Increase Sanity for Earth Day: Psychologists Offer Nature-Connected Health and Wellness, Anti-Addiction Activities

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Apr 18, 2012, 08:05 ET

SAN JUAN ISLAND, Wash., April 18, 2012 /PRNewswire/ -- "For Earth Day, April 22, we must learn how to stop the madness of placing the health of our planet and ourselves at risk," says Dr. Michael J. Cohen, in an Ecopsychology interview about his donation of sensory nature activities for Earth Day. "Our radical problems respond to appropriate radical solutions," he noted.

As the Institute of Global Education, Project NatureConnect director at Akamai University, Cohen claims, "We and our planet suffer because as cherished children of Mother Nature we are biologically conceived to suckle the loving breast of her purity, balance and beauty. However, as part of Industrial Society, it is as if we are socialized to separate from nature and instead suck a plastic nipple attached to a bottle of whiskey.

"We are disjointed because our lives suffer the loss of nature's love along with the destructive effects of the whiskey," says Cohen. "This continues until we consciously reconnect our senses with nature's restorative powers. The connection helps us cure our whiskey-nipple addiction. For this reason reconnecting-with-nature activities help us recover from the disorders that deteriorate our personal, social and environmental well-being."

Project NatureConnect has placed online for Earth Day four key nature-reconnecting activities. They counteract that, on average, over 95 percent of our time is spent indoors and 99 percent of our thoughts and feelings are nature-disconnected. This astonishing separation makes 25 percent of us vulnerable to mental illness. In addition, most of our medical problems result from the stress generated by our excessive severance from nature's peace and self-correcting ways.

Cohen says, "Our estrangement from nature results in our unbalanced lives. We demand satisfactions that take 50 percent more resources from Earth than the planet produces. This gives Earth a fever and places one third of its species at risk of extinction. Our nature-disconnected thoughts and feelings make us deteriorate our own life support system. Is it any wonder some observers claim that Industrial Society is an insane asylum run by the inmates?"

The Earth Day activities are the core of Cohen's subsidized online Educating, Counseling and Healing With Nature (ECHN) certificate and degree programs for becoming a funded ECHN practitioner to help purify Industrial Society into balance.

An ECHN ecotherapy student described the ECHN program to be like learning how to take a Rorschach Test with Mary Poppins, "But we do it in a natural area, the real thing, instead of with ink blots," he said. "In nature's presence the 'test' also becomes a remedy for what ails us."

Cohen joked that Akamai should call their beginning ECHN class "Wellness 101: How to Become the Lorax with an M.D." "However," he said, "Folks enter the program because the problems we face are no joking matter. They want to make a difference by being it."

Contact:

Michael J. Cohen, Ph.D.
360-378-6313
[email protected]
http://www.SaneEarth.com

REFERENCES:

http://www.ecopsych.com/earthavatar.html
http://www.ecopsych.com/avatarpath.html
http://www.ecopsych.com/survey.html

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SOURCE Institute of Global Education