Deep Ecology: The Enchanted Compass

This is an excerpt from one of the presentations featured in the Pari Center’s event Re-enchanting the World, in Pari from August 27 to September 3, 2019.

with Andrew Fellows

Reform environmentalism is demonstrably failing to meet the challenges of the Anthropocene fast enough. Deep ecology, as proposed by Arne Næss and others, offers a coherent, holistic worldview that is ultimately psychological in its expanded sense of being in the world that Næss called the ‘ecological Self.’ It fosters a ‘radically conservative’ metanoia that can be embraced joyfully, not reluctantly, to navigate the perils ahead. The parallels between deep ecology, re-enchanting the world, and the Jungian concept of individuation will be explored.

Andrew Fellows, is a Jungian Analyst (AGAP/IAAP) with private practices in Bern and Zürich, a deep ecologist, and a writer. He holds a Doctorate in Applied Physics (Dunelm), and enjoyed two decades of international professional engagement with renewable energy, sustainable development and environmental policy before moving from the U.K. to Switzerland in 2001 to study Analytical Psychology. His special interests include the anima mundi, the mid-life transition, the new sciences, and the use of depth psychology to understand and address global collective and environmental problems, especially climate change and other aspects of the Anthropocene. His personal passions include nature, mountains and music, and he lives over three thousand feet above sea level in rural Switzerland without a car.

His lecture draws on many years of independent research and writing, from which he has presented his evolving ideas since 2007 at international conferences in England, Estonia, Japan, Switzerland and the U.S. in addition to teaching at ISAP Zurich. His first book, published by Routledge in March 2019, is Gaia, Psyche and Deep Ecology: Navigating Climate Change in the Anthropocene.