Making the Natural Personal: Discussing the Scale Problem in Ecopsychology

Abstract

Positive interpersonal relationships between humans and positive relationships between humans and nature have been shown to share many overlapping benefits for mental, emotional, and physiological well-being in people, as well as similar evolutionary mechanisms. Human disconnection from interpersonal relationships and from natural environments is also associated with significant negative effects, including impacts on human well-being as well as the documented catastrophic effects of nonecological mindsets on global ecology. This has led to growing literature investigating human–human and human–nonhuman disconnection as interlinked phenomena. However, this leads to problems of incompatibility relating to the interpersonal scale at which human beings most readily form emotional connections, including questions of how an individual human being forms a relationship with a concept as broad as nature. This article aims to support and advance the relational view of human–nonhuman entanglement by contracting its emotional scope to the interpersonal level. It identifies and suggests ideas for overcoming existing limitations of the interpersonal lens of nature connectedness. Through this lens, the relational self-expansion model is applied to human–nonhuman relationships to demonstrate how the unique capabilities of humans and nonhumans mutually benefit one another both at the interpersonal and broader social scale.