-denial and the development of identity as one that is inherently biophilic (Albrecht, 2019). Distress is worse if one is frozen in between, understanding the reality of the climate crisis, but unable to shift from anxiety, to grief and then the development of a Symbiocene identity. The grief can be seen as a symptom of Symbiogenesis, a waking up syndrome.

Nichterlein and Morss (2016) draws on the more contemporary European tradition of New Materialism in the reconfiguration of psychology. She extends cybernetic family therapy, originally developed by the ecologist Bateson, to the wider landscape of things, influenced particularly by Deleuze and Guattari (1987) concept of the assemblage. While she is not concerned directly with the climate crisis, she is the first to explore the potential for post-humanism to influence psychotherapy. As Fox and Alldred (2020, p7) put it, a “posthuman perspective de‐privileges human interests in relation to those of other animate and inanimate matter, while not denying continuing human involvement in the Earth’s ecosystem. In this view, the environment is an assemblage or arrangement in which humans are an intrinsic element, rather than separate from or in opposition to it”. It may be possible to develop a systemic psychotherapy that includes our engagement with the more-than-human world. It may be possible to develop therapeutic practices that support the questioning of human exceptionalism through an engagement with body-affect-nature relations to foster greater eco-connection.

Reflections on Short Lecture of Practice: Excerpts from Journal Entries 13.6.2021 3:00 pm

How do we Change?

Depression as a longing for or crying for country. How do we incorporate these ideas? How do we inspire and challenge? Where are the boundaries? Have we stepped over them? Am I fearful? In awe of difference – broadening the pathway; doesn’t have to be rigid or narrow.

We Must Stay with the Trouble

I understand much of the literature, news and documentaries (on ecology) necessarily rely mostly on negative reinforcement to help people “stay with the trouble” and motivate activism. However, I believe a healthy balance of positive reinforcement and self-soothing is important for societal change. This might include mindfulness of sensations in nature; which can be used to link to ideas about longing for places or species long gone in our lives. Otherwise I fear that some people may feel overwhelmed, switch off, dissociate from issues. I certainly know I have felt that way at times.

Flat Ontology in the City?

We talk about what we can do to elicit change. I get the sense that we must start with ourselves. Many parents try to make their children more intelligent or cultured by playing Mozart, but this has no effect. It is down to who the parents are, rather than what they do. We must experience the ontological shift being called for by the theorists. And this weekend we do. We think from the perspective of a plant; we invite actors into our assemblage. We compost. I wonder how we can maintain this when we return to the city. Mini-nature escapes to reorient ourselves? More plants? Living more slowly? A challenge when we return to assignments, commutes, and Aldi.

Walking with Patients?

I’ve also braved the less-contained world of “walk-and-talk” therapy for two patients. They voiced strong feelings (and sometimes cancellations) due to finding it confronting to sit in a clinical environment, face on. I offered an avant-garde session outside (with the proviso of attending the clinic for two sessions, for every session spent outside). This worked well, and then very few sessions outside were ever required. They just appreciated the choice from time to time. We moved between mindful reflections on nature, while also discussing the patient's self-reflections.

Green Health

I was encouraged again when speaking to a friend (himself a veterinarian, researcher) in Switzerland. We discussed mindfulness, planting greener spaces (and a number of other actions) fall in the promising field of Nature-based solutions, a term used by the UN environmental organisations. He encouraged me that the psychological effects of green and blue spaces are increasingly investigated as an approach to public health.

Composting: Towards a Symbiocenic Psychology

Ellingson (2009) uses the term crystallisation in qualitative research to describe the bringing together of different kinds of data, analysis and different forms of sense-making without causing contradiction (Ellingson, 2009): a “postmodern reimagination of post positivist methodological triangulation” (Ellingson, 2009, p. xii). We prefer Haraways’ compost as a term for the same purpose, given we have relied on non-human agents in the development of data for this project (Fig. 9).

Fig. 9
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Composting

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The original questions for this project were as follows: How might the psyche be re-imagined in the light of eco-psychology and post-humanist philosophies? Can we avoid apocalypticism and develop a narrative typology that leads from dread to climate action? Can we learn to think, be and act with other species?

It is clear that it was possible for psychologists, trained in the cognitive metaphor, albeit living lives in resistance to this form of epistemicide, to situate their identities in relation to both place and the non-human species that inhabit it. This helped bring an ecological materiality further into consciousness, breaking the boundary between the ego and the external world proposed by Roszak. For example, some of our comments were “All life falls away, just as leaves fall. Life as a sediment of emplacements and displacements, being lost and found, feeling every-place and no-place”. We were able to talk, think and feel with both the places of our childhood and the plants in our immediate present (“photosynthesis and enzymatic”), exploring Haraway’s sympoiesis as a means of becoming-together, shape shifting Grevilleas, symbiotic Lichen, blooming purple, making odd-kin.

While the writing here is linear, working through places, theorists, ideas, new terms, plants, walking, each other, we were also Worlding, inviting these agents into our lives “composting like a coming-together with no hierarchy, no egos, or ideologies, just seeking an organic path forward, where growth is born”. We recognised at many intervals the simple but critical fact that we are not observers of nature, but participants in it, or rather are natural beings, plant-like, rather than the cybernetic machines of psychology.

The problem for psychologists, as Burman (2017) puts it, is that they have colluded with the “coloniality of reality”. Our dissociation from nature has been amplified and supported by the psy-industries, constructing our wounds as personal cognitive pathology rather than one small part of the anthropogenic system. In this sense, ontological change is a political act, rather than esoteric, and the first step in the development of a new field.

Of particular interest is the endless supply of metaphors that might help us re-imagine psychological processes. Such metaphors, because of their materiality, organicity, can be trusted. We need a more symbiocenic psychology, less man-made, more connected to the more-than-human world. To take “our place in the assemblage of things”. Connections to praxis were perhaps less obvious: what would a symbiocenic psychology look like? How might we develop an actual practice of psychology that rests on the forms of flat ontologies we have explored here and build on restoring the wounds we have created both inside and outside of our natural bodies?

It seems clear that if we, as psychologists, do not want to separate our own identities from the ecologies in which we live, then this must be the same in terms of climate-crisis-distress. We feel the distress that the earth and its more-than-human inhabitants feel, because they are part of that earth. There can be no psychology of climate distress without ecological solutions.

One of the weaknesses of this paper and of the event on which it was based is clearly the poverty of discussion on what actual practice might look like. The lecture on practice and following reflections only allowed for the genesis of possible ideas, based on a reconfigured existentialism possibly, on a post-human expansion of systemic therapy to include our more-than-human family. These discussions, however, have not strayed far from theory, and further work is required. In particular it will be important to stray beyond the discipline of psychotherapy into other fields: human geography, community psychology, art-based methods, permaculture and more. This will be the aim of our next series of studies, a theoretical and systematic review of climate distress interventions and a youth-led participatory action study of climate distress amelioration (Fig. 10).

Fig. 10
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Oscar looks back and is pretty happy with our work

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