Wilderness and Ecopsychology (Routledge Explorations in Environmental Studies)

Offering a radical interdisciplinary exploration of human-wilderness relationships during our current climate crisis, and drawing on psychoanalytic insight, political critique, and ecological wisdom, this volume diagnoses the profound alienation endemic to late capitalist modernity while delineating pathways toward regenerative forms of being.

The book begins by deconstructing wilderness as both geographical reality and psychological construct, tracing its evolution from Enlightenment instrumentality through Romantic idealisation to contemporary relational understandings. In doing so, it examines how dominant narratives illuminate our ambivalent encounter with wilderness as both threat and salvation. The book then moves on to explore concrete alternatives to extractive agriculture, positioning reciprocal land stewardship and agroecological practices as embodiments of interspecies ethics. The culminating vision articulates a ‘wild psychology’ that advocates for collective liberation through practices of deep attention, material engagement, and transformative empathy offering not solutions but threshold experiences for reimagining human-earth relationships beyond the ruins of modernity.

Wilderness and Ecopsychology is a valuable resource for scholars, students, and practitioners in environmental humanities, critical psychology, ecotherapy, and posthumanist therapeutic approaches seeking to understand psychological distress as inherently ecological and political. It is also designed to aid therapeutic practitioners, health professionals and clinicians in thinking more radically about human and planetary health, and to encourage them to incorporate ecological thinking and nature-based/wilderness experience into their clinical practice.

Anastasios Gaitanidis is a Relational Psychoanalytic Psychotherapist, Director of Studies, Author, Theory Editor, and Supervisor. In addition to his clinical work as a Psychoanalyst, Anastasios held appointments as a Senior Lecturer and Director of Studies at Regent’s University London and University of Roehampton, UK. Anastasios is an Author who published numerous journal articles and edited books over the years, with a recent book publication entitled The Sublime in Everyday Life: Psychoanalytic and Aesthetic Perspectives. His recent work focuses on the intersection of psychological and political dimensions of cultural and environmental crisis.

Alan Bainbridge is a Professor of Education at Queen Margaret University, Edinburgh, and a Visiting Reader in Education and Sustainability at Canterbury Christ Church University, UK. He has an expansive view of education that ranges across ecology, psychology, politics, and sustainability. He uses broadly narrative-based research methods to work qualitatively; exploring the development of education professional practice, and the transformative nature of human/more-than-human relationships.

Isabella Mighetto is a Counselling Psychologist based in Bristol. She works in a community mental health service in the NHS and has a small private practice. In her clinical and consultation work she seeks to encourage a deeper connection to the body, as well as connection to the natural world. She is an advocate for incorporating nature-based practices into healthcare settings. Her framework attends to sociopolitical, cultural, ancestral, and linguistic contexts, seeing the human as embedded in a much wider ecology.