Voice of the Earth

In his latest book Theodore Roszak searches for the environmental dimensions of sanity where conventional psychology leaves off: at the threshold of the nonhuman world. He writes: "The sanity that binds us to one another in society is not necessarily the sanity that bonds us companionably to the creatures with whom we share the Earth. If we could assume the viewpoint of nonhuman nature, what passes for sane behavior in our social affairs might seem madness. But as the prevailing Reality Principle would have it, nothing could be greater madness than to believe that beast and plant, mountain and river have a 'point of view.'" The Voice of the Earth seeks to bridge this centuries-old split between the psychological and the ecological. A true "ecopsychology," Roszak insists, sees the needs of the planet and the needs of the person as a continuum. In a sense that weaves science and psychiatry, poetry and politics together, he shows that the ecological priorities of the biosphere are coming to be expressed through our most private emotional and spiritual travail. The Earth's cry for rescue from the punishing weight of the industrial system we have created is our own cry for a scale and quality of life that will free us to become the whole and healthy person that more and more members of our species are coming to believe we were born to be.