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Project NatureConnect |
An Earth Day Proclamation to the
American Psychological Association
Environmental Protection Agency
National Education Association
and similar organizations and individuals.
For Earth Day, April 22, 2004:
Greetings:
A half a century ago, Walt Kelly, through his cartoon character Pogo, said "We have met the enemy and he is us." But what part of us is the enemy and how do we deal with that misled part of us? Planet Earth and its people continue to face this profound problem today, along with its detrimental effects. Its solution eludes us simply because it threatens, and thereby shuts down, the part of us that can understand it and provide the solution.
This Proclamation is to announce that a solution to this conundrum has been found. We must immediately apply it. Studies by renowned scientists show that 55 years after Fairfield Osborne wrote Our Plundered Planet:
-levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere have jumped abruptly
-marine "dead zones" are on the increase
-mental illness* ranks second in the burden of disease in market economies
Neither natural systems nor nature-connected societies/cultures produce these and many similar problems. We produce them.
Our thinking is our destiny. We must learn to genuinely connect it with natural systems and their renewing powers so that we, as part of the global life community can reduce these problems we cause. Over a half a billion people now have the internet and an internet-based tool that enables us to accomplish this is readily available.
WHEREAS:
You and I and all people are part of nature and vice-versa. (The flow of nature's water, air, minerals and vital
energy through us as all of our living planet demonstrates this. We are a seamless continuum of natural systems and their ability to sustain wellness.)
There is no known substitute for nature, the real thing, with its eons of growth and development of its natural systems. These systems contain nature's self-organizing, regenerative, self-perpetuating powers. They produce the perfection of nature's optimums of life, cooperation, renewal and diversity in balance. They accomplish this wellness without producing garbage such as pollution, abusiveness and environmental deterioration. They don't produce our excessive stress, crime and mental disorders.
Substitutes for nature, including abstract thoughts, books or images of nature, omit much of nature's restorative power to sustain the purity, equilibrium and beauty of natural systems in and around us.
Because substitutes for nature are not the real thing, their imperfections produce the detrimental side effects that deteriorate natural systems in people and places
To be part of any system both our consciousness and thinking have to be in communication with and guided by the system. As part of nature, we inherit the ability to communicate with nature and it with us. When we don't communicate and respond, we grow in uncontrolled ways, similar to cancers.
AND WHEREAS:
We don't expect a natural born rabbit or other organism to function normally if we cut it in half or confine it to a closet.
Our ability to think and feel is part of nature and produces our destiny.
It is normal in our nature-separated lives for our natural abilities to be disconnected from nature over 99% of the time. We learn to spend over 95% of our time indoors, closeted from authentic nature. This extreme disconnection from including natural system's messages in our thinking causes nature and its beneficial attributes to disappear from our conscience. Our relationships with ourselves, each other and the environment suffer.
Like a disconnected rabbit, the separation of our mentality from our restorative origins in nature deteriorates our wellness and ability to make sense of our lives.
The loss of nature's rejuvenating spirit and wholeness misguides our thinking and senses. Like opening a destructive floodgate, without the awareness and the use of nature's everpresent guidance, the disconnected way we think produces our great troubles along with progress and its discontents.
Our disconnection leaves us believing that our problems and nature's absence are normal for humanity, for they are everywhere we are.
We have lost contact with the level of consciousness and regenerative powers in nature that we need to sustain wellness in ourselves and the environment. It can be regained.
THEREFORE BE IT KNOWN BY ALL THAT:
Because our nature-disconnected mentality is the part of us that causes many problems, we must invoke and use readily available organic activities, education and psychologies that help our thinking re-connect with nature. This enables us to reduce our dysfunctions while improving the wellness of natural systems in ourselves and the environment.
Nature-reconnected ideas, activities and creativity help us to consciously bring nature's restorative powers back into our thinking, psyche and spirit.
Nature-reconnecting activities help us transform our detrimental bonding to nature substitutes into constructive relationships with authentic natural systems inside and around us.
Today's increases in global warming, oceanic dead zones and mental disorders demonstrate that the nature-detached environmental and psychological mentality we have used for the past century is not able to do the job we need to do now.
Because we are part of nature, nature itself has the power to help us modify our harmful conditioned bonds to our nature-conquering, prejudices, addictions and their questionable rewards. This is because we inherit from nature our ability to build bonds. The bonding ability of all elements in nature is what produces the unified, yet diverse materials, relationships and energies of the natural world. Bonding to the whole of nature through any local natural area helps us produce balance.
Without enlisting nature's help to transform our detrimental bonds into constructive relationships, it may not be possible for us to produce the social and environmental wellness we need, the health that supports all of life on Earth and Earth's life as well. It is our mentality's sterile isolation from this natural process that underlies our problems.
The separation of our thinking from nature is rectifiable via thinking that chooses to use tools that genuinely reconnect it to nature. To knowingly omit psychologically based nature connecting activities in self-help, education, therapeutic, environmental or social programs is like trying to build a life boat without the instructions as to how to do it and with one hand tied behind our back. Even Pogo might agree that the thinking of those of us who omit these activities is the point source problem we are trying to solve, the "us" who is the enemy.
"It is difficult to get people to understand something when their salary depends upon them not understanding it."
............-Upton Sinclair
CONCLUSIONS:
Our great challenge is to overcome our nature-disconnected conditioning. It tells us, falsely, that we cannot meaninglfully connect our psyche to the beneficial ways of natural systems, that we cannot learn, grow and heal through that ecologically sound union, that we can't form communities that through this process co-create with nature. This conditioning is dangerous and criminal because the tools to make this connection are readily available.
It is urgent for us to use nature-connected thinking tools and their ability to help us restore ourselves, our relationships and our planet. To this end, in honor of Mother Earth, Project NatureConnect, on its Earth Day website, makes these methods and materials available.
For Peace on Earth through Peace With Earth,
Michael J. Cohen
Director, Project NatureConnect
NOTE: This proclamation has been sent by e-mail and certified postal mail to appropriate organizations. Encourage your organization to utilize the easily obtained basics of Organic Psychology and Natural System Thinking. If they don't, you and Earth can benefit by you learning them on your own and helping others learn them, too.
* Mental Illness: Mental disorders leave no aspect of human experience untouched, including our wellness and resilience. They include dysfunction and disorders in: Substance relationships, Moods, Anxiety, Sexual and gender identity, Eating, Sleep, Impulse-control, Adjustment, Personality, Intelligence, Alzheimer's, Depression, Anger, Dependency, Attention-deficit and hyperactivity, Bipolar, Cognitive, and include Schizophrenia and other psychotic disorders, Somatoforms disorders, Factitious disorders and Dissociative disorders.
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INSTITUTE OF GLOBAL EDUCATION Special NGO consultant United Nations Economic and Social Council
PROJECT NATURECONNECT
Readily available, online, natural science tools
for the health of person, planet and spiritP.O. Box 1605, Friday Harbor, WA 98250
360-378-6313 <email> www.ecopsych.com
ORGANIC ADVANCED ECOPSYCHOLOGY IN ACTION
The Natural Systems Thinking Process
Dr. Michael J. Cohen, Director
send email
All programs start with the Orientation Course contained in the book
The Web of Life Imperative.
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