International Community for Ecopsychology

International Community for Ecopsychology:

Ecopsychology, or eco-psychology as it is sometimes called, is situated at the intersection of a number of fields of enquiry, including environmental philosophy, psychology, and ecology, but is not limited by any disciplinary boundaries. At its core, ecopsychology suggests that there is a synergistic relation between planetary and personal well being; that the needs of the one are relevant to the other.

Came across this in connection with the interesting *collaborative blog* Seeds for Thought

Sunday, 31 January, 2010

On my Old WordPress blog, someone left this link in a trackback.

From the streets of SF

People at the top say Shock and Awe!

People on the street say Stop this War!

Bush’s day of shame

I just received this from the Greens

Bush’s day of shame

Today’s onslaught on an impoverished country by the world’s biggest military superpower is a black day for humanity, Green Foreign Affairs spokesperson Keith Locke said today.

‘This is an unjust, illegal and immoral act of aggression,’ said Mr Locke. ‘There is no basis under international law for the invasion of Iraq and there is no UN mandate that grants any shred of legitimacy to this action.

‘The norms that govern international affairs have been fatally breached today and the authority that the United Nations has worked so hard to develop over the last 50 years has suffered a grievous setback.

‘Our thoughts are with the innocent men, women and children of Iraq. Having suffered a decade of unfair sanctions they are now bearing the brunt of a massive assault on their cities and towns.

‘We must continue to do everything to stop this war. Our government should move to call the UN General Assembly into urgent session, as it can do under the provisions of Resolution 377.

‘Green MPs will be participating in protest actions which will take place across the country,’ Keith Locke said. ‘I will be at the emergency protest to take place at Wellington’s Cenotaph at 5pm tonight.

‘We must challenge this unilateral use of brute force in international relations. It is such an affront to humanity, when there was so clearly another way of dealing with the Iraq crisis. The inspections were making progress and the United Nations engaged.

‘Unfortunately, the ramifications of this invasion will reverberate through the region and through the world for some time come.’

ENDS

You have received this because your contact details are on the Green Party mailing list as interested in Defence, Foreign Affairs, or Peace.

To unsubscribe, reply to this email address with “Remove” in the subject line.

Greens in NZ have had a very strong and clear position on this war all the way through. I hope they can maintain it as Labour has such trouble, constantly wavering on the edge. Worse than that actually having a ship in the Gulf and probably counted as one of the unamed of the 35 countries the Americans keep mentioning, because we support them trhrough having their military bases in this country. Get them out of here!

A voice for our side – Steve Earle

A voice for our side

At times, Earle rightly makes no attempt at subtlety at all–as with his opposition to the coming war on Iraq. “We intended to go into Iraq before September 11, and we’re gonna go into Iraq, and that’s part of this big lie,” Earle argued in a recent interview. “Iraq had fuck all to do with September 11! John Walker Lindh had fuck all to do with September 11! It’s just scapegoating, and scapegoating is always about making somebody feel more than, by making somebody else feel less than–and that’s a really dark, dangerous, malignant thing to do.

Immediast Manifesto

Seizing The Media
The Immediast Underground Pamphlet Series – Spring 1992 – Immediast International – New York City / Amsterdam / Seattle – Version 1.1 N © Copyright; 1992. Public Domain.

Towards An Ecology Of Information – The Immediast Approach

0. Participating in the proliferation, crosspollination, and consolidation of counter-commercial print, audio, visual, modem, activist, and correspondence media.

1. Documenting the basic sources, dynamics, and effects of corporate and State media control. Exposing methods of mind control, behavior modification, and image embedding.

2. Openly discussing tools and methods that strengthen immunization and freedom from deceptive, disinforming, and subliminal media exposures.
Upgrading public media literacy to decode, produce, and broadcast in all communications media.

3. Open cultural expressions, education, networking and resistance.

4. Reclaiming public sovereignty of the airwaves.

5. The liberation of all public space from government, corporate, and business messages.

6. Public takeover of all airborne commercial broadcast media and the creation of public production libraries.

7. Liberation as glasnost: the emergence of democratic public communications and media networks.

What a noble manifesto.

Sunday, February 27, 2011

added a copy of the whole page for posterity:

seize_it.htm

Lake Pedder – Tasmania Australia

Lake Pedder – Tasmania Australia

I found myself grieving this lake today. I walked and camped on its shores in the 60s before it was flooded. This came up as I feared the loss of the Net to greed. I am actually an optimist with regard to the Net. It is a Net and so it is hard to knock holes in it, and new webs are woven all the time. Still, there is already a great loss of the ethos that I found here in the early 90s, where anything commercial was unacceptable, including my own Psychotherapy Online. I held that back for a while as a result of that ethos. If I could go back to 1972 I would lie in front of the tractors. I doubt this damage can be undone.

James Hillman – Luddite

The Cyberwork: The archetypal imagination in new realms of ensoulment. From the C.G. Jung Page: An article by Cliff Bostock. Towards a Jungian Psychology of Technology

In some ways, this paper represents the recanting of some of my own positions or at least an effort to situate myself with more clarity in cyberspace. It is also an effort to establish some kind of rapprochement between cyber – thinking and the archetypal imagination. This is important to me because among the archetypal Luddites seems to be James Hillman himself. I have heard him dismiss cyberspace in public talks.

The quality of images

The dismissal of cyberspace by so many archetypal psychologists intrigues me because, as I said, the medium is purely imagistic and, according to the Hillmanian view, images are the foundation of psyche. Of course, images have varying character. Images can be degraded in their representation and, certainly, the images in cyberspace vary wildly in that respect. But one does not dismiss all art on the basis of bad painting.

Have I already linked to this? I have some of Cliff’s stuff linked BUT atomz Search is not working! I’m fixing it. This article is of great interest because it addresses the *exact* field of my interest. And yes – many whose psychology I like miss the psyberside.

later: Saturday, March 6, 2010 Entire text follows to prevent link decay.

Cyber-Marx

Cyber-Marx: Cycles and Circuits of Struggle in High Technology Capitalism

Cyber-Marx: Cycles and Circuits of Struggle in High Technology Capitalism (1999) provides an analysis of information-age capitalism and the movements currently dissolving it. The text version is available from University of Illinois Press, and can be purchased from the UWO Bookstore or on-line book stores.

The book is online, each chapter in one pdf file. The opening is intriguing. Nick Dyer-Witheford (the author) refers to the sf book The Difference Engine by Gibson and Stirling. Babbage’s mechanical computer in this alternate history works – and is steam driven. Here is a quote from Chapter 1:

For in the world of The Difference Engine, Karl Marx is
alive and well. His employment by the New York Daily Tribune (for whom the actual
Marx worked during the 1850s as a foreign correspondent in the biggest `information
industry’ of his day) has clearly resulted in migration to the United States–a visit yielding momentous consequence. For, in a North America wracked by regional separatism and
civil war, revolutionaries have seized the “means of information and production” of the
largest city of the New World.2 And the Manhattan Communards now provide a nucleus for
an international ferment of dissidence which, combining re-emerged Luddites, renegade
clackers, anarcho-feminists, Blakean-situationist artists and immiserated proletarians,
boils beneath the surface of the bourgeois universe, waiting for the next calamity to burst
into revolt.

In what follows, I propose a Marxism for the Marx of The Difference Engine. That
is to say, I analyse how the information age, far from transcending the historic conflict
between capital and its labouring subjects, constitutes the latest battleground in their
encounter; how the new high technologies–computers, telecommunications, and genetic
engineering–are shaped and deployed as instruments of an unprecedented, world wide
order of general commodification; and how, paradoxically, arising out of this process
appear forces which could produce a different future based on the common sharing of
wealth–a twenty-first century communism.

The Political Economy of Free Software

The Political Economy of Free Software

A link to my own writing:

If my proposition about this fundamental nature of the Free Software Movement has merit it certainly puts the struggle around its survival against the commercial and legal opposition into a context with very high stakes.

Copyleft vs. Copyright: A Marxist critique

Copyleft vs. Copyright: A Marxist critique

Later New Link

Abstract

“Copyright was invented by and for early capitalism, and its importance to that system has grown ever since. To oppose copyright is to oppose capitalism. Thus, Marxism is a natural starting point when challenging copyright. Marx’s concept of a ‘general intellect’, suggesting that at some point a collective learning process will surpass physical labour as a productive force, offers a promising backdrop to understand the accomplishments of the free software community. Furthermore, the chief concerns of hacker philosophy, creativity and technological empowerment, closely correspond to key Marxist concepts of alienation, the division of labour, deskilling, and commodification. At the end of my inquiry, I will suggest that the development of free software provides an early model of the contradictions inherent to information capitalism, and that free software development has a wider relevance to all future production of information.”

Now that is along the same lines as the thing I wrote after the discussions with Josh – will link to ot in the next item. It all sounds plausible to me, but nothing is a sure thing.

Ivan Illich Transcript

WTP – Ivan Illich Transcript van Illich with Jerry Browe We the People, KPFA – March 22, 1996

“Brown: This hour we have a very special privilege and opportunity. We have here in the studio in Los Angeles Ivan Illich and Carl Mitchum, two friends of mine who I hope you’ll enjoy our conversation. Listen in. You’ll find it instructive. Ivan Illich is the author of a book, very famous in the 1970s, called Deschooling Society, another book called Medical Nemesis. He’s also the author of Celebration of Awareness, Tools for Conviviality, Gender, and now his most recent book called In the Vineyard of the Text, a commentary on a 12th century scholar and saint, Hugh of St. Victor. Along with us here in the studio is Carl Mitchum, a professor of humanities, presently Visiting Scholar at the Colorado School of Mines and on a more permanent basis a professor at Penn State where Ivan Illich and his friends and fellow scholars meet every year for a few months to study these ideas that over the next hour we’re going to do our best to elucidate and share. Ivan, why don’t we just start with the book that I first encountered when I became aware of you, and that is the book Deschooling. Can you reflect on what you were thinking about when you wrote it and how you might see that reality today because we’re still struggling with schools in this society. There’s still a dependency on professionals that seems to have control of how we learn or don’t learn and I just have to wonder have we made any progress in creating the context where people get the sense that they are in charge of their own learning?”

Interesting discussion. Does the world a context sensitive help? Not in schools which subvert that. Xenos – Zeus and hospitality? Acedia the inactivity which results from seeing how enormously difficult it is to do the right thing – is it a sin?

There is also insight into the interface – the pupil of the eye which takes in with its psychopods the other person. But they do not really grasp the potential of the medium for – conviviality and friendship.

Later Saturday, 7 May, 2011

I don’t understand a word of my own comments either.

The link above does not work, but I’ve put the whole item below. Found here:

http://www.wtp.org/archive/transcripts/ivan_illich_jerry.html

Jim Kent & the Genome Data

O’Reilly Network: Keeping Genome Data Open [Apr. 05, 2002]

“Jim Kent was a graduate student in biology at the University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC), when he wrote the program that allowed the public human genome team to assemble its fragments just before Celera’s private, commercial effort. His program ensured that the human genome data would remain in the public domain. Kent wrote the 10,000-line program in a month, because he didn’t want to see the genome data locked up by commercial patents.”

A hero indeed! One of the spin-offs from now using GNU/Linux is that it is easier to see how locking away human knowledge for the benefit of the rich is just evil!

Danger to the planet in dismissing the soul in tech

Cliff Bostock – Writings
Hillman Speaks: The topic is depression and the man is confounding
by Cliff Bostock

“This curious habit of exempting certain areas of inquiry from his own method of reversal permeated the weekend. While valorizing shattering, the suffering of depression, he seemed unwilling to look at what mania itself might be asking of value. To my own mind, mania, as a social descriptor, may be telling us we really do need to speed up our attention, that if we live on a dying planet, we need to begin merging our bodies with new forms of technology. It is in media – the internet, the cell phone, the television – that we see the most visible expressions of consciousness speeded to “manic” rates. There was just no opening in Hillman’s (anti-technological, anti-speed) cosmology to discuss this in a serious way.”

“Indeed, the entire room seemed unwilling to go that way. One man spoke negatively of the way the “window to the world” has been replaced by “Windows ’95.” It is a great mystery to me how people in archetypal psychology offhandedly dismiss the idea that technology itself might be ensouled, that in a world on the apparent verge of environmental disaster, our survival might well depend on our capacity to take on new forms of embodiment. There has been a lot of (optimistic) writing in recent years about the internet as a group mind that may be the planet’s salvation.”

A nice essay on depression from yr 2000. This is also a link which in turn links to a lot of writing by Cliff Bostock. Look for his article on Archetypes for example…

The whole essay follows:

We’re Trying to Change World History

‘We’re Trying to Change World History.’ ‘We’re Trying to Change World History.’
“It sounds corny, but it’s true: Bishop William Swing is a man on a mission. His goal? To change the relationships among the world’s religions, from hostility to harmony.”

by Chuck Salter

photographs by Robbie McClaran

from FC issue 35, page 230
(C) November 2000

I have become the world

CTHEORY: Cyberwar, God And Television: Interview with Paul Virilio

Virilio: The body has a dimension of simulation. The learning process, for instance: when one learns how to drive a car or a van, once in the van, one feels completely lost. But then, once you have learnt how to drive, the whole van is in your body. It is integrated into your body. Another example: a man who pilots a Jumbo Jet will ultimately feel that the Boeing is entering his body. But what is going on now, or should happen in one or two generations, is the disintegration of the world. Real time ‘live’ technologies, cyberreality, will permit the incorporation of the world within oneself. One will be able to read the entire world, just like during the Gulf War. And I will have become the world. The body of the world and my body will be one. Once again, this is a divine vision; and this is what the military are looking for. Earth is already being integrated into the Pentagon, and the man in the Pentagon is already piloting the world war – or the Gulf War – as if he were a captain whose huge boat would have become his own body. Thus the body simulates the relationship to the world.

That is isnteresting on the connection between the body and the virtual world!

Asclepius

Character Glossary (Updated link the old one below does not work – Monday, 26 June, 2006 )

Classical Mythology Online – Character Glossary

Asclepius [as-klee'pi-us] (Aesculapius) or Asklepios, "cut up," or "turn round and round"(?)
The son of Apollo and Coronis, he was god of medicine and healing, but was raised by the centaur Chiron, who taught him medicine (Pindar, Pythian Odes 3.5-7). He could restore the dead to life, for which offense Zeus killed him with a thunderbolt (Pindar, Pythian Odes 3.54-58; Euripides, Alcestis 3-6; Apollodorus 3.10.4; Hyginus, Fabulae 49; Diodorus Siculus 4.71.2-3). The most famous temple of Asclepius was at Epidaurus. His children included Machaon, Podalirius (Diodorus Siculus 4.71.4), Hygeia (Health), and Panacea (Cure-all). Family Tree 21.

The original Psychodrama stage? This site is great – the family tree thing is very useful.

Want a speech?

The Declaration of Independence: Transcription  Dead

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gettysburg_Address#Text_of_Gettysburg_Address

Just in case you want this for something! How about this: Gettysburg Address