Applying the laws of ecological functioning to the life cycle of human development, from intrauterine life through adolescence, will allow us to recover the essential values of humanity and promote a general shift towards health and happiness.
A Sioux leader once wrote: «As long as human beings are not capable of feeling the pain that a fire in a fire causes a tree, or the cuts of a lumberjack’s axe, we will continue to burn forests and cut down trees indiscriminately, or for economic interests.
As long as human beings are unable to feel the pain of the fire of a fire or the gashes of a logger’s axe, we will continue to burn forests and cut down trees indiscriminately or for economic interests. In fact, this is something that is happening in our country and in various places on the planet. In the Amazon, the suffering of those who are still capable of feeling that pain, the natives, is such that some even commit suicide out of desperation or fall victim to those who invade their territories shamelessly, without any affection, even killing to achieve their goals: to build infrastructure for the exploitation of diamonds, gold or any other resource that brings money or power. This destroys our source of life: nature.
In the last 150 years, we humans have radically modified the ecological process of millions of years of our planet Gaia, with irreversible consequences. But the curious thing is that being the most intelligent creatures, we are also the ones who are determined to destroy everything that is alive. We have lost the great opportunity to take advantage of the wonders of technology – a fruit of that intelligence – for the benefit of all living things and not just a few humans. And that loss takes us away from sustainability and, probably, from the guarantee of a livable future.
For some, this is the greatest symptom that we are lost, without identity as a species, as human beings, something that leads us to irrationality and true madness. This is how Ernesto Sábato describes it in his memoirs Before the End: «With magical thinking and logical thinking split, man was exiled from his primitive unity; the harmony between man with himself and with the cosmos was broken forever.
We are intelligent beings, but instead we have lost our identity, placing us at a crossroads that leads to self-absorption, to ignorance of what is essential and to what the physician and psychiatrist Wilhelm Reich called «loss of inner contact». Drawing on the ideas of neuroscientists such as Antonio Damasio or Joseph LeDoux, or neuroethicists such as Kathinka Evers, we can find clues to explain this attitude. It is undeniable that emotions are at the basis of our values, since they allow the preference of certain stimuli over others and make consciousness possible. This starting point allows us to deduce that we are very emotionally blocked, a circumstance that prevents us from the proper development of our per-ception, of our conscience and, therefore, also of our «ecological conscience».
Throughout the last century, from their clinical experience, authors such as Sigmund Freud, Wilhelm Reich, John Bowlby or Juan Rof Carballo explained the influence of the repression of affect and emotions, as well as such as the absence of physical contact and affection, in psychosomatic emotional suffering and in the genesis of neurosis, depression and even psychotic states. Our early years are decisive in organizing our psyche and our identity, and also in generating the possible blockage of emotional perception and consciousness. Everything will depend on our maturational development and the relationship established mainly with our parents and teachers. Therefore, political and ecological changes must go hand in hand with a radical change in our way of educating and accompanying the human baby-mammal: we must recover our humanity and embody it both in the way we relate to each other and in our daily coexistence, recovering our love for our species in order to feel love for nature and for «the living», feeling part of it.
WE MUST RECOVER OUR HUMANITY WITH VALUES LIKE MUTUAL SUPPORT, COOPERATION, RESPECT OR LOVING ETHICS.
It is along these lines that Human Systems Ecology emerges, a system of preventive and psychosocial intervention from intrauterine life to adolescence, whose main objective is to facilitate the self-regulated growth of individuals by applying the general laws of ecological functioning to the particularities of each human system – the family, the school, the institutions… so that they can fulfill their vital function while satisfying the needs of all their members. Of course, without losing sight of the personal, structural and social limitations of each case.
ecological upbringing» and propose ways to recover human relationships, or humanity in relationships, thus establishing ecological atmospheres in any social space: couple, family, school, media, institutions or companies.
This proposal is part of the new para-digm, which Fritjof Capra defines as «ecological» in that it «recognizes the fundamental interdependence between all phenomena and the fact that, as individuals and as societies, we are immersed in the cyclical processes of nature, according to the perception of deep ecology».
Human Systems Ecology, together with the experience gained from decades of clinical and psychosocial practice in teams made up of professionals from different disciplines, takes up the ideas of Wilhelm Reich and Alexander
S. Neill, with their theory of self-regulation, and those of current authors, such as Edgar Morin, Michel Odent or Humberto Maturana. What is evident is that a new paradigm is developing, within which ecological parenting is the radical and realistic alternative to modify the current state of affairs, together with social and political changes, which must also be necessarily ecological.
Capacity for pleasure, cooperation, mutual support, solidarity, respect and a loving-rose ethic, together with a functional aggressiveness, will be some of the natural attributes of the new Human Structure, which contrasts with the sick and sadomasochistic structures that have prevailed for centuries, the result of a form of relationship and child education that is repressive, anti-ecological and foreign to the human.
Our civilization has progressively moved away from many of the essential values of the human being as a consequence of centuries of patriarchy and religious fanaticism.
And furthermore, we maintain this state of affairs with our characteristic attitudes.
Whenever the language of love is impeded, hatred takes its place. Every look of tenderness that is stolen from a child forms in him a new tear; every «no» to his lively and authentic expressiveness weakens his self-confidence and makes him submissive or reactive; every imposition of neurotically conditioned reasons crushes his small initiatives; every caress that his skin misses engraves in him the signs of war or death; every gesture of harshness The fact that in the face of their active sexuality, their capacity to experience that natural pleasure that produces joie de vivre diminishes a little more, generating a rigid defensive organization that Wilhelm Reich described as “armored». This rigid shell begins to form in intrauterine life and is organized throughout our psycho-affective maturation process until the end of adolescence.
To prevent its formation, it is necessary to change the way we relate to babies and children, but also the way we relate to adults, parents, educators, professionals, since we are their models and their source of life through the essential ecosystems, family and school. It is therefore necessary to interrelate and complement the practice of social ecology and political ecology with the ecology of human systems in order to facilitate the global and permanent planetary change that we need for the survival and development of human beings. Each and every one of us – professionals and ordinary citizens – has a leading role and responsibility in this task, because we are all one in the path that Edgar Morin’s words show us: «To live poetically, to live intensely, to live in communion, to live in community, to live in play, to live in aesthetics, to live in knowledge, to live both in affectivity and rationality, to live in life, to live fully assuming the destiny of homo sapiens demens, to live inserting ourselves in the Trinitarian purpose: instinct, affection, reason”.
An international initiative
For several decades, specialists in various fields have been applying an ecological vision of human development, proposing respectful ways of accompanying childbirth, facilitating emotional bonding, the passage of sexual phases and education in freedom.
However, there was a need for a discourse that would bring together all this research and alternative interventions on human maturation. The main objective of the International Institute for the Ecology of Human Systems, presented in Paris in July 2011 by Xavier Serrano, obstetrician Michel Odent and Jean-Loïc Albina, psychotherapist and sexologist, is to be able to do so together with an extensive database of all the groups and professionals working in this field. Specialists in pregnancy, ecological childbirth, ape-go, breastfeeding, infant sexuality, family mediation, gender violence, institutional conflict resolution, psychosocial groups and many others pool their expertise to generate forms of intervention based on evidence and empirical contrast rather than assumptions or ideologies.
