Welcome to Mothering Nature: A new PT blog

We stand on the brink of a new kind of dawn.

Greetings! With thanks to Psychology Today’s leadership for the invitation, I'm here with a new, reported yet personal blog. As a lifelong writer and biologist, I've spent most of my adult years researching and reporting on climate change science and other major destabilizing impacts of human capitalist culture—and the intersection of these impacts on the natural environment with human health and society. This work constantly guides me towards the high-impact, positive outcomes necessary for a world in the throes of social and environmental justice challenges now reaching a crisis point unheard of in human history. Related, I’ve just finished my first novel meant to inspire young adults with critical guidance on how they can effectively cope with, contribute to, and thrive in the ravaged world they’ve inherited.

Which brings me to PT and this new blog. Mothering Nature brings together the biology and the psychology of how to face the greatest transition of all time: the transition to a healthy, thriving and peaceful planet. It examines the human psychology of denial, despair, and powerlessness—and how to transform these—in the face of dire threats like climate change. It also looks at how our culture has unconsciously pushed us up against far too many biological limits and how we can foster restoration and vitality in the human and non-human world. Basically, Mothering Nature looks to how we can unleash the force for harmony we need to face our greatest transition and to create the solutions and healing necessary for the planet and civilization as we know it.

Earth is in our hands now.

Source: FHFFF Images

Mothering Nature is titled to capture the many meanings of living in this new era: an era unlike any we’ve ever seen before. It’s meant to evoke our urgent “mothering” capacity to empathize and care for others, including, now, the very planet which has sustained us throughout all the millions of years of our evolution. It also speaks to the troubling awareness that many mothers (and parents) have as they awaken to the huge gravity of what their young children face as they inherit a very changed planet. How on Earth do we parent these children who’ve already lost “nature” as we know it, and who must grow up at the end of the fossil-fuel era while climate changes so dramatically? Finally, it also speaks to the currency of this era, the immediacy: we are asked to “mother nature” now, perhaps more than any other pivot point in history—before or after—as together we face this great transition.

Mothering Nature will include a broad perspective on the many challenges we face, including climate change, collapsing fisheries and acidification of the oceans, toxic pollution that permeates most of the world and our bodies, mass extinction, population growth, and industrial agriculture. It will also examine the ways Western culture has created these challenges, other much older cultures and what they have to teach us, and how allowing our relationships to better honor our own humanity can change so much of the dysfunction: including the poverty, starvation, suicide rates, gun violence, depression, stress, many illnesses and more.

Alongside all this, I’ll include the emerging science of unity, and what happens to humans who truly understand their connection to all that is. Most important I’ll explore the biological and psychological solutions we already know to unleash human empowerment, our innate ability to change and adapt, and how we can then effect a widespread cultural shift to health, vitality and harmony…a shift we now require if we are to avoid massive suffering and devastation. The great transition is already happening, and Mothering Nature will spotlight incredible success stories that show the way forward.

It’s high time we revved up a global conversation that faces the truth and what we need to do, right now, to effect the changes we need. Psychology Today’s support of this conversation is compelling and potent. This is an exhilarating new era in human psychology: we have never faced anything like this in all the history of humanity. Thus we are all pioneers and fellow travelers in this journey, and we must craft our conscious response to it together.

And yes, this is a conversation!! Please be part of it. Let me know if you have ideas for specific blog posts, relevant ideas and information, or psychologists/scientists/writers you’d like to hear from or know more about. Comment, share, and use the social media—and your own home town and family—to talk about this. We need your voice!

Help unleash our innate capacity to “mother” the very planet which sustains us. It’s a powerful, potentially game-changing approach that the world is ready for, and that can tap the force we need to tip us towards a thriving, peaceful planet.

Join the Mothering Nature conversation on Facebook and Twitter, and unleash your epic force for harmony on Earth.