Somatic Ecology
The theory of Somatic Ecology relates environmental history to epistemology to dance training to the environmental crisis. The idea can seem completely academic, or at least abstract, if you try and down too much at one time. The book, published in 2009 by VDM: Verlag, breaks down component parts of the research into discrete chunks, by chapter. The applications of the theory are broad, and I am just beginning to work on topic specific papers. I am available to lecture and teach on Somatic Ecology; please don’t hesitate to contact me if you’d like to bring me in to present. You can buy the book at select bookstores, and conferences, but you can also buy the book online.
Every year the reporting on the environmental crisis gets more extreme. More and more species are going extinct. The polar ice is melting. Water is in short supply. The globe is warming. Despite increasing documentation of impending chaos and doom, there is reason to believe that humans could develop a healthier relationship to the natural world.
How we think about things matters. To develop the best solutions to our environmental problems, we need to strive for the most complete explanations to understand the world, and our place in it. As an example: consider when you drive down the road and see an animal carcass. You can look at the body and see it as an accident. But dead animals are a regular output of our transportation system. They are not random accidents. They are statistically predictable accidents.
Albert Einstein wrote that people should, “Make things as simple as possible, but no simpler.” It seems odd at first, but one can draw a straight line from our environmental problems, to the human attitude toward the rest of the natural world. And one can draw a straight line from the human attitude toward nature, to the human conception of the body. If one understands the importance of how we consider the body, we might be able to change the regular accidental outputs that together make up the environmental crisis. If Deep Ecologists are correct, the fight to protect our natural environment requires us to eliminate the human/nature divide. This, in turn, requires us to address the human/human body dialectic.
The human/human body divide is a part of the human/nature divide. How we relate to our bodies is representative of how we relate to the natural world. It is the distance between the human conception and the human conception of nature that sanctions a dominant relationship between humans and the natural world.
To download a pdf with information on lectures and workshops about Somatic Ecology offered by the author, click here.
“Robert Bettmann’s seminar combined a cogent review of his theoretic premises – provocative, instructive, and unexpected – with performative/practical applications and discussion which provided students with a new understanding of their body in space and through movement. The dance exercises gave the lecture an immediate reality that was both energizing and thought provoking.”
Marcia F. Feuerstein Ph.D., A.I.A.
Associate Professor
Virginia Tech, Washington Alexandria Architecture Center
