Integrity 101:
The Remarkable Benefits of Thinking and Learning with Nature
(return
to start of course)
SECTION TWO. Course Purpose:
Learning how to build and enjoy responsible relationships.
Our culturally-biased
thinking is too often like that of a factory manager who was
losing money and sought advice:
"Improve
how you hire people," a business analyst told the manager,
"Ask prospective employees, 'How much is 2 + 2 and hire
the person who gives the best answer."
The first candidate that the manager interviewed for a new job
answered "2 + 2 = 22,"
The second candidate said "2 + 2 = 5."
The third said, "The answer to 2 + 2 could be 4 or 22 depending
upon your meaning," and then added, "I love gathering
complete information and considering long term effects to produce
the best possible solutions."
The manager selected the second candidate who said
2 + 2 = 5.
"But, why?" asked the astounded analyst.
"She's the boss's wife," came the reply.
An accidental scientific discovery in 1953 by a pioneering environmental
educator, Michael J. Cohen, Ed.D. has become a much needed higher
education technology and U.S.A., Presidential Platform for 2004.
His work responds to the question, "Is a walk in the park
Snake Oil or advanced medicine for what ails us?"
Cohen, presently
a Director at the Institute of Global Education, in 1953, under
the mentorship of Dr. Paul F. Brandwein at Columbia University,
observed that when
visiting an attractive natural area people, over time, experienced
stress reduction along with greater peace and wellness. This moved him to investigate what
caused this beneficial phenomenon and how it might be made readily
available to relieve human suffering and environmental degradation.
Cohen's observations
and results have been validated by hundreds of studies (Jones 2001,
References).
For example, in the April 2001 issue of the American Journal
of Preventitive Medicine, investigations by Howard Frumkin, M.
D. contend that a growing body of evidence in a variety of disciplines
-biology ,environmental psychology, landscape architecture, medicine,
education, recovery, rehabilitation- show that natural surroundings
make us humans healthier, happier and smarter. Similar information,
called Biophilia, has been available from Pullitizer Prize recipient,
Dr. E. O. Wilson of Harvard, and through the centuries since
the cradle of our civilization. However, like the warning labels
on cigarettes, this information has had little effect in improving
the excessively destructive ways our socialization rewards and
conditions us to think, relate and create.
"And the true order of
going, or being led by another, to the things of love, is to
begin from the beauties of earth. "
...........- Plato circa 400 B.C.
For over forty
years Cohen has lived and researched year-round in natural areas
with graduate and undergraduate student groups that successfully
educate themselves to build communities that meet their members'
deeper ideals, values and hopes. His work helps people construct
responsible relationships by addressing a prime addiction factor
in contemporary society. Like 'the Boss' in the story above,
this factor causes our thinking not to process important information
from natural systems, to short circuit, suffer and unreasonably
produce our current social and environmental ills (Cohen,1997,
2002a; Jones
2001, Part One).
Cohen's work
suggests that we are unknowingly addicted to and contaminated
by a destructive, hidden Boss. "The Boss" in this case is the "Watson
Disappearing Tent Effect" part of our Nature conquering
society that rewards our psyche and thinking for detaching themselves
from their nurturing, supportive roots in natural systems. Our
mentality is further rewarded for attaching itself to the cultural
myth that says "It is reasonable and valuable for our thinking
to conquer, exploit and distance itself from Nature."
Cohen documents
that our attachment to our cultural myth has become a psychological
addiction. He figures
we now spend, on average, over 95% of our time indoors and
over 99.9% of our thinking out of genuine sensory contact with
nature. He
shows that this withdrawal
from contact with natural systems adversely affects the growth
and development of how we think. It is similar to being born, raised
and imprisoned in a shopping mall or closet for the first thirty
years of your life. We become rewarded and psychologically addicted
to what is familiar and supportive in the mall and prejudicially
fearful of the parking lot outside where we have had little contact.
To leave the mall exposes us to the unrewarded newness of the
elements and the danger of being hit by a car due to inexperience.
There are often profound effects
upon organisms that live in nature-separated places. Limited
sensory stimulation there de-energizes many natural growth and
relationship sensitivities. For example: animals in caves lose
the ability to produce eyes or pigment in their skin. Children
brought up in a closet often die when removed from it. Healthy
young people subjected to sensory deprivation develop hallucinations
and delusions and lose their sense of who they are after a few
hours. People living in canyons have distorted long distance
perception. How Patty Hearst changed from a normal student to
an active militant within two months after being kidnapped further
exemplifies the impact of an isolating environment.
Cohen notes
that, like most addicts or bigots, we are in denial. Even when faced with
clear evidence to the contrary, our socialization teaches us
to deny that we are psychologically addicted to exploiting nature,
that our thinking is contaminated, and that 'the Boss" is
a destructive element in human systems (Cohen, 1993; 2002o; Jones 2001, #8,
1). These denials are symptoms of Natural System Dysfunction (NDS).
The denials
are a disorder identified in this course as a Natural Attraction Desensitization Syndrome (NADS). NADS prevents our human mentality from
being able to register our disconnectedness because we see disconnection
as being reasonable, progress and normal. Our destructive environmental and social effects,
however, tell quite another story.
Although the
noted Psychiatrist R. D. Laing was, like most of us, a victim
of NADS, his genuius identified how NADS operates through the
lie of omission. He observed:
"The range of what
we think and do is limited by what we fail to notice. And because
we fail to notice that we fail to notice, there is little we
can do to change; until we notice how failing to notice shapes
our thoughts and deeds."
R. D. Laing
To counteract
NADS and help us think with greater clarity by subduing or retraining
the "Boss," Cohen has developed a nature reconnecting
psychology he calls the Natural Systems Thinking Process
(NSTP). As demonstrated by his class in the Introduction, it enables us to make
genuine conscious sensory contact with Nature, backyard or back
country. This
contact exposes our awareness to the rewards and ways of natural
attractions within and around us. We notice them and register
their presence and value. We notice as well our loss when we
are insensitive to them. In this way NSTP is an antidote for
NADS.
R.D. Laing notes some of the
destructive results on humanity from our consciousness failing
to notice NADS due to the Watson Disappearing Tent Effect.
"The condition of alienation,
of being asleep, of being unconscious, of being out of one's
mind, is the condition of the normal man. Society highly values
its normal man. It educates children to lose themselves and to
become absurd, and thus to be normal. Normal men have killed
perhaps 100,000,000 of their fellow normal men in the last fifty
years."
- R.
D. Laing (1989)
Many scientists have documented
the destructive effects of NADS on the
natural environment. From global warming to runaway extinctions,
extensive
studies show that the desensitized way we have learned to think
is killing nature. We are knowledgeably
destroying our own life support system. This is a form of insanity
yet it continues as demonstrated
by today's weakening of anti-pollution laws and the lack of nature
connected learning in contemporary education and socialization.
For example, buying a gas guzzling, safety risk, Sports Utility
Vehicle is an insane act yet SUVs are very popular vehicles.
Isn't it interesting that the main sales pitch for them is that
they keep you safe in nature?
NADS has destructive effects
on people because people are part of nature. Today, over 80% of contemporary
society suffers from the excessive stress and its accompanying
relationship disorders, generated by our thought and feeling
disconnection from our natural origins. These include unreasonable
degrees of greed, divorce, prejudice, mental illness, abusiveness,
isolation, violence, medical disorders, and social injustice.
Thus NADS is not simply an environmental
issue. The abusive impact of NADS underlies most of our most
challenging personal and social disorders, too.
With respect to the institution
we call "Education," NADS infiltrates and shapes the
thinking of those who there determine what learning is required
for courses, diplomas and degrees. With NADS in control, learning
that helps people effectively deal with NADS is seldom in the
curriculum. For example, most of us know the formula for water
is H2O and the names of our Presidents, for this is required
knowledge. What NADS has our education and government not require
is for us have a familiarity with the vast collection of important
knowledge going back 2000 years regarding the true relationship
between people and nature. NADS has thrown that baby out of the
cradle of our civilization. To rescue that intelligent "infant,"
for educational purposes, this course presents a sampling of
quotes that represent a great deal of information omitted from
the way you and I have learned to think. Is it any wonder we
can't solve the problems this omission causes?
"There is one common flow,
one common breathing, all things are in sympathy."
............- Hippocrates circa 450 B.C.