The Fierce Urgency of Now: The Case for Including the Environmental Field in Clinical Work

The same forces that have caused climate change have also affected people. The impact of those forces has been hard to see because physical environments are primarily perceived as separate from the person. This bifurcation of the human-ecosystem relationship may be a factor in many common mental health problems as well as in continued environmental abuse. In this paper, I advocate for understanding the baseline human-ecosystem relationship along with speculating about climate change’s impacts on mental health. Knowing this relationship can augment psychotherapeutic techniques to create a more integrated human-ecosystem relationship, mitigate the effects of climate change on psychological well-being, and foster increased care for the environment. Using object-relations theory and environmentally informed structural-developmental theory, I suggest the existence of ecological object relationships. They are acted upon systemically (Actor Network Theory), acquired developmentally through an integrationist view of language, and become units of analysis that can be therapeutically applied in clinical work. Ecotherapy is a therapeutic approach that utilizes the clinician, the physical environment, and the person being treated in a temporal framework that can heal the dissociative split in the human-ecosystem relationship, strengthening mental and communal health.