Eco-Anxiety and Pandemic Distress: Psychological Perspectives on Resilience and Interconnectedness

217 Pages·2022·8.256 MB·English

by  Douglas Vakoch, Sam Mickey

Eco- Anxiety and Pandemic Distress

Eco- Anxiety and
Pandemic Distress
Psychological Perspectives on Resilience and
Interconnectedness
Edited by
DOUGLAS A. VAKOCH, PHD AND
SAM MICKEY, PHD
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ISBN 978– 0– 19– 762267– 4
DOI: 10.1093/ oso/ 9780197622674.001.0001
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Contents
About the Authors vii
Introduction: Eco-A nxiety, Climate Change, and
the Coronavirus 1
Panu Pihkala
PART 1. CULTIVATING CONNECTION AND
RESILIENCE
1. Cultivating Belonging: Healing Defensive Anxiety in
Times of Collective Trauma 31
Jan Edl Stein
2. From Eco- Anxiety to Eco-R esilience: Toward a
Psychology of Care 42
Linda Buzzell and Craig Chalquist
3. Walking, Wilderness, and Exposure: Learning from
Thoreau’s Episode on Katahdin 54
Christopher C. Kirby
4. Self- Quarantine: Deepening Natural Encounter
During COVID-1 9 65
Elektra Mercutio
5. Setting Up for Practice with Eco-C onscious Clients 74
Jamie Keaton Jones
PART 2. SOCIOLOGY AND CULTURAL
PSYCHOLOGY
6. Eco- Anxiety as a Global Affect 89
Jaouad Achtitah and Said Mentak
7. Eco- Anxiety in a Risk Society: A Sociological Perspective 99
Leonard A. Steverson
vi Contents
8. The Complex Role of Anxiety in Public Engagement:
Lessons from the COVID-1 9 Crisis for Climate
Communications 110
Rhéa Rocque, Laura Cameron, and Ian Mauro
9. Behavior Change During COVID-1 9: A Matter of Life and
Death? 122
Filia Garivaldis and Muhammad Iqbal
PART 3. DIVERSE GLOBAL RESPONSES
10. The House of Man: Sheltering in the Anthropocene 133
Susan Haris and Bharati Puri
11. Adapting to Eco-A nxiety: Experiences from Zambia 143
Fred Moonga
12. Psychiatric Ward Lockdown in Latin America:
Experiences from the Coronavirus Pandemic 154
Juan Evangelista Tercero Gaitán Buitrago
13. Telepsychology as the Primary Mental Health Care
Response to the COVID-1 9 Pandemic in the Philippines 162
Emmanuel Villoria Hernani
14. Sounding the Environmental Benefits of the COVID-19
Pandemic in Southern Nigeria 173
Olusegun Stephen Titus
Index 187
About the Authors
Jaouad Achtitah earned his BA in English Literature and MA in Green
Cultural Studies from the Faculty of Letters and Human Sciences at the
University Mohammed I in Oujda, Morocco. Now he is a PhD candidate in
the same faculty under the supervision of Said Mentak. Achtitah’s area of re-
search is affect theory and environment. He organized and contributed to
several roundtable discussions as well as national and international con-
ferences about environmental issues. Achtitah is a president of an ecolog-
ical association in Morocco called the Association of Cultural Ecology and
Communication (ACEC). Also, he is a high-s chool teacher of English, and
he has had a good deal of training on pedagogy.
Linda Buzzell, MA, LMFT, is a psychotherapist and ecotherapist. She is
the co- editor with Craig Chalquist of Ecotherapy: Healing with Nature
in Mind (Sierra Club Books, 2009). She is on the Editorial Board of
Ecopsychology, the peer- reviewed journal in the field, and is Adjunct Faculty
at Pacifica Graduate Institute, where she teaches ecotherapy. She is co- host
of “Ecopsychology Voices,” the ongoing video interview series produced by
the Canadian Ecopsychology Network, and co-a dministrator of the 10,000-
member Ecopsychology Facebook group. She has written over 75 blog posts
on ecopsychology and ecotherapy for The Huffington Post. In 2006 she re-
ceived her Permaculture Design Certificate and with her husband has cre-
ated a backyard food forest around her home that serves as her ecotherapy
office. She co-f ounded a Voluntary Simplicity Circle that met for 10 years in
her community and was one of the pioneers of the Eco-H ood concept.
Laura Cameron is Research Associate at the Prairie Climate Centre in
Winnipeg, Manitoba. With an MA in Indigenous Governance from the
University of Winnipeg and an HBSc in Biology from McGill University, her
research interests are transdisciplinary, with a focus on climate change com-
munications and public engagement. Currently, she is working on a three-
year project on communicating the health impacts of climate change, funded
by the Public Health Agency of Canada.
viii About the Authors
Craig Chalquist, PhD, is Professor of East-W est Psychology at the California
Institute of Integral Studies (CIIS) and former Associate Provost of Pacifica
Graduate Institute. He teaches at the intersection of psyche, story, nature,
reenchantment, and imagination through courses on depth psychology, ap-
plied folklore, ecotherapy, and his own field of terrapsychology, the study
of how the things of the world get into our hearts and live there: “Converse
with everything!” Founder of the world’s first ecotherapy certificate program,
Dr. Chalquist is on the board of Holos Institute and on the editorial board
of the journal Ecopsychology. His books include Ecotherapy: Healing with
Nature in Mind (edited with Linda Buzzell), Myths Among Us: When Timeless
Tales Return to Life (World Soul Books, 2018), and Terrapsychological
Inquiry: Restorying Our Relationship with Nature, Place, and Planet
(Routledge, 2020).
Juan Evangelista Tercero Gaitán Buitrago, MD, graduated from Universidad
del Quindío in 2010, after which he dedicated himself to primary care and
clinical care in the mental health environment. In 2016 he graduated as an
addiction specialist from Universidad Católica Luis Amigó and partici-
pated as a speaker and consultant in several specialized addiction services
in Colombia. In the same year he traveled to Argentina to continue his ed-
ucation in psychiatry, while at the same time strengthening his competence
in dementia care. In 2018 he presented his new psychological model named
consequence theory, based on a classical philosophical framework coupled
with cutting- edge neuroscience. He graduated as a psychiatrist in 2019, after
which he traveled back to his home country. Currently he gives seminars
about this psychological model and its clinical applications, mainly in addic-
tion medicine, and he works as an addiction specialist in an addiction treat-
ment ward in the town of Filandia in the province of Quindío, Republic of
Colombia. Among his works are his dissertations on consequence theory, a
published systematic review on the operational aspects of informed consent
under Colombian legislation, and his work on the legal aspects of telemental
health in the book Psicosis actuales: locura y alienación.
Filia Garivaldis, PhD, is Senior Lecturer at the Monash Sustainable
Development Institute (MSDI) of Monash University, Melbourne. She is
leading the development of the online education portfolio of the Institute
on behavior change and is involved in teaching and learning scholar-
ship. Garivaldis is a founding member of an online education Community
About the Authors ix
of Practice, which serves to contribute to and further develop and expand
evidence- based best practice in online teaching, learning, and research.
In 2019 Garivaldis led an inter-f aculty initiative to create Monash’s first
university- wide orientation resource for all online students. Her research
interests concern individual differences in behavior change. Specifically, her
PhD focused on self- regulation ability in the pursuit of personal goals, and
the moderating effect of implicit emotion. She has authored several peer-
reviewed publications, and has attended many conferences, where she has
presented her research. In terms of online education research, Garivaldis
has investigated the impact of various online teaching and learning
practices, and is co-e ditor and author of various chapters on a joint Monash
University– King’s College London textbook, Tertiary Online Teaching and
Learning: TOTAL Digital Education Perspectives and Resources (Springer–
Verlag, 2020).
Susan Haris is a doctoral candidate in Literature and Philosophy in the
Humanities and Social Sciences Department at the Indian Institute of
Technology (IIT) Delhi. She earned her MA in English at St. Stephen’s
College, Delhi University. She researches poetry, multispecies ethnography,
and the Anthropocene. Her work has appeared in such publications as The
Economic and Political Weekly, Frontline, and Scroll. Her review of Ling
Ma’s novel Severance recently appeared on the wire as “The Pandemic as
Prescience: Reading ‘Severance’ in the Time of COVID-1 9.”
Emmanuel Villoria Hernani, PhD, is a teacher, researcher, psychologist, and
psychotherapist who has long considered himself to have learned more from
experience than from classroom instruction. He has presented hundreds of
workshops and training programs on substance use, relationship enhance-
ment and engagement, and psycho-l egal issues. He has served in various
court circuits in the Philippines as an expert witness on psycho-l egal issues.
As a psychotherapist, he has been conducting assessment, counseling, and
psychotherapy to victims of violence, child abuse, drug addiction, and per-
sonal and family crisis for 20 years. As an academician, he has served as a
dean, department chair, student organization advisor, and counselor. At pre-
sent he is Associate Professor in Psychology and the Chair of the Research
Ethics Committee of Cebu Normal University. A Gestalt therapy prac-
titioner and advocate, he is an active member of the Association for the
Advancement of Gestalt Therapy—A n International Community. He was