The Environment as an Object Relationship: A Two-Part Study

Abstract

This two-part qualitative study posits object relationships, the internalized relationships that organize the psyche, as a template for the human relationship to ecosystems. During part one, 14 researchers completed a 5-min free-write that explored how they felt about familiar ecosystems. Results showed that personal ecosystems played similar roles to familial relationships or close friendships. Furthermore, most respondents perceived potential losses of such places as “devastating.” Based on the researchers' narratives, a second part with a larger sample size was developed. One hundred sixty-five participants were similarly surveyed about how they connected with the environment. Results of the second part corroborated part one's conclusion that people relate to the environment similarly to how they relate to people with whom they have meaningful attachment relationships. Taken together, both studies suggest that ecosystems, particularly those experienced as children, function as object relationships. When society does not signify the importance of the ecosystem object relationship, humans have diminished capacity to protect this relationship on behalf of their well-being.

Introduction

The world has reached a climate tipping point. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC 2022) stated as much. Data showed that climate change has already arrived. Global temperature has increased (NOAA, 2021). There was an almost 100% increase in wildfires between 1984 and 2012, and the trend continues upward (C2ES, n.d.). Concurrently, according to Callaghan et al. (2021; as cited in Timsit & Kaplan, 2021), 85% of people have been affected by at least one climate change event in their lifetime, and young people are experiencing more climate events than any prior generation (Thiery et al., 2021).

Yet many in the United States, if not the world, have not agreed on the reality or impact of climate change (Marlon et al., 2022). The split thinking in response to climate change has impeded scientific progress. The rift has also created a social justice crisis, as noted by the IPCC: “Vulnerable people, those marginalized socially and economically, are the most exposed to climate change impacts—and have the fewest resources to adapt” (Lee, 2022). The discord between climate and psychological realities derives from the complex, powerful, and often underappreciated human relationship to ecosystems. Our study begins with an overview of what is taking place between people and their environments.

Climate as a regulatory system

Given the exacerbation of adolescent mental health issues for the past 10 years, it is reasonable to postulate that young people who have been more exclusively exposed to climate change events experienced a greater effect of these social forces on their psychological well-being (Twenge, Cooper, Joiner, Duffy, & Binau, 2019). Clinically, a number of unique phenomena have emerged for the past 10 years. Young men have had vasectomies, some even live-streaming them, removing their ability to procreate as a moral and ethical obligation due to the expected impacts of climate change (Plautz & National Journal, 2014). Children have expressed increasing climate anxiety associated with the perception that the government has failed to act, leading to feelings of betrayal, abandonment, and moral injury (Hickman et al., 2021). Young adults and adolescents have regularly engaged in excessive drinking, sexuality, and materialism that are literal enactments of dysregulation (Bodnar, 2008).

Adults across the lifespan have also faced their own psychological dilemmas (Doherty & Clayton, 2011). They have experienced traumatic impacts when climate events transformed ecosystems. Experiencing and witnessing dysregulated mental health issues across entire communities increases anxiety. Studies have shown that changing environmental conditions have also been linked to an increase in inflammatory illness, autoimmune disorders, and lung disease (Olvera Alvarez, Kubzansky, Campen, & Slavich, 2018).

There have been increases in attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, depression, obesity, autism spectrum disorder, and substance use, due to an interaction of genetic predisposition and environmental exposure to parental instability and mental health issues (Monaco, 2020). As the climate swings wildly, more people than ever have been diagnosed with bipolar illness (He et al., 2020; Yutzy, Woofter, Abbott, Melhem, & Parish, 2012). From a clinical perspective, worry and anxiety over protracted periods of time have predicted poor health outcomes (Kendler, Hettema, Butera, Gardner, & Prescott, 2003).

The climate conditions of any geography function similar to ballasts through which people regulate the functions of mind and body. When the ballasts can no longer balance voltage and current, the light burns out, sometimes explosively. When the ecosystem is no longer in balance, the life it contains begins to behave erratically (Albrecht, 2012, 2014).

People form attachments to their environments

If environments play an important regulating function in well-being, it follows that people will form attachments to them. A review of interviews and surveys conducted almost 10 years ago with a random sample of diverse adults (Bodnar, 2012) revealed that people were attached to their ecosystems. They displayed upset and nostalgia when development and climate events disrupted treasured spaces. The breaking of attachment relationships can lead to psychological detachment and dissociation, defenses that have been linked to suicidality (Murphy, Armstrong, Hermele, Fischer, & Clendenin, 1979).

A significant literature has depicted how the loss of country, place, and value systems due to migration significantly alters mental health and physical well-being (World Health Organization, 2018). A lack of social connectedness and interpersonal stress has caused strong psychological and somatic symptoms (Hutten, Jongen, Vos, van den Hout, & van Lankveld, 2021). Being in an environment with substantial loss of life and resources (i.e., a warzone) has led to mental and physical health issues (Di Razza, 2020). The evidence has also pointed toward the loss of place being a factor in immune system vulnerability and disease transmission.

If people profoundly attach to the places that play a strong regulating role in their psyches, why is not the response to climate change more uniform? The wide swing from billionaire bunkers stocked with supplies to the oblivious citizen mindlessly consuming resources suggests that the relationship people have with ecosystems is both complex and deep, touching on both unconscious and visceral templates that are both neurologically driven and sensorially organized. The psychic splits induced by climate change also characterize the dynamics of important developmental relationships.

The rancor of object relatedness

The mixed responses to climate change and the rapid increase in mental health diagnoses could be understood through the template of object relations theory, a concept that the psyche forms in relation to other developmentally significant people who become internalized as influential and often conflicted psychological constructs that persist across the life span. Is it possible that the physical environment also plays a role in the developing psyche? If so, threats to past or present ecosystems might stimulate an array of emotional and cognitive responses. The range of reactions might also explain climate confusion, a term used to challenge accepted climate science (Spencer, 2008) and to explain the difficulty educators face in teaching climate science (Plutzer et al., 2016). Can dysregulated ecosystems play a role in increasingly dysregulated psyches? Yes, if the environment functions as a psychological object relationship.

Anthropological and psychological definitions of the object relationship

Although Piaget (1954) recognized the importance of space in configuring a child's sensorimotor development, the physical environment has not been highlighted as particularly significant in clinical theory. Object relations theory is ubiquitous in clinical psychology and originated from some of the field's most classical thinkers (Ferenczi, 1909; Guntrip, 1992; Klein, 1975; Sullivan, 1950; Winnicott, 1953). Object relationships refer to the internalized and sometimes unconscious mapping of relationships that exert a powerful influence over psychological organization either because they become the focal point of drives or because they importantly structure thoughts and feelings (Fairbairn, 1952; Greenberg & Mitchell, 1983; Kernberg, 1988). Object relations theory has not addressed the existence of or the formative role of physical space.

The sole standout, psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Searles (1960), theorized that the developing child exists in an undifferentiated state, “subjective oneness,” with the physical environment that eventually leads to a mature and differentiated set of object relations. Yet, given what we now know about the impact of neural patterning, it seems at least possible that the early state of undifferentiation, “the subjective oneness” with the physical environment, still exerts influence. Searles noted that disturbances to this object field can result in significant mental health challenges, including, in his view, psychosis.

Human geographers and some anthropologists have also suggested that the physical environment plays a role in the formation of cultural belief systems. Rappaport (1968) recognized that communal control of the pig population created both a smart ecosystem utilization plan and a ritualized economy that defined how residents of Papua New Guinea understood themselves. Mauss and Beuchat (1979) linked the social patterns in Inuit culture to the seasonal organization of space.

Myers (1986) demonstrated the important role of place in Pintupi (Aboriginal Australia) identity and political culture. In an article adapted from a seminal address to the XIXth International Geographical Congress in Stockholm, Lowenthal (1961) proposed a theory that mind and landscape mutually form one another. The earth gives rise to imagination, whereas imagination enables the construction of personal worldviews that also describe and map the land. Tuan's (1977) essay on the intricacies of spatial consciousness examined the longitudinal mutuality of humans and their environments as undifferentiated space became a meaningful place.

In addition to these human geographers and anthropologists, many nonclinical psychological researchers have long analyzed people's relationships with their personal and local ecosystems (Kahn, 1999; Kahn & Kellert, 2002; Kellert, 2012). They have examined the geographic locations of particular meaning systems across different cultural groups: Kahn was prolific in his documentation of how children and young adults formed and lost attachments to nature in places similar to a Black community in Houston, Texas and a village along the Amazon. Recently, an ambitious research agenda was laid to observe the sweep of humanity's reaction to their ecosystems, one symptom at a time (Frumkin et al., 2017). This study builds on their work by proposing that the environment functions as another object relationship.

Can these organizing relational structures form neurological substrates that become activated by memory as the child develops? Do these substrates have a lasting influence over the adult mind? According to Svrakic and Zorumski (2021),

Specific events of object relations are forgotten but nevertheless profoundly influence the mental future of the individual, acting (i) as implicit schema-affect templates that regulate attentional priorities, relevance, and preferential assimilation of new information based on experience, and (ii) as basic units of experience that are, under normal circumstances, integrated as attractors or “focal points” for interactive self-organization of functional brain networks that underlie the mind. (p. 1)

Ecosystems as an object relationship

Given that climate events will change environments, everyone will have to come to terms with the impact of climate events on physical and mental well-being. Further we will all also have to take some form of unified and adaptive action. Finding out how people think, feel, and express their relationship to the environment compelled us to take the most obvious next step—ask. Our study did exactly this. Asking how people relate to their local ecosystem through a two-part narrative analysis could help explain the chaotic and divergent responses to ecosystem change. The responses might serve as harbingers of what will happen to people when their minds and bodies can no longer count on their ecosystems for stability.

Study Methods: Part One

Procedure

The Teachers College Development, Environment and Wellness (DEW) laboratory sought to examine the often unacknowledged human embeddedness in their ecosystems. This study drew heavily on the methods of Interpretive Phenomenological Analysis (Smith & Nizza, 2021) and especially Narrative Analysis (Josselson & Hammack, 2021) to seek personal and contextual meaning in how people express their relationship to their ecosystems. We utilized, as Lertzman (2019) said, the technique of “listening.”

Pihkala (2022) also explored using naturally occurring words and narratives to better understand human thought and emotion in relationship to the environment. He provided a “taxonomy” of climate emotions that reflected the interconnectedness of personal experience, relationships, and feelings. Narrative analysis historically draws on Bruner (1990), whose work with language and cognition showed how the acquisition of language and the development of a capacity for narrative bridged the private experience of self with social and cultural meaning systems. In a sense, narrative analysis sits at the juncture where word meaning meets word structure (Vygotsky, 1962), the “shared utterances” that constitute personal and collective meaning (Bakhtin, 1981).

The study's first part looked to the researchers as an essential starting point. Before we could begin to analyze others as the objects of our research, we felt it necessary to investigate ourselves. Researchers' phenomenological analysis of their own experience has a long tradition, notably beginning with Dumont's (1978) study of the Panare Indians of Venezuelan Guiana. Positing research as a dialogic and introspective philosophical interaction, Dumont discovered that ethnography could be a mutual study of subject and object, or self and other, such that these distinctions themselves become questionable.

Participants

There were 14 participants in the initial study, all members of the DEW laboratory, primarily clinicians in training who represented a diversity of cultures and social classes (White urban American 4, White rural American 3, White suburban American 2, Black American 1, Chinese American 1, Pakistani 1, Persian American 1, and South American 1), who chose to be the first subjects of our project. Participants ranged from 20 to 61 years old and were largely female. Twelve participants identified as female (n = 12), and two participants identified as male (n = 2). All participants were full-time students (n = 13) or professors (n = 1).

Instruments

Participants were asked to create a 5-min free-write that explored their relationship to a familiar place. Each participant also answered three follow-up prompts: (1) Based on your free-write, describe your relationship to this ecosystem or place; (2) What other relationship in your life is most similar to the one you have to the ecosystem you described? and (3) How would you feel if this place no longer existed? All answers were recorded and posted anonymously. Prompt one was analyzed according to word choice, noting words that reflected feelings of comfort, nostalgia, growth, fondness, concern, worry, and gratitude. Prompt two focused on relationships such as childhood, friends, family, and places, as well as affects such as wistful, confident, sad, hopeful, anxious, resigned, and calm/accepting. Prompt three was coded utilizing an ordinal scale created for this study based on observed word frequency (1 = indifferent, 2 = concerned, 3 = worried, 4 = sad, and 5 = devastated).

All participants completed the free-write and follow-up prompts.

Results

Panov's (2017) Subject/Object continuum provided a thematic starting place to identify patterns of word usage. In Panov's configuration the person and the environment take on the role of subject or object. Subject/Subject means the person and the environment act upon each other equally, Subject/Object means the environment acts on the person, Object/Object means both the environment and the person are acted upon, and Object/Subject means the person acts upon the environment. These relational patterns were coded for each free-write sentence. Subject/Object and Object/Subject were the most common relationship structures noted in each free-write. Object/Object and Subject/Subject were the least common. We took this as an indication that the relationship between person and environment was an active one. Having established that the relationship was not inert, we felt comfortable investigating word frequency to glean content meaning from the narratives.

From prompt one, most participants used words that evoked feelings of “fondness” (mean number of occurrences per participant = 1.29), “comfort” (mean = 1.14), and “nostalgia” (mean = 1). However, feelings of “concern” (mean = 0.64) and “worry” (mean = 0.57) were common as well. Themes of “calm/accepting” were recurrent (n = 13), along with affects such as “anxious” (n = 9), “hopeful” (n = 6), and “sad” (n = 6). From prompt two, most participants described a “family member” (n = 13) or “friend” (n = 11) as the other relationship similar to their ecosystem of choice. From prompt three, most participants said they would be “devastated” should the place they chose no longer exist (mean = 4.73).

Discussion

The free-write process allowed the researchers to analyze what type of ideas surfaced without being previously structured. The dominance of the Subject/Object and Object/Subject configurations and the relative lack of the Subject/Subject or Object/Object configurations strongly suggested a dynamic relationship between the subjects and their ecosystems.

Next, the word frequency of the free-writes provided meaning to the active relationships. The word frequencies depicted a meaningful relationship to primarily childhood places. Similar to the internalization of significant family relationships, the participants appeared to also internalize their ecosystems as developmentally charged cognitive schemes. Intimacy between self and place stood out. For example, one participant wrote about Pune, India:

Rains reminded me of the time I went to my terrace with my sister and friend. We got drenched in the rain, danced, and sang our hearts out… I remember evenings when we would walk to a nearby hill, talk endlessly and watch the sunsets.

Another participant recalled a third-grade field trip to learn about estuaries, swimming, and bridge-jumping:

Spending the last night before we all went our separate ways for college staring at the water and talking for hours. We felt it only fitting that the place where we experienced so much of our childhood home be the same place to experience its final moments.

In their reflections, most participants compared their chosen ecosystem with familial relationships: a “little sister who would always be there,” a “mother with whom it was difficult to set boundaries,” and “generations past to whom a connection is felt through the place.” Another participant likened their local environment to their father because it “helped them change their perspective.”

The word “devastated” frequently emerged to describe how a person would feel if their chosen environment no longer existed. The implications struck us. “Devastated” implied destruction. What kind of relationship would cause a person to feel destroyed if it no longer existed? In our thinking we saw nothing short of the attachment one feels to a loved one.

In a subject pool that was small and consisted primarily of people who worked together, many factors could explain the shared cognitive framing even though the free-write exercise was blind. We decided that our minimalist results were robust enough to take this project to the next level holding onto the newly generated hypothesis that the human relationship to the environment could be seen as an additional object relationship.

Study Methods: Part Two

Procedure

Based on the positive outcome of the study's first part, we conducted a second part with a larger population. Participants were recruited through electronic listservs at Teachers College, Columbia University and elsewhere to take a short survey about the environment. At the end of the survey, participants were asked if they wished to be interviewed. The results of the survey were analyzed according to word frequency and word choice. We focused our coding efforts on the structural and symbolic implications of the words people chose to use and how often they used them. We sought to discover if the experience of the environment played a psychological role similar to that of a childhood relationship that significantly organized the psyche. Further we hoped to discover content that might justify applying the structural principles of object relatedness to people and their physical environments. The IRB has approved our study (IRB Approval: 22-177 Protocol).

Participants

We received 165 responses (N = 165), 65% of whom were between the ages of 18–34 and 35% of whom were between 35 and 83. The breakdown of how respondents stated their country of birth was as follows: United States 112, Pakistan 12, Peru 6, China 4, Canada 3, Germany 3, Albania 2, Hong Kong 2, Saudi Arabia 2, Ukraine 2, Brazil 1, Brazzaville, Congo (Central Africa) 1, Columbia 1, Cuba 1, Ecuador 1, England 1, India 1, Kuwait 1, Mexico 1, Mongolia 1, Russia 1, Sudan 1, Sweden 1, Switzerland 1, Taiwan 1, Tanzania 1, and Vietnam 1.

Although the majority of respondents were White females evenly distributed across all class backgrounds, it is noteworthy that 10% of respondents self-identified as Asian, 10% as Hispanic, 5% as African American, 2% as nonbinary, 1% as parents (male and female), and multiple other single identifiers such as neuroatypical, or Muslim. Close to 50% were students at Teachers College, Columbia University, whereas the rest were recruited through social media posts. The intersectionality reflected modern notions of identity in a population that was currently urban but where people originated from mostly equal distributions of rural, suburban, and urban communities across diverse cultures.

Instruments

Adopting the free-write method used in study's first part, a Qualtrics survey was developed to elicit narrative material and word choice about a larger group of people's relationships with the environment. Some questions provided subjects with a list of choices based on the words that were prominent in the phase one study. The survey for the study's second part can be found in Supplementary Appendix SA1. We included ample space for free-writes and some multiple choice options. The survey enabled people to express how they related to specific ecosystems. Then it offered participants prompts so that the research team could contextualize the significance of word frequency and the spontaneously generated narratives. In the study's second part we sought to more deeply describe how participants related to their ecosystems.

An additional interview was administered to 33 participant volunteers to contextualize the survey responses within the participant's lives. Questions were asked about lifestyle, social media usage, and life history. These interviews have not yet been coded and will serve as the basis of further studies.

Results

Participants described past and present environments with little variation between weather patterns or features of the environment. The word “sad” with modifiers such as “urgently” or “extremely” dominated and occurred most frequently across all questions. The word choice frequency across all answers can be found in Supplementary Appendix SA2.

When asked to describe an environment that had been important, 60% of participants chose a past environment. They notably described their relationships to their chosen places in emotionally inflected terms. The word choices of how respondents felt in the place about which they wrote can be found in Supplementary Appendix SA3. Only 0.67% of respondents said they had “no particular feelings.” In comparison, 10.8% felt “joy,” 10.2% “love,” 9.6% “inspired,” 8.8% “nurtured,” and 8.67% “supported.” Other important negative feelings were also expressed. 4.43% of participants reported “anger,” and 4.4% reported that they felt “threatened.” The verbalization of this range of emotions seemed consistent with how people might feel about someone with whom they were in a relationship (Mitchell, 2003; Roth, 2018).

Supplementary Appendix SA4 shows the word choice responses to the prompt that asked how participants would feel if climate change caused the place they described to no longer exist. In this second part of the study most people used the same word to describe their reaction to a loss of place as did the majority of people from part one: 85% of participants responded without prompt with the word “devastated.” Other terms included “sad,” “very, very, very sad,” “anxious,” “concerned,” “heartbroken,” and “worried.” These words and their feelings suggested recognition of the psychological chaos that would accompany the loss of an ecosystem or place. Finally, 100% of subjects demonstrated some awareness of how climate change had already affected their lives with only two viewing environmental events as signifying patterns of renewal.

Discussion

The study's second part captured word choices and other narrative actions people used to describe their relationship to an ecosystem. Similar to the first part of the study, people chose words that conveyed relatedness. In this second part, word choices and narrative material formed more concrete stories. These stories about people and their ecosystems depicted intimate and sometimes rugged connections, profound change, bafflement, and then endings of disappearance and loss, “nature is constantly in flux, never quite sure what side to show,” bringing to mind the quixotic temperament of any close relationship.

Other words used repeatedly included familiarity, comfort, joy, safety, the draw of ethnic identity, expressing oneself authentically, and often, love: “It is a place that offers comfort, energy, and fun,” or, “I can feel like myself here, and that gives me strength because when you can be yourself, it makes you stronger.” The notion that an ecosystem can be a place that evokes the resonance of home solidified the relational importance of the attachment to places. The narratives revealed a strong and revelatory emotional geography.

As an object relationship, the environment would exhibit three characteristics often associated with these internalized relational constructs: (1) the presence of an attachment (Ainsworth, 1969; Winnicott, 1953); (2) an organizing function in the psyche (Fairbairn, 1952; Kernberg, 1988); and (3) complexity (Klein, 1975).

The narrative material of the study's second part reflected these three characteristics as seen in these examples (see Supplementary Appendix SA5 for a complete summary of this data).

Participants described ongoing and profound attachments to place. One person wrote, “After the brook was poisoned, I never played in it the same way, although I never lost my love for it.” Another example:

I loved getting up in the morning and feeling that fresh breeze brush across my face and enjoying a cup of tea with my family while sitting outside and listening to the birds chirp and leaves rustle. I have a very special bond with my hometown, as living there contributed to who I am today.

Participants also alluded to their ecosystem's organizing function. From the woman who described how being outside in the wilderness protected her from an abusive family environment to the man who learned about dealing with the cold, ecosystems provided important cognitive frames for organizing stimulation. A man from Albuquerque, New Mexico wrote:

I lived with a view of the mountains all the 21 years that I lived there. Wonderful thunderstorms, snow, heat, dryness, not so wonderful winds and drought, but a very powerful landscape. It formed me with all of its power.

Another participant described their ascent up El Capitan in Yosemite National Park, “When I made it to the top, I felt like I had learned a lot about both myself and the environment I was interacting with.”

Finally, complexity surfaced in multiple narratives. One person said, “I feel terrified when I'm in the wilderness, and I can't wait to leave. But when I leave, I can't wait to get back.” Or regarding memories in Brooklyn, “It is a beautiful and welcoming neighborhood, with summers of joy and winters of peace. However, it is deeply at risk.” The binary of positivity and negativity cast environmental relatedness in the same tone as one might experience a parent.

The word devastation stood out in the second study much as it did in the first study. We found it revelatory that this word also occurred frequently and without prompt. Importantly, the narratives that accompanied the word choices suggested that the loss of an ecosystem would be like the loss of a parent. One participant explained, “It would feel like much of my childhood had been lost in an instant, and I don't know what I would do without the feeling of safety, of knowing that it will always be there for me.” Another person told a similar story of “devastation.”

I grew up near a little brook in a suburban town in New Jersey. … I would spend hours with my best friend trying to hop rocks all the way and not get our feet wet. We never succeeded, which was half the fun. In the spring there were little toads and small fish in the brook. One year, all the fish in the brook died. They floated downstream, belly up or facing the wrong way. We were told to stay out of the brook while they tried to figure out what happened. It turns out that the golf course upstream had started to use a new pesticide on their greens that had seeped into the brook. We used to take little drinks out of the brook when we were thirsty. We were told to stay out of the water and never ever drink the water. It was scary and sad. The brook was never the same. I remember feeling defeated by the golf course, and I would sometimes do small acts of vandalism on the course to get my revenge.

This study provided important context to the original finding that the people formed personal relationships with ecosystems. We established how this relationship functioned in the psyche as an object relationship that provided an attachment, cognitive structuring, and emotional complexity. The sample makeup and size were acknowledged limitations. We look forward to studying the follow-up interviews that some respondents completed. However, the trends and patterns in this group of culturally and racially diverse individuals determined that the theory of object relations was a valid construct for understanding how people relate to their ecosystems. Threats to ecosystems provoke similar emotions across a spectrum of feelings as do threats to beloved people.

Conclusion: Thematic Qualitative Results (Across Both Study Parts) That Show Humans and Their Ecosystems as an Object Relationship

The data collected from the first and second part of this study allowed us to examine associative material, word choice analysis, and narratives as an expansive climate ethnography. It revealed an obscured but important relationship that cuts across cultures and class statuses. The relationship between humans and their environments shares the qualities present in object relationships. Ecosystems can be considered another developmentally formative relationship internalized and activated throughout the lifespan.

The study's first part suggested that the Subject/Object positions of the human–environment dynamic continually act upon and influence each other. The study's second part further framed how this dynamic functioned in the psyche. Analysis of participants' word choices (frequency and context) suggested that ecosystems play a pivotal role in psychological organization; they are the unheard heartbeat of our relational life force. Taken together, the two studies suggest that strong and meaningful connections between people and their ecosystems have become embedded in the cognitive schemes that frame mind, emotions, and behavior, much like a more traditionally defined object relationship. We believe that the object relatedness between people and their land forms a psychological arc of physical and mental wellness.

As Bodnar (2008) noted, the forces at work on large-scale geographies affect people at the level of small-scale psychology: through mind, development, and psyche/soma. By disrupting the ecosystem object relationship the socioeconomic activities that change the earth are also changing people. The Earth is Faster Now, 10 collected narratives that combine research and indigenous observations of changing Arctic ecosystems, has documented this process. For example, The Inuit of Kitikmeot Region of Nunavut, Canada have seen transformed weather patterns that disrupt caribou migrations and scramble the Inuit Qaujimajatuqangit, the combined indigenous knowledge across generations that creates a system of wellness in which the Inuit have lived (Krupnik & Jolly, 2002).

Just as the traumatic loss of or threat to any significant person can impair psychological function, the same might well be expected with the loss of ecosystems. In addition to any economic turmoil and subsistence struggles, members of local ecosystems will experience a mourning process on an unimaginable, collective, and highly personal scale. Furthermore, the response to climate change will inspire contradictory and confusing emotional reactions that may disrespect the boundaries of science.

We hope our project will inspire more research and support a practice of respecting the unique ways people internally hold and relate to their environments. The language—words and narratives—that people use to convey their relationship to the environment is at once intimate and personal, idealizing, and rough. Love and anger live there. One question that comes to mind: Does the United States economic structure depend on separating people from their land? What would happen if people refused to sacrifice their ecosystems and chose meaning over profit? What if human behavioral scientists began to think about and contextualize human behavior in the places it took place? Our study does not answer those questions but perhaps our work can be one step toward examining how the social forces impacting the environment also impact us.

No matter where we are from, a private ecosystem lives within us much like a family. Human wellness might well depend on a deeper understanding of our ecological object relatedness. We are not all alike, but in the terra incognita of the mind, we all belong to our places.

Footnotes

Acknowledgments

Thanks to Chap Atwell, Ari Jaffe, and Randall Richardson-Vejlgaard for providing invaluable support to this research endeavor and to Carolyn Lovett and Tanya Verma for data collection.

Authors' Contributions

Conceptualization and hypothesis by S.B., P.A., P.O., S.A., A.L., D.B., H.B., E.G., M.K., L.M., C.O., P.Y., and A.W.; methodology by S.B., P.A., P.O., S.A., A.L., and D.B.; analysis by H.B., P.O., and J.G.; writing by S.B.; writing edit and review by J.G., P.A., P.O., and H.B.; supervision and administration by P.O., S.A., A.L., and P.O.

Author Disclosure Statement

No competing financial interests exist.

Funding Information

No funding was received for this article.

Supplementary Materials

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