[2][4] Instead of examining personal pain solely in the context of individual or family pathology, it is analyzed in its wider connection to the more than human world.
[5] A central premise is that while the mind is shaped by the modern world, its underlying structure was created in a natural non-human environment.
[10] One of Greenway's students founded a psychoecology study group at University of California, Berkeley, which was joined by Theodore Roszak in the 1990s.
It is a tool for better understanding the relationship, for diagnosing what is wrong with that relationship, and for suggesting paths to healing.Theodore Roszak is credited with coining the term "ecopsychology" in his 1992 book The Voice of the Earth, although a group of psychologists and environmentalists, including Mary Gomes and Allen Kanner, were independently using the term at the same time.
The latter was one of the first books to bring phenomenology fully to bear on ecological issues, looking closely at the cosmo-vision (or the traditional ecological knowledge systems) of diverse indigenous, oral cultures, and analyzing the curious effect that the advent of formal writing systems, like the phonetic alphabet, has had upon the human experience of the more-than-human natural world.