Psychology as if the Whole Earth Mattered: Nuclear Threat, Environmental Crisis, and the Emergence of Planetary Psychology by James Dunk, Univ. of Sydney, Dept. of History This article was published Online First December 20, 2021.
“John Mack borrowed the “whole earth” language from a conference he attended 18 months earlier at Findhorn Foundation, on the Moray Firth, Scotland, called “The Individual and the Collective: Politics as if the Whole Earth Mattered.” It had articulated the Findhorn Foundation’s distinct planetary imaginary. The Foundation emerged in the early 1960s in anticipation of the coming “planetary holocaust”—a nuclear one—which spiritualist founders Peter and Eileen Caddy and Dorothy Maclean believed would terminate existing social, economic, and political relations. Cultivating a garden and developing a distinctive community life, they sought to demonstrate a vision of reformed relations between humans and between species which might take root after the apocalypse. This millenarianism held sway at Findhorn for a decade, until U.S. spiritualist David Spangler arrived and helped to establish a set of new priorities as co-director of the Foundation in 1970–1973. Its members would no longer wait for a new age (via holocaust), but act in the present, and in the local environment.
“There is no new age,” Spangler wrote. “There is only a need to recreate, rethink, refeel, reperceive, renew, reconceive and give rebirth to an ongoing process of planetary life and growth. There is one age, filled with many forms that change and one essence that does not” (Rubin, 1982, opening paragraph).
Spangler became a key voice in the new age movement, with his manifesto, Toward a Planetary Vision, published by Findhorn (Spangler, 1977). A Findhorn conference in October 1982, “Building a Planetary Vision,” sought to open up this vision. The planetary was domesticated and situated through the idea of intentional communities, leading to the global EcoVillage movement (McLaughlin & Davidson, 1986; Riddell, 1990; Scott, 2005). The Findhorn conference John Mack attended 6 years later explored the geopolitical implications of the personal politics of garden and community.
==> Pardon me for adding paragraph breaks to help lessen the quote’s ‘wall of text’. Interesting document. Very dense with groups and academic individuals from 70′s to early 2000′s.
One comment on Page 11 about the “new developments in biology and physics” circa 1988 hit me. It says “the universe now presented as “a vast, vibrating matter/energy unity,” and planet Earth as “an interconnected organism with each part dependent on all of its systems both close and distant”. Mind blown. This was just 35 years ago. I thought that interconnectivity was a much much older fundamental basic fact.
Today, 2023, I see much questioning about what did earlier generations do to help the planet and climate change. Well, here is one resource to explore.
