The Greening of Tony Soprano

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Tony and Carmela Soprano ruthlessly strive to secure the standard American good life for their kids, even as they try to suppress the truth that they owe it all to violent crime. Meanwhile, their private pursuit of happiness, multiplied across the culture, is creating its own sort of havoc. Cancer seems to whack as many people on the series as wise guys do with guns. Almost everyone relies on a drug or two (or three), from chemo, coke, and heroin to the many legal nostrums for depression and stress. Tony pops Prozac and lithium like mixed nuts. Melfi goes for tranquilizers and vodka. Meadow’s freshman roommate from Oklahoma quickly unravels under the sensory assault of the big city. “I think I miss my ferrets,” she says, but anti-anxiety pills will have to do.

In much of America today, this psychologically abrasive milieu is now often taken to be the norm. More than a decade ago, the growing acceptance of such conditions began to fascinate cultural critic Theodore Roszak. Back in the late 1960s, Roszak coined the term counterculture to describe those who were trying to live outside industrial society and its values. In The Voice of the Earth, first published in 1992, he examined the aftermath of a social revolution that may or may not have failed, but clearly had stalled. The result was an emerging perspective he called “ecopsychology.”

As he notes in a recent new edition of the book, Roszak couldn’t figure out why so many people were willing to damage the planet—and why environmentalists usually failed in getting them to change their ways. Then he began to view our runaway spending and driving patterns as compulsive self-medication. Most people know such behavior hurts the natural world, he says, and may actually feel bad about the damage, but they’re too hooked on the little relief it brings to stop.

To understand this syndrome, Roszak turned to Paul Shepard (1925–1996), whom he calls “the first ecopsychologist.” In Nature and Madness and other books, Shepard argues that our disregard for the earth deepens into a kind of insanity as we lose touch with the other animals that have played an age-old role in shaping the human mind. Worse yet, in Shepard’s view, this growing estrangement from our natural family has profoundly altered the way we raise and educate children, especially boys. For complex reasons, the result is a culture whose men often claim both the right and the need to destroy other living things, in response to their own insecurities. Roszak agrees: “I have also come to believe that, at its deepest level, the environmental crisis traces to the twisted dynamics of male gender identity.”

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