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This Web
Page is dedicated to Ben White, a friend of Project NatureConnect. Help your friends and associates overcome their nature defecit disorder and its harmful effects. Link to this page from your website: http://www.ecopsych.com/2005taproot.html |
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Taproot
On All Nine Legs-Teaching Outdoor Love to an Indoor World by Janet Thomas with educational links added by Michael J. Cohen, Ed.D. (For best results read through this article in full, then return to links of interest)
Although we are part of nature, most of us learn to spend, on average, over 95 percent of our time and 99 percent of our thinking separated from, and out of tune with, nature's beauty, balance, healing, sustainability and restorative powers. According to Cohen, this is a profound loss and we are traumatized into denial. We deny that we are rewarded by our daily indoor lives for fearing and exploiting, rather than embracing and learning from nature. We deny that we are psychologically addicted to nature-disconnected lives that produce personal, social and environmental dysfunction. In his online-Web world, Cohen focuses on an educational program that offers both elementary and advanced degree training via Project NatureConnect, a workshop and internet program for socially responsible environmental education. The courses send participants outside to have natural attraction experiences and then back inside to write about what happened. Group participants share their postings via email on a regularly scheduled basis; and because the postings involve personal experience as well as observations about nature, they bond their group through a natural intimacy as well as through learning. This connection, through nature and technology, creates an astonishing atmosphere of trust and acceptance. As the students learn, so they teach one another about both nature's ways and their own. Project NatureConnect started in 1985 as workshop program based on activities that became the foundation for Cohen's book, How Nature Works-Regenerating Kinship with Planet Earth. He'd already written two other nature books: Prejudice Against Nature: A Guidebook for the Liberation of Self and Planet and Our Classroom is Wild America. It was also the year he conceived the symposium, Is The Earth A Living Organism? for the National Audubon Society whose Expedition Institute Program he founded in 1968. The natural progressions through Project NatureConnect courses are a result of painstaking development. Cohen, who is most of all a scientist and was trained as a biologist and counselor, learned the hard way not to ask too much of his students too soon. One of his early instructions was to ask students engaged in nature activities to ask consent from natural systems to be there. It was an unnerving proposition. "I had to move it further into the course," said Cohen. "Otherwise people would get mad and quit. Even the most passionate nature-lover has a hard time with this one. They think their presence in nature is a right and the U.S. Constitution unabashedly agrees. However, natural systems tell a different story-about co-creating and coexisting with nature." The challenge is to treat nature, within and around us, with respect and courtesy, to acknowledge nature's "space" as we would acknowledge the privacy of a friend whom we might be interrupting. By articulating the question: Do I have your consent to be here? we articulate relationship, partnership and consensus. We also bring ourselves, Zen-like, into the here and now, that elusive present moment that so many of us have a hard time finding-particularly in this age of future shock and awe. Our techno-mobility has us careening through our lives with hardly a backward reflection. Connecting with nature stops the propelling of time, we get anchored in the sustaining nature of nature's grace. It's like entering a great palace full of timeless treasures and priceless bounty, we'd better find out if it's okay to be there and then how to be there without destroying that which we deeply love. Asking for consent is both simple and complex: It might be easy to say the words, but it can be hard to listen for an answer; because once you learn the non-verbal language of natural systems, sometimes the answer is "no." What this clarifies is our ambivalence and gets to Cohen's most basic teaching: it's all in the attraction. If a stately Douglas Fir doesn't want me to stick around, it's likely because I'm not feeling so stately. My real attraction might be to that big rock I'd like to crawl under. Perhaps I'm having a bad day and am attracted to hiding and being nurtured-instead of being reminded of all that I'm not. This attention to what, precisely, we are attracted to is a fundamental element in Project NatureConnect. By honestly discerning what it is we are attracted to in nature, and why, we increase our self-knowledge and at the same time we are nurtured. This happens over and over with Cohen's students. His program archives are loaded with moments of student insights that enlighten and at the same time deepen their bond with the natural world; they become partners in awareness. Their individual lives become richer and more metaphorical. As a result, they are less likely to exploit the natural systems inherent in Mother Earth, the neighbor next door, or their pet dog. It's a healing and a learning process; and as reflected by the plight of the world we are in, we need both badly. "First of all we have to love this planet. We have relearn over and over how to fall in love every day with being here; and then we have to name it, know it, own it and decide to preserve it," said Cohen. "Because we will only save what we love. It goes beyond what we know; it is a passion fueled by what we feel." Cohen is nothing if not passionate. An eco-psychologist who has been working in outdoor education since 1949, Cohen has lived, worked, researched and taught in deep relationship with nature since 1959. He was introduced as a "maverick genius" at the 1985 Bureau of Applied Sciences International Symposium on the Promotion of Unconventional Ideas in Science, Medicine and Sociology, on the Isle of Wight in England; where he was also described as "the reincarnation of Thoreau as a psychologist." In 1994, he received a World Peace University Distinguished World Citizen award for his work in environmental education. He completed his tenth book, The Web of Life Imperative in 2003. But it was a teaching experience in the Grand Canyon in 1966, that taught him the profound lesson that shaped his life and his work. In the midst of a thunderstorm, with the red canyons running red with rain and the entire landscape pulsing with thirsty vigor and vitality, Cohen sensed the life in the planet. In an essay in "The Soul Unearthed" (Sentient 2002), Cohen writes about that experience: "The living planet's biology, geology and chemistry are its metabolism; night-day, night-day, its heartbeat. Warm evaporating inland seas serve as kidneys; air and water are plasma. In congress, all aspects of Earth compose a planet-size intelligence, a wise gigantic self-regulating plant cell whose life approaches perfection. The cell knows how to organize, preserve and regenerate itself and how to create its diverse life without pollution, war or insanity." Throughout his life as an educator, Cohen has worked to translate the founding passion of this experience into a scientific approach to help us reconnect with the intelligent nurturing power of Mother Earth. His Natural Systems Thinking Process is a blueprint for bringing together the natural multi-sensory awareness that deeply bonds us with the earth and the analytical abstract reasoning that bonds us to our thoughts. Experience through the senses he calls four-leg awareness; the understanding through the mind is five-leg thinking. Our survival, and the planet's, depends on a synthesis of these two ways of experiencing life. Through Project NatureConnect training, students are taught to distinguish between these two perspectives and find solutions that honor both -nine leg thinking. Cohen illustrates his call for nine-leg thinking with the following story: If you look at a normal four-legged dog and count the tail as a leg, how many legs does the dog have? The new brain knows for sure: five, of course. The old brain knows equally for sure: four, because a dog only has four real legs, of course. The challenge, says Cohen, is to incorporate both brains into the decision making process. The part that knows instinctively that our bond with nature is where we are fundamentally, if mysteriously and inarticulately, sound and secure; and the part that can name things and understand them. "If we can't integrate these two ways of knowing, we'll destroy the very nature of our existence," said Cohen, who communes daily with the turkeys, raccoons, eagles and seagulls in his neighborhood. I asked him how education can have an impact on preserving environmental integrity into the future? "We've got to start with natural systems thinking," he said. "When we learn to relate cooperatively and creatively with the natural systems around and within us, we reduce our personal stress and start to heal ourselves and our environment. But we have to spend quality attraction time outside-with the real dog." Natural Systems Thinking Process translates into using nature's grace as a model for behavior. "Nature doesn't make a mess," said Cohen. "It continually generates, and regenerates itself through a vast natural web of cooperation and consensus. Nothing works in balance unless it all works." Throughout his professional life as an eco-psychologist, he has worked to encourage a paradigm shift in thinking that would steer us all forward while still looking backward. Our new brain, he says, is so busy in the hypothetical landscape of hi-tech categorizing and scientific progress that it has lost touch with the intelligence of the old brain-the one that gets happy satisfaction from sniffing a flower without needing to know it's name. Cohen is also renown for the seemingly limitless number of folksongs he can sing at a moment's notice. At age 75, he's vitally involved with Project NatureConnect's day-to-day activities-which involve email communication with students around the world; he hikes regularly in the mountains and performs as a folksinger several times a month. Most recently, Cohen developed ninelegs.com, a website that encompasses the five-leg work of Einstein and the four-leg awareness of Thoreau. It is based on the webstring model that is the foundation of his work. "Earth is a global ecosystem and we are part of it," said Cohen. "Through the natural web of life strands, called webstrings, or webloves, Earth communicates with us, and all other beings, in supportive ways. Webstrings are nature's voice calling out in attraction. They are the basic natural forms of love we all share with one another and our ecosystem. They contain the unifying logic of nature that our nature-conquering society teaches us to ignore." Through reconnecting with nature we can replace our ignorance with the wisdom of natural attraction and expand and strengthen our relationships with the earth and one another. This can only happen if we go outside enough and use our time outside effectively in ways that restore our bond to four-leg knowing. And sometimes it might take five-leg analysis to get us outside where we belong. As far as Cohen is concerned, nine-leg experience can begin with either four- or five-leg perceptions, but it takes both to get us there.
Visit, online, the Practioners Corner section of Taproot, where Cohen presents seven practical activities you can use and teach. Dr. Cohen
can be contacted at 360-378-6313, nature@interisland.net Continued discussion of Cohen may be found in Janet Thomas's book "Battle in Seattle" Janet Thomas is a free-lance writer and editor who lives in Friday Harbor, Washington Books by Michael J. Cohen Contact for Taproot and Coalition for Education in the Outdoors
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PROJECT NATURECONNECT
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