Humboldt, Romantic Science and Ecocide: a Walk in the Woods
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Humboldt, Romantic Science and Ecocide: a Walk in the Woods Johanna L. Degen 1 & Paul Rhodes 2 & Scott Simpson 3 & Rosanne Quinnell 4 Received: 24 January 2020 / Revised: 23 February 2020 / Accepted: 27 February 2020 # Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020
Abstract
Psychology as a science has focussed on internal landscapes at the expense of external ones, a fact that becomes increasingly problematic as we struggle to accept and respond to the climate crisis and its psychoterratic sequelae. This paper, written at the time of the 2019/2020 summer bushfires in Australia, takes inspiration from the Romantic Science of von Humboldt to document our affective response to our natural environment. We aimed, through a method of Flaneurie, to focus and respond and in doing so advocate for this kind of meandering as psychogeographic research. We were inspired also, in presenting our findings, by contemporary post-qualitative methodology, weaving together our observation and introspection in bricolage, to access knowledge beyond the nosology of presumptions, codes and themes. This paper links mental health and well-being to the natural environment, today a political objective. Showing that the human-nature relationship has crucial leverage for the subjects psyche and thus is highly relevant for psychology and psychological science. Keywords Post-qualitative research . Climate change . Eco-anxiety . Human-nature relationship . Mental health . von Humboldt . Romantic Science
I caught this morning morning’s minion, king-dom of daylight’s dauphin, dapple-dawndrawn Falcon, in his riding Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding High
* Johanna L. Degen [email protected] Paul Rhodes [email protected] Scott Simpson [email protected] Rosanne Quinnell [email protected] Extended author information available on the last page of the article
Degen et al.
there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing In his ecstasy! then off, off forth on swing, As a skate’s heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend: the hurl and gliding Rebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding Stirred for a bird,—the achieve of, the mastery of the thing! The Windhover Gerard Manley Hopkins: Poems and Prose (Hopkins 1985)
Psychoterratic Distress Psychology, as a science, has typically concerned itself with the intrapsychic world, with theoretical formulations based on unconscious or cognitive pathology cut-off from culture and place. This position is dissociative, failing to account for the cultural production of both pathology and the treatments designed to cure it. This homeostatic position has been amplified further by the status of psychology as a science-only, where therapy is driven by a diagnostic nosology, cementing disorder in, as both the fault and the responsibility of the sufferer. Sadly, we are left with a field that has failed to extricate itself from individualism, with formulations based on machine models of the isolated mind. In contemporary times, psychology must focus on the fact that human
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