Eco-Spirituality and EcoPsychology: Pathways to Reconnecting with the Earth in the 21st Century

The stream is gushing today. The rains in the Cape Bretton Highlands have satiated the ground, and the overflow is pouring through this little creak at Arisaig Provincial Park. Likely, this stream has been around for 6,000 years. Mi'kmaqpeople possibly sourced their morning Espressos here. Two tectonic plates joined here about 400-500 million years before then. North America and Africa connected long ago, not in a faraway galaxy, but in what we now call Nova Scotia. I’m walking along history at a level that is quite mind-boggling. The evidence is everywhere on these rocks. A French-speaking 8-year-old wearing a Jurassic Park t-shirt is scampering about collecting fossils with his parents. “Un autre, un autre" he calls out as he gathers rocks with fossils.

It's humbling and, in a strange way, comforting that I’m here and so aware of time.

Ordovician and Late Carboniferous periods collide here, where the stream leaves the mountains and crosses a beach entering the ocean. These periods are a part of the Paleozoic Era of geologic time beginning around 540 million years ago. Life back then consisted of a fair number of sea-shell-like creatures. The most famous is Trilobites, who became a short-lived punk rock band in the late 1970s. But there is another era that’s present as well. Scientists are calling it Anthropocene. The period when Homo Sapiens began reshaping planet Earth. Anthropocene is derived from Greek and means the “recent age of humanity.” If you’ve been on an airplane and looked down, you can see the reshaping. We human beings have been quite active for the past 11,600 years. Our actions had a modest impact when it consisted of a local tribe cutting some firewood or hunting bison. As we moved into the 1800s, industrialization expedited the rate of change. Since then, we’ve been changing the face of the planet like a steroid-using athlete. This has significantly altered the Earth, including the extinction of plants, birds, insects, and mammals. The evidence of our impact on the planet is clear.

Today, I’m in Nova Scotia, Canada looking out over the Northumberland Strait with Prince Edward Island in the distance. I’m also standing at the intersection of the past and the future. It’s a sacred moment for me bending down and touching fossils of 400-million-year-old ancestors while an 8-year-old joyfully explores the terrain. I’m pulled back in time and forward in time. What has brought us here, and what will this boy’s future be? I don’t know the family. I’m just observing, but I can’t help but think of my grandchildren and the planet in crisis.

This summer of 2023, climate change moved from the abstract to the concrete. Anyone in the northern hemisphere experienced it firsthand and through family and friends as temperatures soared, forests torched, and oceans warmed to levels typically reserved for hot tubs. While some still deny it, the rest of us look on with sober fear. I know I do.

Nature is my first religion. Before the Universal Christ became a profound metaphor in my life at age 21. (43 years ago this week) The initiatory baptismal rite occurred on indigenous Chumash Native American land, as the Pastor filled an ancient grinding hole carved into granite rock with water. Before that summer, I found my spirituality in the natural world. The hills behind our southern California home contained descendants of dinosaurs, packs of coyotes howling at night, and abundant trails we walked many an afternoon following school. Later the peaks of the Sierra Nevada mountains occupied my attention. Through it all, I sensed and experienced a profound connection that was at once sacred and frightening. Synchronicity brought this nature-loving guy to a camp called El Camino, meaning the way. There I discovered what a koinonia of followers of Yeshua could be like. I delighted in the integration of the natural world and these fun loving worshipping people.

Imagine how disheartened I was years later, while studying for my Master’s degree, to read the now well-known essay by Lynn White, The Historical Roots of our Ecological Crisis. You can read it for yourself, but it paints an unfriendly depiction of how Western religion, Christianity in particular, leads to the exploitation of nature. Instead of humans as a part of the web of life, we believed we were above it all and the natural resources available for our use and abuse. White’s essay circulated widely among religious scholars, and it is one of the reasons many articles, books, seminars, and conferences have been held by Christians attempting to undo the damage. Recently that has taken the form of Eco-Spirituality, Wild Church, and Restoring Creation movements.

In response, two influential movements have emerged that offer perspectives and practices to heal the relationship between humans and the natural world. These are Eco-Spirituality and Eco-Psychology.

Eco-Spirituality: Grounding Spirituality in the Physical World

Eco-Spirituality seeks to intertwine spiritual beliefs with ecological awareness, anchoring spirituality within the tangible, physical world. A leading figure in this field is theologian Sallie McFague, whose seminal 1993 work The Body of God: An Ecological Theology advocates for an embodied, metaphorical understanding of nature and the Earth as God's physical form. This perspective shifts focus from an anthropocentric worldview where humans are the center to a biocentric one that sees all life as divinely created and intrinsically valuable. McFague writes, "We need to reconstruct a theology and practice of God's immanence... If God is not identified with the world, if the world is not God's body, then God is not in the world in any important way." Here, she argues against notions of a detached, transcendent deity, calling for an embedded theology recognizing God’s presence within creation.

Overall, Eco-Spirituality unites reverence for the divine with reverence for nature, providing faith-based justifications for environmental protection. It shifts focus from solely human interests to recognizing the intrinsic worth of all living beings. Divine purpose is expanded from anthropocentric to biocentric. In short, all living things have value and are a part of the sacred, if not sacred themselves.

EcoPsychology: Understanding the Psychological Aspects of Human-Nature Bonding

Theodore Roszak coined "Ecopsychology” in his 1992 book The Voice of the Earth. Roszak suggests an innate psychological need to bond with nature, and that modern disconnect stems from core psychological issues in industrialized society. Alienation from nature reflects distorted priorities that privilege materialism over holistic well-being. The antidote, Roszak argues, lies in remembering our “ecological unconscious” - an intrinsic link to the planet embedded into the human psyche.

In her book The Earth Has a Soul, Meredith Sabini draws on the work of Carl Jung to examine how the modern disconnection from nature arose and how this rupture could be healed. Sabini structures the book as an imagined interview with Jung, presenting condensed answers from his writings alongside her analysis.

Jung believed our contemporary estrangement from nature stems from a cultural neurosis - we have lost contact with our primal instincts and ancestral wisdom. This dissociation from the natural world leads to psychological and social difficulties. Jung called for integrating rational empiricism with intuitive spiritual experiences to mend this rift. He advocated seeing all of nature as sacred and relating to it as a respected other rather than an object to exploit.

Integrating the Spiritual and Psychological Perspectives

Craig Chalquist, a psychologist specializing in depth psychology and eco-theory, has been instrumental in bridging Eco-Spirituality and Eco-psychology. His 2007 work Terrapsychology: Reengaging the Soul of Place examines how bonds with natural entities shape human consciousness and psychological health. Chalquist argues that we gain self-awareness by recognizing nature’s psyche or soul and moving toward balanced existence. The suffering in our psyches often mirrors the mistreatment of the land. Integrating spiritual reverence and psychological insight is vital to rehabilitation. As Chalquist writes, “Bringing the needs of the soul together with the planet's needs...could well be one of the most difficult collective tasks ever undertaken.”

Implications for the 21st Century

We live in a deeply troubled society. Few will argue with that statement. While we appreciate the modern inventions of indoor plumbing and antibiotics, all these solutions have separated us from nature. I’m not sure about you, but my life is comfortable. I have plenty of calories to take in, temperature-controlled shelter, and enough entertainment to last a lifetime. In North America, I imagine most of you live in conditions far better than King Solomon in his Temple circa 500 BCE. We’ve gained much, but I surmise at an expense we may not have anticipated.

Eco-Spirituality and Eco-Psychology seek to remedy the strained human-nature relationship in today’s technology-centered, fragmented world. They call us to honor the profound interdependence and reciprocity between human well-being and ecological health.

We need a shift from a human-centered worldview to a bio-centered one. This will enable us to cultivate compassion towards all living beings and lend urgency to environmental protection efforts. Personal and collective action grounded in spiritual interconnectedness and psychological wholeness is crucial to our future.

Practical Ideas

Civic Engagement is essential. From your local town to state/provincial to federal government. There is a need for public policy to address this crisis. Vote accordingly.
Think about your House and Transportation. The fad of purchasing metal straws was cute, and you can do that, but most of our impact on the environment stems from home and car. Make changes in these two areas since they have the most significant impact.
Put yourself in green space more. Scientific studies abound on the healing impact of a walk in green space. Get out more. You will feel better, and you will be practicing an ancient spirituality. If you belong to a church, encourage outdoor worship. Micah Mortali’s book Rewilding and Victoria Loorz’s Church of the Wild contain an abundance of ideas.

Lastly, get up right now and go outside. It's a glorious sacred creation we are a part of.

Until next time.

James Hazelwood, author, bishop, and spiritual companion, is the author of Weird Wisdom for the Second Half of Life and Everyday Spirituality: Discover a Life of Hope, Peace, and Meaning. This essay first appeared in his Substack Newsletter. www.jameshazelwood.substack.com