It seemed to be a typical “city thing”. To be worried about your addictions, trying to get rid of them. Cigarettes, alcohol, marihuana and “worse”. Even cravings for sucker, coffee, French fries, etc, seems to pre-occupy the minds of city people until such extent it starts to look like an addiction in itself. This last spring holiday of a week in the Netherlands I came acquainted with a methodology to fight addictions that was pretty sure of itself. Until now I understood that no single method had proofed significant results. A good friend of mine had followed it against his depressions and his cravings for alcohol. It is called the “anthroposophic approach”, based largely on the philosophy of Rudolf Steiner. I read a book with stories of practitioners of the method, and what struck me was that they saw as principal reason for addictions the lack of contact with or “listening to” your own feelings, instincts or intuitions. The created emptiness is tried to be filled by some kind of instant satisfaction and continued suppression of feelings by drugs. This lead me to the following questions .

1.       Is there really a stark increased pre-occupation with addictions?
2.       Are city-people more pre-occupied with this than rural people?
3.       Does this reflect an increasing feeling of emptiness among city-people?
4.       Why would that be?

The second thing that struck me and that gave me partly the answers on these questions was the reported essence of the athroposophic treatment. In order to regain contact with your feelings and intuition, an intensive confrontation with nature is necessary, like working with earth, clay, wood, growing plants, raising animals, preparing food, cooperate with others to survive…..  It struck me for two reasons:

1.       It can explain why city-people are increasingly “looking for their roots”, and “authenticity”. They are out of touch with nature and they live in too artificial surroundings.
2.       Because the world is ruled by city-people, and is therefore increasingly defined by city-values, the whole society gets contaminated by this problem of lack of contact with nature.

So the anthroposophic approach shows that we are not merely dealing with individual addiction problems, but in fact the whole society is suffering.  One of the doctors in the book said; “we are in a critical phase in history at the moment: Or we realize that we need nature for the survival of mankind, and we establish new ways of functioning in our ecosystems, or we are entering a phase of mass-psychoses, which is dangerous and self-destructive”.  How can we break our fixations on material well-being, and individual profit-making, and bring care for the collectivity back into the picture? Could climate-change be a wake-up call? How lonely can we get in our ecosystems? Excluding nature is a dangerous game. Leaving big niches unoccupied in ecosystems increases the risks on quickly spreading diseases and plagues. Bacteria and viruses are very patient. It is time for mass-therapy! See for a recent symbolic action in Paris to win the hearts and minds of city-people for the countryside; one thousand gardens on the Champs Elysees: http://www.lemonde.fr/societe/article/2010/05/23/la-campagne-s-installe-sur-les-champs-elysees_1361910_3224.html