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Abstract

The dynamics, patterns, and history underlying our ecologically unsustainable relationship to the Earth are fundamentally intertwined with historic and current dynamics of racial and social injustice. The culture of denial and separation we have constructed in order to forget this painful history stands in the way of our society rising to the urgent challenges we now face. The story of the African American Burial Ground near Wall Street illustrates the way in which collective memory of our painful past is suppressed and buried, and its discovery serves as an entry point for the hidden narrative of race in the United States. The history of the slave trade in the 16th–18th centuries provides clues to how social and environmental devastation are intertwined, when particular people or lands are designated as separate and disposable. These dynamics are still playing out today, in continuing environmental injustices, in the school-to-prison pipeline, and in the spatial apartheid of our metropolitan regions: We damage ourselves and our planet as we continue the cycle of denial and fragmentation. This demands a new vision of ecopsychology that provides solutions for healing these deep-seated patterns, incorporating individual and collective transformation, as well as reflection and action. We offer an ecopsychology tool that facilitates this ongoing transformation of self and world—the Breakthrough Compass. A potent site for this work is in metropolitan regional organizing for environmental sustainability and social equity, where we re-integrate our fragmented social systems and our fragmented psyches while winning real changes for a better world. Key Words: Sustainability—African American—Climate change—Urban—Qualitative research.

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Building Just and Resilient Communities: New Foundations for Ecopsychology

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