Educational Psychology—Limitations and Possibilities

466 The Praeger Handbook of Education and Psychology
many deep ecologists, there is also an explicit political agenda that includes calls to reduce human
populations, to rethink the Western corporate obsessions for endless economic growth, to move
toward smaller-scale modes of production, and to embrace more local governance structures.
A major recommendation in the deep ecological agenda is bioregionalism, a movement toward
region-appropriate lifestyles and production activities.
Attentiveness to situation is a prominent theme in ecological discourses. Ecopsychology, for
example, is oriented by the assertion that widespread feelings of personal isolation and collective
dysfunction are mainly rooted in people’s separations from the natural world, as opposed to
separations from other humans or imagined selves, as posited within much of contemporary
psychological research. The main therapeutic tool of ecopsychologists is reconnection to nature.
Another emergent discourse is ecofeminism, in which it is argued that prevailing worldviews
are not just anthropocentric (human-dominant) but androcentric (male-dominant). Proponents
note close correspondences between the beliefs and structures that contribute to the oppression
of women and those that contribute to the oppression of nature. In effect, ecofeminists, along
with deep ecologists, argue that anti-oppression discourses and movements should include the
category of nature along with race, class, gender, and sexuality.
The issue of how humans discriminate themselves from other living forms is common across
many branches of Western thought. For example, across ancient mystical and religious systems,
the human tends to be distinguished from the nonhuman by virtue of a soul. In Enlightenment-era
rationalist and empiricist discourses, the means of differentiation is the faculty of reason, which
is often assumed (inappropriately) to be a strictly human competency. Across such twentiethcentury
discourses as structuralism and poststructuralism, humans are set apart by language and
other capacities for symbolically mediated interaction. For complexivists, the human brain is
frequently cited as the most sophisticated structure that is known, and human consciousness and
social systems are often described as the highest known forms of organization.
Across most ecological movements, this apparent need to discriminate between the human and
the not-human is interrupted. This point is true of deep ecology, ecopsychology, and ecofeminism.
And it is particularly true of those ecological discourses that are clustered under the umbrella
term of ecospirituality, some of which have pressed toward modes of description and engagement
that are highly reminiscent of ancient mystical traditions and that represent a dramatic break from
the sensibilities that frame most research in psychology.
Ecospiritual movements have found a perhaps surprising ally in recent neurological research.
There is mounting evidence that humans are physiologically predisposed to mystical and spiritual
experiences—that is, to such feelings or sensations as timelessness, boundlessness, transcendence,
and oneness that have been commonly associated with spiritual events (Newberg et al., 2001).
Until quite recently, the psychological explanation for mystical and religious experience was
that the experience was in some sort of pathological state such as a neurosis, a psychosis, or
another problem with brain function. (In fact, the American Psychiatric Association listed “strong
religious belief” as a mental disorder until 1994.) The associated assumption, that the mystic or
religious zealot is prone to losing touch with reality, has proven problematic on several levels.
Psychology has been unable to prove the assumption that spiritual experience is the product of
delusional minds. On the contrary, it appears that those who experience genuine mystical states or
who live devoted religious lives tend to have much higher levels of psychological health than the
general population. There is further evidence that mystical experiences are quite unlike psychotic
states. The latter tend toward confused and even terrifying hallucinations; the former tend to be
described with such terms as serenity, wholeness, and love (Newberg et al., 2001).
Such events, in fact, may not be all that unusual. Virtually everyone can recall an experience
of being lost in a book, immersed in an activity, or caught up in a crowd. Such experiences can
also be induced and enhanced through repetitive, rhythmic activity—which should perhaps not