In the fourteen years since Sierra Club Books published Theodore Roszak, Mary E. Gomes, and Allen D. Kanner's groundbreaking anthology, Ecopsychology: Restoring the Earth, Healing the Mind, the editors of this new volume--a practicing therapist and a teacher--have often been asked: Where can I find out more about the psyche-world connection? How can I do hands-on work in this area, amidst a culture largely blind to such connections? Ecotherapy was compiled to answer these and other urgent questions. Ecotherapy, or applied ecopsychology, encompasses a broad range of nature-based methods of psychological healing, grounded in the crucial facts that people are inseparable from the rest of nature and nurtured by healthy interaction with the Earth. Leaders in the field, including Robert Greenway, Mary Watkins, and Ralph Metzner, contribute essays that take into account the latest scientific understandings and the deepest indigenous wisdom. Other key thinkers, from Bill McKibben to Richard Louv to Joanna Macy, explore the links among ecotherapy, spiritual development, and restoring community. As mental-health professionals find themselves challenged to provide hard evidence that their practices actually work, and as costs for traditional modes of psychotherapy rise rapidly out of sight, this book offers practitioners and interested lay readers alike a spectrum of safe, effective alternative approaches backed by a growing body of research.

"Psychotherapist Buzzell and psychology professor Chalquist (Terrapsychologist) gather 29 contributors to explore traditional psychotherapy at the intersection of the human and the environment. This next-generation update of the Sierra Club's 1995 Ecopsychology finds one of the editors of that volume, Theodore Rosak, comparing society's 'relentless pursuit of money' with Aztec 'blood sacrifice,' and urging all psychologists to challenge the prevailing ethos. Mary E. Gomes, another editor of Ecopsychology, considers an extention of the community circle to 'all that lives and all that has left this world,' treating lost species 'as we would a friend, a family member, a beloved.' Buzzell explores the precepts of ecotherapy (probing 'human-nature' as well as 'human-human' relationships) and its questions ('Are there animals in your life? Special environments where your heart opens and life feels right?'). Chalquist provides an overview of ecotherapy research while exploring the idea that a missing 'psychology of homecoming' is the result of an artificial divide between 'scientific knowledge' and 'indigenous wisdom.' Other sections explore ecotherapy in practice, helping couples bond to nature, treating animal trauma, and the healing methods of wilderness therapy." Publishers Weekly (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)