For those of us who care for an earth not encompassed by machines – a world of textures, tastes and sounds other than those that we have engineered – our task is that of taking up the written word, with all its potency, and patiently, carefully writing language back into the land. Our craft is that of releasing the budded, earthly intelligence of our words, freeing them to respond to the speech of the things themselves – to the green uttering-forth of leaves from the spring branches. It is the practice of spinning stories that have the rhythm and lilt of the local soundscape, tales for the tongue, tales that want to be told, again and again, sliding off the digital screen and slipping off the lettered page to inhabit these coastal forests, those desert canyons, those whispering grasslands and valleys and swamps. Finding phrases that place us in contact with the trembling neck-muscles of a deer holding its antlers high as it swims toward the mainland, or onto the ant dragging a scavenged rice-grain through the grasses. Planting words, like seeds, under rocks and fallen logs – letting language take root, once again, in the earthen silence of shadow and bone and leaf.
The rain surrounded the cabin…with a whole world of meaning, of secrecy, of rumor. Think of it: all that speech pouring down, selling nothing, judging nobody, drenching the thick mulch of dead leaves, soaking the trees, filling the gullies and crannies of the wood with water, washing out the places where men have stripped the hillside…Nobody started it, nobody is going to stop it. It will talk as long as it wants, the rain. As long as it talks, I am going to listen.
~~ Thomas Merton
Our strictly human heavens and hells have only recently been abstracted from the sensuous world that surrounds us, from this more-than-human realm that abounds in its own winged intelligences and cloven-hoofed powers. For almost all oral cultures, the enveloping and sensuous earth remains the dwelling place of both the living and the dead. The “body” – whether human or otherwise – is not yet a mechanical object in such cultures, but is a magical entity, the mind’s own sensuous aspect, and at death the body’s decomposition into soil, worms and dust can only signify the gradual reintegration of one’s ancestors and elders into the living landscape, from which all, too, are born.
This cycling of the human back into the larger world ensures that the other forms of experience that we encounter – whether ants, or willow trees, or clouds – are never absolutely alien to ourselves. It is, paradoxically, this perceived kinship that renders the difference, or otherness, so eerily potent.
Gradually, then, our senses awaken to the world. We become aware of the thoughts that are thinking all around us – in the bushes, under the tumbled stones. As we watch the crows, our own limbs begin to feel the intelligence of feathered muscles adjusting to the wind. Our toes listen to roots sending capillaries in search of water, and our skin replies to the lichens radiating in slow waves across the surface of the upthrust bones of the hill. Walking along the pebbled beach, we notice the ground itself responding to our footfalls – the hermit crabs all diving for cover – and sense the many-voiced forest listening to us as we speak. And so we adjust our own speaking, taking new care with our gestures and actions…
Ah, not to be cut off,
not through the slightest partition
shut out from the law of the stars.
The inner – what is it?
if not intensified sky,
hurled through with birds and deep
with the winds of homecoming
~~ Rainer Maria Rilke
Excerpted from The Spell of the Sensuous, by David Abram.
A good read for anyone interested in the travesty that is factory farming is Jonathan Safran Foer’s new book: Eating Animals. Here’s an excerpt:
We have let the factory farm replace farming for the same reasons our cultures have relegated minorities to being second-class members of society and kept women under the power of men. We treat animals as we do because we want to and can. (Does anyone really wish to deny this anymore?)
At the end of the day, factory farming isn’t about feeding people; it’s about money. Whether or not it’s right to kill animals for food, we know that in today’s dominant systems, it’s impossible to kill them without at least inflicting occasional torture. That is why some farmers apologize to their animals as they are sent off to slaughter. They’ve made a compromise rather than cut a fair deal.
If we are not given the option to live without violence, we are given the choice to centre our meals around harvest or slaughter, husbandry or war. We have chosen slaughter. We have chosen war.
The everyday horrors of factory farming are evoked so vividly, and the case against the people who run the system presented so convincingly, that anyone who, after reading Foer’s book, continues to consume the industry’s products must be without a heart, or impervious to reason, or both.
~ J.M. Coetzee
It shouldn’t be the consumer’s responsibility to figure out what’s cruel and what’s kind, what’s environmentally destructive and what’s sustainable. Cruel and destructive food products should be illegal. We don’t need the option of buying children’s toys made with lead paint, or aerosols with chlorofluorocarbons, or medicines with unlabelled side effects. And we don’t need the option of buying factory-farmed animals.
Historians tell a story about Abraham Lincoln. that while returning to Washington from Springfield, he forced his entire party to stop to help some small birds he saw in distress. When chided by the others, he responded, quite plainly, “I could not have slept tonight if I had left those poor creatures on the ground and not restored them to their mother.” He observed, quite simply, that once those suffering birds came into his view, a moral burden had been assumed. He could not be himself if he walked away.
Whether I sit at the global table, with my family or with my conscience, the factory farm … feels inhuman. To accept the factory farm…to feed the food it produces to my family, to support it with my money — would make me less myself, less my grandmother’s grandson, less my son’s father.
This is what my grandmother meant when she said, “If nothing matters, there’s nothing to save.
Escarpment Blues is the Juno-winning documentary that tells the story of a current land-use conflict in Southern Ontario on the Niagara Escarpment. A 600-acre quarry mine operated by the Nelson Aggregate Company is being expanded by 200 acres, thereby engulfing the natural area around Mt. Nemo, the plateau near where Canada’s own singer/songwriter Sarah Harmer grew up. The site has been designated as a UNESCO World Biosphere Reserve and parts of the proposed quarry areas have been designated as provincially significant wetlands by the Ministry of Natural Resources.
“I grew up on the escarpment on the farm where my family still lives, within a long green ridge corridor that is prized for its freshwater resources, its wetlands and forests, its endangered species habitats, and its prime agricultural soils. This Biosphere Reserve is under serious threat from the aggregate (sand, gravel, shale) industry. Large multinational aggregate companies continually apply to change “tough” environmental land zoning to open new quarries on top of the Niagara Escarpment. Extracting the rock (mostly to be crushed for gravel) below the water table results in headwater depletion and contamination and destroys the most biologically diverse ecosystems in all of Ontario.”
In June 2005, Harmer, along with her band, launched the I Love The Escarpment tour across southern Ontario in order to raise donations for PERL (Protecting Escarpment Rural Land), a conservation group she co-founded. The bandmates walk through the area, playing small venues along the way. Escarpment Blues documents Harmer’s fight to protect the remaining fresh water supply, save species such as the Jefferson Salamander and butternut tree, and preserve the ecological balance.
At the height of the Renaissance, Rabelais cleverly inverted the monastic ideal – a life of labour and prayer – to explore the other Utopian extreme: hedonistic leisure amid inexhaustible abundance. At his fictitious Abbey of Thelème, the inhabitants comport themselves in a regal spendour that was clearly the stuff of fantasy in the early sixteenth century.
But a century later, Francis Bacon decisively transformed the Utopian tradition. He raised the possibility that, given sufficient technological power over nature, the hope of a democratic abundance might not be unrealistic. Bacon’s New Atlantis holds its place as the first scientific Utopia, a bold prediction of good things to come based on unlimited proliferation of material goods. That vision has hovered in the background of the entire industrial process as one justification for the privation, harsh discipline, wrenching dislocation, grime and soot that this great adventure has cost. The concept of plenitude went into eclipse; the foundation of our contemporary ecological crisis was laid.
It was not until the waste, drudgery and filth of industrialism were vividly imprinted on the historical landscape that the plenitude formerly sought became a timely topic once again.
William Morris, the Victorian poet, painter and political philosopher, was among the first to take up the discussion in his Utopian novel, News From Nowhere.
Morris, a bitter critic of both the ugliness and injustice of the industrial system, laid his hopes for a balanced economic order upon a reformation of taste.
In Morris’ land of Nowhere, aesthetics is the context of economic life. The sensibilities of people have been schooled to value the quality, not the quantity of goods. For Morris, this meant a handicraft standard of excellence, as exemplified by his Arts and Crafts Movement, which he took to be of benefit for the soul as well as the body.
One need not endorse Morris’ doctrinaire anti-industrial stance in order to see great practical sense in his proposal. As a matter of environmental sanity, there may be a point at which industrial societies will have to revive the handicraft standard, emphasizing the value of fine design and durability as an alternative to disposability or wasteful turnover.
In her ecological Utopia Woman on the Edge of Time, Marge Piercy proposes another approach to plenitude. In the environmentally intelligent future she envisions – a worldwide society of well-kept rural communes – there exists a globe lending library of luxuries, from which jewels, objects d’art, fashionable clothes may be borrowed and examined by the entire population. It is an idea worth pondering.
In one of the mostly highly developed ecological Utopias, Ernest Callenbach deals with problems of necessity and luxury by imagining an economy that redirects the gratifications of high consumption toward a variety of cheap, non-material pleasures. The citizens of Ecotopia own little, but it is elegantly handmade; beyond that, the prevailing style of housing and dress is dropped-out funky. The workweek has been pared back to twenty hours; leisure becomes a value in its own right, used for the arts and crafts, for play, for recreational sports, espeically in the fiercely defended wilderness, which has come to be respected as Ecotopia’s principal public asset.
An economy of modest means makes possible a simplicity that allows other needs to be gratified. The goal is not cathartic suffering, but pleasure of a superior order.
~ Theodore Roszak, The Voice of the Earth
Image: Dubai Lagoon
Both the Taoist and Zen traditions feature figures of crazy wisdom, good-humoured monks untouched by the solemnity or long-suffering of Western monasticism. Even if their way of life is celibate and abstemious, it has nothing about it that suggests the mortification of the flesh. The image is that of happy sages who live at one with nature in a free and joyous simplicity, the mind alert on all its levels, the senses fully alive.
It is difficult to imagine an ecological Utopia based on Christianity that would not be dismally austere. The necessary rapport with nature is not prominently there.
In Christianity, the green man of the Middle Ages – a free spirit roaming the woodlands, living the life of Adam before the Fall – smacked too much of the pagan Pan; the figure could not blend with saint or sage.
Yet something of the jovial monk managed to survive in Francis of Assisi and his zany follower Brother Juniper. Both were such fools of god, delighting in the company of the birds, the trees, the sun and the stars.
It is no coincidence that this variety of spontaneous elation is connected with pantheistic love of nature. It is as if the body of the sage has grown to encompass the greater body of the Earth whose variety and fertility he then claims as his own.
A nature mysticism embodying all that Deep Ecology has to teach us, belongs to a higher sanity that will find greater rewards than the machines can ever offer.
The Norwegian ecosopher Arne Naess, one of the founders of Deep Ecology, described his goal as rejection of the man-in-environment image in favour of the relational, total-field image. It was a call for biospherical egalitarianism among all species.
“The ecological field-worker acquires a deep-seated respect, even a veneration for the ways and forms of life. He reaches an understanding from within, a kind of understanding that others reserve for fellow men…To the ecological field-worker, the equal right to live and blossom is an intuitively clear and obvious value axiom. Its restriction to humans is an anthropocentrism with detrimental effects upon the life quality of humans themselves.”
Naess is saying that there is a deep system in nature that contains us as a species.
Deep Ecology found the root cause of our environmental ills in our inveterate belief that human beings stand apart from nature and above it, whether as master or steward.
Many major environmental organizations (the shallow ecologists) continue to regard the planet as ours to do with as we see fit; their methods are essentially managerial. That assumption poisons all we try to do. It endorses our self-proclaimed superiority over nature and with it our isolation from all the beings with whom we ought to share the planet in biocentric fellowship.
The contrast between deep and shallow ecologies is revealed in the difference between those conservationists who would deal with the possible extinction of the great whale herds by setting international quotas upon their kill, and organizations like Greenpeace or Earth First, which would set the quota at zero – on the basis that no species may be denied its right to life. In a biocentric democracy, the “rights of man” belong to all species.
A question we might well ponder: when human beings unilaterally declare their superiority to all other species, who do they think is paying attention?
“The heathen in his blindness bows down to wood and stone.”
The words, redolent with centuries of arrogance, are from a hymn written by a British missionary stationed in Calcutta at the time the first cotton mills were beginning to fill the sky above Manchester with soot.
The blindness is ours. No people, regardless of the simplicity of their culture, ever took a stone carving to be divine. Rather, things were once transparent, and greater realities moved behind and within them, were seen in this and that, here and there. This is where the concept of spirit comes from – the once-homely, utterly normal sense that something other than matter moves behind matter, animates it, sustains it.
When we deny there is consciousness in nature, we also deny consciousness to the worlds we find by going through nature; and we end with only one world, the world of McDonald’s, and that is exploitable.
~ Robert Bly
Of that something, tribal people stood in awe, as Wordsworth did when he reached back to salvage the remnants of a visionary childhood in language that can still speak to us:
And I have felt [he tells us]
A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man;
A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things.
It is no coincidence that the advent of industrialism in the late eighteenth century was paralleled by a fascination with madness on the part of artists and philosophers. During the next two centuries, the outward expansion of human power into nature was accompanied by an ever riskier exploration of the unconscious mind and its many strange passions. With each generation, the investigation of dream, nightmare, hallucination, trance, ecstasy has delved deeper into the secret recesses of the psyche.
The Romantics, who initiated this descent into the irrational, soon to be followed by the Decadents, the Surrealists, the Expressionists, were a compensatory response to the excesses of Newtonian science: “single vision”, as William Blake called it.
Blake was among the first to link scientific sensibility to the killing pressure of the new industrial technology upon the landscape. His attack upon “Satan’s Mathematick Holiness” only served to qualify him as one of the first mad artists of the modern world.
A generation later, when Percy Shelley produced his famous Defense of Poetry in 1820, the battle lines had been drawn. The dichotomies on which modern psychiatry would be built had been mapped out. Emotion against reason, the primitive against the civilized, the child against the adult, raw nature against the city, the organic against the mechanical, poetry against science.
The cultivation of those sciences which have enlarged the limits of the empire of man over the external world has, for want of the poetical faculty, propoertionally circumscribed those of the internal world. From what other cause has it arisen that these inventions which should have lightened, have added a weight to the curse imposed on Adam?
Shelley nominated poetic imagination as the antithesis of “the owl-winged faculty of calculation”. Poetry, he said, “is not like reasoning, a power to be exerted according to the determination of the will. It is not subject to the control of the active powers of the mind.
He meant this to be the imagination’s redeeming power, but what he described was madness, as people were coming to understand the word, namely the rational mind swept by impulse, fallen to the influence of forces outside its power.
By the end of the century, Freud, seeking to bring that madness into the province of medical science, admitted that he had discovered nothing the poets had not known before him.
~ Theodore Roszak, The Voice of the Earth.
Image: Max Ernst, The Fireside Angel, 1937
Freud may have almost gotten it backwards [with the Oedipus complex] when he talks about a primal crime against the father that perhaps the crime was against mother — nature.
We usually we think of the earth as a mother figure. And what if the foundations of human madness have more to do with a crime against that mother than they have to do with any transgression against a hypothetical primordial father. At least that’s what I’m suggesting might be the deepest route of madness and that madness is most highly emphasized most crucially in a society that is becoming more and more urban and industrial and growing further and further away from the mother earth that bore us into life in the first place. So it’s an interesting new image to use for understanding human nature, the nature of madness, the nature of sanity.
The species that destroys its own habitat in pursuit of false values, in willful ignorance of what it does, is “mad” if the word means anything.
The city is itself shot through with a kind of madness. And I’m talking about something that’s so apparent in the pace and tempo of our daily life that I think it’s almost taken for granted that we are living a kind of crazy life. And all we have to do is be caught on the freeway in a traffic jam you know to recognize the madness of the way we’ve constructed the world around us. The amount of waste and the amount of stress and the amount of tension that we inflict upon ourselves. There’s something crazy about that.
I suddenly realized that in the language, or at any rate in the spirit of the Glass Bead Game, everything actually was all-meaningful, that every symbol and combination of symbol led not hither and yon, not to single examples, experiments, and proofs, but into the center, the mystery and innermost heart of the world, into primal knowledge. Every transition from major to minor in a sonata, every transformation of a myth or a religious cult, every classical or artistic formulation was, I realized in that flashing moment, if seen with truly a meditative mind, nothing but a direct route into the interior of the cosmic mystery, where in the alternation between inhaling and exhaling, between heaven and earth, between Yin and Yang holiness is forever being created.
In the mid-sixties, chemist James Lovelock hypothesized that living things, once they appeared on our planet, took charge of the global environment in a creative way. They became full-fledged partners in the shaping of the Earth, its rocks and water and soil.
The orthodox view was that life was a passive dependent riding the planet, just fortunate enough to find a niche and survive. Lovelock’s hypothesis, however, held that all s pecies in the planetary biomass act symbiotically to enhance the total life-giving potentiality of the planet. The goal of life is global homeostasis, and toward this end it transforms the planet into what might be viewed as a single self-regulating organism – Gaia.
The idea significantly modifies the Darwinian paradigm of modern biology. Natural selection at the species level becomes less important than the overall integration of living things within a symbiotic global network. The basic unit of evolutionary survival becomes the biomass as a whole, which may select species for their capacity to enhance the liveability of the planet.
This hypothesis introduced suspicion in the scientific community.
For one thing, it is a big hypothesis, an attempt to synthesize several disciplines – always a risky enterprise in the highly territorial academic world. But if there is one signal that will raise the collective hackles of professional science, it is any hint of intentionality. The great commandment of the guild is “Thou shalt not endow nature with goals, purposes, sentience, values,” except where human beings are concerned – though the more extreme Behaviorists might refuse even that minimal concession.
Modern science is committed to the image of a mindless and impersonal universe. The whole sport since the days of Galileo and Newton has been to find clever ways to dispel the illusion of purpose in nature.
For those of us who care for an earth not encompassed by machines – a world of textures, tastes and sounds other than those that we have engineered – our task is that of taking up the written word, with all its potency, and patiently, carefully writing language back into the land. Our craft is that of releasing the budded, earthly intelligence of our words, freeing them to respond to the speech of the things themselves – to the green uttering-forth of leaves from the spring branches. It is the practice of spinning stories that have the rhythm and lilt of the local soundscape, tales for the tongue, tales that want to be told, again and again, sliding off the digital screen and slipping off the lettered page to inhabit these coastal forests, those desert canyons, those whispering grasslands and valleys and swamps. Finding phrases that place us in contact with the trembling neck-muscles of a deer holding its antlers high as it swims toward the mainland, or onto the ant dragging a scavenged rice-grain through the grasses. Planting words, like seeds, under rocks and fallen logs – letting language take root, once again, in the earthen silence of shadow and bone and leaf.
At the height of the Renaissance, Rabelais cleverly inverted the monastic ideal – a life of labour and prayer – to explore the other Utopian extreme: hedonistic leisure amid inexhaustible abundance. At his fictitious Abbey of Thelème, the inhabitants comport themselves in a regal spendour that was clearly the stuff of fantasy in the early sixteenth century.
Both the Taoist and Zen traditions feature figures of crazy wisdom, good-humoured monks untouched by the solemnity or long-suffering of Western monasticism. Even if their way of life is celibate and abstemious, it has nothing about it that suggests the mortification of the flesh. The image is that of happy sages who live at one with nature in a free and joyous simplicity, the mind alert on all its levels, the senses fully alive.
“The heathen in his blindness bows down to wood and stone.”
