Scholarly Work
I keep up a regular schedule of teaching and writing. In addition to offering my Year-Long Training in eastern Ontario, I am one of the instructors (along with Linda Buzzell, Jeanine Canty, and Garret Barnwell) for the annual Certificate in Ecopsychology on-line program at Pacifica Graduate Institute. I taught for a number of years at the University of Vermont, but am now keeping it all closer to home.
As for my writings, my main work is the book Radical Ecopsychology: Psychology in the Service of Life, 2nd ed. (State University of New York Press, 2013). More details on the book are available here. For the second edition I wrote a lengthy new chapter in which I reflect on how the field has developed since the book was first published in 2002. Although there have been a number of positive developments in the last decade, I believe ecopsychology still needs to catch up with its own radicalness.
I am slowly writing a second book, tentatively entitled Ecopsychology as Politics: Nature. Psyche, and the Social-Historical Moment. By the term "social-historical moment," I mean first of all the social and historical dimension of the "human-nature relationship," which has for the most part been ignored by the first two generations of the field. In a second sense, the term refers to this epochal moment in history and the demands it places on us as political animals. The book has turned into two volumes, the first entitled Grounds for the Next Generation and the second Deepening Into Place. The Grounds volume is aimed at getting behind the development of a third generation of ecopsychology that puts matters of justice at the centre of the field and also faces more directly the tremendous political ferment of this historical moment. Deepening Into Place will further elaborate my own approach to ecopsychological praxis in these fiery times.
My most recent thinking can be found in two lengthy articles I wrote for the Ecopsychology journal. The first, "Ecopsychology as Decolonial Praxis," (Sept. 2019, Vol. 11, No. 3) shifts my framing of ecopsychology from a radical praxis to a more specifically decolonial praxis (though I am now using the word "uncolonial" as way to avoid problems in the way that settlers have used the term decolonization). This for me clarifies further the form ecopsychology needs to take in order to both make sense as a field and be adequate to this urgent historical moment.
The second article, "Ecopsychology at the Crossroads: Contesting the Nature of a Field" (Sept. 2013, Vol. 5, No. 3), advances my radical interpretation of the field and challenges the "second-generation" framing of ecopsychology, which I view as a mainstreaming of the field. I am now thinking that a "third generation" is emerging, more akin to the radical and anticolonial approach I have been tracking over the years.
I offer related discussions of the first-generation/second-generation schism in the following two articles: “Clarifying the Challenges: A Response to Zhiwa Woodbury’s Review and Response to Radical Ecopsychology: Psychology in the Service of Life (2nd Ed.), by Andy Fisher.” Ecopsychology, 5 (2013), 158-162; and “Three Arguments for a Radical Ecopsychology.” Ecopsychology, 5 (2013), 225-227.
Another introduction to my approach to ecopsychology is the chapter "What Is Ecopsychology? A Radical View," in the book Ecopsychology: Science, Totems, and the Technological Species, ed. Peter Kahn, Jr. and Patrica Hasbach (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2012). I aim in this writing again to distinguish ecopsychology from mainstream approaches to the human-nature relationship by highlighting what is unique and radical about ecopsychology.
A shorter introduction to my approach is the chapter “Ecopsychology as Radical Praxis,” in Ecotherapy: Healing with Nature in Mind, ed. Linda Buzzell and Craig Chalquist (Sierra Club, 2009). This ecotherapy anthology is a follow-up to the ecopsychology reader Ecopsychology: Restoring the Earth, Healing the Mind, edited by Roszak, Gomes, and Kanner (Sierra Club, 1995).
I recently wrote a chapter, "The Thrumming Relationality of All Things," for a book celebrating the life of Joanna Macy, A Wild Love for the World, edited by Stephanie Kaza. (Shambhala, 2020).
Feel free to contact me if you wish to get copies of the articles I have mentioned here.
Another avenue is to check out my blog on this website. I plan from time to time to throw some content there of scholarly value.
Other articles I have written include the following:
Fisher, Andy. “Going Deep: A Review of Environmental Melancholia: Psychoanalytic Dimensions of Engagement by Renee Lertzman.” Ecopsychology, 8 (2016), 222-227.
Fisher, Andy. “To Praise Again: Phenomenology and the Project of Ecopsychology.” Spring Journal, 75 (2006): 153-174.
Fisher, Andy. “Ecopsychology.” Encyclopedia of Religion and Nature, ed. Bron Taylor and Jeffrey Kaplan. Bristol: Continuum, 2005.
Fisher, Andy. “Toward a More Radical Ecopsychology.” Alternatives Journal 22.3 (1996): 20-26.