ELEMENTS OF APPLIED ECOPSYCHOLOGY

By Michael J. Cohen, Ed.D.

Below are nine basics of the Natural Systems Thinking Process that help people solve the personal, social and environmental problems that result from the difference between the disconnected way we learn to think and how nature works.

Rationale:

The heart of our unsolvable problems is psychological. We are in denial. We deny that we are addicted to a story that says for us to live we must conquer, exploit and subdue nature, including our inherent human nature. Every other part of nature survives in balance through attractions that unite build and sustain consensual, mutually supportive relationships. NSTP enables us to think and act this way by identifying and addressing our denial and addiction.

1. Nature can be seen as a unifying attraction process that organizes, preserves and regenerates itself to produce an optimum of life, diversity and balanced cooperation without producing garbage, madness or death as we know it. Nature's way of expressing love prohibits the pollution, abusiveness and stress that deteriorate life.
2. We are born part of and attached to nature but learn to spend 99.9% of our conscious time and thought detached/disconnected from nature. Our psyche is dismembered from its origins. It silently suffers its profound loss of contact with its nurturing sensory and sensibility roots in nature's ways and intelligence. However, any word or incident that reminds us of our psychological dismemberment breaks the silence. It triggers the emotional pain of it into consciousness and we feel it. As reflected by the state of the world, indoors or outdoors, our mentality is guarded, stressed, ill, wanting and destructive due to our painful deficiency of nature's peace, wisdom, and beauty (10, 16F).
3. When we provide material, social, or financial rewards for nature-disconnecting stories and technologies, we become psychologically bonded to them and their destructive effects. Things that experience these effects suffer.
4. The web of life is a global ecosystem of which people are part. To be part of a system one must in some way be in communication with the system. The Natural Systems Thinking Process enables a person to restore their inherent 53-sense ability to consciously register, enjoy, and respond to communication with nature. It accomplishes this by helping us bring into our awareness the webstring attraction loves that we share with the web of life and make sensory contact with them in nature, backyard or backcountry .
5. People experience webstrings as sensory attractions, uncomfortable sensations are webstrings that attract us to seek additional webstrings and continue to participate.
6. Attractiveness is conscious of itself. When people think in consent and connection with webstrings they experience an attractive global consciousness that leads to unity at every level of endeavor.
7. There is an age old purpose and non-verbal process that sustains nature's web of life and its members, including people. That attractive purpose and process is to support life in balance. In this regard there are no known substitutes for the real thing. People must connect with genuine nature or suffer from the imperfections of the substitutes we create for it.
8. Since in this model there is no substitute for the real thing, if a person is not in conscious connection with webstring attractions, they are probably playing God in some way without the wisdom to do so.
9. Because we are nature renegades, to reconnect with nature, relationships must be entered by gaining consent and measured by their long term effects on global life in balance.
10. To reverse our imbalance and its discontents, continuing, thoughtful, shared, sensory contacts with webstring attractions in natural areas reconnect our thinking with nature's ways. This produces more sensitive and responsible personal, social and environmental relationships. A person can learn to trust and use nature connected experiences to help produce unity and balance.