Director, Theodore Roszak, Professor of History, California State University, Hayward.

Associate Directors, Scott Stine, Professor of Geography and Environmental Studies, California State University, Hayward.

George Miller, Professor of Anthropology, California State University, Hayward.

Mary Gomes, Assistant Professor of Psychology, Sonoma State University.

Allen Kanner, Lecturer Wright Institute, Berkeley, California.

The Ecopsychology Institute was established at California State University, Hayward in April 1994 to facilitate an international dialogue between two communities: environmental scientists/ activists on the one hand, and psychologists/psychotherapists on the other.

The Institute and its newsletter were launched with a grant from the Goldman Environmental Foundation. Each year the Goldman Foundation awards the highly-regarded Goldman Prize to a selection of Environmental Heroes chosen from each of six continents. The Foundations effort to create a new, heroic role in the world for supposedly ordinary people who work to save the planet is an excellent example of ecopsychology in action.
The goals of the Ecopsychology Institute include the following:

1. We seek a fuller understanding by environmentalists of the psychological dimension of their work, especially with respect to winning the attention and support of the public and to finding more effective ways to encourage healthy environmental behavior. Ecopsychologists believe the environmental movement urgently requires a broader psychology of persuasion than reliance upon fear, guilt, and punishment. They believe there are positive, more enduring and reinforcing motivations for good environmental citizenship.

2. We have initiated discussion of an environmentally-based definition of mental health that could be made legally actionable by environmental lawyers and used as a factor in policy-making. The Ecopsychology Institute seeks to draw environmental lawyers and policy-makers into our dialogue and to make our research and expertise useful to them as expert witnesses in courts of law and before congressional committees and as consultants in shaping environmental priorities.

3. Such a redefinition of mental health requires a consensus among psychologists and therapists that balanced environmental relations are a significant emotional factor in people's lives. Conversely, there must be a professional consensus that dysfunctional environmental relations can harm the mental health of individuals, communities, neighborhoods, children, or the human species at large. The Ecopsychology Institute will facilitate and disseminate research to strengthen that consensus.

4. The Ecopsychology Institute wishes to build a network that will keep its constituent communities in touch.

5. In the long term the Ecopsychology Institute wishes to see ecopsychology become a mainstream academic discipline leading to a degree and to professional work. The correspondence we receive leads us to believe there is a widespread interest among students in this field of inquiry. We believe there are many roles for ecopsychology professionals in our society: as advisors to environmental organizations, as consultants in environmental litigation, as policy-makers, as mediators in environmental disputes, as therapeutic practitioners, as environmental educators who emphasize the emotional, motivational, and psychological aspects of environmental issues.

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