The Greening of Tony Soprano

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Though Shepherd and Roszak are certainly right to a point, it’s worth noting that women play a powerful role in shaping male gender identity. Tony’s mother has surely helped to steer him into his criminal life, and Carmela is more than a little guilty of keeping him there. It’s been fascinating to watch Meadow approach the age where these issues now loom before her. While always aware of the cruel machinery beneath the family lie, she soon will have to choose, like her mother, whether to assume a part in keeping it hidden.

Given our deep loyalties to tradition and kin, such decisions are terribly hard, and it isn’t clear what she’ll do; but there can be no doubt that it will be a choice. That is the one real luxury that her affluence has given her (and a lot of the rest of us). If in 10 years time she finds herself numb to the world, there will be no mystery why. It won’t be a case of repression following traumatic shock. It will be a conscious act.

“I’m tired of telling people that you help with environmental cleanup!” she finally shouts at her father. (If only former New Jersey governor Christie Whitman, now head of the EPA, would say the same to her boss.) When it comes to our destruction of the wild, the lies and self-deception that are eating away at the House of Soprano in fact pervade the entire culture. Psychiatrists have said that Tony’s problem is a “vertical split” that allows his good and bad sides to operate in full awareness of each other, thanks to a hefty dose of denial. An ecopsychologist might say the larger society is likewise divided in our love-hate relationship with nature. With or without the help of our healers, the next step will be harder. We have to admit we’re pretty much all accomplices in the most dangerous form of organized crime today—our ruthless shakedown of the planet.

Jeremiah Creedon is a senior editor at Utne.

Ecopsychology 101

Recommended Readings

The Voice of the Earth: An Exploration of Ecopsychology by Theodore Roszak (Phanes Press, $19.95). Roszak adds an update to this new edition of the 1992 book in which ecopsychology is explained.

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