The Greening of Tony Soprano

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In recent books like The Psychology of The Sopranos and A Sitdown with The Sopranos, Tony’s id, ego, and Italian heritage are studied in depth. Both are good reads that examine Tony’s character through today’s standard therapeutic lenses: ethnicity, family, and the Freudian gaze on early childhood. But what if his ills are tied to issues that modern therapy never explores? Well, it might help to widen the frame and look at the “ecopsychology” of The Sopranos.

Eco what? You can almost see Carmela Soprano’s face as her daughter, Meadow, blurts out the latest new idea she’s caught like a cold at Columbia University. Over the last decade, ecopsychology has emerged as an alternative view of mental health that’s been shaped by influences as far afield as Darwinian biology, Gaia theory, Buddhism, and the work of various philosophers. An ecopsychologist might say that Dr. Melfi will never understand the true nature of Tony’s disease without factoring in the diseased state of nature. In other words, the Sopranos live in a world that is sick, and that world in turn is sickening them. What’s more, they don’t fully realize what’s making them ill because the illness leaves them numb to its cause.

Ecopsychology today is less a formal discipline than an ethic of lament shared by people in many fields. If it has a core belief, it’s that our broken ties to the nonhuman world are the cause of both the modern ecological crisis and a related epidemic of alienation and distress. Ecopsychology offers some curious insights into what’s eating at Tony Soprano and everyone in his orbit, including his would-be healers. That said, the show’s vivid gallery of American types, all on the make and all capable of stunning self-deception, might hold a few lessons for the ecopsychologists as well.

Note: Christie Whitman resigned from her EPA position in May, shortly after this article appeared in the magazine.

Jeremiah Creedon is a senior editor at Utne.
Copyright 2003 by Jeremiah Creedon.

Each episode of The Sopranos begins with Tony driving his SUV out of Manhattan onto the New Jersey Turnpike. Alone with his cigar, bound for his big suburban home, he first passes over the Meadowlands, a former lush Eden of tidal marshes that for thousands of years has been a haven for migrating birds. What Tony sees (or doesn’t see) is a blasted vista of smokestacks, tank farms, and other industrial detritus rising from a polluted swamp. Some observers have noted that Tony’s trip is a jump-cut history of America’s march to the suburbs packed into a rock video. It’s also a visual record of the price we’ve paid, in terms of environmental damage, to enclose a parcel of lost Eden in our own backyards.

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