Origin: CHANNEL1 - 0700 - EMAIL
  From: DAEMON@IGC.APC.ORG            PRIVATE
    To: SEARCHNET ZEC
  Date: 08/08/94 at 02:31
    Re: (none)
-------------------------------------------------------------------
Message-ID: <199408080631.XAA26217@mail.igc.apc.org>
From daemon@igc.apc.org  Mon Aug  8 02:34:36 1994
Received: from mail.igc.apc.org (mail.igc.apc.org [192.82.108.38]) by
coyote.channel1.com (8.6.9/8.6.4) with ESMTP id CAA20946 for
; Mon, 8 Aug 1994 02:34:36 -0400
From: daemon@igc.apc.org
Received: by mail.igc.apc.org (8.6.9/Revision: 1.40 )
 id XAA26217; Sun, 7 Aug 1994 23:31:37 -0700
Date: Sun, 7 Aug 1994 23:31:37 -0700
Message-Id: <199408080631.XAA26217@mail.igc.apc.org>
Apparently-To: searchnet.zec@channel1.com


 How To Let Earth Teach Its Process, Wisdom and
 Peace:
     A Message From Dr. Robert Muller.

In recognition of my 39 years as Assistant Secretary General of
the United Nations, my establishment of the University for Peace
and development of global education schools, books and
curriculums, I received the Albert Schweitzer Peace Prize and the
UNESCO Prize for Peace.  My experiences and the disturbing state
of the world show me that we must not shy from new opportunities
to relate more responsibly to each other and the environment.

One such opportunity has just come to light.  Dr. Michael J.
CohenUs remarkable article in the Autumn 1993 issue of THE
HUMANISTIC PSYCHOLOGIST, a division journal of the American
Psychological Association, offers a dramatic tool for building
responsible personel and environmental relationships.  The
article, "Integrated Ecology: The Process of Counseling With
Nature," describes unique sensory techniques used in education,
mental health and recovery programs.  They reduce apathy and
stress, they catalyze balance within and about us.

I am familiar with Dr. Cohen and his ecopsychology work.  It
fulfills our economic needs, deeper ideals and spirit.  His
scientific, self-guiding materials deserve the attention of every
person who seeks to reverse our troubles.

I urge you to consider Dr. Cohen's article and bring about
awareness of its publication and contents.  To this end, I have
have asked Dr. Cohen to post its Abstract and Summary below
followed by the full article when copyright arrangements so
permit.     Until then the article is available in  hard copy from
Article, Box 4112, Roche Harbor WA. 98250 (206) 378-6313.


Dr. Robert Muller, Chancellor University for Peace United Nations

P.S. Please network and/or post the above message.  Thank you.
MJC


     * * * * *

  Abstract and Summary

  INTEGRATED ECOLOGY:

  THE PROCESS OF COUNSELING WITH NATURE,

  by Michael J. Cohen, Ed.D.  World Peace
  University

  The Humanistic Psychologist  Autumn 1993, Vol. 21,
  No.3.
   An American Psychological Association Journal



    ABSTRACT

Whenever our nature-estranged thinking aggrevates our inherent
multitude of natural senses and feelings, it creates the stress
that underlies most of our personal, social and environmental
problems.  This stress further estranges us from experiencing
nature's wise, self-balancing unconditional love within and about
us.  A new integrated ecology training program uniquely addresses
this great challenge to the educational and psychological
community.  Ecopsychologically counseling students in natural
areas over a thirty year period has produced 97 unique nature-
connecting activities that renew over 49 inherent sensory
fulfillments.  Dramatically, the activities induce critical
thinking while in natural areas. They let our natural inborn
feelings of love and understanding express and validate
themselves.  This process catalyzes responsible relationships by
rationally filling the sensory voids which fuel our apathy,
dysfunction, and dependencies.  It gives natural areas added value
as rejuvenators of our biological and spiritual integrity.

    SYNOPSIS

All people are feelingfully connected.  We enjoy the same
migrating birds and whales, the same air and water.  We love our
beautiful landscapes, humanness and spectacular home, our living
planet, Earth.  It is our sensitivities to and from the natural
world that connect, sustain and rejuvenate us. Culturing them has
shown to create wise responsible people(s).

 Although a delicate wildflower delights us and our pets or house
plants give us pleasure, society seldom teaches us that we neither
learn or earn the ability to enjoy our rewarding natural feelings.
We inherit this gift.  At birth we, and most other living things,
biologically inherit at least 53 different natural sensory
attractions.  They are nature's way of building relationships, of
non-verbally sensing, knowing and enjoying life.  They include
pervasive natural  sensativities like taste, sound, community,
nurturing, place, compassion, reason, trust, music, hunger,
empathy, language and belonging.  Each natural sense feelingfully
conveys and integrates our vital natural connections.

Today, thirty years of all-season outdoor education, counseling
and research in over 260 national parks, forests and sub-cultures
offers the public a new science and learning process called
Integrated Ecology.  It uses personal sensory contact with natural
areas, in backyards, parks or back country, to unleash our natural
ability to relate and survive responsibly.  Integrated Ecology
teaches us to critically think about making sense of our natural
lives.  Rationally, it sustains our good feelings by sentiently
connecting our inner nature to its wise, balanced natural origins
and integrity, the nature of a person, natural place or thing. The
World Peace University, a non-governmental organization of the
United Nations, trains counselors, educators and students to use
Integrated Ecology's self-guiding, home study methods and
materials in schools, counseling and environmental education.
Dramatically, the applied ecopsychology program intensifies the
sensory communication and support that pervades self, society and
nature.

   Building responsible relationships:

Integrated Ecology recognizes that biologically and feelingfully,
we and the natural world are "Us" for we are as connected to each
other as is our leg to our body.  Us is our own and every other
person's true inner nature bound to Us, the natural world,
Creation's unadulterated nature.  Learning to tangibly connect
with Us connects us to our origins.  It enables us to feelingfully
measure information, sensations and behaviors by their natural
attractiveness and long term effects. We  learn to  amalgamate
with our deeper natural attractions, sensations and ideals, to
more responsibly organize our daily lives.

Us within and about us has immense wisdom but no spoken or written
language.  Because Us organizes, preserves and regenerates itself
without producing garbage i.e.  without leaving out anything or
anybody, Us is unconditional love in action.  When undisturbed, Us
globally approaches an ever-changing, self-regulating perfection,
an optimum of life and diversity without waste, war, or pollution;
without excessive crime, insanity, stress, unhappiness and
violence.  When we learn to let Us express itself within or about
us, Us heals scarred landscapes as well as our personal bruises,
emotional wounds and destructive relationships.  Every species and
individual biologically inherits this wise non-verbal blueprint.
Individuals and societies that culture it function harmoniously.

    Disintegrating Us:

 As a twig is bent, so grows the tree.  We are biologically
conceived of the love, wisdom and integrity of Us, as sentient
nature-connected organisms.  Because we predicate our survival on
the conquest of nature, our society educates and pays us to
assault Us.  Our authorities teach us to spend, on average, over
95% of our lives indoors, excessively separated from nature.
Collectively, we spend less than 1 day per person per lifetime in
tune with natural areas.  We live over 99% of our adult lives
knowing the non-languaged natural world through abstract words,
facts and pictures about it, not through enjoyable sensory
connections with it.  We learn to estrange ourselves from Us
within and about us, from natural love, support and beauty.  Being
born and raised bewildered (wilderness-severed) assaults our
thinking and our inner nature, the totally loving little child
within us.  Losing feelingful support from our multitude of
natural attraction fulfillments stresses us.  Bewildered, we
helplessly seek help from equally nature-estranged helpers.

In America alone, stress resulting from our excessive nature
disconnection causes 44 million of us to suffer from the apathy
that leads to acute mental disorders, drug abuse and low self-
esteem.  Our stressed immune systems invite diseases that further
stress us.  Stress dissolves 50% of our marriages and erodes the
love in many others.  It fuels the irrationality of alcoholism,
greed, cigarette smoking and violence.  The cost: 500,000 deaths
per year and $250 billion spent from the health care system.  Over
70% of our medical problems are stress related.  We are not
islands.  As we remain estranged from Us, our negative social and
environmental indicators rise.  In the last decade we spent over
100 billion dollars in the war on drugs alone, yet  because
nature-estranged education, psychologies and therapies don't
address our estrangement, more people are addicted now than a
decade ago.

    The process:

Our biggest problem is the nature-estrangement of our thinking.
It seldom recognizes that most stress results from the painful
tearing of our inherent sensory bonds with Us, it seldom values
re-connecting with nature.  Not surprisingly, Integrated Ecology
nature-connecting activities dispel stress and apathy because they
feelingfully rejoin people to their natural origins.  Each
activity lets our critical thinking create a nature-sensitive
moment.  During that special moment, our assaulted natural senses
rejuvenate, strengthen and gain fulfillment from Us.  We
automatically think more sensibly.  Additional sensory activities
reinforce this process,  Ensuing ideas, feelings and
understandings motivate natural sharing, community and
interpersonal support.  We feel better and gain new confidence.
We revive, we begin to relate more responsibly.  For this reason
Integrated Ecology finds a home in the fields of counseling,
education, science teaching, spirituality, recovery, peace and
natural history.  Native elders call it "Indigenous Peoples'
science" and "Awakening the Great Spirit within."  The hands-on
activities work because fully connecting with a wild rose offers
12 times more multi-sensory aliveness, wisdom and rewards than
does just seeing its photograph or reading about it.

        Environmental integrity:

 Integrated Ecology lets counseling and education make a
desperately needed contribution to environmental awareness and
responsibility.  It releases our excessive dependence on
destructive artifacts and re-bonds us to the joys of natural
wisdoms and areas.  Too often, our limited indoor thinking teaches
us to only trust environmentally limited ideas.  For example, when
we learn to mostly know a natural area as economically valuable
raw materials or square feet of real estate, we tend to sense it
as an expendable, exploitable, economic object, a commodity or
resource to develop or improve for progress.  This differs from
equally sensing a natural area as a personal fulfillment; friend;
profound mother; natural wisdom and community; unconditional love;
our other body; spirit and healing in action or un-edited higher
power.  The values we assign to natural areas have vastly
different long term effects on them.  Tangible sensory contact
with Us motivates and gives credence to protecting the natural
world.

To believe that we can find lasting peace and sanity while
continuously injured by our estrangement from the natural
environment defines madness.  Through sensory nature connecting
seminars, workshops, courses and home study training materials,
Integrated Ecology enables the perfection and powers of Us to help
reflect and correct our estrangement and its discontents.  It
encourages our reasoning and language abilities to seek and
validate attractive connections with the natural world.  We
discover responsible stories and sensations that move us.  We
begin to walk our talk, to live in our ideals and the peace of
Us.

For further information contact "worldpeaceu"
(worldpeaceu@igc.apc.org)  (206)378-6313.




INTEGRATED ECOLOGY: THE PROCESS OF COUNSELING WITH  NATURE

Michael J. Cohen.  World Peace University January 5,1994

From: The Humanistic Psychologist, Journal of the Division of
Humanistic Psychology American Psychological Association Autumn,
1993

Every moment of our lives, often without being aware of it, we
relate to the world through multisensory perceptions shaped by our
previous experiences.   Dramatically, in August 1966, while deep
in the bowels of the Grand Canyon National Park, a thunderstorm's
fury vitalized my scientific perceptions.  For me, the world
changed forever.  The storm fused my Newtonian and biological
explanations of Earth's grandeur, landscapes and processes.  When
the sky cleared, in the sun's new light I deeply sensed Planet
Earth as more than mechanical cause and effect relationships.
Rather, it appeared to organize, regulate, preserve and regenerate
itself, to act like a living being .  That unique perception
carved my destiny.  In 1985, I conceived  the National Audubon
Society international symposium "Is the Earth a Living Organism?"
It not only  scientifically substantiated my Grand Canyon
impressions, it laid the foundations for the study of Integrated
Ecology.  That science offers profound additives to counseling
psychology (Cohen, 1988).

Guided by my living earth perceptions, in September, 1984, a
yellow school bus and its occupants embarked on a 9-month living
and learning expedition.  Outfitted with camping gear and a small
library, it departed from Albany, New York carrying 20 students,
my staff and me to a  personal and academic growth utopia (Cohen,
1974).  It began my 16th year sleeping out under storms and bright
stars year round; camping exploring and teaching in America's
natural areas. This all-season, consensus-governed, outdoor-living
program I founded in 1959,  immersed its intimate school community
in critical thinking, rich interpersonal experiences and natural
wonders.  Participants thrived in 83 different natural habitats
and from keeping their commitments to open, honest relationships
with the natural environment, each other and with indigenous
people(s), researchers, ecologists, the Amish, organic farmers,
anthropologists, folk musicians,   naturalists,   shamans,
administrators, historians and many others.   The experience
deeply connected our inner nature to the whole of nature

As a result of our  romance with educating ourselves this way, in
the school community:

Chemical dependencies, including alcohol and tobacco, disappeared
as did destructive social relationships.

Personality and eating disorders subsided.

Violence, crime and prejudice were unknown in the group.

Academics improved because they were applicable, hands-on and fun.


Loneliness, hostility and depression  subsided.  Group
interactions allowed for stress release and management; each day
was fulfilling and relatively peaceful.

Students using meditation found they no longer needed to use it to
feel good.

Participants knew each other better than they knew their families
or best friends.

Participants risked expressing and acting from their deeper
thoughts and feelings; a profound sense of social and
environmental responsibility guided their decisions.

When vacation periods arrived, nobody wanted to go home. Each
person  enjoyably worked to build this supportive, balanced living
and learning utopia. They were home.

All this occurred simply because every community member met their
commitment to make sense of their lives by establishing
relationships that supported the natural world within and around
them.  We hunted, gathered and practiced such relationships; we
organized and preserved group living processes that awakened our
natural wisdoms.  We learned to regenerate responsible
relationships when they decayed.  The secret to our success was to
learn how to learn directly from the natural world, the living
earth within and about us.  Through natural sensations and
feelings it taught us how to trust it, how to validate and
incorporate its wisdom.  From 30 years of all-season travel and
study in over 260 national parks, forests and sub-cultures, I
developed a  learning process and psychology that unleashed our
natural ability to grow and survive responsibly.  By documenting
that it worked repeatedly and could be taught,  I earned my
doctoral degree; the school became a small graduate and
undergraduate degree program.

To share my discovery with the public, in 1988 I encapsulated my
nature-connected psychology in a series of 97 award winning
sensory backyard and back country activities (Cohen, 1988, 1990,
1993).   At the World Peace University, a non-governmental
organization of the United Nations,  I established, and presently
chair, the Department of Integrated Ecology.  The department
trains counselors, educators and students to incorporate these
revolutionary nature-connecting activities in their work and
lives.  The simple, fun activities benefit peopleof all ages and
backgrounds.  Uniquely, they revitalize innate sensory
communication and support between a person and the natural world.
Nature connecting activities balance our lives by letting natural
connectiveness identify and be our common cause.   By reducing
stress while inducing  participation, the activities promote
recovery from destructive habits, dependencies and dysfunction.
Today professionals use them to augment counseling, 12-step,
hospice, stress management,  conflict resolution, self- esteem,
and environmental education programs  (Cohen, 1993).   They enable
us to follow JobUs suggestion: "Speak to the Earth and it will
teach thee."


Us: Identifying our essence

Because Integrated Ecology honors the responsible, ever-changing
perfection of the global life community, it studies the fabric of
that community's ability to relate and grow harmoniously through
natural attractions.  That fabric, which we each biologically
inherit, unifies life relationships rather than further
subdividing Earth into isolated academic and institutional
cubbyholes.  In reality and imagination integrated ecology returns
us to our origins.  There we critically measure information,
procedures and behaviors by their natural attractiveness and long
term effects.  We then, moment by moment, responsibly organize and
balance our relationships by amalgamating our natural attractions.


An essence of integrated ecology is the use of Us, a singular,
powerful, culturally familiar symbol.  In scientific, educational
and spiritual ways, Us lastingly awakens and supports the dormant
harmonic unity of global wholeness that lies within us.  Critical
thinking, research and history about Us enjoins most personal,
intercultural and interspecies relationships.  Eclectically, Us
bridges the destructive gaps between religion and science by
reinforcing what these two ways of thinking hold in common.

The spiritual view of Us respects that most western people believe
the following account:  During the sixth day of creation, (Genesis
1:26) before people are created, The Creator speaks with somebody
or some things present.   The Creator refers to us  and our  on
that sixth day saying "Let us  make man in our image, after our
likeness:S  Who is this us and our?  Since people have not yet
been created, The Creator canUt be speaking to humanity.  All that
exists at that moment is The Creator and His or Her creation.  For