The Canadian Friend

January-February 1998

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 The Planetary and the Personal

Connie Mungall - Victoria MM

Caring for the deepest needs of individual people means caring for our threatened planet. This truth, the link between the personal and the planetary, came to me as I wrote my annual year-end letter.

On a personal level, I celebrated the Light: the beauty of the planet and the part of it I've made my home, my pleasure in my winter vegetables, in my apprenticeship as a facilitator in the Alternatives to Violence Program and as a member of a group dedicated to change on every level, economic, social, ecological, spiritual, personal. Even the petition on my own short street to preserve a small triangle of land as green space.

My year-ender also told about the Dark: the challenges faced by my two sons -- Alex, limited physically but not spiritually by multiple sclerosis for fifteen years, and Robert, who was a few months ago also diagnosed with MS.

My family is not unique. Everywhere, we see immune system diseases increase: chronic fatigue, fibro myalgia, MS, cancer. We see the same with respiratory diseases: asthma, emphysema, allergies. Statistics back up our own observations and will continue to do so; the fading ozone layer makes us not only susceptible to skin cancer, but stresses our immune systems.

An old friend called me the night she received my letter. Her own son has struggled for years with schizophrenia. We talked about how that generation of young people, in their 30's and 40's now, is more susceptible than we who were brought up with clean water, clean air, food grown in clean soil. We wondered: do these people, assaulted by their own bodies, have something special to give us? She posed a question: "What does their plight mean for others who are NOT affected, who are not as vulnerable?"

I can speak for myself. I would never have chosen to grow through the pain of my children. But, having been presented with it, there was no way I was about to decline.

Of course I'm not along. A Statistics Canada survey done in 1996 showed that about 2.8 million (one in eight) adult women and men provided some sort of care that year to people with long term health problems. This help had a substantial impact on the caregivers themselves: a financial toll, and on their own health. At the same time, over half the caregivers did not feel burdened by their care giving.

What is the meaning of all this?

The quick and obvious answer is that both the chronically ill and the caregivers need support. What they're offering is an opportunity to learn compassion, not highly valued in these times of preoccupation with one's own inner turmoil. But still, I thought, there's something more.

Then there fell into my hands a book called "Ecopsychology, Restoring the Earth, Healing the Mind." Edited by Theodore Roszak, the director of the Ecopsychology Institute at a California State University, it is a compilation of essays by environmentalists and psychologists.

This book gave me what I needed. It put my own life into a global context. One contributor, psychiatric social worker Terrance O'Connor, told about giving a talk titled "The Mature and Healthy Intimate Relationship" to a group of divorced people. A woman in the audience interrupted.

"Why should we bother?" she asked.

"I don't know," O'Connor admitted. "I would think that the benefits would speak for themselves. But obviously everyone has a choice."

He went on with his presentation, but the question kept nagging at him. Finally he stopped and said, "I need to go back to that question. Let me say something about the status quo." And he went on to outline: the hole in the ozone layer is as big as the United States. Some scientists predict that because of global warming most coastal cities will be below sea level within 50 years. Acid rain, besides destroying lakes and forests, is now the leading cause of lung cancer after cigarette smoke. Thirty-five thousand people die of starvation every day. Deforestation and pollution eliminate two or more species every day.

He continued with more examples. Finally, "What does this say to you? To me it says that the planet is dying! It is dying because we are satisfied with our limited relationships in which control, denial, and abuse are tolerated... with each other, between nations, with ourselves and the natural world. Why should we bother? Because healthy relationships are not just an esoteric goal, but a matter of our very survival and the survival of most of the life upon this earth."

At last, what I was reading gave significance to my struggle, putting it in a global context. It answered my friend's question: what about the rest of us?

The environmental movement, wrote Roszak in his own chapter, "Where Psyche Meets Gaia," is the largest political cause ever undertaken, reaching beyond our own species, including flora and fauna, the rivers and mountains. Psychotherapy on the other hand is private and introspective, dealing with deeply buried fears, desires, guilty secrets.

What is the link between these, the personal and the planetary? Both diverge radically from "political business as usual," from the dominant culture, I might even say. The problems they pose can never be solved within boundaries "defended by the nation-state, the free-trade zone, the military alliance, or the multinational corporation." The ecology is bigger than any of these: the economy exists, after all, within the environment, rather than vice versa. And psychology is beyond institutional understanding.

Roszak quotes Australian rainforest activist John Seed, "Psychologists... help ecologists to gain deeper understanding of how to facilitate profound change in the human heart and mind." That is the key. There lies our salvation, our hope for saving, not the planet, which will change but survive whatever depredations we impose, but all endangered species, including the human. These people with chronic illnesses are the canaries in the mine, a sign of the results of what we are doing.

And ecologists on the other hand, help us understand the human place in nature. What are our boundaries? Where do we begin and end? With our own skins? The fence around our property? Our bank account? Our street, our town, our country? Roszak again: "The ecologists' web of life now spreads out to embrace the most distant galaxies."

We do have a choice: limited relationships characterized by control, denial and abuse -- or compassion and care for, identification with, every living thing. With the planet. The shift itself doesn't have to be painful. Opening one's heart may seem hard, risky. It will take commitment and practise. And we do have a choice.