Meet Andy
I have been involved with the ups and downs of ecopsychology since it emerged as a field in the early-1990s. Having bailed on a mainstream career as an environmental engineer in the late- 1980s, I turned to ecopsychology as something more radical and promising.
Out of the graduate work and psychotherapist training I did in the 1990s came my first book Radical Ecopsychology, a second edition of which was published in 2013. This book now serves as one of the main texts in the field.
From 2000 to 2020, I worked as a psychotherapist in the town of Perth and community of Brooke Valley in the eastern forest of what is now called Canada. My partner Jill Dunkley and I chose this place as the ground for pursuing our life-commitments. In addition to working as a psychotherapist, I used this period to keep developing a radical approach to ecopsychology. This included writing further scholarly and popular works; teaching at the University of Vermont, Schumacher College, and Pacifica Graduate Institute, as well as in my home community and other locations; and leading rites of passage (“forest vigils”) locally with Jill. I also launched a Year-Long Training in Ecopsychology, with four cohorts completing the training before I put it on hold.
As 2020 approached, I felt the need to close my therapy practice and focus more exclusively on ecopsychology. As it happened, this timed with the Covid pandemic. Since March 2020, then, I have been working away at what has turned into a 2-volume book, Ecopsychology as Politics. I was also involved in an intense year-long exercise with the Union Education Program of the Canadian Union of Postal Workers, which provided a unique opportunity to introduce ecopsychology into the activist environment of a major national public sector institution. I have furthermore continued in this period to work in a number of other veins, including teaching in Pacifica’s Ecopsychology Certificate Program and mentoring people from around the world interested in bringing radical ecopsychology into their lives and work.
I am looking ahead now to getting my new book finished and published and continuing to lend myself to the cause of radical ecopsychology, in whatever collaborative or companionly forms, big and small, this may take. With planetary catastrophes mounting daily, more and more people are feeling the desire for a radical ecopsychology—one that is adequate to the precise needs and deeply systemic nature of this precarious moment. My own work, always humbling, is to keep helping to build such a psychology for our times.