Thinking Like An Octopus

It’s a rare film that comes along that checks all the boxes for being a true example of the best of ecopsychology philosophy.  Fortunately, last year’s winner of the Oscar for Best Documentary film is such a work of art.  My Octopus Teacher wins on so many levels. Not only science, but also as a testament to the healing power of nature and to the inherent interconnectedness that we share with other species when we open to and cultivate the ecological self.

Ecopsychology studies our psychological connections to the natural world, what separates us, what binds us to it, what brings us back to that healthy connection needed if we are ever to evolve towards a regenerative, life-sustaining, ecological civilization that lives in harmony with nature.  In teaching undergraduate classes in ecopsychology for the past eight years I like to use a few basic assignments and readings. I assign Joanna Macy’s essay titled “The Greening of the Self” (in World as Lover, World as Self) for a good description on the ecological self and it’s connections to nonduality, and pair it with John Seed’s essay “Beyond Anthropocentrism” (in Thinking Like a Mountain: Towards A Council of All Beings) for a good summary on what it means to ‘think like a mountain’, as Aldo Leopold put it … to take into account the entire ecosystem, to realize that humans are just a plain member of the whole biotic community, not up on a pedestal above other species but woven in, no more superior or inferior as no other species is no more superior or inferior, all important to the web of life.

I like also to have students reflect on the building blocks of their environmental identity, where they started to explore the world around them in their middle childhood years, the reflective work helping them to deepen their bonds in the present with places that speak to them. But the most important assignment I give is the ’special place assignment’ or as others call it, a sit-spot.  They are tasked with choosing a place to devote time each week in cultivating their relationship with the place.  Ideally, they should have one place, one single place that they visit, the same place, each week, noticing what changes, doing some nature journaling, recording their interactions, observations, their feelings. It’s the most important assignment in the class and I’ve started to insist that each week, when they make their discussion posts, they begin with first giving a reflection from their special place, before they launch into a discussion of the readings.  It’s so common for them to think the readings are important.  In my classes the readings are secondary.  The special place assignment is where the real opportunity lies for them.

Which brings me to the ecopsychology film of the year, My Octopus Teacher. (Spoiler alert!) We meet Craig Foster, the filmmaker walking on a beach in the western cape of South Africa.  A place of wild storms.  He tells us right away that his “childhood memories are completely dominated by the intertidal, the rocky shores and the kelp forest.”  We see immediately this wild place is where his ecological identity was formed.  He grew up here on this shore swimming in the rough seas, the surf flooding the cottage he grew up in as the storms raged onshore from the Atlantic Ocean.

He’s been suffering burn out.  He’s returned to the place of his childhood as he knew he needed radical change as he put it. His relationships have suffered, his family life, he’s not sleeping well.  Psychologically he’s in a rough place.

He goes back to swim in the wild ocean each day finding a special place in a 200-metre zone of the kelp forest where he discovers a common octopus and decides to visit her each day.  He goes to the same place each day.  People ask him why he goes to the same place each day, he tells them “That’s when you see the subtle differences, that’s when you get to know the wild.”  Inspired by master trackers from the Kalahari he met while making a film years ago, he wonders if tracking can be done underwater.

His persistence and diligence in going to this one place each day pays off in him learning how to ‘think like an octopus’, as he calls it.  He says: “She ignited my curiosity in a way that hadn’t before.”

His connection with this octopus becomes so strong that one day when she is attacked by a pajama shark, he felt like he was also attacked, he felt very vulnerable.  And when she overcame her difficulties, when she started to grow back an arm that was lost in the attack, he said “it gave me a strange confidence. She could get past the difficulties, and I felt I was getting past the difficulties I had. In a strange way our lives were mirroring each other.  My relationships with people with humans was changing.”

This is as apt a description of the ecological self as I’ve ever read.

Craig’s wife, Swati Thiyagarajan, an environmental journalist, sums it up in an article she wrote on the experience of the making of the film when she said, “There is a magic that happens when you step into commitment with nature. It is as if when you make that silent promise to forge a deep connection, she opens a door into a secret world that allows you to get a glimpse of possibilities.” 

I tell my students The more we cultivate our relationship with the Earth, the more Earth informs us, each of us individually, of what our next steps to take are in ‘The Great Turning’ towards an ecological civilization.

My Octopus Teacher is assigned in Week 5 each summer in my undergraduate class “Listening to Earth: Ecology, Art and the Spirit of Place” at the California Institute of Integral Studies.   What a gift.

References:

Macy, J., & Kaza, S. (2021). World as lover, world as Self: 30th anniversary edition. Parallax Press.

My Octopus Teacher is available on Netflix.

Seed, J., Macy, J., Fleming, P., & Naess, A. (1988). Thinking like a mountain: Towards a council of all beings. New Society Publishers.

Thiyagarajan, Swati. (2020). “My Octopus Teacher and Me.” Retrieved from: https://seachangeproject.com/stories/my-octopus-teacher-and-me/