The Addiction Afflicting Billions—A Conversation with Chellis Glendinning on Ecopsychology and Addiction Recovery

When Post Carbon Institute recently organized a Deep Dive on the subject of emotional resilience, I saw it in part as a chance to recall the academic and inner work that led to the flourishing of ecopsychology. I also saw it as a chance to reconnect with one of the pioneers of the movement, Chellis Glendinning. In addition to My Name Is Chellis and I’m In Recovery from Western Civilization (1994), she is also the author of Waking Up in the Nuclear Age (1987), When Technology Wounds (1990), Off the Map (2002), Chiva (2005), and the novels Objetos (2018) and Tazas de te y Ametralladoras (English: Tea Cups and Machine Guns, forthcoming). She is a psychologist and activist with a focus on feminism, bioregionalism, and Indigenous rights.

For readers who may not be familiar with ecopsychology, or who may benefit from a refresher, the term refers to a field of research and therapeutic practice that explores the mental and emotional connections between people and the rest of the biosphere. Below is a short history of the field. Readers who are already conversant with it may wish to skip ahead to the interview. 

Ecopsychology was founded in the late 20th century through the publication of several remarkable books. Paul Shepard’s Nature and Madness (1982) led the way. Shepard wrote, “We must affirm the world as a being, as a part of our body.” He argued that disconnection from nature in modern life leaves us with a profound, mostly unspoken sense of loss. 

Theodore Roszak, in The Voice of the Earth (1992), coined the term “ecopsychology,” writing, “The sanity that binds us to one another in society is not necessarily the sanity that bonds us companionably to the creatures with whom we share the Earth. If we could assume the viewpoint of nonhuman nature, what passes for sane behavior in our social affairs might seem madness.”

David Abram’s The Spell of the Sensuous (1996) brought an almost poetic intensity to the observation that, not just the way we live, but the internal processes by which we perceive and think about our surroundings have become disconnected from the basis of reality (i.e., how nature works). Abrams claimed that literacy drowns out the voices of landscapes and creatures in our heads and hearts. He coined the phrase “the more-than-human world” as a way of referring to nature, and mounted a cogent defense of animism as a form of spirituality that acknowledges the world’s sentience. 

Anne Wilson Schaef’s book, When Society Becomes an Addict, (1987) introduced the notion that, while addiction is usually thought of as an aberrant relationship between an individual and alcohol or other drugs, its destructive dynamic can be seen in organizations, and even in society as a whole. Chellis Glendinning’s My Name Is Chellis and I’m in Recovery from Western Civilization (1994) brought together insights from Schaef’s societal addiction-recovery discourse and ecopsychology. Glendinning’s book was an autobiographical, raw, and devastating critique of modern techno-industrial society’s impact on nature and Indigenous peoples, and of the suffering civilized people themselves endure as a result of our addiction to technology and vertical social power.

Ecopsychology continues to develop via theory, research, and practice. The 1995 anthology Ecopsychology, edited by Theodore Roszak, helped connect a community of practitioners. In 2005, Richard Louv coined the term “nature deficit disorder,” encapsulating the idea that human beings, especially children, are spending less time outdoors than they have in the past, and experiencing a wide range of behavioral problems as a result. And 2009 saw the publication of Ecotherapy by Linda Buzzell and Craig Chalquist, which discussed ways for individuals and groups to apply ecopsychology, including forest therapy and wilderness therapy. Today, ecotherapeutic workshops are widely available, including this one from Practicing Transition. 

Ecopsychology’s core insights remain deeply radical. The discipline and its practitioners question mass industrial society, urbanism, even literacy. As we (that is, we modern industrial humans) destroy nature, we torture our own psyches. So, why do we destroy nature? Because of our systemic addictions to technology and other sources of vertical social power. Millennia of social evolution, starting in the early agricultural states, have driven a wedge between us and the foundation of our existence—Earth’s biosphere. We now find ourselves undermining the biosphere by burning fossil fuels, cutting down forests, polluting the oceans, and destabilizing the climate. Climate anxiety tugs at the aspirations of young people, but while this widespread angst appears to be simply a collective psychological response to a single immediate planetary threat, it is also a wordless warning that “progress” as we have conceived it may lead to planetary doom. Only a profound shift in cultural direction can restore nature and psyche. 

I wrote Chellis Glendinning a fan letter many years ago, to which she graciously replied. We later met at a conference in San Francisco. Now we’re both participants in an online network devoted to technology criticism. I was happy to have an excuse to engage her in this email conversation.

RH: Saludos, and thanks for agreeing to this interview! Your book My Name Is Chellis suggested that addiction and recovery might provide useful models for understanding the twisted psychology that maintains our ecocidal global industrial machine, and for treating the alienation, pain, and fear (now common in the form of climate change dread) that result from the machine’s workings. How did you arrive at that insight?

CG: I´d like to start by laying out a premise: linguistic efforts to pin down the nature of existence; of history, ecology, society, psychology; of Life itself have marked the ages. But the results are never complete. Language is too bulky, too concrete, too limited to describe, much less capture, the complex wonders and mysteries of this teeming planet.

Whether attempted on a collective or an individual level, so go psychological interpretations. Yet, we two-leggeds are forever trying. And I did too.

That said, yes, I came to see a diagnosis of addiction as a worthy stab, and it’s a disorder of both civilizations and individuals. The talons of techno-dependence piercing our souls mirror those of the alcoholic, the sex addict, etc., which are consumer-perpetrated as both a bodily/chemical obsession and a psychological/spiritual fixation. Mass technological society requires persistent competitive expansion with attendant abuse of land, air, water, plants, animals, and people. As individuals, we find participation in an out-of-control technological environment is often required for our very survival. Or we are seduced into “voluntarily” chasing each new invention that appears on the horizon.

I came to this realization during the 1970s-80s when recovery from addiction became a popular way of looking at the world. Anonymous meetings were in the zeitgeist, and I had clients who were supplementing their recovery meetings with psychotherapy. I also had, by then, been involved with so many social-change movements—from civil rights, through peace, feminism, and ecology, to Indigenous rights and holistic healing—that I was putting them all together, and lo and behold! The dysfunction of mass society was revealed. Many of my colleagues had reached the conclusion that civilization itself was non-workable, and that perception fit perfectly with my own valuing of small-is-beautiful, land-based, and Indigenous communities.

RH: In the years since your book appeared, there has been a great deal of research on what’s been called “nature deficit disorder,” and therapists who treat climate grief often advise spending time in nature as a way to gain psychological equilibrium. What’s your perspective on that research and the advice that comes from it?

CG: Indeed! The Statistical-Manual-style diagnosis hadn’t yet been invented, and I had already arrived at the same conclusion. I must say I was blessed to be part of the awakening of the 1990s called ecopsychology. Its emphasis includes “spend time in nature,” but really, if one is serious, it’s wider and deeper. It can also include activities like learning primitive survival skill; gathering/sowing plant-friends; turning to animal-colleagues for food, medicines, clothes, and other implements for living; working to save the natural world from utter destruction; praying for it and giving thanks; and dedicating oneself to changing the culture and society that perpetrates such horrors. Really, it’s befriending the natural world, returning to it just as our more sustainable ancestors lived.

In the ’90s, when ecopsychology was becoming popular, I lived in New Mexico, and I happened to be making friends with native folks of Cheyenne, Keres, Diné, Tewa, Hopi, and Apache blood/language/roots. It was a gloriously spirited time of Re-arising in reaction to the ostentatious U.S.-Spain-led 500th anniversary of Columbus’s arrival on Turtle Island. From them I learned about the intertwining of Culture Creation and living as just one creature in the natural world. Well, the field of ecopsychology became increasingly focused on its development as an accepted academic pursuit with an emphasis on individual therapy, whereas my motivation became: how, then, do we live, how do we reshape human values so that we can actually survive?

RH: You’ve gone beyond just spending time in nature, as a way to recover, and have moved away from the US to immerse yourself in a less-industrialized society. If techno-addiction was a problem in the 1990s, when your book came out, it is far worse today, with most people glued to LCD screens for hours every day. Do you see screen addiction and climate grief in Bolivia? What are your fears in this regard? What offers hope?

CG: When I first came to Bolivia in 2006, no one I knew owned a car. Or a cellphone. Burros were common transport on city streets. No one asked “what do you do?”; work wasn´t a factor in identity; ideas, politics, and roots in family, clan, and land were. And everyone celebrated ancient rituals like the offering of prayers to the spirits via the monthly palo-santo-burning kóa. A spirit of solidarity was alive, laughter was brimming, and not only did profound analysis thrive within the intellectual community, but common sense reigned among regular folk.

Alas! Much of that has been erased. A subconscious longing to have a rich-nations lifestyle rules. I’ve had the opportunity to witness a surreal/slapstick development of dictatorship dressed up like a leftist revolution. It’s fraught with corruption; governmental wealth from the cocaine business; a massive erection of cell towers; the payment of small groups of delinquents to purposefully set fires to the Amazonian rainforests in order to make cocaine-destined coca fields and profit-making industrial farms; liaisons with fascist states like Iran, North Korea, and Russia; sadistic punishment of free thinkers, many of whom believe in democracy; manipulated elections; lying as national sport; and hamburgers as national food. Historical buildings are destroyed to make way for skyscrapers. Industrialization is the “key to betterment,” so now we have fewer family farms, more factories. Yes, everyone walks around staring at screens. Youth suicide is widespread. 

Through it all, I’ve become a proud Bolivian citizen! I can vote, I sing the national anthem. I simply feel “right” here, like I belong in Bolivia. Wild, no? It’s yet another case of loving the people and the land, but not the government. Bolivia has become my identity, and identity, it turns out, is one potent motivator. 

The truth is, Richard, I don’t think much about hope, and it has lost its place in my psyche. In the 1990s, eco-philosopher Derrick Jensen pretty much put hope to bed, seeing it as a diversionary detour from facing reality. At this late stage of planetary deterioration, I believe meaning is more relevant. Where does one find meaning in being alive? Guidance to act with dignity, intelligence, resilience? And caring.

RH: I feel so tame by comparison, living in California with our chickens and veg garden and electric car. Still, we face the same societal problems, though at different scales, stages of development, and levels of responsibility. The US could easily be on a path toward dictatorship just a few months from now. And, of course, this country has played a significant role in the destruction of Indigenous societies around the world. The California and US economies are based on the development and spread of high-tech weapons and information technologies that concentrate social power in the hands of the few. I can certainly understand why you’d want to distance yourself from all that. Tell me more about the meaning you’re finding in being alive. For me, playing music and spending time in nature are the big payoffs. You?

CH: Good question! To begin, I believe that participating in what needs to be done is a worthy goal. In the ancestral, land-based communities that each and every one of us harks back to, there were no police, no courts of law, no firefighters; whatever needed action was attended to by whoever was available. The British anthropologist Colin Turnbull studied the BaMbuti people of the African Congo and found that no formal councils for decision-making existed; rather, when a dispute arose or unacceptable offense was perpetrated, anyone who was free at that moment was invited to listen, join in, talk things out, and offer ideas and resolutions—with the overarching guidance of maintaining balance as a communal goal.

As naturalist/nature writer Dolores LaChappelle wrote in her Earth Wisdom, “Just as in a flight of birds turning through the air, no one is the leader and none the follower, yet all are together.”

The hierarchies and individualism that isolate us in mass capitalist society have left us without such recourses as BaMbuti enjoyed, but at least as birds in flight we can offer our services to one another. For me, decades have passed since a lone car in the busy San Francisco shopping area of Clement Street was blocked from going forward by a pile of debris in the road; it was a Saturday, and the vehicles behind went wild with frustration and horn-blowing. I looked around. The passers-by and shoppers on the sidewalk were stiff as ice statues, just gaping at the predicament. I gathered my courage—for the taboo against initiating such an act carried hefty weight—and I walked out to the center of the street and picked up the rubble so the car could pass. How simple was that?!

Such a straight-forward act carries meaning: essentially, it’s an act of reclaiming collective consciousness while, at the same, dashing the rule of civilization with its hyper-emphasis on turning to father figures to do everything for us, a sort of “practice simple acts of kindness” applied to a long-disappeared responsibility, yes? One can quietly paint over graffiti on the white walls of the neighborhood church, move garbage blocking parking places, pay for medicines when the stranger in front of you in the pharmacy line can’t afford them, offer a plate of nourishment when a neighbor has suffered a defeat, support a local farmer by buying her/his home-grown foods and herbs, eliminate all plastic from the kitchen. And guess what? You can do it all nearly anonymously, walking away with no medals, no fanfare, just a private knowing that, for one brief moment, you participated in restoring a sense of community that, let’s face it, still resides in our bones.

But meaning for me is not always an obvious political act in support of the public good. What with the ferocious punishment meted out to those not in accord with the authoritarian “socialism” being perpetrated in Bolivia, I realized that my op eds in national newspapers were putting me in danger, and indeed when I applied for citizenship, suddenly my garbage started to be stolen and my computer hacked. So, this may come as a surprise, Richard, but I find meaning in throwing colorful costume parties that generate creativity and joy. Small acts of kindness that—in this darkening world of social chaos, wars, environmental refugees, collapsing glaciers, out-and-out failure of crops, increasing crime, irrepressible economic injustices, and a global rise of tyrannical interlopers—might bring at least one moment of brightness.

Check out our Deep Dive on Emotional Resilience, which includes other interviews, articles, an event recording, and a curated list of resources: