Environmental & Architectural
Phenomenology Newsletter
Selected Reviews
Shierry Weber Nicholsen, 2002. The Love of Nature and the End of the World: The Unspoken Dimensions of Environmental Concern. Cambridge: MIT Press. |
Reviewed byLouise Chawla
This book has its starting point in a persistent question: How can the public mind relegate matters of the environment, which is the ground of our whole lives, to the periphery of concern, as though they were the private interest of a group called “environmentalists”? At the same time, I have never met anyone who did not value and appreciate some part of the environment. How can we be so split in our thinking.
This opening question guides this book by Shierry Weber Nicholsen, a psychotherapist in private practice in Seattle, who for many years taught environmental philosophy and psychology in Antioch University’s Program on Environment and Community.
By the “public mind,” she does not mean politicians and the voters they mobilize: at least, not only actors in formal political processes. If this were the case, her question would be relatively easy to answer, because there is no shortage of reports that document how big money influences politics by attributing concern for the environment to “special interest” groups of environmentalists.
Instead, Nicholsen explores a much more difficult and less charted territory by extending the public mind to include people in their spheres of everyday life. As she uses the word “mind,” it includes perceptual experience and emotion. To answer this question, she assembles the insights of aesthetics and psychoanalysis.
She works through a collage of quotations and reflections, a method that she describes as “a series of interconnected meditations” or “a set of developing variations” on the theme of people’s simultaneous attachment to and destructiveness toward the natural world. In less deft hands, this method would quickly collapse into formless rambling, but the pieces hold together by echoes between the chapters, so that the reader has a sense of an outwardly expanding and inwardly deepening exploration.
In the process, Nicholsen introduces readers to an extensive, varied literature. As she notes, “With few exceptions, people writing about the natural environment and people concerned with the interior of the psyche have not drawn on each other’s work” (p. 2). Add to these two bodies of literature relevant texts from the field of aesthetics, and this interdisciplinary weaving alone makes this book worthwhile.
In addition to elaborating central images and ideas through this method, Nicholsen also seeks to evoke experiences, to bring to awareness “things unthought and unspoken.” The meditations on quotations invite readers to initiate their own lines of reflection, “allowing the phrases to resonate in the mind and lead one where one will” (p. 3).
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ppropriately, the book’s opening chapter deals with the unspoken, a sphere of everyday life that Nicholsen as a psychotherapist knows to be “a vast and important territory,” and one that she considers particularly relevant to human relationships with the natural environment.
We are silent, she observes, about our most intimate loves and our most overwhelming fears. She makes the case that these loves and fears include our dependency and identification with the natural world as the ground of our being—today, a world that we know to be wounded, whose destruction threatens our own.
Nicholsen argues that our apparent blindness to the scale of this destruction is in fact denial—the defense mechanism by which we not only hide the depth of our love, fear, pain and concern from others, but simultaneously from ourselves. She acknowledges many reasons why people understandably hide their loves and fears, but also affirms that, “There is a relief that comes with speaking, and with it a potential for growth, understanding and effectiveness” (p. 12). The purpose of this book is to indicate ways to open up this speaking through personal memory and through the insights of psychoanalysis and art.
In the field of psychoanalysis, Nicholsen draws together the work of Wilfred Bion, Harold Searles, D. W. Winnicott, Donald Meltzner, Robert Jay Lifton and James Hillman. She shows these authors’ relevance to an understanding of our environmental relationships, not only mining their best known books but also less known essays and articles, often making surprising but apt connections.
In the area of aesthetic theory, she draws upon the work of Christopher Alexander, especially his writing on early Turkish carpets in which he argued that beauty and aesthetic experience bridge and unify our human and natural worlds and our internal and external experience.
Reflecting on the ideas of Christopher Alexander, David Abrams, Thoreau and Cezanne, she elaborates the possibility for a relation with the natural world that she terms “perceptual reciprocity.” Convinced by the argument of Paul Shepard that cultures that encourage this type of perception also foster a greater degree of maturity, she proposes the concept of “perceptual maturity.”
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icholsen relates the type of “binocular vision” that perceptual maturity involves to phenomenology. “Phenomenology,” she suggests, “as the philosophical approach that attempts to step back from categories and experience things directly, might then provide humans with a sense of something more like embodied limits, which would in turn leave room for the other creatures” (p. 170).
Certainly, phenomenology shares her shift of attention to “the unspoken.” The binocular vision that she advocates requires alertness to the direct experience of things, which opens us to our embodiedness and interconnectedness with the natural world, along with awareness of cultural perspectives and the perspective shaped within us by language. This openness is, indeed, the phenomenological task.
In this phenomenological space, which Nicholsen associates with Winicott’s concept of the “holding environment,” people and groups can be open to the fear, mourning and joy that come with their connectedness to the natural world. Through admitting and feeling loss, people can move on together to meet the challenges they face.
Facing the emotional issues raised by our connectedness to a natural world in grave peril, Nicholsen believes, “means not only suffering the pain of them; it also means reflecting on their meaning so that we learn from experience, and allowing this reflection to give rise to experimental action.” In this way, we find “places where experiments to meet adaptive challenges are generated” (p. 196).
These “holding environments” opened up by the phenomenology of “perceptual maturity” are public spaces in Nicholsen’s broad sense of the public mind. At their best, political leaders will create these environments within formal political processes, but they may also be created by groups of all kinds.
Nicholsen’s hope for her book is that “the temporary intellectual community created by the internal dialogue between author and reader” will form one space of this kind (p. 197). In an area where more reflection is urgently needed, this book has successfully gathered important and relevant work from many authors and disciplines, insightfully drawn connections, and indicated potentially productive lines of thought for readers to follow further.
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