Arne Naess’s Concept of the Ecological – Self: a Way to Achieve a Healthier – Self

The Environmental Movement started as a social voice that was trying to warn about how damaged nature was starting to appear, as a consequence of the careless and thoughtless use that humans were doing over it. Some of these voices were fervently raised for nature and in some cases that took to extremist positions that elevated misanthropic statements and created a theoretical war between humans and nature. The following sentence of Thomas Berry is, in my opinion, an adequate representation of what most people recognized, for awhile, as “the ” ecological message: A deep cultural pathology has developed in Western society and has now spread throughout the planet. A savage plundering of the entire earth is taking place through industrial exploitation. Thousands of poisons unknown in former times are saturating the air, the water, and the soil. The habitat of a vast number of living species is being irreversibly damaged. In this universal disturbance of the biosphere by human agents, the human being now finds that the harm done to the natural world is returning to threaten the human species itself1. The amount of information about the important problems that currently affect our Earth has been increasing continuously since the 1970s, providing with a new global phenomenon of concern toward our environment, with both positive and negative consequences. Education needs to take account of both the negative and the positive. Of the negative, to learn so we can avoid repetition of it; of the positive, to transmit encouragement and to inspire farther achievements. As this paper aims to address the educational possibilities of ecology in health related issues, I am going to very briefl