San Juan Island, Washington -- December 3, 2009: It has been presented to the website of the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen that the reason global warming threatens the well-being of life as we know it is because we have failed to address an easily remedied warp in the way we usually learn to think.
Dr. Michael J. Cohen, director of Project NatureConnect at the Akamai University Institute of Applied Ecopsychology has alerted the conference that we destructively think in ways that are out of balance with our planetary home. While Mother Earth creates and supportively governs her perfections through her love of life, we teach our psyche to believe in industrial schemes that deteriorate Earth's ability to renew and restore life in balance.
Cohen suggests that to reverse detrimental climate change, the Conference must help all nations learn how to teach our contemporary thinking to make sensory contacts with nature, backyard or back country. These sensory connections help our psyche interlace with nature's healing ways to increase well-being, in and around us. The contact creates powerful moments in which Earth enables our thinking to recycle and transform our misguided industrial beliefs into the beauty of sane, reasonable and balanced relationships with the global life community.
"Learning to co-create with the natural world reduces climate change and it promotes personal and global peace, too," says Cohen, who is the author of "Educating, Counseling and Healing With Nature" and the Project NatureConnect website at www.ecopsych.com. He claims that we suffer because we deny that our society's nature-conquering bias makes the way we think believe it is superior to the attraction-sensitive way that nature produces its perfection.
The pioneering mission of Project NatureConnect (PNC) is to increase personal, social and environmental health and wellness. It accomplishes this by helping individuals genuinely connect their thinking and feeling with the healing intelligence of nature's self-correcting flow, in and around them. The online program's low-cost, UNESCO approved, training courses and degrees at Akamai University enable students to make conscious sensory contact with the life-wisdom of the eons that they learn to discover in themselves and in local or remote natural areas.
An anonymous PNC graduate student wrote in her field study journal,: "Through integrating the principles and practices of nature-connecting into my life I recognize this perfect release valve for stress and a never-ending source for rejuvenation. It has become so much a part of me that it never leaves. For example, today the weather reminds me that I am planning to install a water barrel rain water collection system. I am inspired. I find myself doing "green" things out of LOVE and gratitude for the earth rather than being fear driven by frightening global warming messages. I find myself constantly seeking small ways to lesson our "footprint" on earth: switching to rechargeable batteries, unplugging cords when not in use, using earth-friendly cleaning products, making careful choices about the content of clothing and how its made (hemp, organic cotton), buying used/recycled when possible. This results from the difference in thinking of Mother Earth as a breathing, living, loving home that sustains us rather than as a used up and polluted planet that is doomed. When I think of Earth now, I see and feel GREEN all the way to my marrow."
For additional information and free materials:
www.ecopsych.com
360-378-6313
nature@interisland.net
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Program Founder and Director:
Recipient of the 1994 Distinguished World Citizen Award, Ecopsychologist Michael J. Cohen, Ph.D., is a Program Director of the Institute of Global Education, where he coordinates its Integrated Ecology Department and Project NatureConnect. He also serves on the Ecopsychology faculty of Portland State University and Akamai University. Dr. Cohen has founded sensory environmental education outdoor programs independently and for the National Audubon Society and Lesley University (AEI). He conceived the 1985 National Audubon Conference "Is the Earth a Living Organism," and is an award winning author of "Educating, Counseling and Healing With Nature," "The Web Of Life Imperative"and "Reconnecting With Nature." A video about his lifework may be viewed at http://www.imdb.comtitle/tt1357054/
"We cannot win the battle to increase the well-being of the web of life, that includes our life, without strengthening our natural senses, our emotional bonds with nature - for we will not fight to save what we do not love."
- Michael J. Cohen
http://www.ecopsych.com/mjcohen.html
Email: nature@interisland.net
360-378-6313, Pacific Time Zone
The following is the content of Dr. Cohen's statement to the Conference:
The root of our most challenging problems, including global warming, has been identified. It is this: An unreasonable, emotionally bonded bias in our thinking rewards us for damaging the prime source of our personal, social and environmental well-being.
Our bias pays us to ignore that:
- the flow of natural systems, in and around us, has biologically and psychologically designed us to be supportive citizens of the global life community, not conquers of it.
- nature's supportive ways sensibly nurture, purify and restore our well being and this includes our ability to think clearly about global warming and many other challenges that face us.
For more than 99 percent of our lifetime our thoughts and senses are disconnected from direct sensory contact with nature's revitalizing flow. This excessive separation of our psyche from the nature's grace creates problems that we can't solve. It estranges us. We are removed from the source of our ability to think and feel like nature's self-correcting powers work.
When we wisely choose to reconnect our psyche with nature, we benefit from participating in the wellness of the web-of-life and its capacity to recycle our stressed or contaminated thinking. This is demonstrated by the renewal that results from even a short walk in the park.
In our excessively nature-separated lives, it is the profound absence of nature's regenerative qualities and spirit that underlies our personal and environmental dilemmas.
Learning how to make lasting sensory contact with nature enables our psyche to bind with nature's healing ways and increase well-being, in and around us. It empowers us to give nature the space it needs to help our thinking transform our misguided bonds into the beauty of sane, reasonable and balanced relationships. This process is readily available at http://www.ecopsych.com.
Will you please help the conference become aware of this remedy that we presently overlook?
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