It was the shells. They were too thin. The Eagle chicks were not surviving their way into this world. Population collapsed and approached extinction, with only 487 mating pairs of Bald Eagles surviving in 1966 (Howard, 2018). The evidence had been amassing, but it was renowned scientist and author Rachel Carson who put the issue into the zeitgeist with her extensively researched book Silent Spring.

"The balance of nature is filled of a series of interrelationships between living things, and between living things and their environment. You can't just step in with some brute force, change one thing without changing many others" Rachel Carson, 1963 on CBS (Howard, 2018).

Born in 1907 in a country that forbade women from voting, her critical examination of the systemic effects of DDT in the environment–-a then-common but now-banned pesticide used to control 'pest insects'–- coupled with her decades of service writing and then heading the US Fish and Wildlife Service publication department, catalyzed and would reshape legislation and environmental discourse in the USA forever. In sum, this was the start of the environmental movement, and within a decade, some of the strongest legislation ever passed for the protection of air, water, and more-than-humans manifest (EPA, Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act, Endangered Species Act, and a ban on DDT in 1972).

Both my grandmothers were born around the same time as Carson and into a country that disallowed them to vote. My maternal grandmother's oldest sister, great Aunt Capy, marched on the capital in Tennessee in 1920, which played a pivotal role in finally breaking the stalemate and the passing of the 19th Amendment. All this is to say that the liberties and rights so easy to take for granted today in our society were hard-won and are relatively new.

Nevertheless, when Carson's book was published in 1962, there was significant resistance; there still is. As an elder once shared with me during a rite-of-passage ceremony, the forces of the extractive industry have been with us since the founding of this country and much, much farther back; they still are. So, while there were relatively quick wins early in the environmental movement and consistent efforts to educate and shift society and culture, things quickly mired out.

About thirty years later, a group of deep thinkers from a variety of fields met and circled around a single question: why, after thirty years of dedicated advocacy for nature, more-than-humans, and the environment, had progress stalled? This was the beginning of ecopsychology as a field. Here, thirty years onward, the potency of this question seems just as valid, if not more so. Much has been done to support the unfolding of this question, including the critical insight early in ecopsychology that perhaps the environmental movement had relied too much on blame and shame tactics and had not sought to support and help people have meaningful, positively affirmative relationships with nature.

In any case, one of those critical early thinkers was Chellis Glendinning. When I first read Glendinning's (1995) connections between addiction and technology–-technoaddiction–-in 2015 as part of the master's program at Naropa in transpersonal ecopsychology, and for perhaps most of the time since, I understood her critical analysis and reflection to imply and point toward the obvious digital virtualities of modernity: screens and smartphones. While this is certainly an aspect of technoaddiction, I have come to understand that my first reading nearly ten years ago was somewhat naïve to the intersecting webwork of technologies we live within.

For example, our home is constructed with layers upon layers of technologies based on mechanized industrial technologies for the extraction, refinement, and creation of such materials. How I wash my clothes; how I wash my dishes; how I pick up food from the store and then keep it in the refrigerator; how we heat via wood and also a thermostat which triggers the boiler which pulls from the propane tank out by where we store our trash, recycling, and compost–-the same propane tank which flames the stove for cooking; the electricity which, though a full share of wind subsidy assigned, comes to us most locally by burning coal to boil water to spin copper which was probably mined in the Atacama desert of Chile some six-thousand miles away.

It goes even deeper: the idea of a home, built of these modern materials, set upon a proper plat in a neighborhood approved by a county of elected peoples who, at some point, elected themselves as separate from the Indigenous peoples who always lived there but never claimed ownership–-all these are technologies too, operating silently and embedded so deep as to be invisible.

Even deeper, these letters which sought to homogenize the prior-used glyphs that were representative via shape of the beings surrounding, yet reorganized into a code, an alphabet, a form of dissociative mathing (additive and subtractive linguistic shenanigans) that further reduced the sensory contact with the wild, untamed, un-thought existential lifeworld.

All of this is the field in which I find myself so immediately and seemingly irrevocably ensconced within–-my technoaddiction. And it is quite confusing to (de)conceptualize.

Democracy is about more voices, not fewer (Lovitz, 2010). The key dimension missing, however, is that in our technoaddicted society, we are centralizing only the human voices and diminishing, ignoring, or exploiting the more-than-humans and our shared lifeworld. Interconnecting webs of interactions between species in ecology is known as a trophic cascade, where changes at a specific level (i.e., wolves removed) can cause major effects elsewhere (i.e., decrease in riparian vegetation and beaver populations because of a greater numbers of Elk)–-a cascade of effects progressing throughout the (complex) system. Trophic cascade changes can manifest top-down, bottom-up, or in non-linear ways.

What I am coming to understand is that technoaddiction seems to present like an interwoven tropic cascade of technologies that is nearly completely immersive.

Until I go outside.

Until I go out and feel the cold wind on my face, the light pouring through the leaves or pine needles, and the frigid temperatures making the tips of my toes, nose, checks, fingers come alive with icy fire. I am awakened to the wonders of the lifeworld, the sounds of the wind whipping that one loose guyline against the edge of the tent in the night, and the cold wetness of morning as I boil the water in dew-soaked land and watch the star bring her majestic light heat and dryness to the land. There, something starts to crack, a rigidified facade. I no longer feel subsumed into an indifferent framework that is so hard to keep up with, so consuming and completely immersive, and so desperately devastating in its complicit destruction of our sacred lifeworld  

After a time, days maybe, the effects move deeper and I feel my morals realign toward life, toward existence, and what I value becomes something utterly different than in the certain square structures of civilization's cast. Like Glendinning recently noted, a deeper shift from hope into meaning begins to transpire (Heinberg, 2024)–-whereby connection to the lifeworld as lived, in the moment, returns something deeply innate and intrinsic about our animal-bodied selves. Paul Shepard (1995) noted it clearly, that proper psychological growth as humyns “will graduate (us) not out of the world but into its significance” (p. 30). 

"meanwhile the world goes on"

…and this blog has traversed much terrain. In conclusion, in these days of change, don't forget to go outside and be with the quiet you live by. Maybe it is just one tree, one passing crow, or one dandelion struggling up through the crumbling concrete, but it is in that single connection that we can rebuild our world. How we navigate technoaddiction can be confusing and difficult, and perhaps it should be because the invitation is vast and requires us to look deep at our situation and realign our values toward and with the lifeworld. 

For that prayer, I will light a candle.