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Virtually everyone values some aspect of the natural world. Yet many people are surprisingly unconcerned about environmental issues, treating them as the province of special interest groups. Seeking to understand how our appreciation for the beauty of nature and our indifference to its destruction can coexist in us, Shierry Weber Nicholsen explores dimensions of our emotional experience with the natural world that are so deep and painful that they often remain unspoken. The Love of Nature and the End of the World is a gathering of meditations and collages. Its evocations of our emotional attachment to the natural world and the emotional impact of environmental deterioration are meant to encourage individual and collective reflection on a difficult dilemma. Nicholsen draws on work in environmental philosophy and ecopsychology; the writings of psychoanalytic thinkers such as Wilfred Bion, Donald Meltzer, and D. W. Winnicott; and ideas from Buddhist and Sufi traditions. She shows how our emotional responses to the vulnerabilities of the natural world range from intense caring and compassion, through grief and outrage, to diffuse depression. Individual chapters focus on silence and the process whereby we move from the unspoken to the spoken, the love of nature, the "perceptual reciprocity" with the natural world to which we might mature, beauty in the human and natural realms, the psychological impact of the destruction of the natural world, and reflections on the future.
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The Love of Nature and the End of the World This page intentionally left blank The Love of Nature and the End of the World The Unspoken Dimensions of Environmental Concern Shierry Weber Nicholsen The MIT Press Cambridge, Massachusetts London, England 2002 Massachusetts Institute of Technology All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or information storage and retrieval) without permission in writing from the publisher. This book was set in Berkeley Old Style Book by Achorn Graphic Services, Inc. on the Miles 33 system. Printed and bound in the United States of America. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Nicholsen, Shierry Weber. The love of nature and the end of the world : the unspoken dimensions of environmental concern / Shierry Weber Nicholsen. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-262-14076-4 (hc. : alk. paper) 1. Human ecology—Philosophy. 2. Environmental degradation—Psychological aspects. I. Title. GF21 .N53 2001 179′.1—dc21 2001044329 Arden H. Nicholsen in memoriam This page intentionally left blank Contents Acknowledgments Introduction ix 1 1 Many Silences 7 2 The Love of Nature and the Concern for Life 3 Tangling at the Roots of Being: Perception as Field and Reciprocity 63 4 What Beauty Can Tell Us: The Face of Nature 5 A Severe and Pervasive Apathy: Trauma, Destructiveness, and the End of the World 129 6 The Future and the Possible Concluding Thoughts Bibliography 201 Name Index 209 Subject Index 213 195 161 35 95 This page intentionally left blank Acknowledgments The stuff of this book is derived in large part from conversations with many people in many contexts over the past years—friends, colleagues, teachers, and students; people I have come to know in Seattle’s psychoanalytic community, in Antioch University’s Environment & Community program, in the arts, and elsewhere. There are many people to whom I am grateful for very specific contributions, of widely varying kinds, to the