Vital Signs

'"Vital signs" are, of course, the basic physiological measures of functioning which health practitioners use to assess the gravity of a patient's predicament. This anthology focuses not so much on our physical predicament, with so many of the Earth's systems severely stressed and beginning to fail - there are plenty of other places to read about this Instead we focus on our psychological predicament, as news of the situation slowly penetrates our defences and we struggle as individuals and as a society to find an adequate response. By "vital signs" we also mean signs that such a response is beginning to take shape: signs of hope, signs of healing.We feel that ecopsychology in Britain has a distinctive voice and unique contributions to make. In doing so, we hope to facilitate debate and dialogue within the field, in the hope that this will lead eventually to more developed theory and practice. Things are still at quite an early stage in the construction of ecopsychology as a discipline, and the articulation of relationships of compatibility or incompatibility between various approaches. It will take time for the field to reach maturity, to agree on terminology (or agree to use different terminologies), and to develop organisational forms. This is a familiar process for any new way of looking at things.At the same time as recognising this slow maturation, we are of course equally aware of the extraordinary urgency of the external situation which it is one of the missions of ecopsychologists to address. While there would in theory still be an important role for ecopsychology if we were not facing environmental meltdown - exploring the complex relationships between human and other-than-human, and the therapeutic value of bringing the two together - in practice ecopsychology has been completely shaped by a sense of catastrophic loss, of the irreversible destruction of complexity and the impending threat to the systems which sustain life on this planet.From this point of view, ecopsychology is part of a much larger movement seeking to develop awareness of climate change together with all the other developing ecological crises (pollution, over-consumption of resources, destruction of habitats, etc). What distinguishes ecopsychology from many of the other players in this larger movement, however - apart from the psychological focus itself...