Theodore Roszak

The Voice of the Earth: An Exploration of Ecopsychology

(Grand Rapids, MI: Phanes Press, 337 pp.).
Theodore Roszaks THE VOICE OF THE EARTH is a big book. Big not only in
actual volume, chapter to chapter, page by page, but big in scope and containing a largess, as
in abundant wealth; for THE VOICE is rich in perspective and reflective depth.
Professor Roszaks work comes at the onset with a foretelling recommendation from
Nobel Prize recipient and former US Vice President Al Gore, who writes: Powerful,
compelling, extraordinary We need urgently to heal our relationship with our life-giving
planet and feel the intimate connection with nature Roszak so beautifully describes. I second
this evaluation, placing emphasis on the term ext raordinary. Considering other writings;
from Metzers GREEN PSYCHOLOGY and John Hays IN DEFENSE OF NATURE, to
Shephards
NATURE
AND
MADNESS
and
Andy
Fishers
RADICAL
ECOPSYCHOLOGY; Roszaks book stands out even from such important contributions in
the field of eco-consciousness and the new science of ecopsychology. Our author is never
content with the dispensation of information alone, howsoever insightful, but he continuously
relates readers to the mandala-universe (Gary Synder) or dynamic gestalt of the Earth as a
living system through establishing relationships of contemplation and inter-connective
experience. Due to this interconnecting process, beyond all else, THE VOICE is a vital
addition toward establishing what Deep Ecology founder Arne Ness called upon future
generations to awaken within and live by, namely an emotional philosophy of the biotic
plenum of our miraculously metamorphic and evolutionary Earth.
Part One of THE VOICE OF THE EARTH Roszak labels Psychology and it runs
through such topics as The Boundaries of the Ego and Psyche and the Biosphere, to The
Sacramental Real and Ecological Madness. On page 90 one reads the following: Long
before modern biology formulated its theories about the descent of man, traditional therapies
were instinctively drawing upon an evolutionary priority older than family and society, rooted
in the foundations of life itself: the claim of the nurturing planet upon our loyalty. Where our
society tries to gain security by domination and conquest, tribal societies have relied on trust,
expecting their loyalty to be fairly requited. Whether we, in the long run, will prove to be the
more justified in our expectations than they have been in there is yet to be seen. If our greedy
and heedless industrial culture should meet the bad end some ecologists predict, then our
choice will have been a foolish one that brought us neither peace of mind nor long term
prosperity.
Roszak names Part Two Cosmology and leads us through chapters and subtopics
which include Anima Mundi, The Alchemical Mistress, Deep Systems and Imigo Mundi. On
page 137 there is this: Myths like the anima mundi never die. They have the immortality of
the phoenix. Reduced to ashes, they undergo miraculous transformations, returning to life
with their essence intact. They might be described as a sort of ethereal gene passed from
mind to mind across the centuries, mingling along the way, as all genetic traits do, with other
cultural strains and intellectual mutations. Some myths have sufficient vitality to transcend
the boundaries of history and ethnicity, finally to become the common property of the human
family. These are perhaps what Jung called archetypes, the ageless furniture of the collective
unconscious.

In the case of the anima mundi, we may be dealing with one of the oldest experiences
of mankind, the spontaneous sense of dread and wonder primitive humans once felt in the
presence of the Earths majestic power. When we were no more than the first few
representatives of a timid, scurrying new species in the world, these early humans must have
greeted the immense creativity of nature with an awe that has since been lost to all but the
poetic minority among us in the modern world. The Earth does go so powerfully and
completely about her work, bringing forth the crops, ushering in the seasons, nurturing the
many species that find their home in her vast body. She can, of course, also be a menacing
giant: that too is remembered in myth and folklore. Many of the oldest rituals are acts of
propitiation offered to a sometimes fierce and punishing divinity, an Earth who can be an
angry mother as well as a beautiful one.
Throughout Roszak weaves a foretelling and cautionary cross-referencing of new
sciences, creation spirituality and the imagination, as can be found on pages 158-159: If the
Earth is a self-adjusting organism, its adaptive power may be that of a metabolic system:
efficient, impersonal, crushingly powerful. That is frequently the picture I get when I try to
give some mythical embodiment to the Gaia hypothesis. If there is an integrating intelligence
at work in the planet all around me, I sense it is not a human intelligence. It is at once
something greater and more primal: a wisdom like that of the body in its stubborn will to
pursue the tasks that physical survival demands. In the classical metaphysical use of the
word, this is what soul meant: the principle of bodily life that only God could create, but
which functioned at some lower level than the demands of mind or spirit. In Latin anima
suggests a stronger connection with animality (instinct) than intellect.
That may be what Gaia, the World Soul, is in her relationship to her most highly
evolved creation. If so, in her brute determination to defend the variety and quantity of life
she carries, she may at some point decide that this so-clever human species is too troublesome
a hazard to maintain. The adjustment she may then see fit to make will be far from gentle.
Moving ahead to pages 202-203, in the sub-chapter Imago Mundi (Image of the
World, or Image of Creation), the dire warning gives way to an aesthetic imagery that served
certain of our ancestors as a sublime centering symbol of integral and harmoniously purposive
energies and entities. Through the seventeenth century, in the Western World, there existed
an artistic genre that combined cosmology and psychology. It was the art of the microcosm,
the little cosmos at it might be graphically depicted. Until the universe came to be seen as a
mathematical artifact best understood by numbers and formulas, natural philosophers freely
employed religious symbols, myths and poetic metaphors to depict and explain the world they
lived in. The depiction was the explanation.
Invariably human beings and the Earth found their place at the center of the imago
mundi, richly surrounded by all the stuff of nature and culture. Through deep self-knowledge,
human beings might each ideally become microcosms in their own right, distillations in body,
mind and spirit of all the universe around them. In this sense, a microcosm was a sort of
mandala, the symbolic circle used in Eastern cultures to concentrate the mind during
meditation. The microcosm, like the mandala, is a contemplative domain where the soul
finds its proper place.
Part Three is Theo Roszaks final division and appropriate to such a study it is called
Ecology wherein again we encounter movement through enticingly titled topics: The Madness
of Cities, The Dream of Savage Wisdom, Deep Systems, Toward an Ecological Ego, The
Enchanted Child and The Ecological Unconscious. Here we might justifiably say, the plot
thickens as our planetary crisis moves toward critical mass.

On pages 301-302 the reader comes upon these lines: Of all the theoretical
approaches we inherit from mainstream modern psychology, Jungs often elusive and always
controversial notion of a collective unconscious may prove to be the most serviceable in the
creation of an ecopsychology. Like the Freudian Id, the collective unconscious is meant to be
an essentially conservative entity, a sort of psychic ballast filled with residue of formative
experience. In the original formulation, Jung intended it to be a repository for the
compounded evolutionary history of our species. Just as the body has its evo lutionary stages,
so too does the psyche. In the reading of some analysts, it extends beyond the human farther
back into the past.
Then after sifting through a few Jungian and Freudian counter perspectives, Professor
Roszak arrives at a somewhat conclus ion to his own impressive research, unfolding the
following thoughts into words on pages 304-305: All psychologies turn to the unconscious to
find the root of neurosis, as well as the powers that will heal the troubled psyche. Only the
Gestalt school has introduced a larger, more fully biological context for therapy that seeks to
unite figure with ground, organism with environment; it is the only school that uses the
concept of ecology in its theories. What I propose here builds on that beginning. The
collective unconscious, at its deepest level, shelters the compacted ecological intelligence of
our species, the source form which culture finally unfolds as the self-conscious reflection of
natures own steadily emergent mindlikeness. The survival of life and of our species would
not have been possible without such a self-adjusting, system-building wisdom. It was there to
guide that development by trial and error, selection and extinction, as it was there in the
instant of the Big Band to congeal the first flash of radiation into the rudiments of durable
matter. It is this Id with which the ego must unite if we are to become a sane species capable
of greater evolutionary adventures.
This foregoing is as good an explanation as I have yet to come upon fo r the phrase
primitive sanity, which I first heard more than twenty years ago spoken by international law
scholar Richard Falk. Although perhaps through Roszak we should link primitive sanity with
primal sanity and primitive wisdom with primordial? Yet again, to draw toward a close here,
let me quote THE VOICE OF THE EARTH once more, this time from a chapter entitled
Attending the Planet and found on pages 306-307.
Psychology, like theology, must eventually come to terms with original sin. Both
madness and sin presuppose a preexisting state of grace. At some point, the healthy animals
we once were, if only for some split second of prenatal or postnatal time, lost that primal
sanity and grew up to become bad mothers and bad fathers who made all the bad institutions.
Within the framework of an ecopsychology, we raise the question: How did the psyche that
was once symbiotically rooted in the planetary ecosystem produce the environmental crisis
we now confront?
Blaming the trauma on parents or on society in general is no real answer. It simply
moves the problem a step farther back. Systems Theory, especially the work of Ilya
Prigogine, which plays so great a role in Deep Ecology, may offer a better answer. Prigogine
focuses on those systems that elude entropy by oscillating through and out of equilibrium.
There order is not that of dead rest but of constant fluctuation, a sort of dialectic of dissipative
structures. Their episodic oscillations are as natural as the compensatory equilibrium toward
which they tend to return. All organismsand in the case of human beings, the social
structures they createare examples of such nonequilibrium thermodynamics. Evolution
through symmetry breaking is their normal mode.

This approach to our ecological condition possesses a rich ambivalence. In our tiny
slice of cosmic time that represents the history of human life on Earth, we may imagine
consciousness evolving through a series of creative oscillations. Various distortions and
exaggerations occur. With hindsight, we can now identity these as various cultural systoles of
the past playing in and around the equilibrium of sanity. The balance point would be the
perfect environment understood as a state of solid harmony with our habitat, the sort of
unquestioning stasis that prehuman organisms have presumably attained. But we are the
species uniquely capable of becoming unbalanced; the capacity to flirt with imbalance makes
us such an interesting experiment. Following Prigogine, we might assign, if only
metaphorically, an intriguing new thermodynamic meaning to this familiar term for madness.
Human intelligence oscillates like every open system. Developed far beyond what
competitive advantage requires, it takes off on flights of creative fancy, high art, religious and
scientific speculation. It has created a universe within the universe, a world of wild, spinning
and magnificent ideas that, from time to time, take hold of entire populations and become a
culture. The tension between neurotic distortion and sane equilibrium is what we call
history.
Ending on a hopeful note (pg. 308), this mantra: The Earth hurts, and we hurt with it.
If we can accept the imagery of a Mother Earth, we might say that the planets umbilical cord
links us at the root to the unconscious mind. If that link is between the present, the primitive,
primal and primordial, then we might, in an experiential reversal of a renown line from
Shakespeares King Lear, begin to believe that that way sanity (not madness) lies.
David Sparenberg