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Sight and Sensibility: The Ecopsychology of Perception
In the tradition of A Natural History of the Senses, an esteemed expert in ecopsychology shows how expanding the way we see the natural world can improve the way we relate to it.
In recent years, there has been a surge of interest in the connection between the human psyche and the natural environment. Fueled by a growing awareness of worldwide ecological degradation, an entirely new field of study, called ecopsychology, has emerged. At universities across the country, scientists are learning how the decline of our planet's environment affects not just our physical health but also our minds and emotions.
Laura Sewall, Ph.D., is one of ecopsychology's pioneers and an expert in the study of the visual process. In combining these fields, she has determined that the sense of sight is key to understanding and potentially reversing the effects of ecological destruction. In Sight and Sensibility--the first book on ecopsychology for lay readers--Sewall draws on her fieldwork studying the visual behavior of baboons and teaching vision improvement to trace the evolution of human sight and the cultural development of different ways of seeing. She shows how we can restructure the neural networks that determine how we see, awaken to visual patterns and depth perception, and learn to see more of the world around us.
A contemporary companion to John Berger's classic Ways of Seeing, Sight and Sensibility is a dazzling blend of science, psychology, and poetry.
In recent years, there has been a surge of interest in the connection between the human psyche and the natural environment. Fueled by a growing awareness of worldwide ecological degradation, an entirely new field of study, called ecopsychology, has emerged. At universities across the country, scientists are learning how the decline of our planet's environment affects not just our physical health but also our minds and emotions.
Laura Sewall, Ph.D., is one of ecopsychology's pioneers and an expert in the study of the visual process. In combining these fields, she has determined that the sense of sight is key to understanding and potentially reversing the effects of ecological destruction. In Sight and Sensibility--the first book on ecopsychology for lay readers--Sewall draws on her fieldwork studying the visual behavior of baboons and teaching vision improvement to trace the evolution of human sight and the cultural development of different ways of seeing. She shows how we can restructure the neural networks that determine how we see, awaken to visual patterns and depth perception, and learn to see more of the world around us.
A contemporary companion to John Berger's classic Ways of Seeing, Sight and Sensibility is a dazzling blend of science, psychology, and poetry.
First published October 4, 1999
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
August 13, 2014
Sight and Sensibility is a very nice audit on seeing and perception. From an aerial view on vision to a primer on how the eye works, the author navigates the theme very well. She makes an admiral connection between nature and sight. She takes most of the book to do so, but it's worthwhile. Essentially she says that nature is something we see and even enjoy as a backdrop rather than something that we are 'in' and 'of'. I enjoyed her perspective on the fact that what we actually see is conditioned in some ways I would add "programmed" by our culture, gender, experience and other personal factors. What are the implications of this as we engage others in life? The implications as to how we have understood life, others, history, etc.? Her viewpoint on how sight and perception works is quite informative. Particularly what we notice, how we focus, and what we choose to pay attention to.
However, she lost me halfway through the book as she began describing her many walks in the mountains, meadows, and woods. I can only take a very detailed description of how her bare feet felt as they touched the ground and her skin absorbed the bug-filled forest once or twice. I get the point the first time... ok, maybe by the second dull narrative. After recounting more than half a dozen experiences I napped for several days... between each one. Maybe that's why it took me so long to finish the book. Or maybe I'm not at the place where I can see or experience nature to it's fullest yet. My senses may not be that developed. Or maybe I begin to tune out when I hear about others seeing God better, themselves better, experiencing life more fully only when they withdraw from the city and/or other people. Can we not see and experience nature in the 'hood? How it reveals itself through the cracks in the streets and sidewalks? Through the rich colors of its diversity? Through the noise of humanity? Through the silence of the rich and wealthy? I believe we can, and some of us do.
Overall a very good book. I will read it again.
However, she lost me halfway through the book as she began describing her many walks in the mountains, meadows, and woods. I can only take a very detailed description of how her bare feet felt as they touched the ground and her skin absorbed the bug-filled forest once or twice. I get the point the first time... ok, maybe by the second dull narrative. After recounting more than half a dozen experiences I napped for several days... between each one. Maybe that's why it took me so long to finish the book. Or maybe I'm not at the place where I can see or experience nature to it's fullest yet. My senses may not be that developed. Or maybe I begin to tune out when I hear about others seeing God better, themselves better, experiencing life more fully only when they withdraw from the city and/or other people. Can we not see and experience nature in the 'hood? How it reveals itself through the cracks in the streets and sidewalks? Through the rich colors of its diversity? Through the noise of humanity? Through the silence of the rich and wealthy? I believe we can, and some of us do.
Overall a very good book. I will read it again.
March 14, 2026
Of the many books I have read this past year, only this one would I call beautiful. It is not just a read but an encounter with a deeply inspiring being who seems to become an actual presence herself—someone to guide us back toward consciously awakening to the wondrous, sensuous world around us. Far beyond the information purveyed or even the stories told, Laura Sewall herself emerges from her luminous prose as though to point with a gentle smile to the doorway which will lead us from our self-made enclosure, from the prison of our own device.
This prison seems to consist of our habit-routines that bind our perceptions. Sewall's special field of expertise is sight. She demonstrates how we have lost our ‘depth-perception’ by seeing everything in terms of our own culturally constructed self and its need for (illusory) security. We have learned to see only objects in terms of their potential use or threat to us. We do not see into them or their unified relations or our relationship with them: ‘The canon that our Western worldview posits is that the healthy, well-adjusted adult is autonomous and independent, not interdependent’ (p. 247). Instead of seeing the living world and knowing we are part of it, we see a dead world reduced to ‘resources’.
But her tale is much more than a position or an argument. She shows the reader both through her own experience (including a powerfully transcendent moment of awakening on the East African veldt) and, more subtly, through her captivating, poetic prose and truly unique metaphors. Reading this book is itself an experience that approaches such transcendent moments. For Laura Sewall, ‘perception is the dynamic ground ... for a sensuous, even ecstatic relationship with the world’ (pp. 17-18). And this is the kind of many-faceted text that can remind us of that.
The new artscience of ecopsychology has not entered the public mind to any significant extent to this point. Sewall's text points out why it should, however. Among the assumptions necessary to the conscious self-awakening of perception is the holistic, dynamic view of the brain which emerges from the science of complexity. Only a brain that responds decisively through feedback to the surrounding environment could adapt its own synaptic networks to perceive anew. It seems the brain is understood more as a transducer of the undifferentiated, non-focused consciousness of the world than the isolated source of individual consciousness. Sewall illustrates how preconscious focal attentive processing can be made conscious so as to stop its habitual saccades of distraction into time, space, memory, or self-indulgence. By focusing in the moment, the patterns perceived in nature are understood as the patterns of our own bottomless mind. In the eternal present, we can realize that the true perceiver is found in that which we are perceiving: the world around us sees itself through us. This is beauty itself revealed.
Toward the end, I found myself hesitating at all the mystic guidance and joyful tears as vision was awakened. (After all, nature can be vicious and ugly too.) The assumption of meaning in such things as medicine wheels and synchronistic events took a toll on my less credulous outlook. As Sewall called for the courage of new consciousness, I feared for a time that we were going to leave terra firma and go soaring into airy-fairy realms of New Age spiritualism. But I was wrong; this fine author embraced the world as is and stayed firmly on our dusty planet: ‘My prayer is that we get down, that we get down and dirty’ (p. 274). I understood. I had fallen in love with the mind behind the words, with the world behind the mind. When I was finished, I closed the book and whooped aloud in joy.
This prison seems to consist of our habit-routines that bind our perceptions. Sewall's special field of expertise is sight. She demonstrates how we have lost our ‘depth-perception’ by seeing everything in terms of our own culturally constructed self and its need for (illusory) security. We have learned to see only objects in terms of their potential use or threat to us. We do not see into them or their unified relations or our relationship with them: ‘The canon that our Western worldview posits is that the healthy, well-adjusted adult is autonomous and independent, not interdependent’ (p. 247). Instead of seeing the living world and knowing we are part of it, we see a dead world reduced to ‘resources’.
But her tale is much more than a position or an argument. She shows the reader both through her own experience (including a powerfully transcendent moment of awakening on the East African veldt) and, more subtly, through her captivating, poetic prose and truly unique metaphors. Reading this book is itself an experience that approaches such transcendent moments. For Laura Sewall, ‘perception is the dynamic ground ... for a sensuous, even ecstatic relationship with the world’ (pp. 17-18). And this is the kind of many-faceted text that can remind us of that.
The new artscience of ecopsychology has not entered the public mind to any significant extent to this point. Sewall's text points out why it should, however. Among the assumptions necessary to the conscious self-awakening of perception is the holistic, dynamic view of the brain which emerges from the science of complexity. Only a brain that responds decisively through feedback to the surrounding environment could adapt its own synaptic networks to perceive anew. It seems the brain is understood more as a transducer of the undifferentiated, non-focused consciousness of the world than the isolated source of individual consciousness. Sewall illustrates how preconscious focal attentive processing can be made conscious so as to stop its habitual saccades of distraction into time, space, memory, or self-indulgence. By focusing in the moment, the patterns perceived in nature are understood as the patterns of our own bottomless mind. In the eternal present, we can realize that the true perceiver is found in that which we are perceiving: the world around us sees itself through us. This is beauty itself revealed.
Toward the end, I found myself hesitating at all the mystic guidance and joyful tears as vision was awakened. (After all, nature can be vicious and ugly too.) The assumption of meaning in such things as medicine wheels and synchronistic events took a toll on my less credulous outlook. As Sewall called for the courage of new consciousness, I feared for a time that we were going to leave terra firma and go soaring into airy-fairy realms of New Age spiritualism. But I was wrong; this fine author embraced the world as is and stayed firmly on our dusty planet: ‘My prayer is that we get down, that we get down and dirty’ (p. 274). I understood. I had fallen in love with the mind behind the words, with the world behind the mind. When I was finished, I closed the book and whooped aloud in joy.
May 29, 2019
I cannot rave about this book enough. It is incredibly well researched and seems to distill the main pearls of wisdom from so many great thinkers (especially Arne Naess, Theodore Roszak, David Abram, Joanna Macy, and so many more). I was left feeling as if I could see differently and with some practical things I can do to encourage that different sight. Sewall is obviously someone who practices what she preaches and I so appreciate the application of theory rather than just the philosophy. A main purpose of this work was to discuss different ways to look at the Earth so as to create a connection that Sewall (and many others) believes we've lost. She talks about falling in love with the Earth and how eyesight aids in this endeavor. She is a scientist and psychologist, specializing in the neurobiology of sight, so this book is fascinating in so many different ways.
If you have interest in sustainability, spirituality, the senses, psychology, mysticism, deepening your connection with self and others, you should read this book. Truly, it has changed my life in ways that I don't understand yet, but I'm so excited to keep discovering them.
If you have interest in sustainability, spirituality, the senses, psychology, mysticism, deepening your connection with self and others, you should read this book. Truly, it has changed my life in ways that I don't understand yet, but I'm so excited to keep discovering them.
March 6, 2020
The book rambles a bit, but it is still an excellent book for someone trying to understand eco-psychology.
January 3, 2008
Most excellent examination of the role perception plays in our lives... highly recommended for anyone doing diagnosis (especially TCM or psychological), anyone interested in mindfulness or meditation designed to increase awareness/ perception... i intend to buy several copies -- one for myself, another to lend, some as gifts...
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews