Last night I was hanging with my friend Robin and she was reading me this chapter from Ecopsychology: Restoring the Earth, Healing the Mind, a book I bought several years ago when I was out of mine. The chapter she was reading was an interview of a guy named Carl Anthony, whom I'd never heard of, by Theodore Roszak, whom I had. Roszak's been around forever; the first book of his I remember is The Making of a Counter Culture: Reflections on the Technocratic Society and Its Youthful Opposition. I was too busy making countercultural to read it at the time, and later, after I came down and got old, it seemed irrelevant. Roszak is your basic Luddite, which I don't hold against him (some of my best friends, etc.), but I do hate him for other reasons that I find it difficult to articulate. It's just a feeling, you know? Like meeting someone at a party and wishing you'd gone for that Black Belt in May-Hem-Do. I don't know. I guess it's not a real rational sorta thing, but hey, what're ya gonna do?

We were trying to figure out if this Carl Anthony dude was black. Sure seemed like it. He was saying things that most of us Caucasians wouldn't be quick enough to think of right off. I guess another clue was the title of the chapter: "Ecopsychology and the Deconstruction of Whiteness." Robin and I were having a rockin good time reading and kibitzing on this exchange, especially when Roszak was digging his own grave in passages like the following...

ROSZAK: ...there are a whole set of references that the dominant white society has with blacks and these include nature references. But in the case of blacks, the psychological associations don't come out favorably. They come out as reference to jungles, savages, and wildness, and they take on a threatening aspect. Has it ever occurred to you that this is a strange reversal of the way in which nature metaphors and associations work?

ANTHONY: It's interesting to me that you used the word "jungle," because now we call it "rainforest."

ROSZAK: Rainforest, right. More benign. "Jungle" is the more menacing word.

ANTHONY: And when I was growing up, we always talked about "swamps." Now we talk about "wetlands." Do you know what a "wetland" is? It's a swamp that white people care about.

Mining for deeper background (and yet another citable source for my quasi-mythical book-in-progress), I came across the following piece from Psychology Today...

The term "ecopsychology" was coined 25 years ago by Theodore Roszak, Ph.D., author of The Voice of the Earth (Simon & Schuster, 1992) and a history professor at California State University at Hayward. It is grounded in the notion that people experience what renowned ethnobiologist and Harvard University professor Edward O. Wilson, Ph.D., calls "biophilia," an innate need to interact with the living world of which we're a part. But as humankind becomes increasingly reliant upon modern technology and less in tune with the natural environment, this disconnection from our roots instills feelings of restlessness and alienation and may undermine emotional health.

from: Nature's Path To Inner Peace by Carin Gorrell
source: Psychology Today, 1 July 2001
via: HighBeam Research
Copyright © 2001 Sussex Publishers, Inc.

Speaking of emotional health, to my way of thinking both Theodore Roszak and Carl Anthony are whackjobs of the first water, hearing -- as they claim to -- the lamentable cries of the wounded Earth. Uh-huh. But surely Anthony is the lesser nutcase -- the less deluded about the "spirituality" of Nature-with-a-capital-N, and a whole lot hipper with respect to swamps.