Host: Sheryl Glick R.M.T. (http://sherylglick.com)
Special Guest: Dr. Donna M. Orange (http://donnaorange.net)
In this episode of Healing From Within Sheryl Glick your host and author
of The Living Spirit a story of spiritual awakening, spiritual
communication healing Universal Energy and a guide to soul awareness and
evolving intuition and am delighted to welcome Donna M Orange author of
Climate Crisis, Psychoanalysis and Radical Ethics and discuss her efforts
to fight climate change by caring for the earth and its inhabitants
everywhere.
We share awareness of life in all in complexities in hopes of further
becoming aware of the purpose of life, human nature, and ways we interact
with each other and the planet. In metaphysical searches we become more
aware of who we are and how to improve life individually and collectively.
We will talk about the tendency of clinicians, healers and government
workers to avoid the warnings, times of crisis, and our engagement with
human suffering as we face the inextricably bound issues of global warming
and massive social injustices. We look for ways to develop radical ethics
of responsibility to truly awaken to climate change and bring professional
involvement for demanding change from government such as living more
simply, flying less, and caring for the earth more. Dr. Orange is a
psychoanalyst and philosopher living in California who teaches at the NYU
Postdoctoral Program and the Institute for the Psychoanalytic Study of
Subjectivity, New York. Author of several books her most recent Nourishing
the Inner Life of Clinicians and Humanitarians is a topic we all need to
focus on.
Dr. Donna Orange when asked to think back to a memory from their earlier
days and share a story of a person place event or value tells of her early
days on the farm and the connection and freedom she felt in that open
unrestricted beautiful world where childhood imaginings and dreams as well
as joy could be experiences without the problems of the outside world.
Thinking back, she also remembered being taught as a child to memorize the
³natural resources² of the places we studied in geography class, including
minerals, forests, sometimes fish and other animals. Now she realizes
that, from the viewpoint of the United States in the 1950s, we were meant
to learn what could be extracted from these faraway countries, then often
known by colonial names, to grow the economy here. The people in these
places, considered exotic and ³primitive,² had nothing to teach us in our
vast superiority. To study the world was to learn to dominate. While a
passion for knowing may, instead, serve humanistic, ecological, and
transcendent purposes‹curing disease, alerting us to climate dangers,
connecting us to others geographically distant and culturally strange to
us‹cognition as master rather than servant destroys, appropriating,
dominating, and conquering, just as Hegel wrote.
Dr. Orange tells us why and how she decided to write Climate Crisis
Psychoanalysis and Radical Ethics and how they all relate to each other
and what can be achieved by bringing these thoughts together. Though she
may never have wanted to write this book, she felt demanded, or a
responsibility from which she could not turn away, an urgent call.
Somehow, this urgency, this ³stop now!² forced this task upon me. At this
point in life, beginning retirement from clinical practice, Donna had
hoped to slow down and perhaps, wanted to write something reflective, even
more literary Donna quotes from Hans-Georg Gadamer and R. E. Palmer (2007)
who distinguished between eminent artistic texts where one speaks of ³a
work² and those writings intended to be of service, more like handicraft.
Then write, ³Alas, the looming threat to our common home, and to its most
vulnerable members, felt too demanding to proceed at leisure. Literary
aspirations must wait. Literary or no, however, I must remind my readers
