Season 2, Episode 16: Our Emotional Attachment to Nature with Susan Bodnar

Climate Change and Happiness

image credit | Jake Ingle

Season 2, Episode 16: Our Emotional Attachment to Nature with Susan Bodnar

Panu and Thomas spoke with Susan Bodnar, a clinical psychologist who practices in New York City and does teaching and research at Columbia University’s Teachers College. The trio discussed Susan’s earlier pathfinding papers like “Wasted and Bombed; Clinical Enactments of a changing relationship to the Earth.” And also her current studies that link the concept of psychological attachment—long studied in terms of the dynamics of close human relationships—to people’s close connections with natural places. In a stimulating dialog, Susan described important ecological insights she gained observing bears in Alaska, and the social and media phenomena of Flaco the owl living newly wild in New York City. Of her current research, Susan recounted:

And we started with the simplest of questions. “Think of a place, what does it mean to you?” And our first pass through the study, we were amazed at the similarity of the response. People were describing relationships… And then later, when asked, “What does it remind you of?” people said, “mother, father, mentor, best friend, sibling.” Those were the words that people used. “If this place were no longer here, how would you feel?” “Devastated.” …“what else devastates you?” I mean, we know right? The loss of someone you love.

Join us for a validating discussion of emotional attachment to nature and “emotional biodiversity” that you can apply to your own life. And support us at our Patreon.

Links

• Susan Bodnar

• Bodnar, S. (2008) Wasted and Bombed; Clinical Enactments of a changing relationship to the Earth, Psychoanalytic Dialogues 18 484-513.

• Bodnar, S. at al. (2023). The Environment as an Object Relationship: A Two-Part Study

• Michiko Kakutani (2023, March 3). Everyone Loves Flaco the Escaped Owl. But Why, Exactly? (See also this story on ethical concerns posed by Flaco’s freedom.)

• The Human Access Project Reclaiming connections with the Willamette River

Transcript

Transcript edited for clarity and brevity.

[music: “CC&H theme music”]

Thomas Doherty: Well, hello, I'm Thomas Doherty.

Panu Pihkala: And I am Panu Pihkala.

Doherty: And welcome to Climate Change and Happiness. Our podcast, the show for people around the globe who are thinking and feeling deeply about the personal side of climate change and other environmental issues. So here, we focus on many things. But really, we try to come back to our emotions and our feelings and our personal experience and our coping. And we're really excited to have a guest with us today.

Susan Bodnar: Hi, I'm Susan Bodnar. And I am a clinical psychologist in full time, private practice here in New York City. And I also am a faculty member at Teachers College, Columbia University, where in addition to teaching a class on psychology, climate, and development, I'm also running a research project on the human relationship to ecosystems.

Doherty: Susan, it's so great to have you. Panu and I have been talking about our episode. We both are aware of you and your work. And you're one of those people that has been thinking about this topic and ahead of the game. And has published in this area around people's connections with nature and the natural world. And it's really exciting the work you've done around people's attachment to place. So we're gonna get into all that kind of stuff today. And listeners, I think you're gonna find this episode really interesting. Panu, you want to get us started?

Pihkala: Warmly welcome, Susan. Also, for my part. We’ve met a couple of times online, never live. And I've mentioned that when I started doing research on so-called eco anxiety and other difficult emotions, there wasn't much empirical source material, then in the mid 2010's. Your articles were very important for me. And also, they have a depth dimension, which hasn't been very often explored. Namely, how interconnected our inner worlds and the so-called outer world are. So we're gonna talk about that today at some point. But I'd like to start by asking you, could you share something about your own journey to become a clinical psychologist who has such a deep interest in the more than human world? That's not very typical, especially during those times when you went to training. So would you like to share something of your personal journey?

Bodnar: I was born in a very small town in Pennsylvania. In a coal mining area. In I guess would be close to the Poconos. People know that area. And I was influenced by a grandparent generation who were very close to their immigrant identities. And they had not yet really fully adapted to the modern world. And I had a great grandmother who refused to allow electricity into her home. She thought it was evil or something. And everything was done in a wood burning stove. And my grandfather had been a farmer. And my grandmother ultimately was, I think, the first family psychologist. Because when they were no longer able to keep the farm, they went to work at the family market. Like a very small little market for this town of, you know, 1200 people. And she used to listen to people's problems in the checkout. She was the checkout person. And they always did everything outside. Family gatherings were outside. We went for picnics. My grandfather took me deer hunting, which was without a gun, to just observe nature. To observe the deer. He was proud of the land that he lived in. And that was because my father had that tradition as well. And took me camping. And all over the place, the highest peaks. And those experiences were profound, I think.

And when I first started writing about this, it was because I had been in analytic training. I had been in private practice. I felt something was really missing. I was seeing so many people with regulatory disorders, roughly. And I kept saying, why, why, why? Why are there so many of these? And I started to really notice how few people had any kind of relationship to their environments. Physical spaces. And I thought, this is not a coincidence. And so I started to dive into it a little bit more deeply. And then I was in Alaska. In Denali National Park with Ranger Bailey. Ranger Greg Bailey, if you're out there, I will never forget you! Because he gave me an understanding of the dynamics of landscapes that was so incredible. Because he was really trying to talk to me about the human bear ecosystem interface. And just the simple knowledge that you can be safe from bears if you understand how much food is available. To me, it was wow, that's amazing. But it started to make sense that this whole ecology that everything was integrated. And when I started to see that, I could never unsee it. And I took that back to my work. And began to start to understand it.

Doherty: That's really beautiful. That was like an epiphany, it sounds like for you. An ecological epiphany there regarding the bears.

Bodnar: Well, he taught it to me. When he said, look, this is how much food there is. This is how much food a bear needs. And how they behave toward you, as a human is proportional to the availability of that food in a given area. That's what you need to start thinking about when you want to interact with bears. And I thought that was amazing. It was such a simple thing. And it explains so much of what people have been seeing with, you know, bear intrusions. All we have to do is think about that, and you can solve the problem. But it's a thought process we don't really know how to have because this whole relationship to our physical spaces isn't something that's validated as important and meaningful in the culture we're part of.

Doherty: Yeah so it's ecological. A basic ecological intelligence and it's also like relational intelligence. So you have to understand the bear as a being. As a sentient being. And that's the other piece I think you're hinting at, right? Is the lack of the relation. You know, the person to person entity to entity relationship with the bears or the place. Right? That gets us to our attachment stuff. What do you think? Yeah, yeah. What do you think about Panu?

Pihkala: Yeah, I'm very fascinated by the examples of profound moments and dynamics in childhood and youth. We often in this podcast talk about environmental identity. Some people use the ecological identity term. And these foundational influences are, of course, very important for us. And it definitely sounds like there's many of them coming from the place and relatives and the various things you described. And then later on what you say about the profession during the time that you went to training and went to practice. So I guess that's a sort of sign of the times and dynamics that even psychological professionals tend to be so out of touch with the significance of the more than human world.

Doherty: Yeah. And brings us up to today. Susan, you were telling us about your—do you want to tell us a little more about what you're experiencing, where you practice in New York? And also some of this really exciting research on attachment.

Bodnar: So where I practice in New York City, there are lots of things to think about. Let's start with Flaco. The owl, who, in February, somebody vandalized his mesh enclosure at the zoo. He escaped and is now an international star because people are attaching to the story of this bird who had lived in captivity all 13 years of his life. He was a Eurasian eagle owl. Raised in captivity. He escapes. The zoos and other wildlife officials, he'll never survive, they say. They're trying to catch him. Desperately trying to get him back. And he eludes them every time. And then it turns out, he can hunt and he can fly. Where it came from? Where was it inside of him? I don't know, but it emerged. And now he is a free owl. And they've given up trying to capture him. And he now lives as a, you know, social media celebrity. And I'm looking at the narrative about Flaco the owl. And I'm thinking, I think that's how everybody's relating. The story they're telling about the wild inside, I think is really important to our discussion about attachment to places and to object relations. What we carry inside and how it influences us.

And I, because of my work, and I work with people, and I listen to people all the time. I've been hearing this agitation about this disconnect from something very hard to name. But it has to do with authenticity. It has to do with nature. It has to do with real. It has to do with, you know, what feels honest. I want to write about that. But I didn't know how to write about it in a way that it could be heard by people who didn't already agree with what I said.

So I decided to do this research project. And it's a result of the class I teach. One of the classes I teach. And, you know, my goal in life isn't research, in particular. I probably shouldn't say that, but that's not where I live. It's like, I want to do it, because I'm so passionate about these ideas. And I so much want to get them heard and witnessed and all of that. So in a kind of random way, I just started this research project. And all these students showed up to work on it. Like they heard that call that was like the environment. I want to do that. And we started with the simplest of questions. Think of a place, what does it mean to you? And our first pass through the study, we were amazed at the similarity of the response. People were describing relationships. Describe a place, what does it mean to you? They were describing a relationship. And then later, when asked, what does it remind you of, people said, mother, father, mentor, best friend, sibling. Those were the words that people used. If this place were no longer here, how would you feel? Devastated. That's in the paper. You know, this huge percentage of people use that word. Devastated. Cool, what else devastates you? I mean, we know right? The loss of someone you love. So we expanded the study, started doing more surveys. And then we added interviews. Interviewing people.

And what's amazing to me, is as much as what we're finding out. What's being told to us in the surveys in the research, is how eager people are to do the interviews and to take the survey. We're not like a big operation. Right? But people are taking the survey. We don't have anything to offer them. We're not giving the money. Just saying take the survey and do the interview. Huge percentage of people I would say I think we have 60% of people taking the survey want to do an interview because they want to talk about it. They want the chance to talk about what this means to them.

Doherty: And when you say talk about it, you mean they want to talk about their feelings and their relationship with places and nature?

Bodnar: Absolutely. And the stories are. One person talked about the fact that they came from a family where there was just so much pain and substance abuse and domestic violence. And they had nowhere to go but outside. And the outdoors parented them. That there were lessons of living there. They were watching what was happening in the ecosystem around them. They figured out how to grow up. How to live a life. You had to share. It was one thing that she referred to. You had to make space for others. It wasn't always about you. Like little things.

Another person talked about a childhood pond where all the kids used to play and watch fish and frogs and watch the tadpoles become frogs. And it was just a yearly thing. And then one day, they showed up and all the fish were dead. And it was horrifying. It was like traumatic is the word that was used. And they didn't know what had happened. And they were told not to touch the water. The water that they had been playing in. The mud they've been squishing in. Don't touch it. And it turns out that the treatments for the golf course had gotten into the water supply. And it was poisonous. And it was dead. The pond was dead. And this person started to commit acts of sabotage against the golf course. And they still remember the pond.

Pihkala: Thanks for sharing all that. That's so important. And justifies how important places and place relations and entanglements with them are to us. And many people can still recollect things related to their childhood. And, of course, things are changing with urbanization and technology, such that there are some people who already now find it a bit difficult. But luckily, even in cities, you usually have some water spaces and some parks. That all justifies to, I think, the sort of very deep element in our humanity which is connection to the more-than-human world. And what you say about students volunteering, I think that testifies to it. And I'm thinking about this story of Flaco the owl also having a symbolic dimension of, you know, there is a certain wildness, living even in domesticated conditions. But I think this is very profoundly important work that you're doing.

Bodnar: I think, to that point, in our current version of the study, we're trying to select for urban versus rural and suburban. Trying to see how that changes the quality of how they talk about their environments. It's in progress. So I don't know how that will look. I can give you a hint, however, about something else, which is that people who are parents, feel a sense of their relationship and their connection to the environment has changed a lot. Because now they're thinking of the future. They're thinking of their children. I don't know if that's going to hold up. But the early findings are very, very robust. That becoming a parent makes a big difference.

Doherty: Yeah.

Pihkala: As a quick point for that, Thomas. Just today I was having a workshop online with a group of Finns, professionals in religion. And one of them shared that when she had her second child, she actually had to have medication for her eco anxiety. And that was a very brave thing to say, of course. This was a group which had established group dynamics. And I had tried to create a safe space. But I was still very, not totally surprised, but struck by the honesty. So just echoing that I've also heard many still anecdotal things about how parenthood really can activate or reactivate this, our eco-distress. And in some episodes back also testified to this thing. So just wanted to say that before moving on, but please, Thomas, what did you have in mind?

Doherty: Yeah, no, this is such a great conversation. I just want to cycle back to some ideas for our listeners. Because we're using some psychology terms and things just to make sure people are tracking this. Because it is really easy to understand. But, you know, Susan, you're working from this tradition in therapy. Psychoanalytic tradition which really focuses on our inner lives. And sometimes even unconscious parts of our life that we're not really aware of. And this idea of attachment, which is our primary connections with our close people in our life. Our parents. Our significant others. You know, we have this gut level attachment relationship.

And some people are lucky enough to have a nice secure set of relationships with people in the world. And other people have more, you know, avoidant, you know, uneasy relationships. And so that's just something for listeners to realize. That's what we're talking about here. And, you know, object relations are the internal parents and the internal people that we have in our psyche that we carry with us. A lot of which, hopefully, are quite positive. But we can also have conflicts as well. Right?

Bodnar: Yeah, the important thing is that it's a relationship. It's not always positive. And there can be, I think, one person in the research who talked about this really remote cabin that their parents used to take them to in Minnesota. It was literally in the middle of nowhere. And they had no plumbing or electricity, or anything. It was just a bare bones cabin. And they used to greet those trips with a mixture of absolute excitement and terror and panic. Because every time they went there, it meant letting go of everything that was familiar. And didn't always feel good about them. You know, the wilderness is scary.

Doherty: Yeah.

Bodnar: When we took our kids to Humpy Creek, and there was, you know, brown bear scat everywhere. And the salmon were running upstream. It was terrifying.

Doherty: Yeah. So anyway, what we're doing is really kind of revolutionary. Because traditionally in therapy, people talk about all this attachment. And, you know, these internalized presences. Purely in an interpersonal realm in terms of our family. And so what we're talking about, and what Susan is doing is really, you know, bringing this out and saying we have the same kind of attachments. This gut level unconscious attachment with the place where we grew up. With these environments. And then that leads to we've mentioned regulatory disorders or regulations. So we regulate our emotions. Yeah. I just want to make sure the listeners because this is so rich. I want to unpack this. So because they know what we're talking about here. Because it's a takeaway. You know, so if I'm good with my attachments, and I can work those. Then I can kind of regulate my emotions. And my attachments can help me to regulate my emotions and be a healthy person.

And so all we're doing is saying, and I think the listeners get this, I get this totally. I can tell my story of where I grew up in Buffalo, New York, and all this sort of stuff. But you know, our attachments are not just people. They're places. They're animals. They're the ground. They're the land. And climate change. And environmental issues. The issues in East Palestine, for example, with the train derailment are activating these deep connections. These deep inner attachments are bringing it up. So I just want to make sure that we have that clear for the listener.

Pihkala: Yeah, thanks, Thomas. That's very important.

Bodnar: I will tell you, when my kids were first born, they discovered the moon here in New York City. And they became obsessed. We had to see the moon every single night. It's life changing. I didn't even know where to find the moon. I took them out like snuggly in a stroller, and literally asked people on the street, do you see the moon in the sky? People were looking like what? Who is this crazy person? But it was really tapping into how children view the world. What they know is the moon. Animals. Moon. Flowers. Tadpoles. That's their world. And when you start to go inside their world with them and you actually validate it and strengthen it and give it power. It's going to change you as an adult.

Doherty: Yeah, healthy emotional experiences that parents do that promote this kind of attachment, you know, healthy attachment. So as we talk and where I'm going with this, my own work is that, you know, some people are lucky enough to have double attachment. They're securely attached in general in their life. And they also have healthy relationships to places, but we can have variations of attachments. And that's where it gets really interesting. We can be ambivalent. I know, you know, a lot of people are ambivalent about their attachments to places because of these losses and some of the things that you've talked about. And so the juicy question is how does that resonate with your attachments to other people?

Bodnar: Yeah, I mean, one of the things that has also come up in the research is a woman from Albania. Tearfully discussed the coast where she lived, as she watched it transform into a hotel after hotel after hotel after hotel with the beachfront being given over to commercial enterprises. It broke her heart.

A gentleman who was at the time about 60 something spontaneously wasn't part of the research, became tearful, when he went to visit childhood home. And found out that the field where he used to play was now turned into sort of like a McMansion village. I've heard in the research, people describe how violated. Word they used, violated. They felt when places that had been natural, became converted into malls. Feeling that in a way, told the story of our modern world. Taking these beautiful natural places and chopping them down, to make stores so you could buy things that in the end, were sometimes an attempt to get you back to where you would have been if you've been able to just be in that natural place.

Pihkala: Yeah, that's a great quote from Susan's 2008 article “Wasted and Bombed: Clinical Enactments of a Changing Relationship to the Earth”. I warmly recommend it for many reasons. But this line from the sixty year old man: “my personality is a mall plastered over a wildlife sanctuary”. This reminds me of many things. Also, Terrence Malick’s movies, which are a complex thing. But that's one movie maker who is doing movies so that he is showing out the scenes, which are actually the inner landscapes of the characters. And then that doesn't always give you much [box office] revenue, because it may be that these movies are a bit difficult for people to be able to get [a sense of]. But just pointing out this theme of how we intuitively see the landscapes of our psyches, and what's the relationship between buildings and so-called natural things there.

This is so juicy that I would warmly recommend that we try to find a time to do a second episode where we get deeper to these kinds of things. And there would be so much to discuss here. The sort of disappointments and devastating experiences we have touched upon in several episodes. Sherry Weber Nicholson's book was a very important early take on this. And then some later work like Glenn Albrecht's concepts of solastalgia can be related to this. But also to sort of repressed or suppressed experiences of being so shaken inside that it's difficult to get forward. But also, there is this option of building more ecological inner landscapes again together with what we do in the outer world. And perhaps in an effort to bring us towards these kinds of ecological reconstruction I'd like to ask you two, that does this resonate with you? This sort of idea of simultaneously trying to enrich the biodiversity of both the inner and the outer landscape?

Bodnar: Yes. And I will say that when we validate experience. Even an experience that's painful, you populate consciousness. You know, when a person's sadness or a person's joy or a person's questioning or a person's anything. Grief, envy, admiration. When that's allowed to exist internally, it fertilizes. It creates a kind of emotional biodiversity. If a person has emotional biodiversity, they will, this is just my idea, but I think they will start to demand it from their places.

Doherty: That's a lovely term. See that's where the creative comes in. As we were imagining earlier, before we started recording, You know, emotional biodiversity. What a lovely term to come out of this. But yeah, I think Panu, you're totally onto something. In Portland here, like many places, we, you know, we're a city that is around a river. The Willamette River. It's been why the city is here, obviously, is this river. But for many, many years, the Willamette River was really polluted. And, you know, we as a city until the 1950s, just dumped all the sewage into the river. And there used to be factories. So the city actually lived away from the river. And, you know, people grew up here, we're taught never to go in the river. There were Superfund sites and World War Two shipbuilding. And, you know, chemicals and various things like a lot of places.

But there's been a movement in the last decade. Human Access Project. A program really because the river is cleaner now. And it has been cleaned up over the years. And the Human Access Project has sponsored over the years events where people swim and float. And they have a float in the river every year. And it's essentially taught people that the water is safe. And that you can go into the water. And they have people swimming in the river. So it is a rejuvenation, recovery or restoration. So I think it is quite possible to think on these multiple levels.

Bodnar: I'm so glad that that's happening. And to see those kinds of projects everywhere. It's tender that we have to teach people that water is safe. But yes, let's teach people that water is safe. And that air is safe. And that the ground you walk on is full of nutrients. Like let's believe that and let's teach people that. I mean, I think you know, one of the things I'm really learning a lot about doing this special issue on eco therapy for the journal eco psychology. Really recognizing the powerful role that an ecologically integrated psychotherapy can have not just for individuals, but certainly for individuals. But for communities, for cultures. And really trying to understand I feel a need to say this all the time and try to find a way to write about this.

This understanding has been with native and indigenous peoples of different kinds and in different ways forever. This is not actually news, but it's just news to us. And I always feel a need to acknowledge that we took a very powerful set of understandings away from many different peoples invalidating their truth. Only now to come back to it as though, “Oh boy, look what we found out.” And I'm glad we are finding it out. And I sit as a, you know, white person, female person struggling with this. I'm no expert. But my heart is wide open. And putting down, you know, taking away one's ego. And letting oneself be a listener to history. To others. To children. To people who are coming to do our research. To my students who want to do it. Everybody needs to be in the conversation together. Even corporate America. You know, it's time to stop separating our voices. But I like to bring them together. So that we can make people know that water is safe and air is safe. And that is not only safe, but that there's information and knowledge and powerful potential for connection to self and other animals and environment all of which can help us build a better world. And sort of hold it so it doesn't implode itself, you know.

Doherty: It's beautifully said. We definitely as we always say we could keep talking. And when we think about bringing you back with more here because this is a thread we're gonna keep following in our podcast as we go forward here.

Bodnar: But it's great to talk to both of you. It's not exactly like there's opportunities everywhere to have these conversations. Right? It's a rare chance to be able to sit down and talk about this and not feel self-conscious. And I'm so grateful that you're doing this podcast because I'm sure I'm not alone in feeling lonely with these ideas. And you're creating community. And when there's community, it's shared. And when it's shared, it's strong. So thank you.

Doherty: You're welcome. I agree. You know, the therapist creates the therapy they need for themselves, right? Yes. So thanks. Panu, what's your evening like here? Where are you heading for the rest of your day?

Pihkala: Well, you know, typical Finnish winter evening. It's dark already. But luckily, we have snow. That's yet another topic we could talk about. And I know, Susan, you've been working with snow and lack of snow also. But now we have it. And we are glad about it. And we don't worry about the lack of it. So that's one thing is trying to both have a long term perspective and to live in the moment. But thanks a lot for these very broad ranging discussions you brought to the space, Susan. And this great inclusive vision, including also the decolonial elements that you shared at the end. So this has been greatly a pleasure.

Doherty: And Susan, what's the rest of your day look like?

Bodnar: More clients. And yeah, I'm back-to-back [providing counseling to] a lot of people. And more hopefully walk therapy. Oh, I have a beautiful kid that I work with for just two seconds. Neuroatypical, very rigid about things that he does. Routinized. Doesn't like me. Doesn't want to come to see me. and I say okay, let's go outside. We work outside all the time. He wants to play football. All he wants to do is knock me over, knock me over, knock me over. And I say hey, okay, but look, there's witches. Look, those things over there. They're witches. Those are trees. I know, they're trees, but we can pretend they're witches. And all of a sudden, these are witches. And then we have a whole thing going now about being outside. He sees the outside world now. His eyes are opened. And we're now climbing bean stalks to go see giants, the clouds in the sky. And it's changing him. That's what I'm doing today. I'm working with him.

Doherty: That's really inspiring. So yes, there's therapists out there around the world that are trying to do this work. And Susan, you're a leader. And I'll do my own versions of this today as well.

Bodnar: You are the leader, excuse me.

Doherty: We try. We try. But it's really great to see these connections again, Susan us to talk and we'll talk more. And the ecopsychology journal and your work. And we'll have our show notes with some of the many things we referenced in here. We reference movies. We reference news stories. And some of the academic work that therapists will really appreciate. So you all will be well. And listeners will be well. And you can find this episode and other episodes at climatechangeandhappiness.com. And please support us so we can bring in more guests like Susan, we all enjoy. So you all be well and take care. Okay, take care.

Bodnar: Thank you.

Doherty: The Climate Change and Happiness Podcast is a self funded volunteer effort. Please support us so we can keep bringing you messages of coping and thriving. See the donate page at climatechangeandhappiness.com