36 NATURE-BASED EXPRESSIVE ARTS THERAPY
in the formative forces of the continual creativity of the world
(Richards 1973).Personal and planetary challenges
The multitude of interconnected challenges of the world today include
climate disruption, pollution, corporate control of governments, the
erosion of democracy, mass extinction, poverty, increasing wealth
disparities and ongoing wars and their aftermath. In the United States
we are bombarded with political, environmental, economic and social
stories of climate change, war, political extremism and a turn toward
social media for connection and information. Physicist and novelist
Alan Lightman (2005) says that many have become prisoners of the
“wired world” (p.187) in which we live, which includes an overload
of information and stimulation, the loss of privacy and silence and
obsessions with speed, consumption and material wealth. According
to the recent report, “The State of Mental Health in America” (Nguyen
et al. 2016), 40 million adults (one in five) have a mental health
condition in the United States. Likewise, rates of youth depression are
increasing significantly. Similar trends are seen in rates of addiction,
suicide and incarceration among American adults. Additionally, most
Americans lack access to adequate mental health care.
When distanced from our own senses and embodied reality, we are
primed to create and enact anthropocentric, human-centered stories
that have had catastrophic effects for the Earth and all its inhabitants.
In a manic push for economic growth, many societies, particularly in
the West, have turned humans into machine-like entities feeding an
endless system of production and consumption. It is not unusual that
when individuals become tired, anxious or depressed they may try to
fix the problem quickly in order to return to business as usual rather
than pausing to consider the underlying cause of the dis-ease or the
consequences for the living Earth. This is a narrative of falling out
of harmony with the interconnected web of life, and it perpetuates
stories and histories of power and ego, conquest and domination,
exploitation and consumption.