ECOPSYCHOLOGY ON-LINE: Politics

        IN OUR LAST issue of Ecopsychology On-Line, the Eco-Psy Forum featured a selection of "Natural Epiphanies," essays of a highly personal character that related moments of special insight and emotional power. Moments like these often get lost when we take up an environmental cause or turn to making policy. In becoming political, we often feel impelled to be as "objective," meaning as cool, impersonal, and quantitative, as possible.
        This issue of the website turns "outward" to deal with tough questions of environmental law and policy. In the Eco-Psy Forum, you will find several views of the relationship between mental health and the law. And here, in our Politics section, we offer essays that infuse their analysis of environmental issues with strong psychological insight. Tom Hayden discusses the ways in which the underlying worldview of the environmental movement influences the practical political choices we make; Allen Kanner asks what the symbolism of Mount Rushmore, America's most famous national monument, tells us about the dominant culture's environmental sensibility. Carl Anthony probes the troubling racial undercurrents of our urban ecology, and Molly Young Brown recalls how the wilderness illuminated her Los Alamos childhood and taught her the horrors of the atomic age.
        If ecopsychology has anything special to offer, it lies in just such efforts to trace environmental ideas and behavior back to their deep, emotional sources.

	Mount Rushmore Syndrome by Allen Kanner
	"The United States has imposed its human face onto the nation's countryside, overriding nature's presence with monumental cities and an ego to match."
	The Politics of Nature by Tom Hayden
	"The machinery of politics is based on a heartless and hidden debasement of nature."
	A Multicultural Approach to Ecopsychology by Carl Anthony and Renée Soule
	"Our survival depends on sharing -- both in terms of economic equity and the wisdom of each others' cultures."
	Awakening from a Cultural Trance by Molly Young Brown
	"In Los Alamos, emotions became taboo. Emotions might call into question the behavior so elaborately rationalized by thought."
	Positively Fourth Street: Mount Rushmore Reclaimed An Essay Without Words by John Rampley

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