Exploring the Call to Water: Ecopsychology in Nonprofit Environmentalism

Abstract

This practice-led, creative, and heuristic dissertation tracks the evolution of a depth psychologist from volunteer to program director at a nonprofit environmental organization. The research follows a life-changing, near-death experience that steered the author into a psychological and physical reconnective process with water, which included participation in ocean restoration programs, graduate studies in community, liberation, and ecopsychology, and employment at an environmental nonprofit. The research methodology includes chapters that analyze detailed personal journals, classroom lessons, and fieldwork collected over 14 years on, in and around the waters of Southern California. Each chapter explores major shifts in the author’s understanding of how to successfully integrate a depth psychological perspective into organizational programs that address the need to reconnect humans with nature. The author offers an ecopsychologically based practice of directing nonprofit programs while navigating conditioned ways of thinking and approaches to nonprofit environmentalism.