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Identity and the Natural Environment: The Psychological Significance of Nature.

Article Excerpt
Clayton, S., & Opotow, S. (Eds.). (2003). Identity and the Natural Environment: The Psychological Significance of Nature. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, ISBN 0-262-53206-9, 353 pp., $29.00 (paper).

The concept of identity has in recent years come to occupy a central place in research on the psychological dimension of the ecological crisis. Well before psychologists got involved, however, notions of identity and selfhood were already being employed in defence of the natural world. Witness the opening lines of John Livingston's 1981 book The Fallacy of Wildlife Conservation, in which he positions himself from the outset along lines of identity.

I am not a biologist, an ecologist, nor indeed an "ologist" of any kind. I am merely a naturalist, for whom logic and 'the word' have come to count for little.

Speaking as a naturalist, as a lover of nature for its own sake, Livingston concludes that "There is no 'reason' for wildlife preservation. It is a state of being." He argues, accordingly, that the best way to make his actions as a preservationist intelligible to others is to describe his lived experience of human-nature continuity, of the selfless love he experiences, for example, in the presence of a sea turtle. His activism is not based in instrumental reason or logic; it is simply an expression of the world he inhabits, of the particular fields of care that define his existence.

Readers of this journal will recognize an existential phenomenological quality to Livingston's work. I mention it at the start of this review because there has been a distinct lack of phenomenological inquiry within the circles of environmental psychology itself. Noteworthy, in this regard, is David Seamon's 1982 Journal of Environmental Psychology article "The Phenomenological Contribution to Environmental Psychology."

In this important article Seamon advocates for a phenomenological approach to environmental psychology as opposed to the prevailing positivist approach. The phenomenological tradition, says Seamon, not only offers environmental psychology an ontological alternative to the measurable, objective, predictable universe of conventional scientific research, but in doing so also opens...

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