ABSTRACT
This chapter seeks to facilitate a direct look at how therapists as Western people and especially they as mental health clinicians participate in their ongoing environmental devastation and subsequent denial. There are two major characteristics of Western culture especially related to therapy that have contributed to our current environmental crisis and continue to affect our ability to respond. The two characteristics are: the notion of an isolated, independent ego, our "split" consciousness and general perception of the world and the dominance of the left hemisphere and hyper-rationality and objectivity of positivist science. The chapter also seeks to briefly synthesize a few basic examples from the literature to alert the reader to the possibility that something deeper and greater is at stake in "nature-assisted art therapy", which requires more than "using" nature as another technique. It points to the necessity of a complete transformation of the fragmented Western consciousness starting with therapists.
