Green Psychology: Transforming Our Relationship to the Earth

Metzner, who worked at Harvard in the 1960s with Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert (they co-wrote The Psychedelic Experience), is currently a psychotherapist in California and the author of several books, including Maps of Consciousness. At once visionary and down-to-earth, his latest is an often profound exploration of the deeply disturbed relationship between humanity and nature, which, in his diagnosis, is leading to worldwide ecological destruction. Building on the work of Mircea Eliade, Marija Gimbutas and others, Metzner traces our dissociation from Mother Earth some 6000 years back, when invading Indo-European tribes conquered the relatively peaceful, matriarchal cultures of Old Europe, replacing Earth Goddess worship with sky-and-war-god religions and patriarchy. In later epochs, he maintains, as Christian monotheism and mechanistic science stamped out polytheistic animism, the Western psyche was increasingly marked by a ""human superiority complex,"" along with a presumed right to dominate and exploit nature, animals and other societies. Metzner seeks the basis for an ecological ethic, not always convincingly, in shamanistic interaction with nature, alchemy, yoga and mind-expanding plants used sacramentally by indigenous cultures. Assembled from essays published in ReVision, the Sun and elsewhere, his book has a patchwork quality. On balance, however, his useful synthesis should appeal to Gaian scientists, environmentalists, students of myth and holistic thinkers. Illustrated. (Aug.)