Table Of ContentEcopsychology, Phenomenology,
and the Environment
Douglas A. Vakoch • Fernando Castrillón
Editors
Ecopsychology,
Phenomenology,
and the Environment
The Experience of Nature
1 3
Editors
Douglas A. Vakoch Fernando Castrillón
SETI Institute, Center for SETI Research Department of Community Mental Health
California Institute of Integral Studies California Institute of Integral Studies
Mountain View San Francisco
USA USA
ISBN 978-1-4614-9618-2 ISBN 978-1-4614-9619-9 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-1-4614-9619-9
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A mi madre,
por la vida.
A mi padre,
por la palabra.
~Fernando Castrillón
Foreword
The Experience of Nature: Phenomenologies
of the Earth
On Wild Ethics
Phenomenology, as a style of refection and a practice of life, invites us to drop
beneath our accepted abstractions (to suspend our inherited notions and theoretical
conceptions) in order to pay close attention to our directly felt experience of things.
It asks us to notice the way that the surrounding world and its manifold constitu-
ents spontaneously disclose themselves to our most immediate awareness. Phenom-
enology invites us to trade in our concepts for fresh percepts, to trade theoretical
schemata for the difficult articulation of our ongoing experience of the real in its
inexhaustible strangeness.
Our lives unfold in continual contact and interchange with elemental presences
at once oddly familiar and uncannily other. The practice of mindful, phenomenolog-
ical attention strives to respect this strange otherness—whether of a phenomenon
that is fluid and dispersed or one that is neatly bounded, whether it is glimpsed in
the surroundings or felt in the depths of our own person. In the hands of some phe-
nomenologists, such a practice involves a resolute refusal to totalize the other—a
refusal to completely define or delimit the phenomenon as though it could be fully
possessed in thought.
After all, when we consider the visible and invisible earth around us as though
it were an object—when we conceive of nature merely as an objective set of me-
chanically determinate processes—we tacitly remove our thinking selves from the
world we inhabit. We pretend that we are not palpable creatures co-evolved with the
rest of earthly life, but are rather disembodied minds pondering reality from a god-
like position outside that reality. In this manner, we free our thinking selves from
any responsibility to the rest of the biosphere; we give ourselves license to engage
other animals, plants, landforms and natural elements merely as resources waiting
to be used by our species, as a clutch of fixed and finished entities waiting to be
manipulated and engineered to suit our purposes. To look upon any being strictly as
a definable object is to sever the possibility of real relationship with that being, and
so to forestall any need for ethical reflection.
If, however, we acknowledge the myriad presences around us not just as passive
objects but as material subjects in their own right—as open-ended beings with their
vii
viii Foreword
own inherent spontaneity and active agency—then we swiftly become aware of
the relationships that we sustain with those beings. Only then, when we allow the
things their own enigmatic dynamism and responsiveness, do we notice that we in-
habit a common world. And of course it is not only the other animals, plants, fungi,
and microorganisms with whom we actively share this world; it is also glaciers
and gathering thunderclouds, the asphalt street underfoot and the surging seawater
short-circuiting the nuclear reactor. In truth, every aspect of the sensuous surround-
ings can be experienced as an active, animate power, able to sense the beings around
it and to influence them in turn.
When we speak of the biosphere in this manner, not as an inert collection of pas-
sive and determinate objects but as a community of animate material agencies (of
corporeal subjects or bodies), we straightaway begin to feel ourselves as members
of this community, and to wonder about the quality of our relations with the other
beings in our neighborhood.
Such an approach demands great care and lucidity on the part of the would-be
practitioner. In careless hands, phenomenology can risk assimilating the wild multi-
plicity of things into too human a register, one not fully awake to the divergent weird-
ness hunkered or leaping within things, their outrageous differences from one another
and from us. An insectivorous bat unable to trust its echolocation skills, confounded
by the airborne fungus rapidly spreading through its colony; a Lincoln penny recently
unearthed in the flowerbed; the clacking antlers of two bull moose; a series of earth-
quakes provoked by hydraulic fracturing: each phenomenon, when we draw close
to it, organizes the things around it in odd and often incommensurable ways. The
real value of allowing some degree of spontaneity and agency across the full range
of phenomena is the opportunity it affords our own body to participate, to enter into
relation, to feel out the divergent ways in which specific things resist our advances—
the utterly unique way each entity has of torquing our assumptions, and returning us
to ourselves transformed. It offers a nuanced way of discovering difference…
The intuition that we inhabit a breathing cosmos—the awareness that the sen-
sible things around us are, like our own organism, sensate and perhaps even sentient
powers—is common to the discourse of a broad array of indigenous, traditionally
oral cultures. For in the absence of intervening technologies, the human senses can-
not help but encounter the world as a tangle of animate and expressive entities.
Since humans are bodily creatures thoroughly embedded in the sensuous cosmos,
we are able to encounter things only from our limited angle or perspective in the
midst of those things. Hence, we never directly experience another entity in its
totality—we can never completely penetrate or plumb the secrets of another being.
Each thing that we perceive has its accessible aspects and its hidden aspects, its
bright facets that capture our attention and its unseen dimensions that lure us deeper
into participation. Our perception of any presence is thus not an instantaneous event
but rather an unfolding interaction—a living interplay wherein a thing first “catches
our eye,” or subtly beckons to our body, to which we reply by focusing our gaze
upon it, or reaching out to touch it, whereupon the other replies by revealing some
further facet of itself, and so we are drawn ever deeper into a carnal conversation
with the unique allurement of this lichen-encrusted boulder or that fungus-ridden
tree stump. Bodily perception reveals the things around us not as inert or inanimate
Foreword ix
chunks of matter but as enigmatic, elemental presences that draw us into relation,
coaxing our attention or repulsing our curiosity, dazzling us with their resplendence
or dulling us with their plastic sheen.
To speak of the world solely as a cluster of neatly defined objects and determi-
nate, quantifiable processes is therefore to deny our direct experience: it avoids (and
consequently stifles) our instinctive, sensory engagement with things in favor of a
set of mental abstractions. It is a way of speaking, and thinking, that closes down
our animal senses.
To speak of this earthly cosmos, on the other hand, as a living field of relation-
ships between beings—each being with its own openness or creativity—is to speak
in accordance with our creaturely senses, and with our spontaneous bodily experi-
ence of the world around us. It is a way of speaking, and of thinking, that enhances
our sensory rapport with the sensuous terrain; a way that holds us in conscious rela-
tion to the elemental realities that enfold us. By acknowledging the inherent ambi-
guity and enigma of the myriad beings that surround us (by acknowledging that we
can never fathom all the secrets of even a single blade of grass), such a way of think-
ing engenders humility, and a steady wonder—the exuberant heart of a wild ethics.
At this curious moment in the world’s unfolding, when human violence toward
other humans is matched only by our violence toward the living earth—with ter-
restrial and oceanic ecosystems rapidly collapsing under the weight of our steady
assaults, and with countless species tumbling into oblivion as a result of our arro-
gant disregard—it is now evident that our own species must undergo a sea change if
anything of beauty is to survive.
If we wish to bring humankind into a new reciprocity with the rest of the bio-
sphere, then we will need to release ourselves from the tyranny of outmoded con-
cepts, and remember ourselves as a part of this breathing planet. We will need to
renew our felt experience of the land as a complex of sensitive and sentient powers,
as a boisterous community of beings in which our own lives are participant, and to
which we are beholden. This primordial form of experience, which returns us from
the pretense of disembodied detachment to our corporeal situation in the midst of
the here and now, engenders a new respect and restraint in all our actions. Divesting
ourselves of our abstractions, honoring the enigmatic otherness that things display
when we meet them in the depth of the present moment, enables an attentive and
ethical comportment in all our endeavors, an empathic attunement to our surround-
ings and a compassionate intention to do least harm.
For too long many of us have withheld our allegiance from the sustaining earth,
reserving our faith only for a mystery assumed to reside entirely beyond the sen-
suous. To return to our senses is to remember an older, indigenous faith that we
have never completely lost—our animal body’s implicit faith in the solid ground
underfoot and the renewal of light every dawn, its faith in mountains and rivers and
the cyclical return of the salmon, in the silent germination of seeds and the unseen,
imperturbable wind. It is this animal fidelity to the breathing earth, so easily over-
looked or forgotten, that unites us with countless other species—and it remains the
ground of every lasting ethic between persons, and between peoples. A faith in the
wild and shadowed goodness of the earth.
David Abram
Acknowledgments
Fernando Castrillón To my friend and colleague, Doug Vakoch, with whom I
have had the great pleasure of editing this book, I would like to express my pro-
found gratitude. Our work together started seven years ago when I was laboring
away on my dissertation. We forged an easy and convivial friendship and after a
few encounters, Doug approached me about putting something together in the area
of ecopsychology. The result has been a double-issue of the journal ReVision pub-
lished in Spring of 2010, and now this book. I am grateful to Doug for listening to
my words and seeing promise in me at such an early point.
I also thank Doug for his work on this volume. It was he who directed the first
phase of this project and set the thematic tone for the anthology as a whole. From
securing the contract with Springer Science+Business Media, recruiting contribu-
tors, and handling all of the paperwork associated with the production of the book
to answering my innumerable editorial questions; it was Doug who made this book
possible in the first place.
I am particularly grateful to the contributors in this volume. Not only was every
author a joy to work with, but also their submissions have left an indelible mark on
my sensibilities and outlook. I thank each of them for their courage, engagement,
and sincerity.
While I spend much of my time swimming in ecopsychological waters, I spend
the greater part of my life traversing psychoanalytic topographies. In that world, I
would like to thank my many colleagues and friends, including but not limited to
Néstor Braunstein for his ear, Bruce Fink for his questions, Raul Moncayo for his
encouragement, the analysts and candidates of the Lacanian School of Psychoanal-
ysis for their friendship and joie de vivre, my analysands, patients, and supervisees
for speaking and continually reminding me of the power of the word, the many
Latin American and European analysts I have come to know more recently, and
finally to P.G. for steadfastly maintaining the stance.
My colleagues, students, and friends at the California Institute of Integral Stud-
ies (CIIS) also deserve special mention and acknowledgment. While there are sim-
ply too many people to name here, I would like to give a special thanks to Kaisa
Puhakka for her generosity of spirit and grace, Tanya Wilkinson for her humor and
strength, Andrew Harlem for forging the connection, Ian Grand for always being
xi
xii Acknowledgments
there, Leland Van den Daele for the conversation, Benjamin R. Tong for his spirit,
Andrej Grubacic for the laughter and the politics, Steven Goodman for the com-
mentary, Michelle Eng for starting me out, Alec Macleod for the artistry, Sandra
Pacheco for the commitment, Amanda Morrison for the music, Charlotte Sáenz
por la risa, Steven Tierney for his fairness, Josefa Molina for her solidarity, Caro-
lyn Cooke for her strength, Craig Chalquist for the grounding, Janis Phelps for
the memory, Carol Whitfield for stepping up, Jacob Sherman for being a gentle-
men, Brian Swimme for his encouragement, Barbara Morrill for the laughter, Philip
Brooks for sharing, Sergio Rodriguez-Castillo for holding the space, Meg Jordan
for taking care of business, Sean Kelly for his insistence, and Joanne Gozawa for
the slide-show. A special thank you to President Joseph Subbiondo and Academic
Vice-President Judie Wexler for their unwavering support. The writing and editing
of this book would have taken much longer had it not been for a generous sabbatical
leave afforded to me by CIIS.
Thank you to Sylvana Ruggirello at Springer for all her expert work on this
book. Her knowledge and attention to detail have been crucial to the success of this
volume.
I have been fortunate enough to have many friends join me in my numerous and
varied excursions into the wild. Their friendship and words have helped me to open
up to the experience of nature itself. I especially wish to thank my brother Richard
Castrillón, Chris Christofferson, Chris Cerny, German Ascani, Christian Erickson,
and Matt Shields.
A big thank you to my family here in the USA and in South America. You have
been integral parts of this endeavor. And a hearty and loving welcome to the newest
addition to the Castrillón clan: my nephew Gabriel Fernando Castrillón.
My most sincere and heartfelt thanks go to my wife Holly S. Castrillón and my
son David Paolo Castrillón. As someone once told me, people meet on signifiers,
and this is truly the case for Holly and myself. In our case, it was the allure of the
Sierras that brought us together. Without her steadfast patience, love and sincerity
of heart, I would not have been able to edit this book. Gracias mi amor! As for my
son David, it was he that taught me that there is as much grandeur in a patch of dirt
as there is in all of the Trinity Alps. And for that, I am eternally grateful.
Douglas A. Vakoch To my friend Fernando Castrillon, who edited this book with
me, I am grateful for a collaboration that was as enjoyable as it was successful. I
thank Fernando for his ongoing work from the initial recruitment of contributors;
through structuring the book as a whole, writing the introduction, and working
with authors to refine their chapters; and finally for overseeing the book as it went
through every step of the production process. Without Fernando’s focused labor and
deep insight, this book would not exist.
To the authors of Ecopsychology, Phenomenology, and the Environment, I espe-
cially appreciate the innovation, depth, and sensitivity of the work they share here.
They deserve special thanks for thoughtfully engaging one another’s ideas, as re-
flected in the numerous cross-references between chapters throughout the volume.
