NEW BOOK: Wilderness and Ecopsychology: From Anthropocentrism to Ecological Awareness - Anastasios Gaitanidis, Alan Bainbridge and Isabella Mighetto

This book emerges from a visceral encounter with wildness - Brent Geese materialising through Thames Estuary fog, their presence disrupting the observer's conceptual frameworks. This originating moment captures the book's central gesture: moving beyond ornithological curiosity toward embodied recognition of our entanglement with more-than-human worlds. Over five years, I, Alan, and Isabella constructed a “wild conversation” - an interdisciplinary exploration refusing easy resolution in favour of productive uncertainty.

Our book diagnoses modern consciousness through what we term a “double alienation”: humanity alienated not only from labour’s products (Marx’s original formulation) but from the ecological systems sustaining life itself. This metabolic rift (Foster, 1999) manifests simultaneously as material reality and psychic formation. Wilderness emerges not as geographical fact but contested construct - an idea bearing traces of Enlightenment instrumentality, Romantic idealisation, and Cartesian dualism’s violent legacy. We trace how mechanistic worldviews established epistemological foundations for industrial capitalism’s extractive violence, while carefully avoiding romantic narratives of prelapsarian harmony. Human-nature conflict preceded industrialisation; what distinguishes the Anthropocene is the exponential scale of this acceleration and potentially irreversible consequences.

The psychoanalytic dimensions of this work prove particularly generative. We carefully develop an “ecological ethic of attunement” grounded in negative capability - Keats’s capacity for dwelling in uncertainty without reaching conclusions. Drawing on Bion's theory, this approach requires suspending ego-defences that shield against overwhelming anxiety. Modernity's relationship with wilderness resembles Odysseus bound to his mast: acknowledging nature's allure while maintaining protective distance through technological-bureaucratic mediation. Against this defensive posture, we propose a “mediated immediacy” - consciously attenuating and minimising conceptual filters to enable more intimate proximity with ecological others.

Wilderness experiences function as liminal spaces disrupting habitual perception. Building on Turner's anthropology and Winnicott's transitional space, these encounters temporarily suspend rigid ego structures, opening what Deleuze and Guattari call “lines of flight” - escape routes from stratified formations enabling novel modes of ecological awareness. Yet this disruption carries dangers. The “wild excess” erupting through civilisation's fissures holds both creative and destructive potential. Lacan's notion of the “Real” - that which resists symbolisation and threatens psychic stability - frames wildness as simultaneously essential and terrifying. Ecological attunement must navigate between violent domestication and catastrophic dissolution, cultivating capacity for discomfort, ambiguity, and not-knowing.

A political-economic critique proves inseparable from psychological analysis. We trace capitalism’s systematic destruction of human-nature reciprocity, showing how commodity fetishism obscures exploitative production conditions - we consume smartphones without confronting the violence of mining rare minerals or the toxic waste streams of their planned obsolescence. We extend this analysis through Indigenous dispossession and climate-driven displacement, revealing capital accumulation's never-ending production of landless, exploitable populations. Against extractive logics, we recover alternative imaginaries: commoning practices, agroecology, food sovereignty movements demonstrating communities’ capacity for managing shared resources through local governance.

Indigenous epistemologies function not as romantic supplement but fundamental challenge to Western ontological assumptions. Australian Aboriginal Dreamtime and similar cosmologies maintain relational ontologies resisting subject-object bifurcation, understanding landscape as animate and ensouled. We handle this material carefully, acknowledging the dangers of appropriation while claiming epistemic humility. Stein's concept of “epistemicide” - deliberate annihilation of alternative knowledges through colonial education - illuminates the violence enabling Western thought's hegemonic universalism. Palestinian agricultural practices and African diasporic agrarian reclamation exemplify such ecological attunement, proving decolonial ecology means supporting communities' reciprocal relations with place rather than protecting “pristine” nature.

The therapeutic implications resist mental health’s commodification. Against brief, mechanised interventions reducing complex suffering to manageable symptoms, we advocate slower, relationally-intensive approaches addressing structural violence and unconscious processes. Genuine healing requires political transformation alongside psychological work - what liberation psychologies call engaging intrapsychic experience and oppressive structures simultaneously.

Threading throughout is temporal politics. Capitalism's acceleration proves ecologically and psychologically unsustainable, demanding what we term "radical slowness" - refusing temporal regimes serving capital accumulation. This manifests through meditative practices cultivating presence, durational art requiring sustained attention, agricultural practices honouring seasons. Against modernity's death denial - expressed through technological transcendence fantasies and “forever chemicals” contaminating generations - we propose "hospicing modernity": ritualising mourning for what cannot be sustained while midwifing emergent possibilities.

Wilderness and Ecopsychology concludes not with a resolution but an invitation: “gathering at the threshold” between dying and nascent worlds. The book models collaborative dialogue with disagreement and surprise at its heart, cultivating capacities - attentiveness, receptivity, courage - needed for navigating unprecedented challenges. Wild psychology emerges through situated practice: generating space for grief, rejecting mechanisation, rupturing perception, constructing alternative infrastructures. The geese continue their migrations; the conversation persists; the future remains unwritten.