The Ecopsychology Project

When we view our cities or think about them, we can imagine the change that must have occurred. We can even understand without difficulty that much of the change has been damaging to the environment, but according to some psychologists, we don't always make the connection to how it is damaging us. The world we are born into becomes the baseline from which we form our basic, normative perception of the world we live in, against which we measure change later in our lives. A kind of environmental amnesia sets it, and our sense of what once was, what was taken away, built over, was always there, and it always will be. But what if we had access to that distant past? What if we are able to connect our present sense of the world - the world we grew up in - to the world that once gave so much to us in return? Would we be motivated to shape it? Would feel a greater responsibility to act? This podcast series is an attempt to do just that. Access to full report of LA River Watershed's Historical Ecology Visit the Series' website for more information

When we view our cities or think about them, we can imagine the change that must have occurred. We can even understand without difficulty that much of the change has been damaging to the environment, but according to some psychologists, we don't always make the connection to how it is damaging us. The world we are born into becomes the baseline from which we form our basic, normative perception of the world we live in, against which we measure change later in our lives. A kind of environmental amnesia sets it, and our sense of what once was, what was taken away, built over, was always there, and it always will be. But what if we had access to that distant past? What if we are able to connect our present sense of the world - the world we grew up in - to the world that once gave so much to us in return? Would we be motivated to shape it? Would feel a greater responsibility to act? This podcast series is an attempt to do just that. Access to full report of LA River Watershed's Historical Ecology Visit the Series' website for more information

For many of us, we have spent our lives exploring who we are, shaping our identity to the self. From a young age, we are given language and symbols that orient this forming identity to the world from a cultural perspective relayed to us by our parents, caregivers, media, and our education system. Included in this shaping of our identity is how we view and relate to other animals. What is that relationship today? How did it come to be? How does it in turn shape the way animals exist in and around our human communities, and what might this contemporary relationship be doing to our own health and well-being? I attempt to explore these questions and more in this episode.  This will be the first of a series of episodes on the topic of animal relations, as I have come to find through the production of this first part just how complex of a topic it is.  To begin, I am joined by Matt Fogarty, an author and a mental health counselor who practices place-based therapy in his professional work. We talk about the importance of connecting to animals, what it means to be an animal as a human, the trauma of separation, and how we can look towards children for keys to the answers to our own healing. You can find more information about Matt and his work at https://www.truenaturecounseling.com/ I also meet up with Maddie Cole, Director of the Fiddle Heads Forest School, an outdoor preschool in the Washington Arboretum in Seattle, WA. She gives me a mini-tour of the outdoor classrooms for preschoolers and we chat about how the children spend their time in the fully-outdoor immersion experience. You can find more information at https://botanicgardens.uw.edu/education/youth-family/fiddleheads-forest-school/ I'd love to hear your own thoughts about how you relate to other animals or being an animal yourself, and how this relationship steers the way you act in the world.  Please follow the link to the website and post a comment in the below section. https://theecopsychologyproject.wordpress.com/ You can find more information on the research end of things from these sources that I've gathered: Kahn, P. H., & Hasbach, P. H. (2013). In The rediscovery of the wild (pp. 93–118). essay, MIT Press. Melson, G. F. (2020). Rethinking children’s connections with other animals: A childhood nature perspective. Research Handbook on Childhoodnature, 1221–1236. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-67286-1_70 Olin Myers, E. (1999). Human development as transcendence of the animal body and the child-animal association in psychological thought. Society & Animals, 7(2), 121–140. https://doi.org/10.1163/156853099x00031 Saari, M. H. (2020). Re-examining the human-nonhuman animal relationship through humane education. Research Handbook on Childhoodnature, 1263–1273. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-67286-1_69

In this episode, I talk with Robin David about his work as an urban Beekeeper in Seattle, WA. Robin works for Best Bees, a company dedicated to the health of bees and bee populations by installing and maintaining honeybee hives on commercial and residential properties in urban areas across the US. They also partner and collaborate with bee researchers to continue finding new solutions and approaches to beekeeping and pollinator health for stronger food systems, economic security, and environmental resiliency. In this conversation, we cover a lot about what is going on behind the scenes of beekeeping, but the actual bees are up to, and why urban beekeeping is not only vital but becoming a popular service to prove to residents and commercial clients. A few other topics also discussed: - the difference between the introduced honey bee and native bees, - pollination - the science of bees, - approaches to beekeeping, - emerging research on beekeeping, - history of beekeeping - and more! Links for more information: Best Bees Research bestbees.com/research Ted Talk Noah Wilson Rich https://www.ted.com/talks/noah_wilson_rich_how_you_can_help_save_the_bees_one_hive_at_a_time?utm_campaign=tedspread&utm_medium=referral&utm_source=tedcomshare University of Guelph beekeeping https://www.youtube.com/c/UoGHoneyBeeResearchCentre

Four newly published authors bring their personal narratives to life to speak about their journey into the larger collective movement of sustainability. Growing up in the age of climate crisis, environmental degradation, and environmental justice has been at the forefront of these authors’ lives in their own unique way as they explore, activate, and solve some of the greatest problems facing our world today. From understanding human impact on the environment to the changing environment’s impact on human well-being, these authors have dedicated their thoughts and passions to creating opportunities for change, inspiring conversations for empowerment, and nurturing a greater sense of belonging to a world shared by our co-inhabitants. Topics to be discussed: - Environmental Identity - Personal sustainability journey - Environmental Justice - and more! This is panel discussion recorded on April 17th 2021, moderated by the wonderful Linn Haglund of Brainy Backpackers (https://brainybackpackers.com/). Speakers Priyanka Surio - Third Culture Kids of the World: Exploring Sustainable Travel Mindsets Jon-Erik Jardine - Return to Pō Kelsey Rumburg - Trash to Treasure: Exploring a New Wave of Entrepreneurship with Waste Jessica Reid - Planet Now: Effective Strategies for Communicating about the Environment

Permaculture designer by day and master of ceremonies by night, Ethan Holzer works hard to implement sustainable farming and forestry practices in the US but found that socioeconomic and political obstacles drained his energy and now lives and works in Colombia, focusing on community-scale food systems and spiritual healing using an understanding of internal alignment to implement material changes in the world. Using the cycles of giving to and receiving from our ecology, Ethan dedicates his work to sustaining life through the practice of gratitude and acceptance. Some of the topics we discuss are Permaculture Therapeutic environmental interactions reintegration of lives with cycles of creation, abundance, and scarcity Ecological consciousness Human leadership in the biological realm Balances of nature intentions and unintended consequences in conservation community action, “Not in my backyard, or in your backyard.” getting out of your own way the shadow side of individual accomplishment and the anxiety of fulfillment healing and accepting change mentality of scarcity loosening the grip on understanding and control environmental guilt contributing to society the inevitability of pain - the choice of suffering the idea of ownership going inside: the final frontier and much more I hope you enjoy this first episode. Ethan and I had a great time recording. The conversation was fairly organic and we covered a lot of ground, really diving into the personal experience of one's own nature as a key to not only wellness but also to increase our effectiveness in the world.

Welcome to the Ecopsychology Project. I’m Jon-Erik Jardine, and this is my podcast. The Ecopsychology Project is just that: it’s a project. It’s not a product to be consumed, but an on-going process. It is not a place to reach out and find solutions to the worlds problems, it’s more instead an orientation towards what we already know, and what we may have forgotten, and listening to what emerges in this space of remembering. The Ecopsychology Project is part of what I hope to be a larger dialogue that reaches across the minds of many listeners who inhabit all walks of life on this globe. I hope to find other people who are thinking in similar, and divergent ways about the human identity oriented towards nature. Here we will discuss all things concerned with human well-being but always grounded in the married relationship with the other-than-human world. We too are nature, but what does this really mean? How do we unpack the meaning of what it means to be human, and is there truly anything to be found there? These are questions I have explored through my own life, determined to describe the implicit world of the experiential cycle in motion, that we are our felt experiencing. So why Ecopsychology? Well, Ecopsychology as a discipline has not formerly established itself amongst academic elites, but it is gaining the attention of many, and I think now is the time to bring it to the forefront of public discourse. At its essence, it is philosophical, an attempt to understand the depth of phenomenology, the study of experience itself. If there is one thing we can be certain about human causality, it is that we have excelled at speeding things up. Here, I am attempting to slow things down, just enough that we can slip back into the realm that we inhabit continuously from birth to death: our bodies. Ecopsychology primarily deals in the realm of the osmotic membrane; the place of contact between the inner and the outer; The cycle in which exchange takes place. Where our bodies make contact with the world. It is the realm of experience in which we relax our boundaries just enough to let something new in. Final contact. Where our feelings, our bodily-felt ground of experience is satisfied. Where we surrender into an orgasm, give in to grief, gain a new skill, learn something, receive a message, or flow into an expressive movement. It’s the place in our experience where we sink into the sounds of the river rushing below during a rest in the warm sun. The Ecopsychology Project is an attempt to peer into the nature of our psyche not merely as a hidden world beneath layers of insulating consciousness, but rather as a joined and flowing process rooted in the world around us. This will be a versatile podcast with interviews, programmed shows, storytelling, meditation and mindfulness practices you can participate in, and live events which will be uploaded to this platform, and much more. So all that being said, let this be a hub you can return to time and time again to remember that through all the struggles of being human, we too are nature. Thanks for listening, and see you on the next episode of the Ecopsychology Project.