Becoming Rhizomes in the Midst of Biospheric Collapse
What have they done to the earth, what have they done to our fair sister?
When the Music’s Over, The Doors 1967
They paved paradise, put up a parking lot.
Big Yellow Taxi, Joni Mitchell 1970
Where We Are: Dissociated from the Biosphere
I’m six years old – it’s the height of modernity; vegetables are frozen; appliances are hawked on TV, transistor radios crackle, the sun gleams off of car fenders. I’m home with my mother and tell her, “I want to go home.” What do you mean, she asks. Cadwalader Avenue? “No. I plead, I want to go h-o-m-e.” The word, Solastalgia was coined by philosopher Glenn Albrecht in his 2003 book Solastalgia: a new concept in human health and identity.[1] He describes it as “the homesickness you feel when your environment is changing in ways you find distressing.
Today the sheer Real is saturating our psyches with multi-faceted pandemics related to the Cartesian mindset which separates, exploits and extracts resulting in ecological degradation, habitat destruction, species extinction, biospheric collapse commonly known as climate change alongside mass shootings,a viral pandemic, rapacious inequity, the rise of facism and a war which has brought the other “n” word (nuclear) to the forefront of our consciousness. As though there’s not enough suffering from the slings and arrows of daily living within the context of the Great Matter of LIfe and Death.
How We Got Here: Divide & Conquer
I and many of us would not be alive today were it not for advances stemming from a Cartesian mindset and I honor that; nevertheless, it’s this very mindset that has brought us to the brink of biospheric collapse.
Cartesian dualism coursing through our culture. We operate by separating, by spliting – from splitting atoms to separating calves and their mothers and from separating our minds from our bodies and ourselves from nature; in short by objectifying subjects aka othering – this in tandem with the delusion of a permanent I who must always win, results in ends used to justify means; for example, a manager at work advises: Don’t administer the questionnaire until after the treatment plan is written so as to delay the clock from ticking on our metrics, which is tied to bonuses. The Organization Man now sports blue hair. Moreover, this fetish for metrics is reinforced by the reigning paradigm’s belief in unlimited growth and consumption so that consuming is now an expression of patriotism. Self-restraint is tantamount to sedition. What was Bush’s advice after 9/11? Go shopping.
We’re acculturated into an excess of individuality. Excess in the ecological sense of coping capacity, a concept describing the limit of stressors that a system is capable of carrying adaptively. And excess in the sense that lack is manufactured in our ever TB-like consumptive society – there’s never enough – there’s always something new and improved to buy and then some. A consumptive jouissance that can never be satisfied and keeps markets open 24/7 with disregard to our circadian rhythms, to the fact of our being earthlings. In his book, The Nutmegs Curse, Amitav Ghosh writes about omnicide as the outcome of the Cartesian, colonial mindset. We’ve only recently started to extradite ourselves from falsely separating our minds from our bodies and from nature to reclaim relationship as an essential condition of existence, consistent with indigenous and Buddhist wisdom of interdependence.
The way we’ve been living for the past 250 years is maladaptive in the long-term; a seven-generations mindset such as held by the Iroquois, who consider the effects of our actions on subsequent generations as distinct from our society’s quarterly shareholder gain mindset. Excessively separating ourselves from nature is boomeranging to bite us. It’s as though the natural world after patient, long suffering is in the midst of a fierce transference neurosis. Please be so kind as to indulge my animisitic explanation: Despite Cartesian dualism, we are in a relationship with Nature, one in which we’ve been chronically abusive. For a long while Nature cowered, all the while resentment seethed to coalesce and rise up against the oppressive Other, occasioned by serial hissy fits of flood and fire that kill and destroy. The biosphere is raging, sobbing, convulsing. We didn’t set limits on serial, ruthless exploiting and now the violence is coming back to haunt us. And just as with our patient’s, we’re not the original offender, but we bear the brunt of it – the intergenerational transmission of trauma isn’t limited to humans.
Exploitive, extractive industries view nature as a resource that Others through commodifying, through monetizing soil, air and water, the very sine qua non of life. Moreover, there’s a new obscenity called, Natural Asset Corporations (NACs), which the World Bank touts as, “Harnessing the power of capital markets to conserve and restore global biodiversity.” Environmental concerns are hijacked by NACs representing themselves as the solution to climate change whereas their mindset of making a buck in all situations problematizes their so-called solutions. The neoliberal, rational, enlightened mindset performs the slave/master function to posit nature as out there, to be conquered and mastered and couches this as in the best interest of the enslaved. The insidious appellation Human Resources was coined to refer to office Personnel. Employee’s energy is extracted so that we go home completely exhausted, good for nothing and who is the silent partner? Human Resources. HR is a forceful driver in the world, a kind of sub-global corporation in its own right, deciding our health plans, our pensions, our benefits. It would be progressive to reclaim the term, Personnel. There’s a confusion of pricing and value in the reigning paradigm; however, not everything has a price. Value is inestimable.
To accomplish the nefarious task of monetizing nature, the world outside our doorstep had to be othered, objectified, desouled, desacralized, deadened, a Cartesian machine existing as resources for our use without regard for the inherent value, dignity and uniqueness of every grain of sand, every blade of grass, existing within the web of universal life.
What is the psychology of those who have a choice of vocation and choose to engage in the extractive industries? Is the earth a mother, a child or simply a resource? What is being enacted here?
In 1947, the Mont Pelerin Society* began to sculpt today’s reigning economic world order. The intention was to integrate the global economy with minimum regulation and without planning. The metaphor, “market forces,” is reified now to such an extent that it is experienced as a literal force of Nature but is in fact a force by design, by policy.
How We Transform: Two-Eyed Seeing The Ecological Third and the Rhizomatic Theory of Mind
Transforming the current wealth-based paradigm to a life-based, ecocentric paradigm requires “two-eyed” seeing; that is, dialectically intertwining indigenous knowledge and wisdom traditions with current science such as advanced systems thinking and interpersonal neurobiology. Truth emerges paradoxically via the pataking of alleged opposites. Affirming dialectically intertwined, disinterested disciplines circumvents the audacity of reductive, autocratic certainty of mechanistic dualism.
There are four characteristics of indigenous culture shared by Indigenous people around the world, according to Comanche activist LaDonna Harris: relationship, responsibility, reciprocity and redistribution. All are our kin, including animals, plants and the living earth and we are responsible to nurture and care for them. Taking and giving are reciprocal: We share – skills, time, energy and material wealth. And as Daniel Wildcat advises, we relate to flora, fauna, all that is as relatives, not resources.
People who live indigenously experience flora, fauna and entities such as rocks, minerals, soil as living, ensouled beings with their own subjectivity, which fosters intersubjective relationality, a living network that I call the Symbolized Real. Symbolized because nature appears as characters in indigenous storytelling, growing out of a felt, experiential relatedness. There is a felt porousness
with the surround. I harm only what I need to harm in order to survive and conduct myself with reverence towards those whom I need to harm. All beings and entities are a who – not an it. Let’s each of us ask, What is my relationship with the biosphere starting with the shrub outside my door? And whatever it is, does it, and if so, how does it affect my work with my patients?
Just as the clinician and patient create a third intersubjective reality, let us now admit the biosphere into the clinician/patient relationship. Let’s call it the Ecological Third. And not just because of the calamitous crisis but because this is our reality as beings in the biosphere, with other beings, many embodied, many not in what we would commonly identify as a body. We’re here together in one massive bio-heap, composting together. We’re rhizomes, continuously growing horizontal underground stems which put out lateral shoots and adventitious roots at intervals, rooted in the Wood Wide Web. Like the quote from John Muir which Joseph will share, we’re all threaded together. We are the natural world. The biologist Merlin Sheldrake writes, “The mycelial web looks like a network of neurons . . . extending through the dirt, sending molecular messages between plants, like the electrical impulses of the nervous system. These signals can confer greater resistance to disease for the plants.” Resilience is strengthened when we relate & communicate as part of the web of life, such as rhizomes do by forming networks, which relate and communicate laterally. This is significant towards our goal of creating an equitable world. Trees are great. Who doesn’t love a tree? But trees have become stand ins for hierarchy as shown in umpteen corporate organizational charts. By the by, I hope that we start to call Case Conferences, Emerging Conferences to reflect a rhizomatic trajectory of the psychoanalytic experience as the concept, case seems to me to be stuck in positivist, reductive thinking, connoting something that’s encased, ossified in space and time and objectified, denying the ongoing, emerging evolution of an intersubjective field.
Our minds are distributed throughout our body and beyond; these are the vibes we pick up from one another. Such intuition implores us not only to do no harm, but to assume sentience in all who are – fish & wood, water & soil – yes, let’s use animate pronouns to indicate sentience in all matter, including inorganic.
Because I’m disheartened by extractive capitalism, don’t think for one moment that I’m heartened by how socialists or communists treat the fauna and flora dwelling in their midst as their economies operate in an human-centric register; that is, I have a prefrontal cortex and opposable thumbs and therefore can do what I want, when I want, to whom I want whereas an ecocentric civilization reflects the reality of our existence: we’re one species in a vast network of myriad interdependent species. Similarly, let’s consider the psyche as distributed not only throughout our body but throughout the planet.
Psychotherapy is a liberatory experience as it strengthens the capacity for choice. It seems to me that a critical psychotherapy would engage with liberatory social transformation. We are the shamans of our culture. We create realities. Our job now includes being doulas to midwife a ecocentric civilization as we transform from a wealth-based to a life-based economy. How do we listen to our patients in the midst of the pervasive ontological insecurity ripping through the world today. Do we have the will to engage adeptly with multiple subjectivities? Do we have the courage to dwell in uncertainty, in interstitial limbo? With Todd we ask, What stories will emerge, shepherding us into this new paradigm of symbiotic holobionts as one jewel within the web of life?
A plethora of organizations worldwide is percolating to address all aspects of living such as regenerative energy, economics and agriculture and includes indices for well-being and flourishing economies to replace the GDP, an index of the monetary economy.
I realize now that my homesickness expressed at age 6 was a longing for a loving relational experience with the natural world. Now, decades later I have a word for it, solastalgia. Let’s create a world where matter matters, where the well-being of all beings matter & every entity, organic and inorganic is and feels at home.