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:
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- 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.
Resonance and Relationship
Resonance and Relationship
We are losing treasure – species, ecosystems, and the essential fluids of our planet. If we think of these as separate elements – a species of turtle here, a rainforest there – then we are missing the greater loss.
Plants, animals, and minerals are interdependent members of their eco-communities and the family of Life. Everything exists in relationship. This is biology, not just philosophy. And now, biological and quantum theories of consciousness are reinforcing what the mystics have always known. Matter and mind are co-equal sides of the same coin. A new theory of resonance (Tam Hunt, Jonathan Schooler), suggests that vibrational relationships underlie all physical processes, on a continuum of increasing richness, from sub-atomic to complex neural processes, and may be the very basis of consciousness.
This means all matter is conscious at some level. The consciousness of sand may be different than the consciousness of a panther…or a rainforest, but the creational energy of the entire universe vibrates in every subatomic particle that comprises it, and all matter resonates with this immanence.
We might even say that that consciousness evolves through resonant relationships. That is why, when we lose a species, consciousness itself is diminished. You can feel this reality in your own heart, when you learn that a species is gone. It’s like losing a part of yourself. Imagine the collective consciousness and ‘nature wisdom’ lost with the extinction of the West African black rhinoceros, after 8 million years of evolution. What community of relationships vanished? Will songs of the black rhino still be sung?
When we think about ecocide, we often forget cultural ecocide. When places are poisoned, blasted, clear-cut, or turned to deserts, the people of those places – their stories, language, traditions and intimate knowledge of the land – disappear along with the plants, animals, and minerals. All of that connective tissue, where resonance resides, is obliterated.
These losses can be subtle. Urban expansion and hunting have pushed chimpanzees, into shrinking preserves. Compared to chimpanzees in pristine forests, these ‘refugee’ chimps demonstrate far less learned behavior. Since their DNA overlaps with humans by 98 percent, what do we suppose happens when humans are disconnected from nature, imprisoned, or forced to flee their homelands? Wisdom will tell you: our destruction of the Earth is damaging us – mind, body and spirit.
The articles in our summer edition of Kosmos Quarterly speak to these deeper issues of relationship. ‘All My Relations’, or in the Lakota language, Mitákuye Oyás’iŋ, is an important ceremonial prayer of harmony and oneness with all beings. It is a prayer that honors Life.
And there is so much Life still remaining to love, honor, and defend. Wherever damage is occurring, we can still work to reverse it. And what is intact, we can still protect. That is the spirit of the selfless work our beloved contributors share here.
Pachamama Alliance and PARCA are working to protect the Amazon rainforests and African rhinos respectively; John Liu describes work to restore the Sinai Peninsula; Sam Teicher, the coral reefs; and Laura Williams, forests in Portugal. There are stories of inter-species cooperation with wild boars in Pakistan, and not one but two talented musicians collaborating with nightingales: David Rothenberg and Sam Lee.
Two articles – Farming While Black and Plant-Based Medicine is Diaspora Communities – remind us of the relationships between climate, food, race, and historic trauma, and the great healing potential that empowerment unleashes. Two more paired articles on Earth justice and Plant-based eating, offer mindfulness perspectives to help guide us in right action.
This edition is also a special collaboration with Tamera Peace Research & Education Center in Portugal. They are calling activists from around the world to attend their August conference on resistance and regenerating the community of life. Join Tamera and their work to build a planetary community of trust, shared ethics, prayer, vision, and action to serve global system change.
All of this, and our beautiful poetry and art galleries too. Beauty will always be the heart of Kosmos.
A common prayer of oneness in Buddhist traditions is, may all beings be happy; may all beings be free; may all being be at peace. It might be useful to add: may all beings be in right relationship. When we are in right relationship with the Earth and all beings, then peace, happiness and freedom are natural outcomes.
Mitákuye Oyás’iŋ! Let us return to right relationship with the Earth. Aho! May it be so.
Sacred Headwaters of the Amazon
Sacred Headwaters of the Amazon
Kosmos | When you talk of Awakening the Dreamer, what does our collective ‘dream’ say about our modern habits and addictions? And what are the historic seeds of our delusion?
Bill Twist | There are several answers to that question. Ego, separation, a dream of individualism. We see ourselves as separate players, independent players in life. That’s a fantasy we have created and been born into and live in. Through our work at Pachamama Alliance, we have had the privilege of working with indigenous people in the Amazon. And they don’t see the world as made up of separate, independent players. It’s confusing for us at times, seeing how they make decisions and how they work. It challenges our own understanding of the world.
However, when you have a chance to go deeper with the indigenous people we work with, you get their sense of the connection of all life, of all beings—beings that are in the rocks, the rivers, the trees, and all around. And I think that’s what modern humanity is beginning to understand. There have always been a few people—visionaries or mystics—who have known that, but it’s becoming more general knowledge now. That’s what the work of Awakening the Dreamer (an educational program at Pachamama Alliance that explores challenges and opportunities currently facing humanity) has been. It’s awaking people from a trance of individualism and separateness, to seeing that we’re actually all deeply connected and integrally a part of some great process, some great guiding wisdom.
Belén Páez | The ‘dream’ is a complete disconnection from nature, and it’s sad in a country like Ecuador with important biodiversity in many different areas: the highlands, the coasts, the Amazon region. For 40 years, delusion led us to base all our economic solutions on oil extraction without taking into account the pollution and the destruction, not just of the ecosystems, but also humans—indigenous peoples. We have already lost several indigenous tribes that used to live in the forest.
So we have become more and more detached from our biodiversity and from the wisdom heritage of our indigenous peoples.
Kosmos | I think it was about 10 years ago that Ecuador was the first to pass a Rights of Nature policy?
Bill Twist | It’s built into the constitution of the country, the only country on earth that has that. Other countries have adopted laws pertaining to Rights of Nature, but have not formally added it to their constitution.
Kosmos | So, has that been a tool that’s been helpful?
Bill Twist | That was a bold and innovative move by the country of Ecuador to build into their constitution, into the governing structure for the whole country, that nature has an inherent right to exist and flourish. It was monumental that it went in, but slow in its implementation. One of the very first places where that constitutional provision got tested was with a proposed huge mining project. It was probably the wrong place to first test it because the government saw it as a threat to its national development plans. Although the mining project would obviously be a violation of nature’s rights, the government basically chose to set aside that provision of the constitution as not, in that case, being in the national interest.
But there’s a huge amount of work that has been done now over the last eight or nine years in Ecuador to build Rights of Nature cases from the ground up, and start building a structure of jurisprudence. Every time there’s a chance to bring a case on behalf of nature, it shifts consciousness. There’s been steady progress in Ecuador around the issue of Rights of Nature. There are many more lawyers now who understand how to bring cases; and people in their communities understand that it is possible be an advocate for nature. It hasn’t stopped oil development or mining, but I think it will be a significant policy tool for the future.
Belén Páez | During the last 10 years, we have had more than 17 Rights of Nature cases in Ecuador regarding ecosystems close to the sea, to some rivers and mountains, and even endangered species. The courts ruled in favor in only three of these cases, meaning that we are still facing a lot of judges and people in the courts who don’t understand very clearly yet what Rights of Nature are.
So, as Bill was saying, there is a path and we have a tool that we are promoting to engage more and more people at the national and regional levels. Ecuador is leading the region, and the whole Amazon Basin, in this regard. This is acknowledged by the United Nations and the international community, and there are now hundreds of members under the Global Alliance for the Rights of Nature. It is becoming a powerful community of citizens engaged in ethical tribunals to defend the rights of Mother Earth everywhere.
Kosmos | How aware are the indigenous people of Ecuador and Peru of the loss of species worldwide?
Bill Twist | The area where we work, which has been called The Sacred Headwaters of the Amazon, is the most biodiverse area of the Amazon Basin. It’s still very resilient—there has been minimal human encroachment—but the indigenous people are aware of what’s going on in other parts of the world. And they know that if industrial-level extractivism moves into their territory, they will face species extinction and degradation of their territory’s natural ability to support life just as has happened in so many parts of the world. They are fiercely committed that that doesn’t happen in the area of the Sacred Headwaters.
Belén Páez | I think that it is clear we are facing the Sixth Mass Extinction on Earth, and that’s affecting every ecosystem on the planet. There are deep studies in Ecuador about how biodiversity is threatened in the Galapagos, in the Andes region, and in the Amazon. There is a critical relationship between the Andes and the Amazon. Certain fish are not migrating anymore, vegetables and plants are changing. Many indigenous people are letting us know that things are changing in the forest.
For example: One friend has been taking pictures every month of caterpillars in different stages and he has been able to show that the larvae are not becoming butterflies at the end. The Achuar people say that even our thoughts and our brains are facing these changes, and that it is very important to protect the sacred places that remain on Earth—these places of ‘nature intelligence’ that could be expanded to the next generations if we are able to protect them.
Kosmos | Different tribal peoples likely have different ideas about what to do next. Is there some consensus about what needs to be done and what direction to move in?
Bill Twist | For years, the various indigenous nationalities of this region, in addition to defending their territory, have been developing a vision for the future of their territory. This work has pretty much been done independently by the various groups.
We are now supporting all of the indigenous nations to come together to forge a common vision for their area, the Amazon Sacred Headwaters—nearly 60 million acres and 18 nationalities. The task they are working on is to build a common “life plan”—an indigenous inspired development plan—for this region. They all know that each of them working individually is not going to be anywhere near as powerful, or as effective, or as important for the world, as all of them coming together and working on behalf of a common vision.
What is particularly inspiring about this initiative is that the indigenous groups, although clearly working to protect their territories, also see that this project is for the world and that it is setting a conservation example for the world.
Belén Páez | And this is different from what was happening 10 years ago or even five years ago. The governments were still able to divide the organizations through money, through false promises about what is ‘good development,’ and offers of housing or relief. All these political promises have a way of dividing the wisdom.
But nowadays, through the Sacred Headwaters Initiatives, there is a clear result—different indigenous nations and nationalities between Ecuador and Peru have been coming together. First, they tell the country and the region that the Amazon is one of the most important forests and ecosystems for the world; second, they really are visionaries, ancestral people with a lot of wisdom, telling humanity what to do to confront climate change; and third, they are resisting. I mean they are resisting to protect life, to protect their territories, to protect their collective rights. They have shown during the last year—and they will be showing us during the next years or decades—that they are going to give their lives and not allow any oil and mining and monoculture industry inside of their sacred lands and territories. Because they truly believe that at this moment of life, they need to give their own lives to protect this part of the planet for the future generations.
Kosmos | I’d like to shift now a little bit from talking about outward things to experiences of inner transformation—beginning with your own. What has transformed in you, doing this work?
Bill Twist | Getting a sense of connection to the Earth and being a part of the web of nature. That’s an understanding that is available to people anywhere, but it’s particularly dense in the communications that are going on in the Amazon forest—there’s so much life and so much information being exchanged. Being in the middle of that, you do get a sense that you’re embedded inside something that’s aware, that responds. It’s not like nature’s out there and you’re here. You’re in the middle of it, you’re part of it. Experiencing that is a great gift.
Belén Páez | During the last Ice Age, the Amazon region was not covered by ice. What happened in the Amazon is that a lot of intelligence of life itself—plants and animals—was able to maintain its evolution. Every time that I have been in the Amazon, I could feel that. I felt in my body, in my mind, the truth of that. Everything happening, maybe thousands of years ago, is still coming through the earth and the air that I was breathing. I found that I was connected with not just the surrounding time, but with all times.
Kosmos | Wonderful. How beautiful to be connected to that prana, the living energy of the planet. And when you bring people on these journeys to the Amazon, this is the transformational experience they have too?
Bill Twist | It’s almost universal that the people who come to the Amazon and spend a week in the forest with indigenous people—participate with them in their daily life, doing ceremonies, hiking through the forest—are fundamentally altered by it. You almost can’t help it. I think it’s something you don’t forget, like riding a bike. You can activate it again by going out into nature almost anywhere. But trips to the Amazon make a huge difference.
Kosmos | And do you feel people can still live in a state of pure connection to the Earth? Or do you feel that we’re losing it by the very fact that we’re encroaching upon it?
Bill Twist | It clearly still exists. There are people in the headwaters region who still live voluntarily in isolation from the outside world. And, at the same time, in many of the communities where we work, civilization is much closer. People can leave and go to the town to try to earn money. And, of course, there are examples of people losing their connection to the culture. But still, in all the communities, there’s this deep, deep sense of connection to the natural world.
Just a quick story: I was in the rainforest just recently with a group of visitors. They were going to do a ceremony in a community that night and they had prepared well. They’d fasted, visited a sacred waterfall, done a tobacco ceremony, sat in silence in the forest and meditated, and were back in the community sitting in the dark in preparation to meet with the shaman. About this time, a jaguar was spotted on the periphery of the area where the ceremony would take place. It was almost casually observing and it was astounding how close it was to so much activity. For the Achuar, it all made sense. The jaguar is a powerful carrier of Arutam, the highest and most potent spirit of the forest. The jaguar had sensed the energy generated by the extensive and pure preparations for the ceremony. In right reciprocity, it brought its power to the participants.
Belén Páez | What I see is that they are still really connected with the spiritual world for healing purposes and to understand what is going on in their lives, to hear the advice of their family or their community. Youth are coming back to listen to their grandparents or to their parents, and in order to interpret their dreams. They are really into dreams and spiritual life.
Kosmos | Yes the spirit world must feel very close there. I haven’t been, but a friend of mine, who accompanied you, came back transformed. He had never experienced the ‘spirit world’ directly before. And I’m wondering … this is a mystical kind of a question, but do you feel that the spirit world is working to help guide us through this very difficult time humanity is facing? Do you feel the spirits are with us, or in fact, that they are us?
Bill Twist | I think there’s something that is guiding us; there’s something that’s reacting, that is trying to wake us up. There’s something that’s responding to the assault that’s been going on against our living Earth.
My sense is that Mother Earth, Pachamama, is trying to figure it out and is getting more skillful at reaching out—and thankfully we’re starting to do a better job of listening—to get us humans off our butts and into action to honor and protect her. It is a kind of immune system that’s activating, and we’re a part of it. The human species is a critical, important part of shaping and being responsible for the immune response that is being called for.
Kosmos | Do human beings have a purpose on Earth?
Bill Twist | Yes, I think we are here for something. We have amazing powers. Because of our toolmaking ability and our ability to coordinate and collaborate, we’ve left scars and damage and destruction on the Earth, yet those same powers are now so strong that they can be used to steer the process of evolution on Earth. ‘Steer it toward what?’ is a great question to live in.
Belén Páez | At the beginning of the Earth, a great spinning of matter was required for fusion to occur. This great spinning is the power behind creation and all the cycles on Earth, all this circle of Life going around and around. We already have many answers to solve the problems that we are confronted with now, and we will be able to do something creatively that will allow us to stay longer on this beautiful planet. We are not just something separate in the Universe. We are part of this huge turning creativity, which is Life within us. That’s why we are given opportunities to keep going.
Kosmos | Wonderful. Thank you both so much.
