...
...Project NatureConnect: Ecopsychology in Action
...Learn how to add the intelligent power of your sensory origins to how you think and feel

 

 


Institute of Global Education
Special NGO consultant to the United Nations Economic and Social Council 
Department of Intetgrated Ecology: Project NatureConnect

Dr. Michael J. Cohen, Director

   

 

 

 

"The significant problems we face cannot be solved by the same level of thinking we were at when we created them."

- Albert Einstein

 

 

Links Updated 8/1/2005



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Link Update 7/1/2005



.
Web Site
Navigation

 

Project NatureConnect
Homepage

Funded, online books, training and degree programs that supportively integrate
- nature

- sustainability
- environment
- holism
- ecology
- Earth
- and organics
into all subjects and relationships.

Introduction
Shortcut
Overview
What We Do
Who We Are
Learn in Nature

Purpose
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Director
Site Map
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.
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Education
Introduction
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Key
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................................................

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

.

 

 



.
Web Site
Navigation

 

Project NatureConnect
Homepage

Online books, training and degree programs that supportively integrate

  • nature
  • sustainability
  • environment
  • holism
  • ecology
  • Earth
  • and organics

into all subjects and relationships.

Introduction
Shortcut
Overview
What We Do
Who We Are
Learn in Nature

Purpose
Program
Director
Site Map
New/Updates
Burnout Prevention

Application Forms
.
Act now: grants, loans scholarships

Education
Introduction
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Key
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Key
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Information
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Careers/Jobs
Key
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References
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Essence

Validation
Outcomes Key
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Contacts
Email
360-378-6313

Return to Homepage

Act now: student grants, scholarships loans for college online

 

 

 

 

v

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 



.
Web Site
Navigation

 

Project NatureConnect
Homepage

Online books, training and degree programs that supportively integrate

  • nature
  • sustainability
  • environment
  • holism
  • ecology
  • Earth
  • and organics

into all subjects and relationships.

Introduction
Shortcut
Overview
What We Do
Who We Are
Learn in Nature

Purpose
Program
Director
Site Map
New/Updates
Burnout Prevention

Application Forms
.
Act now: grants, loans scholarships

Education
Introduction
Education Index

Degrees/CEU's
Certification
Orientation
Key
Courses
Scholarships
Key
Procedures Key
Financial

Free Course
Free Activity

Information
Synopsis
Books
Careers/Jobs
Key
Articles/News
Organic Psych
Sensibility

References
Blog

Essence

Validation
Outcomes Key
Testimonials
Key Book

Contacts
Email
360-378-6313

Return to Homepage

Act now: student grants, scholarships loans for college online

 

 

 

Continued from our new October, 2005, homepage at www.ecopsych.com .

 

 

PROJECT NATURECONNECT

The Natural Systems Thinking Process (NSTP)

Online courses, training, books, and degree programs.


 

 

Learn to master NSTP, a psychological, nature-reconnecting

tool. Backyard or backcountry, it enables you to scientifically

reduce the profound problems that result from the excessive

separation from Nature of our consciousness, thinking and spirit.

 

 

IMPORTANT NOTE: Please use the side panel or page-end links to access, out of context, the topics listed there. The context of these topics is found in the OVERVIEW below and on the pages that follow. The Overview also contains links to these topics.

 

 

OVERVIEW

"You must nurture your felt love for nature. Never deny it. It is your connection with the unifying essence that organizes, preserves and regenerates life relationships at every level. Its profound loss in our thinking produces our destructiveness and imbalance.

Those of us who are not scientifically filling the void in our life with our attractions to nature have been brainwashed into producing the problems we suffer personally, locally, and globally"

- Michael J. Cohen


Who are you?

People are part of nature. Nature's eons of intelligence, perfection, and beauty are in us as they are in all of Nature.*

In contemporary society we learn to spend, on average, over 95% of our time and 99.9% of our thinking disconnected from nature.

We, society, and the environment hurt from our extreme loss of contact with our origins in nature. Whenever a story or relationship reminds us of this loss, we feel the hurt. This makes us fearful, defensive, and apathetic.

Significantly, the major problems we face are seldom displayed or caused by natural systems or nature centered people.

 

 

Who disconnected you?

As the twig is bent, so grows the tree.

Our formal education molds our natural being and spirit to become our indoor, exploitive, cultural selves. It "sentences" us to spend eighteen thousand formative childhood hours indoors to gain a high school diploma. Our defining family and recreational relationships mostly occur indoors. So do our influential college years.

We learn to spend, on average, less than 12 hours of our total lifetime in conscious sensory contact with nature. Our immeasureable loss of nature's intelligence, balance and beauty in our thinking produces our madness.** It creates a stressful, psychological void in us that keeps us wanting. Nature's absence, leaves us feeling we don't have enough of anything. Too often this feeling psychologically addicts us to emotionally satisfying relationships and things that we know will eventually hurt us, others and the environment..

To our loss, today, when we spend time in nature, our mentality no longer consciously knows how to reconnect and benefit from nature's restorative energies. However, even a short visit to an attractive natural area "magically" helps us find calm and fulfillment. The science of that magic makes its benefits readily available. The science is a natural systems thinking process. It honors and nurtures the innate part of us that has defied conquest and still loves nature.**

 

 

Our underlying problem: does it disrupt your life?

Contemporary society is in denial. On one hand we can't stop engaging in environmentally and socially destructive relationships that we know are harmful. On the other hand, we deny that we are psychologically addicted to these relationships. We consider this situation "normal' or "progress".

"It is difficult to get people to understand something when their salary depends upon them not understanding it."
- Upton Sinclair 

Psychological addiction problems demand psychological addiction solutions. How can we apply such solutions if it is normal to deny our nature disconnected addiction and therefore not seek or use appropriate help for it? How much longer can we safely remain in our destructive social and environmental rut? Every time we travel it don't we make it deeper?

 

 

 

 

The NSTP opportunity: a pyschological solution.

Since 1952 I have researched, applied, and taught people to incorporate a readily available Natural Systems Thinking Process into their personal and professional lives. NSTP enables a child or adult to recognize our destructive, nature-disconnection addictions. It empowers a person to counter them by safely making emotional reconnections with nature that recycle our destructive bonds, help us act responsibly and reap the benefits thereof.

In our nature conquering society, for most leaders NSTP is about as popular as admitting an person of color into the KKK. However, the worthwhile effects of the process are easily accessable to any individual. For this reason, NSTP is included in several advanced University training and degree programs.

The results of education and counseling with nature. (From the 1997 NSTP Survey )

"In 1959, Dr. Michael J. Cohen founded a program and school based on reconnecting with nature. The National Audubon Society and many others called it the most revolutionary school in America saying, 'It is on the side of the angels.' School participants traveled and thrived in 83 different natural habitats by keeping their commitments to having open, honest relationships with the natural environment, each other and with indigenous people(s), researchers, ecologists, the Amish, organic farmers, anthropologists, folk musicians, naturalists, shamans, administrators, historians and many others. The experience deeply reconnected their inner nature to the whole of nature.

As a result of the participants' romance with educating themselves this way, in the school community:

Chemical dependencies, including alcohol and tobacco, disappeared as did destructive social relationships.

Personality and eating disorders subsided.

Violence, crime and prejudice were unknown in the group.

Academics improved because they were applicable, hands-on and fun.

Loneliness, hostility and depression subsided. Group interactions allowed for stress release and management; each day was fulfilling and relatively peaceful.

Students using meditation found they no longer needed to use it. They had learned how to sustain a nature-connected community that helped them improve their resiliency to stress and disease.

Participants knew each other better than they knew their families or best friends.

Participants felt safe. They risked expressing and acting from their deeper thoughts and feelings. A profound sense of social and environmental responsibility guided their decisions.

When vacation periods arrived, neither staff nor student wanted to go home. Each person enjoyably worked to build this supportive, balanced living and learning utopia. They were home.

Students sought and entered right livelihood professions upon graduation.

All this occurred simply because every community member met their commitment to make sense of their lives by establishing and sustaining sensory relationships that helped restore the natural world within and around them. Students and staff hunted, gathered and practiced such relationships; they organized and preserved group living processes that reawakened their natural wisdoms. They learned how to let nature help them regenerate responsible relationships when they decayed.

The secret to each participant's success was to learn how to learn directly from the natural world, the living Earth within and about them. Through natural sensations and feelings that arose through their newly grown sensory roots in Earth, the global life community taught them how to trust it, how to validate and incorporate its intelligence in their thinking.

From 30 years of all-season travel and study in over 260 national parks, forests and subcultures, Dr. Cohen developed a repeatable learning process and psychology that unleashes our natural attraction to grow and survive responsibly. By documenting that the process works and can be taught, he earned his doctoral degree and the school became a small graduate and underegraduate degree program co-sponsored by a leading conservation organization and several university degree programs.

From1985-92, Cohen translated the school's operants into a publically available Natural Systems Thinking Process (NSTP). Today, backyard or backcountry, people use and teach NSTP at home, work or school via the internet."

The results of NSTP are described in the Survey on this website and in the work of the students in the Degree programs.

 

 

The critical contribution of NSTP is that it empowers an individual to create moments that let Earth teach and that individuals can teach the world this skill via the internet.

To learn and teach NSTP one must engage in it. Intellectually understanding it is not enough, just as reading a driving manual does not mean you can actually drive.

You may learn, use and and teach the essence of NSTP, online and outdoors, in less than 45 hours of study, (eight five hour sessions with a study group.) This is best accomplished over four weeks time through our online Orientation Course "Psychological Elements of Global Citizenship." It usually consists of two sessions spread out over each week, about 90 minutes/day or less. Credit is optionally available.

Reading the web links to these pages will help you further understand how and why NSTP works. They also shorten by 40% your reading requirements on the Orientation Course since the Course includes some of this material.

Please be aware that without having NSTP experiences, some material you read on this website may seem unbelieveable. This is because it is based on restoring and experiencing 48 natural senses that your thinking has been trained to suppress. Although you are in touch with many of these senses at this very moment, you can not identify them due to your learned disconnectedness. For example: What is your 12th or18th natural sense?

 

 

 

 

 

NOTE: CONTINUED ON PAGES TWO and THREE

Located there are

    • FACTS TO CONSIDER
    • SAVING WHAT WE LOVE
    • USING THE PROCESS
    • AN NSTP SYNOPSIS
    • IMPLEMENTATION
    • OUTCOMES
    • DEGREE PROGRAMS
    • ACADEMIC AND PROFESSIONAL CERTIFICATION
    • PERSONALIZED DISCOVERY MATERIALS
    • ARTICLES
    • LINKS

 

 

 

 

 

DEGREES COURSES INTERNSHIPS ACTIVITIES RESEARCH WORKSHOPS DISCUSSION ARTICLES ECO-IQ TEST EARTHSPEAK

 
REMINDER

CONTINUED ON PAGE TWO

.

 

 


* ABOUT NATURE'S PERFECTION:

Nature can scientifically be seen as an attraction process that organizes, preserves and regenerates itself to produce an optimum of life, diversity, cooperation and peace. It accomplishes this without producing pollution, excessive abusiveness or garbage (nothing is left out, an attribute of unconditional love.) Seldom do war, insanity or death, as we know them, exist in natural systems.

 

** ABOUT BIOPHILIA:

According to Pulitzer-Prize winning sociobiologist Edward O. Wilson, Ph.D., of Harvard, as part of nature people have an inherent biological need to be in contact with the out-of-doors. He calls it "biophilia", and believes that nature may hold the key to our aesthetic, intellectual, cognitive, and even spiritual satisfaction. Wilson has found much evidence for our basic affinity for nature and its instructive and healing properties.

Writings of the noted authors and scientific thinkers below, as well as many others, have recognized the biophilia value of nature connected educating and counseling. Pick your favorite author:

John Locke, Phillip Lubin, Joanna Macy, Maraya Mannes, Don Marquis, Bill Mckibben, Marshal Mcluhan, Margaret Mead, Malwida von Meysenbug, Henry Miller, Claude Monet, Montaigne, Alfred Montepert, Maria Montessori, Thomas Moore, John Muir, T.T. Munger, Caroline Myss, Navaho, Isaac Newton, Odonahue, Jose Ortega, Osho, Thomas Paine, Pascal, William Penn, Plato, Plutarch, Alexander Pope, Daniel Quinn,, Robert Redford, Ranier Maria Ilke , Franklin Roosevelt., Theodore Roszak., Jean-Jaques Rousseau, Jedaluddin Rumi, Bertrand Russell, George Santayana, Susan Polis Schutz, Albert Schweitzer,

Seneca the Younger, William Shakespeare, George Bernard Shaw, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Sioux, Skinner, Sydney Smith, Gary Snyder, Pete Catches, Benedict Spinoza, St. Basil, Wallace Stegner, Saint Francis of Assisi,Clement Stone, Gary Synder, Thomas Berry, Wendall Berry, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Lily Tomlin, Stewart Udall., Hendrik Willem Van Loon, Voltaire, Mark Twain, Neale Donald Walshe, H.G. Wells, Lynn White, Jr., Willis Harmon, E.B.White, Alfred North Whitehead, Walt Whitman, Oscar Wilde, E.O.Wilson, Samuel Adams, Aristotle, Marcus Aurelius, Jane Austin, Francis Bacon, Gregory Bateson, Charlotte Beck, The Bible, William Blake, David Bohm, Hal Borland. William Cullen Bryant,

Pearl S. Buck, Robert Burns, John Burroughs, Lord Byron, Joseph Campbell, James Carol. Rachel Carson, Deepak Chopra, Walter Christie, Chuang-tzu, Cicero, Norman Cousins, Steven Covey, e. e. cummings, Leonardo da Vinci, John Davy, Paul Devereux, Bernard Devoto, D. H.Lawrence, Charles Dickens, Fyodor Dostoevski,, William O. Douglas Brooke Medicine Eagle, Albert Einstein,. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Euripides,, Henry Fielding,, Michael Fox, George Fox, Anne Frank, Sigmund Freud, Robert Frost.html, Mohandas K.Gandhi, China Garland, Kahil Gibran, Ralph Ginsberg, Chellis Glendinning, Albert Gore, Steven Jay Gould, Robert Greenway, Dick Gregory, William Thackeray, Thich

Nhat Thanh, Martin Heidegger, Hippocrates, Lewis Thomas, William Irwin Thompson, Robert Hook, Henry David Thoreau, Elbert Hubbard, Victor Hugo,. Aldous Huxley, I Ching, Ralph Ingersoll,Thomas Jefferson, Jesus, Samuel Johnson, Jovenel, Carl Jung, Viliyat Kahn, Immanual Kant, John Keats, Helen Keller, R. D. Laing, Lao-Tzu, John Lennon, Aldo Leopold, Thomas Wolfe, William Wordsworth, Frank Lloyd Wright, William butler Yeats, Zeno, Samuel Adams, Aristotle, Marcus Aurelius, Jane Austin, Francis Bacon, Gregory Bateson, Charlotte Beck, The Bible, William Blake, David Bohm, Hal Borland. William Cullen Bryant, Pearl S. Buck, Robert Burns, John Burroughs, Lord Byron, Joseph Campbell, James Carol. Rachel Carson, Deepak Chopra, Walter Christie, Chuang-tzu,

Cicero, Norman Cousins, Steven Covey, e. e. cummings, Leonardo da Vinci, John Davy, Paul Devereux, Bernard Devoto, D. H.Lawrence, Charles Dickens, Fyodor Dostoevski,, William O. Douglas Brooke Medicine Eagle, Albert Einstein,. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Euripides,, Henry Fielding,, Michael Fox, George Fox, Anne Frank, Sigmund Freud, Robert Frost, Mohandas K.Gandhi, China Garland, Kahil Gibran, Ralph Ginsberg, Chellis Glendinning, Albert Gore, Steven Jay Gould, Robert Greenway, Dick Gregory, William Thackeray, Thich Nhat Thanh, Martin Heidegger, Hippocrates, Lewis Thomas, William Irwin Thompson, Robert Hook, Henry David Thoreau, Elbert Hubbard, Victor Hugo,. Aldous Huxley, I Ching, Ralph Ingersoll,Thomas Jefferson, Jesus, Samuel Johnson, Jovenel, Carl Jung, Viliyat Kahn, Immanual Kant, John Keats, Helen Keller, R. D. Laing, Lao-Tzu, John Lennon,

Aldo Leopold, John Locke, Phillip Lubin, Joanna Macy, Maraya Mannes, Don Marquis, Bill Mckibben, Marshal Mcluhan, Margaret Mead, Malwida von Meysenbug, Henry Miller, Claude Monet, Montaigne, Alfred Montepert, Maria Montessori, Thomas Moore, John Muir, T.T. Munger, Caroline Myss, Navaho, Isaac Newton, Odonahue, Jose Ortega, Osho, Thomas Paine, Pascal, William Penn, Plato, Plutarch, Alexander Pope, Daniel Quinn,, Robert Redford, Ranier Maria Ilke , Franklin Roosevelt., Theodore Roszak., Jean-Jaques Rousseau, Jedaluddin Rumi, Bertrand Russell, George Santayana, Susan Polis Schutz, Albert Schweitzer, Seneca the Younger, William Shakespeare, George Bernard Shaw,

Isaac Bashevis Singer, Sioux, Skinner, Sydney Smith, Gary Snyder, Pete Catches, Benedict Spinoza, St. Basil, Wallace Stegner, Saint Francis of Assisi, Clement Stone, Gary Synder, Thomas Berry, Wendall Berry, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Lily Tomlin, Stewart Udall., Hendrik Willem Van Loon, Voltaire, Mark Twain, Neale Donald Walshe, H.G. Wells, Lynn White, Jr., Willis Harmon, E.B.White, Alfred North Whitehead, Walt Whitman, Oscar Wilde, E.O.Wilson, Thomas Wolfe, William Wordsworth, Frank Lloyd Wright, William butler Yeats, Zeno,

 

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