Travis Cox Sustainability is Ecopsychology **** [MUSIC] Hello. And welcome to Mindful U at Naropa. A podcast presented by Naropa University in Boulder, Colorado. I'm your host, David Divine. And itÕs a pleasure to welcome you. Joining the best of Eastern and Western educational traditions - Naropa is the birth place of the modern mindfulness movement. [MUSIC] Today we welcome Travis Cox. A professor in the Ecopsychology Department. Welcome. [00:00:49.07] TRAVIS: Thanks. I'm glad to be here. [00:00:50.18] DAVID: Yeah would you like to introduce yourself a bit further? [00:00:53.12] TRAVIS: Yeah. ItÕs funny - one of my former colleagues uh he used to love to introduce me but he's in England now and so now I have to introduce myself. He always used to say Travis got a BA in philosophy. An MA in philosophy and religion with an emphasis in philosophy cosmology and consciousness. And then a PhD in Sustainable Agriculture. [00:01:15.13] DAVID: Wow! What a combo. [00:01:17.14] TRAVIS: It's weird like - but every time he would do it I'd be like that's weird but it is also true. Yeah and now I'm in the - a master's degree in Ecopsychology here at Naropa that's low residency. So, itÕs like you come for intenses and then do course work online. [00:01:33.02] DAVID: Great. And uh today we're going to be talking about Sustainability is Ecopsychology. Yeah, very interesting. [00:01:41.21] TRAVIS: And so, in order to do it I found the best way is to - just tell my story and like so to have you follow me through my thinking and experience and then I am going to circle back around again. [00:01:52.07] DAVID: That sounds great. [00:01:53.02] TRAVIS: Ok. So, and I will start with - itÕs kind of my graduate education and then teaching career is the thing that took me to this understanding about ecopsychology is sustainability. So, it started 2000 and I don't want to turn any of this noise off right at the beginning. But I did work for the Ralph Nader campaign and maybe enough time has passed that like people won't attack me for that, but right afterwards I would often get - LAUGHS - chastised. And so, it feels like a lot like this time where there was like some existential dread for me about like where are we in the world. And like what am I supposed to do. And, I found a master's degree like I said in philosophy, cosmology, and consciousness. And I've got some props right here. Uh and I saved the advertising because it was so good. [00:02:44.14] DAVID: Oh nice. [00:02:45.20] TRAVIS: I was just a sucker for like how it started. It says, another way forward is possible. Transformation of the entire human project is possible. And the PCC program is dedicated to this crucial evolutionary task and like it totally had me at that right. And so, I got out to San Francisco and like I'll just give you a couple examples of what I learned like - one, was just a concept of world views. Like I didn't have that beforehand. Even as a philosophy major and so we read a book called the passion of the western mind uh by one of my professor's Richard Tarnis who really gets to the power of ideas and the way that your ideas about something then affect the world that you build and live in and your behavior and then there was specific people like Thomas Berry uh was somebody that we learned he calls himself uh a geologian. So, itÕs like a theologian of the earth, which is -- [00:03:43.01] DAVID: I like that. [00:03:44.04] TRAVIS: And so, he like back then I was not that I am not now, but I'll talk later about how philosophy became practical for me, but back then I was like really interested in pragmatic action. And so, the thing that attracted me to Thomas Berry was he - you know he had identified - like here's the things that we need to change. Like politics, religion, economics and education. Right? Here's how we're going to change them. We're going to - we're going to bring in the world views of like indigenous people's wisdom, traditions, women and then science as its own wisdom tradition. [00:04:17.10] DAVID: Yeah. [00:04:17.10] TRAVIS: And so, I really resonated with that. There's another guy Gregory Bateson who was like a cyber neticist uh ecologist and anthropologist. Like this you know his career spanned a lot of disciplines and he's somebody who is talking about like that civilizations should only be using limited resources to transition into a sustainable culture. Right, so we use fossil fuels to build a culture that then runs on solar energy or something like that. Really like practical uh ideas that then I had the experience of learning about the 6 mass extinction. So, there's been 5 previous mass extinctions usually caused by asteroids or you know climatic - or severe changes like that. Well we're currently in the 6th one and itÕs like human beings are causing it. And so, like it just hit me like I had this like real experience of like I have to do something about this. Like my life needs to be like a part of this. And so, then it was like I want to study sustainability. Like this is the practical thing that I am going to move into in order to make a difference on this front. And, through a series of like synchronicities uh like I did research into biomimicry. They talked about perennial agriculture. I stop at the Land Institute in Kansas on my - this road trip I was doing where they do perennial agriculture. One of my former professors is like I know the guy who runs that place. We used to be on a board together. So, I would look up the board and I find out about Iowa State who has a degree in sustainable agriculture and I was like I'm going to try to do that. And so, itÕs the only PhD in Sustainable Agriculture in the country. Like there is a lot that might be like agro-ecology or food systems, but this one is like purposefully sustainable agriculture. ItÕs kind of an in your face. So, I start there and I am the only humanity student in the 10 year history of the whole department. Like there is natural scientists and social scientists who are working on their stuff. So, when I was at Iowa State I started to think - are organic practices enough? Like we can do things for the soil. We can have diverse crop rotations. We can plant uh plants at the margins that bring in beneficial insects. But, if we still have this production, this mindset. If we still have like where the owners of the earth who have dominion over it - are we really going to have a sustainable relationship. And so, I went back to uh - the people who've come up with these different alternative agricultures. So, like Rudolph Steiner is somebody who came up with biodynamic agriculture. Uh Sir Albert Howard is credited with being like the father of organic agriculture. There's a guy - Liberty Hyde Bailey who was a dean of an ag college at the turn of the century and I went to look into their writing and thinking and they all recognize that no a consciousness. There's a sustainable agriculture consciousness that goes along with a sustainable agriculture practices. And so, I started to get into like wow ok you know I was a little pre-disposed with my - with my master's program to be thinking along those lines. But I didn't - I didn't make Liberty Hyde Bailey talk about dandelions as like - needing to be loved, right? Like that - it existed already. And so, uh I just was predisposed to kind of see it and draw it out and so again kind of uh sychronistically I - I knew about permaculture when I was out in the Bay Area uh doing my masters. You know 2001 to 2005. But I never wanted to take a class there because I knew that I was going to come back to the Midwest. And permaculture is so context dependent that even though - you know I would learn the principles it would better to like experience it where I was going to be. And so, I found a permaculture class in Iowa. I took it to do research for this PhD that I was doing to try to see like oh permaculture is another example of sustainable agriculture. Does it have like these deeper principles about you know the mindset that you have. And through that I actually got my first teaching job right - like -- [00:08:42.03] DAVID: Nice. [00:08:42.03] TRAVIS: And it was at one of the first 4 year degrees - undergraduate degrees in sustainability in the country at Maharishi University of Management. So, then I started to get to teach about sustainability and consciousness. And again, it was - I might be pre-disposed to looking for it, but it still has to be there in the literature in order for me to be able to teach it. And it is. I mean like David Ore who is the progenitor of the idea of ecological literacy. Like he says genuine sustainability in other words will come not from superficial changes but from a deeper process akin to human kind growing into a fuller stature. Right? Like that's - that's deep. Or like uh Paul Hawkin who wrote this book, "Blessed Unrest" - so his previous book was "Natural Capitalism" and was a really big revolutionary kind of book. Toured all over the world. Uh at the end of his talks people would come up and give him their business cards. All over the world saying like these are the - this is the thing that I am doing in my community. When he got home he literally had like shoe boxes full of these business cards. And then he started to - the book, "Blessed Unrest" is about him realizing that itÕs like oh my gosh this is a movement. But itÕs not a movement like we've had in the past. ItÕs like a leaderless movement to the point where - one of the chapters is about the analogy of the sustainability movement being like the first immune system because the immune system doesn't have like a brain or a heart. Or lungs. There's no like controller. [00:10:21.22] DAVID: Yeah. [00:10:22.20] TRAVIS: And so, so there's all these responses all over the world that are like context dependent that are coming up, but he says we can't save our planet unless humankind undergoes a wide spread spiritual awakening. Right? Like and so I'm not putting words in people's mouths. Like this is where its coming from. And so, as I look for it - especially to teach in this environment where itÕs like yeah, we need to learn sustainability but we need to learn sustainability alongside consciousness. I found it all over the place. Like there was a gentleman name Christopher Yule who teaches at Penn State. He's a biologist. And he has - I was looking for like an introduction to sustainability textbook. And you know he has a book - itÕs in three parts. ItÕs great. Like the first one is like here's how the earth works. The second part is like here's how we've messed up the way that the earth works. And then the third part is like here's how we're going to fix it. And he has things like - like a model of power dynamics. He has power over and power with - which most people who do power dynamics recognize, but then he also has power within. And like that was novel for me to see that in the sustainability literature. He also - I mean he has a section on the role that mindfulness meditation can play right in the sustainability movement. And this is a biologist at Penn State. Like itÕs not you know - and for James Gustof Speth is the co-found of the National Resource Defense Council. He was Jimmy Carter's chairman for the Council on Environmental Quality. He was a Dean of the Forestry Environmental Studies at Yale - in his book called the "Bridge at the End of the World" he has a chapter called a new consciousness. And he says like many of our deepest thinkers and many of those familiar with the scale of the challenges we face - have concluded that the transitions required can only be achieved in the context of what I will call a rise of a new consciousness. For some itÕs a spiritual awakening. For others, itÕs a more intellectual process of coming to see the world. And - and the the last one I will do - I mean like you know I spent so much of my time like trying to find these mainstream voices that are talking about countercultural change. Right? I lied. Maybe I might do two more. Uh - there's a gentleman named John Earnfeld - he is the progenitor of the idea of industrial ecology. So, it would be like let's say you were going to set up an industrial park in your city. And you're going to invite you know different factories to come in. How about you situate it so that the seven that are there - the food for one is the waste of another. So that like it works as like a little ecosystem. He taught at MIT. In his first book, "Sustainability By Design" he's using a heidegger of philosophers' conception of being to like root sustainability in being. Like with a capital B. Again, here's somebody who is like working on factories whose talking about being right. And then there's this next book, which I would recommend to everyone is called, "Flourishing" and it was great. And he says in that -- I challenge you to re-examine what it means to be human. I want to challenge you to reconsider our place within the whole of nature. We need to shift from the view of ourselves first from one of having to one of being and second from one of needing to one of caring. So, like - and then the last two - Steven Keller who teaches social ecology at Yale and worked with Iia Wilson on the concept of biophilia. He said the mitigation of this environmental crisis may necessitate nothing less than a fundamental shift in human consciousness. And then the last one I will do is Donella Meadows who is a - who is famous as a systems thinker and she has this -- how to leverage change in systems. And like at the very top - you have things like buffer, stocks, and flows. And so, what that means is like - like a buffer would be how big your flood wall is. Right? Like a stock would be uh - how much water - rain water is coming into that. And then the flow would be how much are letting out. Right? So, itÕs a really tangible physical thing that helps you change a system. So, that's like the 11th place to change systems. It changes a little bit but not very much. The number one place is the power to transcend paradigms is what she says. Right? And so, I'm not making this up. And so, like in getting into this I've just realized that like what - what that means is that you're doing environmental humanities. Or uh what some of my colleagues like uh Lonnie who use to introduce me that way. Or John Agard who was this retired agricultural economist who beacon of conversion experiences - he in the 80s was like their mainstream and was promoting you know get big or get out policies in agriculture. And then - and there was a farm crisis and there were farmers who were honestly committing suicide. And he had this realization that he's like oh my gosh like my job and what I tell people to do is directly related to the like - people committing suicide. And you just had this change to go from like conventional agriculture and just sustainable agriculture. And then as we like went through like what is - what does sustainability actually mean? We kept going to consciousness. To like paradigms. To like worldview shifts. And so, and here comes along another synchronicity - so I had two students that I was working on their senior projects with at NUM. And one of them used Bill Platkin's work who uh I first got turned on to it at CIIS in my master's program. Through what he was calling soul craft, which is like nature base practices in order for you to get in touch with your true self and then as a result of him doing that as a career uh he came up with a human development model that I think is really cool and his premise is that we've created a culture that keeps us pathologically adolescent. So that like a lot of adults and elders in this culture don't know how to be authentic adults and elders. And so, she took that development model and said, ok well if you take that as a species - or at least a Western culture - then like sustainability is us growing up. Is recognizing that we're not the center of the world right. Yeah and so that was a really interesting paper that started me waking up to the - what does the discipline actually look like that takes this seriously. That takes this world view stuff related to the environmental crisis nicely. And then, I had another student who uh Krystal who wrote a paper about ecopsychology - like explicitly. And, her paper was essentially look you have this industrial society and then that gives you Freud in psychology and now we're trying to move into a sustainable society. We need a psychology that works with that. And that's ecopscyholgoy. So, then this job opens up and I get to like apply for it. And it - and I applied for it at the exact same time that I ordered this book. So, its Theodore Roszak, "Where the Wasteland Ends." Like she was quoting Roszak so much in her paper and I got on to look and see what the big deal was all about. And I will just read this real quick - itÕs from the back cover of that book uh Roszak says in this one actually is - was written in 1972. '73. Uh 00 [00:18:18.20] DAVID: That's when Naropa was started around. [00:18:20.16] TRAVIS: Hey, serendipitous. Uh - and so, he wrote, we can now recognize that the fate of the sole is the fate of the social order. That if the spirit within us withers so to will all the world we built around us. Literally so. What after all is the ecological crisis that now captures so much belated attention. But the inevitable extraversion of a blighted psyche like inside, like outside - in the 11th hour the very physical environment suddenly looms up before us as the outward mirror of our inner condition. For many the first discernable symptoms of an advanced disease within. And so, I was like whoa that's exactly what I'm talking about. Like that's where I am going. And so, then you know - now I'm here. And I get to uh - you know assign students uh work from John Davis who started this program as actually a transpersonal psyche program over 10 years ago. Uh and its morphed into - from a transpersonal psyche program into transpersonal psyche with an emphasis in ecopsychology into transpersonal ecopsychology. Now into just ecopsychology. Right? And he says you know the ecopsychology is the same wish by fundamental inner connection between humans and their environment and like we have concepts that go along with this - like the ecological self - the ecological unconscious. And then he also says that ecopsychology is about a fundamental world view change. And so, like we're - that's exactly what I've been studying and talking about. And then, but I still like - in not having been trained explicitly in ecopsychology like I still kind of second guess myself. Like even though I know that like this is exactly what I've been doing and exactly what I've been looking for and so it wasn't until a student wrote a paper on agriculture for me last year - like her master's paper was on it. That I recognized that I've been doing this for 10 years now. And so, I'm just going to read an excerpt from her paper and then I will be - I am going to circle back and be done. [00:20:28.02] DAVID: Cool. [00:20:29.10] TRAVIS: So, she wrote, Theodore Roszak considered the father of ecopsychology defines the field and practice this way. It is a field whose goal is to bridge our cultures long standing historical gulf between the psychological and the ecological to see the needs of the planet and the person as a continuum. And she says, transpersonal ecopsychology is the evolving exploration expression and embodied practice of the inner dependence of humans in the more than human world. Which tend towards to the health balance and optimal well being of all. And she says years before Roszak begin publishing work in ecopsychology, Aldo Leopold wrote about the complexities of inner dependent relationships between humans and land in his book, Sand County Almanac. In the book, he writes - a quote, a land ethic changes the role of homosapiens from conqueror of the land community to play members and citizens of it. It implies respect for his fellow members and also respect for the community as such. And then she says Leopold argues for a change in our internal landscapes is something might change our relationships with the land. This change includes extending social ethics to the land and an examination of our quote - loyalties, affections, and convictions. And so, like I had to read Aldo Leopold 5 times in the first three semesters that I was at Iowa State. And so, like to recognize that like here's these two things and they're exactly the same. Like it made me feel so much better and so to wrap up. What I've come to know in studying and teaching ecopsychology more as an explicit discipline is I've recognized like three things that are really important to it. One, is story, which is why I just told you the story of - me over the last 15 years. That goes all way back to the beginning of what I just talked about. So, when I learned Thomas Berry uh in my masterÕs program - Thomas believes that we are human beings are a storied being. And that we need story in order to live and right now we're in between stories. And that's why itÕs so hard for us. And then - and then I come here and I learn counsel practice and the Ojai Foundation, which is just sitting in a circle and telling stories. And I genuinely think that it can change the world right. And so, story is important. Conversion is important. Right? Like so much actual and empirical research in ecopsychology is about how people can go into nature. And break out of the limiting ideas that they have for them self or give for themselves. And get connected back to this larger. And then the last one is with synchronicity like synchronicity has lead me all the way until being in this room with you and - and so I've always followed it. But then ecopsychologist Leslie Gray said I'd say that synchronicity is a consistent theme and shamanism synchronist experience is considered a sign of health. And the lack of synchronicity is a sign of deterioration. And so like, even to go all the way back to - and this is it - the 6 extinction which was my conversion experience. We started this student group to try to do something about it and we had enough students over the years who were involved in the film industry that they actually made a movie about it. Called uh Call of the Wild. Uh narrated by Peter Coyote. I think itÕs on Vinmeo. That you can find it. And what's crazy is Allen Canner and Mary Gomes are like featured heavily in that movie. And they are the authors of like the ecopsychology book. So, like so many things for me have just come full circle into like recognizing that sustainability is ecopsychology. [00:24:15.09] DAVID: Wow. There it is. Full circle. Yeah. While listening to you I was realizing how your vast and diverse backgrounds informed interdisciplinary way of thought in developing your cautiousness to come to a point to realize that you know we all need to work with our consciousness and realizing that we have a spirit. The earth has a spirit and it seems as though we're trying to change our spirit to hear the spirit that has always been inherent with the earth. And, itÕs very interesting. It almost seems backwards a little bit. Like we should have started with spirit other than working with the outside and then kind of going to the inside. But I'm really finding it interesting to hear how you are taking all this information and all these things that you were interested in and then realizing the bigger synchronicity. The mosaic that came from the viewpoint after collecting all that. And that was very interesting. So, thank you for sharing all that. [00:25:18.20] TRAVIS: Yeah. No that was great. Yeah it is - I mean one of the ways that it makes sense to me - because like the way that you said we're almost doing it backwards, right? I have an evolution of consciousness perspective, right? So, like for whatever reason let's say 200 thousand years ago we started burying our dead, right? 40 to 60 thousand years ago we started painting inside cave walls. Right? And then like this thing has happened where we've become like a symbolic chimpanzee right? And have like taken over. And so, with this conscious self-awareness we've - we've gone further and further away from being embedded in that to kind of know who we are. And then like I see sustainability as like coming back into that. Like recognizing oh yeah like we have this and it makes us special. But it doesn't make us different than like the - the world. And so then starting to see the spirit. The same spirit out there - like that's how - that's how the process makes sense. [00:26:27.21] DAVID: Yeah cool. All right so I have a question for you. ItÕs kind of a fun one I guess. [00:26:31.11] TRAVIS: All right. [00:26:31.16] DAVID: If you were to define ecopsychology in your own words, how would you explain? How would you define that? [00:26:37.06] TRAVIS: That's funny. Oh man that's hard because itÕs always like in terms of like my audience. Like if its somebody like a board of trustee asks me like then I have one definition, but if I defined it for myself - [00:26:52.04] DAVID: Yeah, so if you were to - if you were explaining it to yourself with your diverse background of knowledge. Like how would you understand it? How would that click in your mind to understand what ecopsychology is? [00:27:02.04] TRAVIS: Right. Yeah. I mean its - it can be - itÕs like. It makes me think of the definition of like feminism that itÕs like a radical idea that women are equal to men, right? ItÕs like ecopsychology is the radical idea that like we are the earth because we came from the earth and that we should have a relationship - a positive relationship with the earth, right? ItÕs like that simple. And then like, I mean the - that's the eco part - the psychology part would be like ok so what world views do we have? What stories can we inhabit that then uh in gender having this like positive nourishing relationship with the natural world. [00:27:41.12] DAVID: Yeah. Yeah. Wow. I like it. Simple. Its good. [00:27:45.18] TRAVIS: Yeah. [00:27:46.06] DAVID: Yeah, all right, well - well thank you for joining us today. It was a pleasure to have you. [00:27:50.16] TRAVIS: Thanks for having me. [00:27:51.14] DAVID: That was Travis Cox. A professor in the ecopsychology department and thanks for speaking with us. [00:27:57.12] TRAVIS: Yep. Take care. [MUSIC] On behalf of the Naropa community thank you for listening to Mindful U. The official podcast of Naropa University. Check us out at www.naropa.edu or follow us on social media for more updates. [MUSIC]