Bringing Reefs Back to Life
Bringing Reefs Back to Life
Two years ago, an “obituary” for the Great Barrier Reef flew across the Internet like grapeshot fired from a cannon. But the pronouncement was premature. Coral reefs are indeed dying, but they are not yet dead. Witness textbook hyperbole: “The Great Barrier Reef was predeceased by the South Pacific’s Coral Triangle, the Florida Reef off the Florida Keys, and most other coral reefs on earth. It is survived by the remnants of the Belize Barrier Reef and some deepwater corals.” Roughly 30% of the northern Great Barrier Reef suffered severe bleaching from spikes in ocean temperatures this year and coral cover in the Caribbean has declined up to 80% since the 1970s. And based on the last IPCC projections, we’re on track to lose over 90% of the world’s reefs by 2050. There’s no doubt the world’s reefs are at grave risk, but it’s not yet time to lose hope or deal in falsehoods.
As someone who’s dedicating my life to preserving coral reefs through my venture Coral Vita, I appreciate how seriously pollution, overfishing, and warming & acidifying oceans threaten their health. But for the average reader, who likely may not possess even a passing awareness of what’s happening to our world’s reefs, this story risks becoming accepted fact. That’s exactly why the article went viral, and why a host of coral scientists stepped out to vociferously condemn the dangers of Rowan Jacobsen’s piece.
Russell Brainard, chief of NOAA’s Coral Reef Ecosystem Program told the Huffington Post he fears Jacobsen reinforces a popular sentiment that “If there’s nothing that can be done, let’s not do anything and move onto other issues.” And that’s not just some heedless anxiety: dozens of people asked me if the Great Barrier Reef is really dead in the days following the obituary’s trending Internet status. I can only imagine what beliefs countless readers now hold about the fate of coral reefs.
A Dying Reef
So what can be done? In my view, there are three general courses of action: stop killing reefs, actively restore reef health, and instill hope in people that we can make things better.
Stopping reefs from dying is the most obvious and important strategy, but also the most challenging and time-consuming. Mitigating risks is always the smart choice. Why pay an excessive financial, social, and environmental price after the damage is done rather than spending less up front to prevent the pain from occurring? It seems like a no-brainer. But how bullish are you feeling about betting on governments and private industry to enact policies to stop overfishing, excess coastal development, and pollution while implementing a strong & sufficient greenhouse gas emissions reduction treaty?
I’m an optimistic guy, but I’m also a realist. And even if the best-case mitigation scenario went live, the lag time before positive effects are felt in the oceans would still not be fast enough to prevent mass coral die-off. This is not an argument against mitigation – it remains an absolute necessity. But it’s also an acknowledgement that simultaneous strategies must be pursued.
This brings us to adaptation, and the field where I work: coral reef restoration. I launched Coral Vita with my friend Gator Halpern in order to provide a scalable means to enact large-scale restoration. And we hope that by growing climate change resilient corals en masse, we can not only help preserve reef health but also galvanize hope and inspire people to act to meaningfully protect our planet.
Coral Vita is commercializing proven methods of coral farming that allows us to grow heat- and acidity-tolerant corals up to 50x faster. This translates into corals that are better prepared to survive climate changed-oceans and that can reach mature sizes in months rather than decades. These methods – assisted evolution and microfragmenting – were developed by two of the world’s leading reef scientists and Coral Vita advisors – Dr. Ruth Gates of the University of Hawaii and Dr. David Vaughan of the Mote Marine Lab. After growing native corals in our land-based farms (6-12 month cycles depending on species), we than transplant them into reefs to help revitalize their health and ecosystem services. As noted in a Science News article, by “testing an arsenal of options to rescue a diversity of underwater communities…[restoration] could be a quick and affordable way to help severely damaged reefs bounce back.”
Coral Vita believes that selling restoration to clients – such as governments, hotels, fishing associations, and the re-insurance industry – that depend on the $30B annual tourism, fisheries, and coastal protection benefits of reefs will help inject the needed capital to help fight off global degradation. Our pilot coral farm is a small-scale facility in Freeport, Grand Bahama, built in partnership with the Grand Bahama Port Authority and GB DEVCO. The farm serves three purposes: coral production facility to restore local reefs, education center for local communities, and an eco-tourism attraction with experiential opportunities for guests (e.g. adopting or planting corals, touch tanks, and seeing microfragmenting in action). From there, we plan to operate a large-scale farm that can service an entire nation’s reefs, with the ultimate vision of managing a global network of farms that can help preserve reef health for future generations.
A Thriving Reef
I wouldn’t be dedicating my life to this cause if hope for healthier oceans wasn’t viable. The journey ahead is not easy. The news of dying reefs must serve as an impetus for stakeholders to act to stop killing the reefs that nearly 1B people depend upon to survive. But for those feeling like they are losing hope amidst a sea of sobering and misleading news, search for the term #OceanOptimism on social media to shepherd us all back to the promise of a better world. For impactful solutions are now possible, practical, and affordable, made possible by an incredible global community of practitioners working tirelessly make reefs great again. And when you’re planning your next beach vacation, think about visiting Grand Bahama: the Coral Vita team looks forward to planting corals with you and your friends sometime soon.
Sources: Outside Magazine, Florida Department of Environmental Protection, Science News, Huffington Post
Images from William Saville-Kent’s The Great Barrier Reef of Australia (1893)
In 1884 William Saville-Kent voyaged to Australia and was the first to extensively photograph coral reefs. He was particularly spellbound by the corals, polyps and other lifeforms on the Queensland coast. He hoped his book The Great Barrier Reef of Australia (1893) would increase public awareness of the reef and its origins. Lithographs were created from his original sketches, based on the photos.
The Great Barrier Reef—which, at 1,400 miles long, is the longest and largest coral reef in the world—was blanketed by dangerously hot water in the summers of 2016 and 2017. This heat strangled and starved the corals, causing more than half to perish.
Dancing with Animals
Dancing with Animals
Feature Image: River Murray, South Australia
A few years ago, I participated in a transformative writing for emergence course. Through it, I realised that the troubling sense of disconnection I had been feeling was from both a loss of my culture, and a lack of a relationship with the Earth itself. The Western worldview in which I grew up taught me that other lifeforms are not alive in the special way humans are. This belief prevented me from considering other lifeforms as worthy of being in relation with, and from forming the intricate systems of relationship that many indigenous cultures retain. I now believe this loss of an Earth identity is why we are able to wantonly destroy so much of our planet; it is something that needs to be rediscovered.
Recently, I embarked on a river healing journey, called Ringbalin, along the River Murray in South-East Australia. It was led by the Ngarrindjeri people whose traditional lands exist where this river empties into the Southern Ocean. The journey took us through several Indigenous Nations’ lands, and involved the building and strengthening of connections between Indigenous Nations, as well as allowed us non-indigenous people to learn and participate in acts of healing and connection through nightly ceremonies along the river.
While the journey was incredible in many ways, a part of me wondered what good it is to be dancing while people continue to drain too much water from the river for agriculture and human settlements, and allow polluted water to flow back into it. Shouldn’t we be taking more direct action to stop this? What good is it to take years and years to build relationships while we know that right now the river is not running to the ocean? Surely we must be doing something big, like lobbying politicians or protesting en masse to ensure that ecological restoration begins immediately. It seemed too small until I reflected on how the journey affected me.
Each night, the ceremony began with all of the people present inviting their ancestors to witness what was taking place. I had never really thought about my ancestors. It wasn’t a term that was used in my Christian family. Recently, I have begun exploring Buddhism, particularly the writings of Thich Nhat Hanh, and have struggled with his reverence for ancestors. If anything, my recent ancestors were not people I respected. I saw them as the people who began the stripping away of their culture, which lead to me—a person who cannot even speak my language and doesn’t know my people’s stories and ceremonies. Yet, in participating in Ringbalin, I gained a sense of the importance of acknowledging where I come from and connecting what was to what is. I see that the present cannot be without the actions of the past and that the future emerges out of what we presently do. So, when future generations invite their ancestors into the ceremonial circle, I will be part of those ancestors being called forth. With that, comes a continuity and responsibility that its weightier than a life lived only for the individual now.
The ceremonial dances at Ringbalin were about the river ecosystem and the sustenance it provided. Ngarrindjeri elder Uncle Moogy spoke about how their culture considers creatures—the animals, birds, fish, and plants—as Naatchi, meaning their friends. In dancing, the Ngarrindjeri honour this connection. We were invited to join in the dances—to learn the hop of the Kangaroo, the bobbing strut of the Emu, the flight of the Kite Hawk, and the swimming motions of the Whale and a school of fish. In dancing, I felt a connection and empathy for these creatures that I had not felt before. It was as if, for a brief moment, I had slipped into their fur, feathers, or scales; even as I write this, the tug of connection re-emerges.
What we choose to recreate in stories, dance, and art says a lot about our culture. I wonder then what it is to be fully emerged in a belief system that creates these dances and honours them by performing them in their ceremonies. Indigenous Nations, in what is now Australia, track their movement across the landscape through songs of animals that crafted the contours and waterways, and remain embodied in the hills, plains, and rivers. From what little I have learned of their cultures, it is apparent that they have complex, finely tuned systems of respect and responsibility to each other, the land, and the seen and unseen creatures that live in it. This has allowed them to live for tens of thousands of years across the continent in a variety of ecosystems, from northern monsoonal areas to inland deserts and more temperate climates.
In the 200-odd years since Europeans invaded Australia, it has been dramatically altered. In this country and around the world, the dominant Western mindset has trapped us into a system that diminishes the Earth’s diversity through an ongoing attempt to force the land into being things it does not want to be. In all this, we have lost an understanding of the land and forgotten how to honour the embodied life that exists throughout. In thinking how the river healing journey affected me, I see that we need to learn to really sit with the land, to dance its creatures into life, or even to begin to acknowledge a connection to something non-human. Perhaps it is my ancestral connections, too, reminding me of this important need to situate ourselves again within our Earth and all it offers. From whatever source this knowledge comes, I know that having an Earth identity is necessary for us to create ways of being that allow humans and the rest of creation to flourish.
Developing a Mindful Approach to Earth Justice Work
Developing a Mindful Approach to Earth Justice Work
The story one tells oneself about climate change shapes individual feelings and actions. For example, are we on the verge of breakdown or breakthrough? There is ample evidence for both. What if the climate crisis we face offers humans the necessary conditions to move to a higher stage of collective evolution? How might we then view this situation?
Our beloved Mother Earth is hurting, and we humans are the cause of this suffering. There is a growing awareness of the immensity and unprecedented nature of our current situation. Some climate scientists and academics have declared that we are headed toward inevitable social collapse, probable environmental catastrophe, and possible human extinction. This occurs at a time when the world is stressed by racial and social oppression, population growth and overconsumption, an unfair distribution of resources, and an extractive growth economy.
Vietnamese Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh came of age in another time of great suffering, the 1950s and 60s in Vietnam. He is one of the world’s most effective practitioners of what he calls, “socially engaged Buddhism.” His Plum Village tradition was formed in the cauldron of the Vietnam War, where he urged his followers to bring the grounding and peacefulness gained on the meditation cushion out into the villages to help relieve the suffering of a war-torn people, by direct aid, social work, and building schools.
This tradition of engaged social action continues today with the Earth Holder Community: An Earth Justice Initiative in the Plum Village Community of Engaged Buddhism. The aim of Earth Holders is to “bring mindfulness, compassion, healing, and non-violence to protecting ourselves, each other, all beings, and the Earth.”
The Earth Holder Community focuses attention on six interconnected elements of a holistic, mindfulness-based climate action and earth justice practice:
-
- Cultivating wise view, so that our actions are grounded in spiritual depth
- Healing & transforming racism and social oppression; to link climate justice with racial justice in order to foster human unity as a reality not an ideal
- Healing grief, despair, fear, and feelings of powerlessness, so that we may think more clearly, act more boldly, and love more deeply
- Building strong community, so that we have reliable space to recover, refresh, and renew ourselves as environmental and social suffering spreads
- Practicing living an ethical life, including reverence for life, deep listening and kind speech, so that we nurture the capacity for compassion and counteract hatred, blame, and “othering”
- Engaging in mindfulness-based earth justice work, and to bring these elements to individuals and communities around the world
We believe these six elements can help to deepen the movement for environmental and social justice.
1. Cultivating Wise View
Impermanence and interbeing are two key elements of what Buddhists call wise view.
Impermanence means everything changes.
This is the nature of reality. Nothing lasts – not our bodies, not our lives, not our civilization, not our ecosystems, not our species. Indeed, the vast majority of species that have existed on earth are now extinct. The earth and all its creations are but a moment in the mysterious cosmic flow. We are understandably attached to our particular species on our particular planet, and letting go of the idea that we are not the center of the universe is challenging. When we resist change, we suffer. Wise view asks us to learn to look deeply at the reality of change and not cling to our attached views or preferences. This can help us find freedom in the midst of the storm. This freedom helps us respond more appropriately to the changes that are occurring.
This doesn’t mean we “give in” to climate change, racial injustice or social collapse, or have no responsibility or duty to act. It does mean that we loosen our grip on having things turn out the way we want them to. We can listen more carefully to others. We can pay more attention to people outside our circles and to beings that are not human. Acting in this manner helps us develop compassion and lessen suffering, transforming our relationship with the natural world.
Interbeing means everything is interconnected.
Another crucial element of wise view is that nothing exists as a separate entity; that everything is connected to everything else. In Eastern teachings, there is a beautiful image of “Indra’s Net”—an infinite web with a jewel at every node with facets that reflect every other jewel.
Interbeing is the awareness that we are not separate from the earth, but rather we are the Earth. When we are open and still, we can know without a doubt that we carry the Earth in every cell of our bodies. This awareness awakens a deep desire to care for the Earth, as we want to care for ourselves. What we do to Earth we do to ourselves and each other. And how we are with each other, collectively, is how we are with the Earth.
When John Seed, a rainforest activist was asked how he handles despair he said:
I try to remember that it’s not me, John Seed, trying to protect the rainforest. Rather, I am part of the rainforest protecting itself. I am that part of the rainforest recently emerged into human thinking.
Another aspect of interbeing is the recognition that each of us shares a basic human nature with every other human being: with the Maldive islanders who are losing their islands to rising sea levels, and also with the oil barons, the Koch brothers, and climate crisis deniers. We all want to be happy and safe, and we all are highly conditioned to be attached to our points of views. To the extent that we can effectively deal with our judgmental and polarizing minds, we have a better chance to overcome these feelings of separation, and to see all beings with the eyes of compassion, even as we try to stop destructive activity.
2. Healing and Transforming Racial and Social Inequity
We can increasingly see how climate change highlights the interconnection between issues that were previously viewed as separate. Climate change is a racial justice issue; a resource extraction issue; a food security issue; a national security issue; an economic justice issue; a public health issue; a population issue; a democracy issue; an immigration issue; a technology issue; a gender equity issue, a species loss issue, a rights of the earth issue; and so on. Anything we care about is somehow related to climate change and environmental degradation. The silver lining of climate change, if we can grace it with such a positive term, is that we now have the real and necessary possibility of knitting together an integrated awareness that links all these issues into a new understanding of our interconnectedness.
For example, African American Zen teacher angel Kyoto williams succinctly makes the link between climate crisis and racism when she says, “The reason we continue to degrade the earth is that we continue to degrade each other.” So, as we heal the wounds of racism and white supremacy, we will also be healing that which keeps us in unhealthy relationship with the Earth. Acknowledging and healing from the wounds of racism needs to be high on our collective agenda.
The crux of environmental justice, is that the people who have contributed the least to the environmental catastrophe – mostly the Global South, mostly people-of-color – are bearing the brunt of the effects of climate change, from Pacific Islanders who are already experiencing the effects of rising sea levels, to Sub-Saharan West African subsistence farmers who are feeling the simultaneous erratic effects of extreme drought and flooding, to communities of color in the US who are more likely to be impacted by air pollution (see this NPR article). When we talk about justice, we need to think about how we can rectify/mitigate/remedy this.
What Earth justice requires is radical transformation at the base of our civilization—an economy that promotes well-being and happiness, not based on greed; a society based on fairness, compassion, and cooperation where the “isms” have been healed and eliminated; a re-uniting of humans with the rest of the natural world, recognizing our inextricable interdependence and embeddedness; a human culture that encourages contentedness, sufficiency, caring, curiosity, and creativity.
This transformation seems like a dream, given the current trends. All the more reason to not rely on the slow, incremental reforms that most of the past environmental movements have attempted. As Greta Thunberg, the sixteen year-old Swedish climate activist says – “This is not sufficient, our house is on fire.”
Hoping that technology or the market or human decency or enough political will can “save” us from the worst is not sufficient either. Indigenous people all over the world have tried their best to remain close to and in harmonious relationship to the natural world, despite the colonialist destruction of their cultures. Those of us from non-indigenous cultures can learn much from their resistance and ancient wisdom. This calls for a radical shift in consciousness coupled with deep systemic changes in our behavior, policies, and institutional structures, and correspondingly deep inner changes in our beliefs and feelings of powerlessness and unworthiness, our unconscious biases that make us feel superior or inferior, and the underlying conditioning that makes us feel separate from each other, other beings, and the Earth.
3. Handling Feelings of Grief, Despair, Fear, and Powerlessness.
As we contemplate the profound changes ahead, we come face-to-face with deep grief. How do we find ways of allowing ourselves to grieve, to let our hearts break open at both the present suffering and the suffering that is predicted? Feelings of despair, depression, and sadness are natural responses to the possibilities of extinction, but as passing states of grief, not as a reason to give up or not act. Life is still miraculous, even as suffering deepens, there is still so much to love and protect.
Powerlessness. There is a huge barrier to humans mobilizing to limit harm and to change our relationship to the Earth. This barrier is the presence of deeply conditioned feelings of powerlessness in many people. While it is true that many people are engaged in inner and/or outer work from a place of fierce compassion, or solidarity or community service, regardless of what they think the outcome of their efforts might be, it is also true that there is a more pervasive societal denial, distraction, and paralysis about the situation facing us that needs addressing. Bill McKibben of 350.org puts it this way: “The crisis seems so big, and we seem so small, that it’s hard to imagine that we can make a difference.”
Many of us have internalized our childhood conditioning of powerlessness. But what if total climate catastrophe is not inevitable? What if we are big enough to tackle this? What if this is just the right level of challenge to slingshot us through to the next level of collective consciousness? What would we do if we adopted this view?
Of course, we can’t simply think our way to this point of view. We need courage to examine and feel the old feelings in order to transform them. In our meditation practice, or support groups, or therapy sessions, or friendship circles, can we make the commitment to find ways of accepting, embracing, and feeling those old feelings, and releasing them? If so, they will gradually lose their constraining hold on our unlimited capacity to love and act.
For example, for the past 30 years, I have maintained a weekly co-listening session with a friend. Each week, I listen to him for 45 minutes, and then he listens to me for 45 minutes. No advice, no agenda other than allowing ourselves to feel the feelings that arise. Along with meditation, this deep listening process over the years has helped me explore and release the early childhood hurts and historical trauma and increasingly uncover my innate capacity to care, to think clearly, and to act more fearlessly, which has allowed me to be more effective in social change work. So for me, healing early or ongoing trauma and feelings of powerlessness is a necessary part of earth justice work.
4. Building Strong Community
Feelings of powerlessness and living in a thoroughly oppressive society gives rise to separation. We get pitted against each other. We blame and shame others. We feel the need to protect our own, to go it alone, to compete, to get “ahead.” Our families, social networks, and communities break down. So building community is another necessary component of earth justice work – finding ways to unite across issues, create multi-racial and multi-class organizations, develop deep communities of practice as refuges, as sanctuaries, as think tanks, as renewal spaces.
I know this is easier said than done. White supremacy, patriarchy, and classism are dominant. Climate crisis asks us to get on with this healing and unification work, because the environmental impacts will affect everyone, not equally or at the same pace or time, but no place will be untouched, and the coming generations depend on us repairing long festering historical systems of oppression and exploitation that have kept us separate and have helped bring about the damage to the earth.
Another reason to nurture deep community is to be better able to provide a refuge of support for climate activists and climate refugees, to help each other maintain loving kindness and compassion as climate stress mounts, to be able to resist likely voices of separation and demonizing as fear increases. Strong community helps us deepen our skills in listening, and healing, and reaching harmony, skills that will become increasingly needed with rising chaos.
5. Practice living an ethical life, individually and collectively
If “interbeing” is true, then what I do in my thoughts, words, and deeds ripples outward infinitely. How I speak impacts you and vice versa. Knowing this interdependence makes me want to take good care of my actions. It helps me see the necessity of living an ethical life, and the desirability of a collective ethic along the lines of the “Five Mindfulness Trainings” offered by Thich Nhat Hanh, namely: reverence for life, generosity, kind speech, sexual responsibility, and mindful consumption.
Reverence for life means trying to do as little harm as possible, insofar as we can know. This points to nourishing gratitude for all of life, noticing the goodness and beauty all around, even in the midst of suffering. It means cultivating compassion for all beings, being kind and non- violent in my relationship with all humans, the earth, oceans, rivers and lakes, and with animals, fish and plants. It means eating in such a way the causes minimal suffering to animals and plants, growing or buying organic foods as means allow, conserving water and energy, and so on. And, we can see how this is directly linked to healing the wounds of white supremacy and patriarchy, no matter where we are in connection to those powerful societal dynamics.
Kind Speech and Deep Listening. Given the corrosive public discourse that permeates public life in much of the Western world, how can we practice kindness and solidarity in our speech, so we don’t add to ill-will, blame, and demonizing? Conversely, how can we listen well to others who disagree with us? How can we keep their inherent goodness in mind even as we dialogue respectfully with them to help understand and transform the situation? How can we offer compassionate listening with the whole-hearted attempt to help relieve suffering and find common ground?
Generosity, or No Stealing. One of the causes of the climate crisis is that we humans have been “stealing” the future from our descendants. Not intentionally stealing, but our extraction of the natural resources for our comfort and profit has essentially robbed our descendants and millions of species of a quality environment. Similarly, greed, hatred, and insecurity have caused humans to oppress, enslave, imprison, or otherwise steal from other humans through much of history. How do we cultivate deep generosity, refusing to take what is not ours, giving of our time and material resources to those in need, creating a widespread culture of giving and sharing, even as seas rise and food shortages increase and climate refugees flood across international borders? How can we practice opening our hearts and extending our hands instead of putting up walls?
True Love, Sexual Responsibility. The #MeToo Movement is just the latest expose in the long, sad history of patriarchy, sexual exploitation, and abuse. Underlying the structural power dynamics is immense suffering born of loneliness, a need for closeness, and having been cut off from knowing our true nature. In addition to challenging the structures of sexism, the personal work required is reconnecting with one’s essence, one’s true home to recover our innate security and contentment that doesn’t depend on anyone else. When people so attuned to their true nature come together, there is no exploitation or abuse, but true expression of love.
Mindful Consumption. On the one level, this is obvious. Our consumption habits are hurting the earth, and so, becoming increasingly aware of our personal and collective consumption is part of addressing climate change. Looking deeply helps us examine our desires. Less obvious forms of “consumption” include media, news, entertainment, conversations, and jokes. Which are wholesome and which are toxic? How can we protect our precious consciousness from unwholesome consumption? This inquiry can lead to many changes in our lives, individually and collectively, leading toward simpler, more wholesome, mindful and responsible living.
6. Engaging in Compassionate Wise Action
Earth justice work requires the whole spectrum of engagement, from beginners just waking to the environmental crisis, to personal healing of one’s inner life; from adopting ways to reduce one’s personal carbon footprint, to preserving a local habitat, forest or wetlands; from protecting an endangered species, to actions, advocacy, and organizing in the wider world that change policies, structures, and institutions – putting an end to all forms of systemic violence.
This also includes electoral politics.
Innumerable organizations have been active in climate justice work for decades, and despite huge and heroic outpourings of energy, money, and effort, why do we seem to be going nowhere fast? One reason is that we have not used our influence enough in a concerted and powerful way to elect local, state, and federal officials who support effective climate justice approaches, and who are willing to challenge the moneyed interests and corporations that benefit from the status quo.
The fossil fuel industry, for example, has powerfully organized to elect candidates who deny human-caused climate change, challenge overwhelming scientific consensus (97%), roll back healthy climate laws and policies, and effectively legislate for continued fossil fuel subsidies.
Changing our personal habits is helpful, but not sufficient. To have significant impact, many more of us will need to step into the power space, the political space, and the space where the laws and policies are shaped and implemented. Specifically, without eliminating gerrymandered voting districts, without getting corporate money out of politics, without ensuring all people have an equal opportunity to vote, without electing climate-friendly candidates to office up and down the ballot, or running for office ourselves, we are ceding the future to those whose patterns, wrong views, and power are hastening collapse of the ecosystems we all depend on for food, water, air, and shelter. We need to help give Mother Earth good partners in government.
And we can do electoral work without demeaning other candidates, without using divisive or disrespectful language, without demonizing opponents. Instead, we can use kind speech, invite conversations about what kind of environment we want, skillfully link racial justice with climate justice with economic justice with immigrant justice and so on, without blaming or shaming.
We can invite people to be on the side of love.
In Summary
While not pretending that it is complete, we offer this framework of a mindful approach to Earth Justice work in hopes that it is helpful to the wider movement. It helps to think of the six elements as interacting with each other, none standing alone, but together forming a promising approach. May it be of benefit.
John wrote this article with the help of members of the steering committee of the Earth Holder Community, an Earth Justice Initiative of the Plum Village Community of Engaged Buddhism. This framework collectively emerged from discussions among members of the steering committee, on which he happily serves.
Among the Nightingales in Berlin
Among the Nightingales in Berlin
David Rothenberg is a distinguished professor of humanities and music at The New Jersey Institute of Technology and has studied music for over four decades. He is acclaimed for his career contributions in the fields of philosophy, art, and conservation science. Most of his work has an environmental theme and involves the sounds of nature, live and in the studio. As an internationally known composer and jazz clarinetist, his releases, on ECM Records and other labels, feature unique clarinet performances, often live field recordings incorporating the music of whales, birds and insects.
David’s latest recording projects are focused on collaborations with nightingales. As part of the work, Rothenberg and an international band of musicians perform music in concert with nightingales in Berlin’s public parks. His project is documented in several music releases, most notably, Berlin Bülbül (bülbül is turkish for nightingale) and Nightingale Cities. The project has also given rise to a film, Nightingales In Berlin, and a newly released book Nightingales In Berlin Searching for the Perfect Sound. David very kindly sent Kosmos this update from the very heart of the project, Berlin.
– Kari Auerbach, for Kosmos Journal
Nightingales in Berlin Trailer | Footage and Ethos of the Project
This film tells the story of David Rothenberg’s efforts to gather together an international band of musicians to cross the species line and make music live with nightingales. Because of its spacious parks and the large number of enthusiastically singing birds, Berlin is the best city to make music with nightingales. (pull out quote: “Almost everything one plays to a nightingale will encourage him to sing more. These encounters becomes a direct window into the unknown, a touch of communication with a being with whom we cannot speak. The play of pure tones jarring against click and buzz, it all becomes not a code but a groove, an amphitheater of rhythms in which we strive to find a place.”
It’s been five years since I began playing music live with the nightingales in Berlin. In 2013, I moved to the city for one year to steep myself in its refreshing range of artistic possibility and mix of world cultures, something like the New York of an era before my time, where one could live well on moderate means, and art is produced together simply because it can be, not because it might make some people known while others remain unknown.
I was also buoyed by the knowledge that Berlin offers glimmers of environmental success. Citizens had reclaimed its first airport, turned it into a giant open air park where you can bicycle the runways and listen to skylarks, who have been given part of the giant airfield as a sanctuary. Other sections contain community gardens, and whenever the city threatens to plonk down a housing development, the people fight back and it doesn’t happen.
I knew the city was home to a thriving population of several thousand nightingales, whose intense midnight songs were the terrestrial equivalent of the twenty-four hour arias of humpback whales. These were the birds of myth and literature, and, living in the New World, I had never heard one in person. As an interspecies musician, I dreamed of a music that could only be made by humans and nightingales together.
Half a decade later, I am happy to say we have a book, a film, and several recorded versions of the music, all to be explored at www.nightingalesinberlin.com. I can hardly believe everything got ready at the same time.
Last Friday, the film had just been wrapped up by director Ville Tanttu in Helsinki as he flew to Germany, heading straight for the BUFA Film Studios where we would hold the world premiere. This facility, one of Germany’s earliest movie production facilities, is currently being transformed into a center for sustainable culture by the people behind the wonderful retreat centers in the UK, www.42acres.com. Apparently, when the facility was first built, movies were only made with natural light, so the buildings were like giant greenhouses, and it is to that form that they may soon be restored.
An excerpt from the documentary Nightingales in Berlin
Still, right now it’s an idea, not a reality, so our crew had to turn the black box movie studio into a screening space, and more and more people kept signing up for the show, so we ran all over the campus, finding every possible couch and chair we could, carrying them all to the floor with the help of a great team of Iranian and Syrian students and refugees. Lima Vafadar organized the whole process, Yassi Pishvai decided where every seat would go. Ville and I and two stagehands put up the giant screen four times before we got it right.
Lima and Ehsan Tavakoli prepared food that was a work of art in itself. Binta Wasgeschah tended the bar put together out of old crates. The lights were adjusted, the public filed in. I saw my film for the very first time.
My initial reaction was a bit like Pee Wee Herman in his Great Adventure: “I don’t have to see the movie because I lived it.” But I was soon lured in to a visual poem about my recent past. It was dark, beautiful, made mostly at night. There is a lot of me talking, which I don’t like to hear, preferring instead the actual music of this amazing bird, and these fine musicians joining in: Cymin Samawatie on voice, Sanna Salmenkallio and Benedicte Maurseth on violins, Korhan Erel on electronics, and Wassim Mukdad on oud. Pioneers of nightingale science Dietmar Todt, Tina Roeske, Silke Voigt-Huecke and even Sarah Darwin, great-great-grandaughter of Charles, explain a few things.
Under the nightingale’s song
Everyone is gone except you and I
The night is cold but we are warm
As warm as long as the nightingale sings—
Forever
Yet there is much of the story we cannot explain. Why do these birds sing all night, as few other species need to do? The function of territory and attraction are not enough to presage all this beauty. We have scanned their brains, we know they love and enjoy their own music even more than we do.
“How can I be silent,” says the Farsi poet Saadi, in the thirteenth century, “while birds chant praises?” That is my motto for why I dare to join in. The nightingale needs not my own tentative, feeble human music. Or any human music. After all, he has sung the way he does for millions of years, we have only got a few hundred thousand cycles down thus far. He goes to Africa in winter, and flies back to exactly the same tree or lamppost in Berlin many years in a row—that much we do know.
After the show, some of us walk together toward the edge of the Tempelhof Field where nightingales trade fours in the underbrush. I play along for half an hour or so, then we listen reverentially for another hour to our bird. He has a few hundred phrases to work with, and somehow neither he nor we ever get bored. People file away into the night. Just a few of us are left, huddled together in the cold as this beautiful ancient music goes on and on, reminder that at least something is still right with the world, right at the border between nature and culture where the most important contact is found. We may never crack the nightingale’s code, as Dylan and Merwin well knew. I don’t even need to record it anymore, it’s wound itself up into my own songs, as I remember this moment always and will keep coming back.
David Presents for 25 minutes on the process of collaborating with whales, insects and birds. He concludes with comparing, contrasting, slowing down, speeding up and combining animal sounds and as a finale.
In this same edition of Kosmos Quarterly, read about another artist who collaborates with nightingales! Sam Lee: Birdsong Hits the Charts.
The Stones Will Cry Out
The Stones Will Cry Out
Climate Change is Colonialism
Today we have entered the fateful epoch of the “Sixth Great Extinction” – a geological time period similar to the last mass extinction event when the dinosaurs were wiped out tens of millions of years ago. Vertiginously, we are climbing a dangerous staircase of global warming-driven “tipping points” – catalytic chain-reaction events, such as melting permafrost, that could trigger widespread and sudden catastrophe within the heretofore self-regulating global climate system.
Unsustainable, mechanized civilization has dumped billions of metric tons of carb0n into the atmosphere through fossil fuels burning since the onset of coal-fired industrialization in the mid-18th century. Heavy consumption of coal, oil, and natural gas, along with continued deforestation since the start of the Columbian Age, is causing global temperatures to escalate astronomically – anywhere from three to seven degrees Fahrenheit by 2050, to as high as seven to ten degrees by the century’s end.
Climate change driven by carbon dependence is the direct result of the extractive worldview that came ashore in the Americas with the arrival of Columbus in 1492 CE. It is easy to think that contemporary global warming is an exceptional apocalyptic event spawned by the Industrial Revolution. In fact, the first instance of global climate change occurred within a hundred years of European colonization of the New World. Set in motion by initial contact between indigenes and settlers, European diseases and armed conflicts killed upwards of 56 million Indigenous people, causing large human communities to be evacuated as well as great swaths of farmland to be abandoned and then reforested. The resulting increase in trees and vegetation triggered a massive decrease of CO2 in the atmosphere, enough to cool the Earth by 1610, in what is called the Little Ice Age. Tragically, Native genocide was only the beginning of the ecocidal birth pangs that have led to the catastrophic climate sorrows of our own historical period. We are not unique. The Great Dying in the Americas five hundred years ago has now led directly to the Sixth Great Extinction of our own time.
As the planet becomes hotter and cascading waves of extinctions are the inevitable result, our reliance on fossil fuels continues apace. This carbon addiction stems from our exploitative settler colonialist posture toward the natural world. Earth, to use philosopher Martin Heidegger’s formulation, has become an extensive “standing-reserve” of inexhaustible power for modern industrial development, and our exploitative disposition toward the planet belies any hope we might have of extricating ourselves from our fundamentally abusive orientation toward the life-giving systems on which we all depend.
As an unfeeling standing-reserve, Earth for us is no longer a “living being” or “feeling organism” with its own subjective moods and affective propensities. It cannot feel pain, or experience loss, or undergo the suffering, some claim, that only we so-called higher forms of life and other sentient beings can feel. Our techno-supply vocabulary for Earth has effectively rendered our living planet numb and silent – a dead zone of inert matter, a fixed deposit of energy to fuel commercial development at all costs. As Indigenous biologist Robin Wall Kimmerer warns, “In English, we speak of the land as ‘natural resources’ or ‘ecosystem services,’ as if the lives of other beings were our property.” As a lifeless thing, as an impersonal, mechanized repository of useful materials, Earth, in the terminology we consistently use and with which we feel most comfortable, is now, in its most basic essentiality, a “resource” of “services” to supply the needs of human society – or, perhaps more accurately in a market-driven economy, a “commodity” to be bought and sold in the financial marketplace, like toothpaste or pork futures or stock options.
But understood from a different perspective, Earth can be reimagined as a living community of intersubjective persons, all of whom have their own emotional lives, capacities for relationship, and distinctive roles to play in maintaining the vibrancy of the wider web of life. This worldview is often referred to as animism. As a traditional form of knowledge, it ascribes personhood to all members of the web and regards them as “life-forms” or “beings” rather than as “things” or “objects.” Animism locates human beings in an expansive family of kinfolk that includes “bear persons” and “rock persons” along with “tree persons” and “human persons.”
This sensibility is both ancient and modern. Today, for example, animism is enshrined in the language of Bolivia’s Universal Declaration of the Rights of Mother Earth on Earth Day, 2010, wherein humankind and otherkind are described as environing members of “Mother Earth, an indivisible, living community of interrelated and interdependent beings with a common destiny.” In antiquity, animism is the angle of vision that underlies Jesus’ comment in the Gospel of Luke that if his followers were to become silent about his mission then the rocky earth itself would cry out and proclaim his message. “Jesus answered, ‘I tell you, if these [disciples] were silent, then the stones will shout out.” Native theologian George “Tink” Tinker makes this same point. He argues that even “rocks talk and have what we must call consciousness,” and then continues, “The Western world, long rooted in the evidential objectivity of science, distinguishes at least popularly between things that are alive and things that are inert, between the animate and the inanimate. Among those things that are alive, in turn, there is a consistent distinction between plants and animals and between human consciousness and the rest of existence in the world. To the contrary, American Indian peoples understand that all life forms not only have consciousness, but also have qualities that are either poorly developed or entirely lacking in humans.”
Animism, therefore, flattens commonplace ontological distinctions between living/nonliving or animate/inert along a continuum of multiple subjectivities: now everything that is is alive with personhood and relationality, even sentience, according to its own capacities for being in relationship with others. Or as Pagan scholar Graham Harvey says, “Animists are people who recognize that the world is full of persons, only some of whom are human, and that life is lived in relationship with others.” All life-forms are persons, only some of whom are human, because all beings are differentiated members of a community of relationships, only some of whom are recognizable as living beings by us.
Feral Rock Religion
If animism tells us who we are in relation to the family of living beings around us, then these beings are now revealed to us not as unfeeling things but as bearers of personhood with their own deep emotional registers. Take, for example, the stone wall that runs along the level of my eye outside my study window as I write these words. Fixed and impassive, how could this squat, rocky enclosure be anything other than lifeless matter? In what sense could it be said to be a living, feeling being with dispositions and moods like the rest of us? My rock wall is made from Wissahickon schist, a beautiful, and, at one time, ubiquitous local stone, flecked with quartz and mica, that has given Philadelphia and its surrounding architecture a uniformly earth-toned and stolid appearance. But while Wissahickon schist is aesthetically pleasing, in what sense can it be said to be affective and alive?
In response, let me suggest the following: the rocks in my wall are living beings – as are all of the rocks strewn across the stony face of the planet – precisely because they are vital structural elements in the geochemical processes that support their own, and my family’s existence in our common Swarthmore home. In this sense, my rock wall and I subsist together: our mutual personhood is co-generated by the subtle and abiding interactions we enjoy within the village habitat of Swarthmore borough. My seemingly inert and immobile rock wall is actually part of a living, swirling ecosystem that energizes everything around it with interlocking vitality. Covered in lichen and micro-organisms I cannot see, my stony barricade holds together the teeming community of a/biotic life-forms that sustain my immediate niche within the larger eco-zone we co-inhabit together. By controlling soil loss through sediment trapping, for example, my wall holds steady much of the biomass that insures the well-being of our collective existence along with my family’s household. This biomass, including my yard’s surrounding thicket of trees, shrubs and groundcover, also plays a role in Earth’s carbon cycle as one of the many links in the photosynthetic food chains that make all planetary life possible, in my bioregion and elsewhere. Among other critical functions, the absorption of carbon dioxide at my particular home-site, and the corresponding production of oxygen, now stabilized by the rock wall outside my study window, is essential to my and my family’s, and all other beings’, survival.
The Gaia Hypothesis
Are rocks, then, not dead things, but vital members of the life-web necessary for existence? Could Jesus and the Bolivian Declaration be right that Earth itself is a vital “actant,” to borrow a term from social theorist Bruno Latour, with its own affective tendencies and relational capacities? Paleontologist James Lovelock argues for the intrinsic value of all of Earth’s living elements – including, by implication, my Wissahickon schist rock wall – in the maintenance of the functional integrity of the biosphere writ large. Lovelock theorizes that the planet is a “superorganism” in which all of its biological, physical, and chemical components are “alive” and necessary for the support and regulation of global biodiversity. Lovelock calls the living Earth “Gaia,” named after the ancient Earth goddess of the Greeks, to signal the quasi-mystical powers of the worldwide biochemical interactions between animals, insects, fungi, algae, air, water, trees, soil and rocks to create the ideal living conditions – including the ideal climate – for all inhabitants of the planet. He calls his cosmology “the Gaia hypothesis,” and frames it this way: “The entire range of living matter on Earth, from whales to viruses, from oaks to algae, could be regarded as constituting a single living entity, capable of manipulating Earth’s atmosphere to suit its overall needs and endowed with faculties and powers far beyond those of its constituent parts.”
According to Lovelock, our particular human role in the biosphere is to understand how Earth’s or Gaia’s biophysical interactions create a steady state fit for life, and then to support the capacities of this “single living entity” to maintain optimal ecosystem functionality for diverse communities of species. Lovelock writes: “The more we know, the better we shall understand . . . the consequences of abusing our present powers as a dominant species and recklessly plundering or exploiting [Earth’s] most fruitful regions.” In reference to Lovelock, my corresponding point is that when we devolve into “abusing our present powers” and degrade the abilities of Gaia’s interweaving elements to achieve their natural ends – in other words, when we cause any of the constituent members of diverse ecosystems to suffer needless harm – then we do injury to the vital organisms and processes that make our self-regulating planetary life-system generative and sustainable. It is in this sense, therefore, that we can say that when we assail Gaia’s ecosystemic balance that we are causing Earth, as an organic being, as a “single living entity,” to quote Lovelock, to suffer harm, to feel pain, and to undergo trauma.
If Lovelock’s Gaia cosmology is accurate, then Earth is a living, feeling being who cries out and suffers injury from the depredation brought about by human malice. But why is this animist insight – the recognition of the common personhood of all life-forms who suffer repeated injury – so crucial to our well-being on the planet? It is crucial because the existential awareness that we ourselves are not the only bearers of apperceptive suffering compels us to re-situate ourselves – ontologically and ethically – in the wider personhood of Earth itself who, like us, is a living being with emotion and purpose unto itself. It is crucial because this insight into our wider belonging to a living being far greater than ourselves compels us to re-imagine ourselves as integral members of a cosmic body, a supreme organism, an all-encompassing life-form whose needs and requirements surpass our own, and to whom we owe our ultimate loyalty and devotion.
It is crucial because this recognition of Earth’s vital essence forms the basis of more-than-human sacred kinship relationships and rituals wherein all beings are now regarded as sharing a common existence together as equal co-participants in the web of life. And it is crucial because once we sense the longing of creation to be free from chronic suffering – once we sense nature’s capacity to experience depredation in a manner similar to how we too experience loss and injury – then we will feel an inner drive to live our lives in harmony with all of God’s creatures, all of whom, including ourselves, subside and flourish in Mother Earth’s loving embrace. Or, as Lovelock puts it so succinctly, once we recognize Gaia as a “single living entity,” we will then feel the “compulsive urge to belong to the commonwealth of all creatures which constitutes Gaia.”
Three Poems
Three Poems
Something about a Goat
My mind is always offering up
images for sacrifice—
a dog flopping in the street
until the pup becomes
a grocery bag.
So today as I cross the little bridge
on my daily walk through town,
I see a white nanny goat lying
dead in the run-off stream,
her head resting on the bank.
I think of Sappho and her love:
I shall burn the fat thigh-bones of
a white she-goat on her altar.
But here it has been raining for days,
and my billy is in California.
It’s suds I am seeing,
a goat-size heap of foam
throttling the run-off.
I walk on thinking pollutants—
sulfates, parabens, phthalates,
triclosan, formaldehyde, toluene,
that knock-on-wood list of stains
that surround us and destroy.
Is this goat white with an earthy, fishy
or cut-grass odor, natural foam
or some MIT soapy concoction
than prevents neurons from communicating?
Farther on, no question what is on the road:
nine turkey buzzards
huddled over a doe that forgot
to look both ways.
A Divination of Sorts
– Portland, Maine
Circling the Back Bay
on our morning walk
we saw two gulls fighting
over what seemed a plastic bag
but on drawing closer,
we imagined haruspices
sparring over the right
to read entrails.
Then a flock of blackbirds
swirled against the clouds,
but not being augurs
we didn’t know how to read that either
though we remembered
the Romans and Etruscans:
how Romulus won the right
to choose the site of Rome
by sitting on his big hill
and seeing twelve vultures
while Remus crouching on his tuffet
saw only six.
Meanwhile our dog Caesar looked up
from sniffing his own omens
as a smiling Tiresias hobbled
towards us and said,
Do you know what you get
if you cross an elephant and a rhinoceros?
That too seemed strange,
but we were on vacation, so we shrugged,
and he said: Elephino—
get it, Ell-if-I-know.
It should have been funny,
but we knew how few elephants
were left to cross
with the even fewer rhinos.
The Minor Poet Writes One More New York Poem
Shoes shuffling through the dead
chewing gum and leaves with that slough-slough sound
of children trying to up the ante, but it’s past 9 am,
so all the little monsters are in school and the sidewalks
are safe from their scooters and bicycles
though as usual I am little worried following
my Drive Medical Walker with flip-up seat
and basket with just enough room for a pint
of non-fat half-and-half and three croissants
without crushing them, you think they’d make
the basket bigger, when down the street
comes the local dog walker with her five dogs in tow,
a Boston terrier, a schnauzer, a dachshund,
a Maltese, and the one-eared pit bull who
always stops to sniff my crotch and the lanky blonde
with the Yankees baseball hat, who happens
to be the dog walker, too bony to be a looker,
at least in my opinion, says as she always says,
Good Morning, Mr. Foster, and the day
doesn’t seem so bad so I throw her in too.
Three Poems
Three Poems
Estero Bay Buffer Preserve
Alone at the trailhead, I touch the charred trunks of slash pines,
gather the ashes of saw palmettos with my fingers, and squeeze.
I imagine cotton mice, orb-weavers, and scrub lizards clambering
for the salvation of a gopher tortoise burrow. Who ate who,
thirty feet under the flames, and whose remains do I hold?
I move farther into the scrub, strain through sugar sand.
A woodpecker clings to a snag, red head drumming a warning:
my territory. Who remembers what month the native grasses
glow pink? When do the butterfly orchids bloom? Maybe last
spring I saw pools teem with oak toad tadpoles, who swam
joyous in the absence of fish, but now I must sidestep a feral hog,
wallow next to dried out deer tracks. Where are the warblers,
the wrens? Head deeper, past buzzards perched on driftwood
skeletons, and scan sandstone for fossils. What does it feel
like to wander a desert? Summer rains will flood these flats,
but this journey ends dry before mangrove tangles one
can not navigate. I want to plow through to the bay and study
the secrets the islands keep. Seek the oak that guards flatwoods
from salt marsh tides. Fiddler crabs surround it, a beached
leviathan, whose roots sprawl as wide as its wind-whipped branches.
Gated Community
I fish for fire ants
under the pavers,
sever the sewer grate,
swim in the reeds, jump
through the canal to make waves in the gulf,
bend the road until torrents flood,
crack the cul-de-sac so the lichen grows,
roll in the mulch, eat the weeds,
palpate the sprinkler heads, sweep the drive,
dust the shutters, congratulate the webs,
celebrate the hive,
peel the sod, dig through crushed
shell in the fill, nestle in sand,
bathe in an aquifer, taste the sulphur,
rest in the mangrove tangles til dusk,
covet the bats swishing and hunting
by the gate house tonight.
You Pick
In the Appalachians climb the peaks and clutch the rails, burp ginger ale at the general store,
fish in Maggie Valley and wonder who Maggie was, feed a deer a potato chip, rent a boat
to tour the cold lake, drop your car keys, stretch for them, sink to the secret mountain
channels.
In the Piedmont see a sign that says you pick or we pick and laugh when Sean thinks it means
you can pay people to pick your nose, drink apple cider at Horney’s Hollow, walk high
and low on the foothills trails, startle turkeys in the thicket, canoe on the Haw River
where the water flows southeast off the plateau.
In the Coastal Plain touch roadside tobacco leaves, swallow moonshine at the race track,
enter the National Hollerin’ Contest in Spivey’s Corner, pick berries and pray to God you
don’t startle the black bear, kayak at high tide in the Great Dismal Swamp, ride the low
tide out to Albemarle Sound.
In the Outer Banks climb the dunes and reach for wild horses, stay at Peppertree and ask
Dad if pepper grows on trees, fall asleep on the pier, lower the crab trap, drink margaritas
from a bucket, stumble from Cape Lookout to Cape Fear, imagine you are one grain of
shifting grit in the Graveyard of the Atlantic, wade out to the sandbar.
Two Poems
Two Poems
Referencing Emily D in the Anthropocene
I wonder if dying will be like the first day of summer—
preoccupations of the school year
dropped as you leave the grounds
That spaciousness—
I would like to rediscover it
this side of the grave
The one clover, the bee,
and unbounded reverie
the prairie—
a once and future unfenced place
I wonder how long it will take
for those bacteria to evolve
and reproduce to a number sufficient
to consume all the plastics in the ocean—
the rafts of trash
and the tiny fibers
I’d like a shred of consciousness
equal to the emergence
of that first microscopic diner
with all the banquet to come—
I worry
a lot. Will the squirrels nip off the tops
of the tulips just like last year?
Am I right to hate them so?
Is it OK to take my sorry garden so seriously?
Even though I just say no to plastic everything,
to methane-producing pork and beef,
the zones are shifting–bark beetles now survive
these newly mild winters, voracious.
I worry about all the trees. And the fact
I can no longer remember their botanical names,
I worry about that too.
I turn off the lights, compulsively.
Drive less, take the bus
but ice shelves are still crumbling.
I worry about resistant bacteria and mass extinction
while trying hard not to care at all
about the rampant misuse of apostrophes.
I worry about the worry
I hear in your voice, long distance.
I worry about Florida.
And about that old woman out in the alley again,
singing tunelessly morning after morning.
We’re too old now, Baby, to have to worry
about adding to the population problem,
so let’s pick up where we left off
and after that take our worrying selves
out of the house, into the street.
This might be the right time to take direct action,
get arrested for the right reasons,
let squirrels be squirrels.
Two Poems
Two Poems
Metal Mothers
To follow up that classic
experiment done in the Sixties
on young primates fed by wire
figures, how they always rushed
right when the bottle emptied to snuggle
with some padded forms
though those never fed them
anything nor ever hugged them
back. What hunger
that softness satisfied
science wanted to know.
So now to have the facts
on this early lack of mother,
a modern steel-lined crib
for infant rhesus monkeys
without the former cotton
clutter, each in its own
cylinder, sealed.
(The scientist had quite a bent
for lab language
who named that place
“a well of despair.”) Forty-five days
and forty-five nights
of maternal deprivation.
While it lasts
each babe gives science its best
moments through one-way glass
as their spindly arms
trying to cuddle the smooth steel
sides of those metal mothers.
Oxen
Last night a calf was born
to my yoke partner’s mate
and we moaned though low
because it is to live as we
and all before us live
we who have never lived
wild. Nor will this new tiller
already stumbling
after his mother as she returns
to the grindstone rounds
rise up to rebel
and lead us out of slavery.
Oxen have no other fate.
We gave up
counting our steps in the fields
or the persistent prods of the rod.
We know no longings
but for food. We drag
over the difficult earth.
But sometimes the smell of dew
on new-cut grass or the shadow
of a bird rippling over
the furrow ahead
lets us know our despair
we who tow the boats and bear the loads
we who turn the wheels and push the carts
and feel nothing
but the soft powdery explosions
of the clods that burst beneath our hoofs.
Yet when times are bad
and men eat the grain
meant for us
then the fear of nothing
finally makes us yearn
to hold even this
treadmill life of pulling.
Rhino Conservation
I literally won an auction. It was a live auction for a trip to Namibia. That was completely on a whim, but it was a bucket list item that I always had. I am the quintessential animal lover, the little girl who was picking up the strays and the little birds. I’ve always loved animals. I’ve always liked being out in nature. I probably never would have taken the plunge to go to Africa because it was daunting to me. Where do you go? How do you figure it out? It seemed so foreign.
When I got to Namibia, the first large wildlife that I saw wasn’t a bird or baboon but a giraffe. It was actually a group of giraffes walking towards a waterhole. The sauntering and the movement of those giraffes coming above the trees, that was it for me. I was so… taken. That’s what sowed the seed.
I happen to have a friend at work, Dr. Mullen of Penn Medicine, who’s also a wildlife lover who has been to Africa a number of times. He is a National Geographic supporter, and connected me with Dereck and Beverly Joubert, National Geographic Explorers-in-Residence. They were on tour in the US in the fall of 2015 for their film Soul of the Elephant which was debuting and had won some awards. The Jouberts came and spoke at the Department of Surgery at Penn Medicine on leadership from their perspective as conservationists.
Connecting with them after their talk, I had one question for them, “How can I help?”
They had just started their joint program Rhinos Without Borders. There has been lots of press around big cats and elephants. Not as many people know about the plight of the rhinos and, in fact, I did not. I said, “Fantastic. If the rhinos need help, then we are here to help the rhinos.” That was really the beginning for PARCA.
Since then, our mission has been to educate about the plight of rhinos, contribute to their conservation as well as the preservation of their larger ecosystem.
Over the last year, I’ve realized how profoundly wildlife affects people. The prior President of Botswana had a very animal-focused mentality. He was very much about the environment, very much about photographic tourism. They stopped all hunting in the country, and they’ve seen wildlife rebound.
Yet as wildlife has rebounded, it has encroached further upon humans. Women who have to go to retrieve water, are not able to get to their water source because the elephants are blocking it. Farmers are also affected by crops that get damaged. There have actually been incidents of elephants killing humans, and many other effects of their encroachment.
The new president is not as environmentally focused. He says he is more about the people and looking at what the people need, like crop protection. The environmental ministers presented him with a plan a few months ago that included elephant culling and reinstituting hunting.
As Westerners, when we make comments on social media or in petitions about ‘saving the elephants,’ some of us are intending for that to mean we have to protect the elephants and the people, but we haven’t been saying that. So the people of Botswana weren’t hearing that. What they were hearing was Westerners—who think they know the situation yet who don’t have conflict with these enormous land mammals—just saying ‘protect the elephants,’ while locals are losing family and friends sometimes to this conflict.
The Extinction Report
In the midst of our global climate crisis, the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services report sheds light on the rapidly declining biodiversity and worsening health of the planet’s ecosystems. The 40-page summary for policymakers, published this May, compiles evidence from various scientific studies and reveals a reality that cannot be softened–one million species face extinction, and their loss further compromises surviving ecosystems. Without the restoration of their habitats, nearly 500,000 species will face extinction in just the next few decades.
The drive of this crisis is clear: human activity–development, deforestation, resource extraction, overfishing, hunting–as well as climate change (also largely driven by human activity) has put these species at risk. The extinction of such scale threatens human well-being, as biodiversity is foundational to our livelihoods, health, and, ultimately, our survival. The consequences of ecological and climate changes will disproportionately affect urban and poor communities.
Nearly 25% of global land is owned or tended by indigenous or local communities, and proves to be healthier than nature managed by large corporations. Appropriately, the report consults and includes local and indengeous knowledge, and contends that improving the planet’s ecological health depends on a cultural shift away from primarily valuing economic growth toward perceiving ecological health as central to human quality of life. With human activity at the center of this ecological crisis, the solution also rests in our hands, requiring systemic change across every industry.
Key findings
- Up to 1 million: species threatened with extinction, many within decades
- 33%: marine fish stocks in 2015 being harvested at unsustainable levels; 60% are maximally sustainably fished; 7% are underfished
- 45%: increase in raw timber production since 1970 (4 billion cubic meters in 2017)
- >75%: global food crop types that rely on animal pollination
- +/-821 million: people face food insecurity in Asia and Africa
- 68%: global forest area today compared with the estimated pre-industrial level
- 29%: average reduction in the extinction risk for mammals and birds in 109 countries thanks to conservation investments from 1996 to 2008; the extinction risk of birds, mammals and amphibians would have been at least 20% greater without conservation action in recent decade
It caused me to pause and think about how I was saying, “I wanted the elephants to be protected.” It doesn’t mean I don’t want to protect humans. I want, hopefully, to find a solution that encompasses everybody.
It’s complex, and we can’t do it without the locals involved in the conversation. Understanding the disruption of social structures to both humans and animals is critical in the work of conservation.
Understanding how to extend my circle of compassion has been transformational for me in this work. Take poaching or hunting even here in Pennsylvania—when you hunt a deer, you’re removing an animal from is social structure. You have no idea if that deer has young to take care of. And then, when you consider folks that hunt as a food source, it’s not as easy to say, “No, it’s completely wrong, and you can’t do that.”
Taking time to consider the whole and listen to others’ perspectives is essential in this work. Articles like the latest UN extinction report are so important to keep the dialog going. I hope that folks find time to read these reports and really think about the scope of these issues. You don’t need to feel pressured to find the solution, but participating in the conversation is important, because you may have ideas that the experts haven’t thought about. And we need to find space for the voices of local communities, for those living this experience everyday. Otherwise, our solutions will fall flat.
Having been in the conservation realm now, I’ve become more aware of all of the plights that exist and the different animals who are threatened, from amphibians to birds, insects – it’s profound. We have a lot of work to do and it can be very daunting, but if you find your cause, you will love it and you will work for it. Of course, I would love for you to take my cause, because I love my cause. But, I want you to find your cause. We are pretty powerful when we put our minds to things.
When you lock eyes with an animal—whether its common or foreign to you–you cannot help but have that awe inspiring moment of, “Oh my gosh, I just had a connection with a wild animal.” Even if you go for a hike in your local woods or spend time in your backyard, take time to hear the birds. So often, we become immune to seeing and hearing the life around us.
I often think about book Silent Spring. What would it be like if you woke up in May, finally able to open our windows, everything’s coming back to life, and it was silent? It would be so void. Our lives are enriched by the animals among us, and we have to just take a moment and appreciate that. When you make that connection with another living being, and certainly one that you don’t expect it because they’re wild, it’s profound.
PA Rhino Conservation Advocates (PARCA) has been working to help protect the rhinoceros since 2015. First and foremost, our work raises much-needed funds to enable groups in Africa to protect and care for rhinos. We advocate for and educate the public about rhino conservation and the critical nature of this issue. We are a U.S. public charity under IRS Section 501(c)(3).
Dereck and Beverly Joubert
Dereck and Beverly Joubert are globally recognized wildlife conservationists, National Geographic Explorers-in-Residence, award-winning filmmakers, and photographers. They are the founders of the Big Cats Initiative with National Geographic, which funds 86 grants in 27 countries for the conservation of big cats. The Jouberts have been researching in Africa for over 30 years and are prolific in their conservation work. They have made 25 films for National Geographic, published 11 books, six scientific papers, and written many articles for National Geographic Magazine. They have received 8 Emmy Awards, a Peabody Award, a Grand Teton Award, multiple Golden Panda Awards, a World Ecology Award, and a Presidential Order of Merit awarded by Botswana’s president, Seretse Khama Ian Khama.
One of the most beneficial things that the Jouberts did for me personally and for PARCA as an organization was to extend their full support to us, ‘What we have at our disposal, you have at your disposal,’ they assured me. ‘Use what you can, because we’re all partners in this. There’s no competition. If you’re jumping on board and we’re all going to do this, we’re going to do this together and we all have to support each other.’ Their generosity came in the form of advice and expertise, access to their staff, and even their portfolio of photography–Beverly Joubert-quality photography, of course.
Beverly Joubert is an acclaimed photographer, and her exhibitions have furthered the reach of their mission. The Jouberts recently launched Rhinos Without Borders in partnership with Great Plains Conservation and And Beyond which aims to move 100 rhinos from South Africa to Botswana to save them from the poaching crisis.
