The Ecological Self

 

FIRST PUBLISHED IN EARTHLIGHT APRIL 2005

 

There’s a story about one time when Jerry Brown was Governor of California in the 70’s and the eco-poet Gary Snyder was working in his administration. One day Brown, exasperated, said

 

"Gary, why is it that, whatever the issue, you are always going against the flow."

 

To which Gary replied:

 

"Jerry what you call ‘the flow’ is just a 16,000 year eddy, I'm going with the actual flow!"

 

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Deep Ecology is a philosophy of nature which sees the environmental crisis as a symptom of a psychological or spiritual ailment which afflicts modern humanity.

 

We are enveloped by the illusion of separation from nature, by anthropocentrism or human centeredness.

 

Deep ecology critiques the idea that we are the crown of creation, the measure of all being. That the world is a pyramid with humanity rightly on top, merely a resource, and that nature has instrumental value only.

 

The great Californian poet Robinson Jeffers was one of the ancestors of the deep ecology movement.

 

In “Shine, Perishing Republic”, as a young man in the 1920’s he wrote this prophetic poem to his two infant sons:

 

SHINE, PERISHING REPUBLIC

 

While this America settles in the mould of its vulgarity, heavily

thickening to Empire,

And protest, just a bubble in the molten mass, pops and sighs

out, and the mass hardens,

 

I sadly smiling remember that the flower fades to make fruit, the

fruit rots to make earth.

Out of the mother; and through the spring exultances, ripeness

and decadence; and home to the mother.

 

You making haste, haste on decay: not blameworthy; life is good,

be it stubbornly long or suddenly

A mortal splendour: meteors are not needed less than mountains:

shine perishing republic.

 

But for my children, I would have them keep their distance from

the thickening center: corruption

Never has been compulsory, when the cities lie at the monster's

feet there are left the mountains.

 

And boys, be in nothing so moderate as in love of man, a clever

servant, insufferable master.

There is the trap that catches noblest spirits, that caught -

they say - God, when he walked on earth. ([i][ii])

 

A popular formulation of deep ecology is found in “Ishmael” and other books by Daniel Quinn.

 

In a recent essay titled “The New Renaissance” which Quinn calls "a concise expression of the basic message of all my books." He argues that anthropocentrism is “the most dangerous idea in existence” because it necessitates mass extinction including our own.

 

“And even more than being the most dangerous idea in existence” he writes, “it's the most dangerous thing in existence--more dangerous than all our nuclear armaments, more dangerous than biological warfare, more dangerous than all the pollutants we pump into the air, the water, and the land. All the same, it sounds pretty harmless. You can hear it and say, "Uh huh, yeah, so?" It's pretty simple too. Here it is: Humans belong to an order of being that is separate from the rest of the living community. There's us and then there's nature. There's humans and then there's the human environment.”

 

The term deep ecology was coined in the ‘60’s by Arne Naess, Emeritus professor of Philosophy at Oslo University. He and other deep ecology theorists have traced the historical roots of anthropocentrism,[iii] while Lynn White focuses particularly on the role Judeo-Christian[iv].

 

We live in a world where only humans were created in the image of God, only humans have a soul and, prophetically:

 

"the fear of you and the dread of you shall be upon every beast of the earth , and upon every fowl of the air, and upon all that moveth on the earth, and upon all the fishes of the sea; into your hands they are delivered".[v]

 

Given such deep roots in culture and psyche, little wonder that a change of concepts is not by itself sufficient to reorient ourselves, to align ourselves back with the flow.

 

As Arne Naess pointed out, ecological ideas are not enough, we need an ecological identity an ecological self.

 

Ideas only engage one part of our brain, the frontal lobe, cognition. We need ecological feelings and actions as well as ideas to nurture ecological identity.

 

Poets have always known that in wild places too, we may expand into larger identities.

                 

<<I entered the life of the brown forest,

 

And the great life of the ancient peaks, the patience of stone,

 

I felt the changes in the veins

 

In the throat of the mountain,

and, I was the stream,

 

Draining the mountain wood; and I the stag drinking:

and I was the stars,

 

Boiling with light, wandering alone, each one the lord of his own

summit;

and I was the darkness

 

Outside the stars, I included them. They were part of me.

I was mankind also, a moving lichen

 

On the cheek of the round stone ... they have not made words for it… >> (Not Man Apart Robinson Jeffers footnote 1)

 

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Arne Naess: “If reality is experienced by the ecological Self , our behaviour naturally and beautifully follows norms of strict environmental ethics. We certainly need to hear about our ethical shortcomings from time to time, but we change more easily through encouragement and a deepened perception of reality and our own self, that is, through a deepened realism. How that is to be brought about is too large a question for me to deal with here. But it will clearly be more a question of community therapy than community science: we must find and develop therapies which heal our relations with the widest community, that of all living beings.” (footnote Vl)

 

When I first read these words in 1986, I couldn’t help but think of the work that Joanna Macy and I had initiated the year before. “The Council of All Beings” is a set of experiential deep ecology processes, ceremonies and rituals that help us to expand our identification in the way that Naess describes.

 

“Community therapy to develop ecological self” is a good way of thinking about this work.

 

A couple of years later I was privileged to witness a ceremony held in a Hopi village high on a mesa in the South-West of the United States. It was so like the Council of All Beings. The masks representing plants and animals were more splendid, of course, the drums more confident. And people assured me that they had continually celebrated thus for thousands of years.

 

Since then I have searched in vain for a single example of an indigenous culture still connected to their traditions which didn’t have such ceremonies: Regular rituals to testify that the human family is one strand in the larger web of life, to acknowledge all our relations.

 

This suggests that the tendency to disconnect from the natural world might not be just a modern phenomenon as I had assumed. The fact that indigenous people invariably practice such ceremonies, speaks of the human tendency to forget who we really are and wander off into socially constructed identities. Why else would we need to regularly and powerfully remind ourselves that we are part of the web of life?

 

Most peoples have always had cultural processes to counteract this tendency. So many solutions have been found that allow the human community to continue to cleave to the whole Earth community. This had been lost from our culture, suppressed by inquisitions and ignorance and now re-emerges in a thousand ways..

 

Even more than “community therapy”, I think that “cultural reclamation” encapsulates this work that reconnects.

 

Deep ecology experiential processes that have been developed and extensively tested over the last 20 years are described in detail elsewhere. [vi]

 

We work with 3 major processes:

 

* Despair and Empowerment or work with feelings.

* Deep Time, Evolutionary Remembering, The Cosmic Walk.

* The Council of All Beings.

 

We circle together with our people as of old and mourn the loss of species and landscapes, remember our billion-year journey and empathize with the myriad creatures. Whenever we do so, we have found that a palpable and expanded ecological identity inevitably emerges in participants along with a profound experience of community.

 

However, these experiences are ephemeral.

 

Research has shown[vii] that unless we find a way to regularly practice our deep ecology, the new and fragile consciousness fades back into the logic of the eddy and we remain trapped inside a skin encapsulated ego floating helplessly towards the abyss.

 

The ideas of interconnectedness and participation may remain, but in the absence of the experience they are sterile.

 

These things are explored in community. We need to find or create a “sangha” of kindred spirits (as all spiritual traditions have recognized). We need to find opportunities to meet - on solstices, equinoxes, under the full moon, in deep ecology workshops or on-line to build these vital support systems into our lives.

 

In such ways, whilst swirling in the midst of the vast eddy, we may remain aligned to the flow.

 

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John Seed and Joanna Macy will be facilitating a workshop titled “Earth, Spirit, Action” in N California on the July 4th weekend. John will also facilitate experiential deep ecology workshops in June and July at Hollyhock (Cortez Island BC), Portland OR, Cincinnati OH , Louisville KY, Asheville NC, Bloomington IN, Boston and Boulder CO

 

Workshop descriptions and John Seed & Ruth Rosenhek workshop schedules and essays may be found at www.rainforestinfo.org.au

 

Joanna Macy’s schedule and writings may be found at

www.joannamacy.net

 

 

John Seed is an ecological activist who has been working for the protection of rainforests for 25 years. He will deliver a keynote address titled “Our Larger Community: All Species of the Cenozoic Era” at EarthSpirit Rising: A Conference on Ecology, Spirituality and Community at Xavier University, Cincinnati, OH July 8-10 2005 http://earthspiritrising.org/

 

 



[i] The Collected Poetry of Robinson Jeffers. Ed. Tim Hunt. 
Stanford: Stanford University Press, Vol.l, l988

 

[ii] http://ishmael.org/Education/Writings/The_New_Renaissance.shtml

 

[iii] see the deep ecology section at www.rainforestinfo.org.au/

 

[iv] “The Historical Roots of our Ecological Crisis” Lynn White. 1967. Science 155: 1203-1207

 

[v] Genesis 9;2

 

[vi] www.joannamacy.net/ www.rainforestinfo.org.au (click on “deep ecology”)

 

[vii] PhD thesis by Eshana (Elizabeth Bragg) For a summary of her findings see “Towards Ecological Self” at www.rainforestinfo.org.au/deep-eco/Eshana.htm