ecospirit

Two traditions have anchored my personal spiritual practice since laying down college teaching at the millennium, returning to Appalachia to work for the healing of the earth – and myself. The first set of practices clusters around enlarging my field of awareness to honor the entire earth system, Gaia, as a divine whole and in her particulars, both saying thanks for participation in the exquisite natural world in the Southern Highlands and in grieving what we are losing here and elsewhere. This practice, which still feels like an apprenticeship after 10 years, grows out of my encounters and training with Joanna Macy and her process of accepting the despair which we all carry for the earth, then moving through it to empowering our place in healing the earth. All of this is framed by prayers of thanksgiving, both for what the earth gives us, and for the opportunity to speak and act on her behalf. Joanna Macy's training is in Tibetan Buddhism, which honors the natural world and a host of divinities who embody natural forces and characteristics. It incorporates elements of Himalayan shamanism as well as pre-Buddhist India, both Vedic and animistic. Though the modern term for this approach, following Arne Naess, is “Deep Ecology,” I name it as shamanistic: practices that honor the divinity shot through all of creation, mirroring each aspect through our own consciousness and ritual. The second set of practices grows out of Advaita Vedanta. Historical circumstance threw me into the midst of a religion that accepted and accommodated every practice in South Asia, including yoga, animism, as well as priestly brahmanism and polytheism. Though I was taken by everything about the Hindu culture in 1968, it was self-inquiry as taught by Ramana Maharshi that affected me most deeply. He took the ancient practice of the jnana yogi, neti, neti – which recognized the ineffable quality of the divine by saying “not this, not that” to every experience or formulation of God, turning it into the simple inquiry, the vichara, “Who am I?” For every experience, including the customary practice of dividing experience into body-mind (the “self”), the world, and god, is at root only the emanation of the Self, (Brahman), the ultimate creator, sustainer and destroyer of the universe. The I thought is primary, and no other thought or image is possible without it. This primal thought itself arises as an epiphenomenal miracle from the Self, which is all that exists. After a couple of years of intermittent practice as a young adult, I quit, frustrated with my lack of progress. Then, a few years ago, I discovered, virtually in my backyard, a community that trains folks in the Maharshi's self-inquiry. Turns out that the practice which the ashram authorities forbade to be transmitted at the Maharshi's ashram in South India has been taught since 1978 in NC, first in Greensboro at a storefront, now at a rural ashram near Asheboro, home of the NC Zoo. The center calls itself AHAM (Association for the Happiness of All Mankind), and its training in self-inquiry is authentic, augmented by a highly supportive structure for thoroughly incorporating the teaching in one's life. Since re-encountering self-inquiry through the AHAM community, I have prioritized this practice. As the Maharshi said, one must always come to this in the end, no matter what practice one follows initially. But I sense that I am not sufficiently honoring the Tibetan-shamanistic practices I learned from Joanna. I am not moving through despair to an affirmation of the essential joy of our true creative nature that the Maharshi says is our natural state, and which I usually re-experience when I do the deep ecology exercises. Instead of using the sympathetic identification of shamanism, I merely glance outdoors and retire to my meditation cushion, where I struggle with the endless stream of thoughts. They occasionally cease long enough to dive within to the questions, who's experiencing, who's thinking, to the gateway question, “who am I?” There is rarely very much energy in the process (maybe I should do more yoga first, or pranayam {breathing exercises}, I ask myself). I struggle to get beyond a deadening apathy, stalked by despair over the state of the earth that I hold at bay long enough to engage in the effort at meditation. Occasionally this works, ending despair by letting it in, going through it, and simply cutting off the feeling by retracing the I-thought, undoing karma. Despair, and any other feeling or thought, is totally destroyed as soon as one asks, “who's thinking ..who's feeling? But when the vichara is working, even with the eyes open, the world feels unreal, like an image, a mirage. When the shamanistic practice works, on the other hand, I enter into identification with the world as plant, creature or natural feature, and what starts to feel unreal is experiencing myself as a separate entity. The practice takes me outside of myself, beyond experiencing that self as encapsulated in my body, breaking down boundaries, rendering them more fluid. I expand my identity, beginning to experience what Naess called the ecological self. So it feels like the two practices are moving in opposite directions. It is true that each of them moves beyond the ego, the little tyrant who converts everything to his dominion. Shamanism moves beyond the ego through identification with wider and wider circles of being. I am that too. Advaita, especially through the Marharshi's self-inquiry, moves beyond the ego by going through it more deeply within, moving into identity with the Self who creates the world, including Gaia in all her multifaceted being. The “I” disappears into its source, like waves into the ocean. I am only That. I deeply honor both of these practices, and have had remarkable experiences using each method. Shamanism feels closer to my experience, because I am an embodied being. But Advaita feels fundamentally true, however fleetingly I experience its core: I am that I am. To choose one over the other feels fundamentally wrong. What eludes me is integrating them. NEXT: Thoughts about integration of the two practices.

Labels: Advaita, AHAM, Arne Naess, deep ecology, Joanna Macy, Ramana Maharshi, self-inquiry, shamanism

In a warming world of diminished resources creating tensions over oil and water, encroaching seas producing unprecedented numbers of refugees, and severely compromised farmland leading to widespread famine, compassion is the resource we are going to need to grow most of all, not just for fellow human beings, but extending to the entire web of life. Thus ended my last post. I am interested in hearing from readers about pro-active training programs, as well as personal transformation as compassionate beings, in preparation for the arrival of this wave of disaster, which is already gathering. The tensions are going to elevate – already have with oil wars - long before some of the worst effects like refugees from flooding coastal areas. But if this is the greatest crisis we’ve ever faced, then the level of response will need to be correspondingly huge.

In the midst of my analysis of nuclear power, retooling my thought, I stopped one day to reread some of the touchstones of my personal values, Edwin Goldsmith and Thomas Berry. It was only after integrating with these previous mentors that I proceeded to write the piece on nuclear morality which I posted last week.

Feb 25 Ah, the beauty of Goldsmith's analysis (The Way), speaking to my depths as a human being, to my animal, my Adam. And oh, the sullied world in which we have to embrace nukes to have a chance of getting through. We're certainly not going to just give up carbon-burning and shrivel up and die. We're gonna go down swinging, one way or another. So perhaps his is yet another statement that shows us who we could be, if we hewed close to our type. And I would prefer to write and teach about that. Yes, I feel dirty and compromised, though Lovelock and Karen Street (that “Quaker woman”) would argue otherwise. Coal plants are even dirtier and far more deadly; I've just looked the other way. Those who prefer that we'd destroy ourselves have some sympathy from me when I try to listen deeply to the earth..

How can we hold ourselves to our best selves, as Thomas Berry and Goldsmith do, and continue to build nukes? How can we hold to our best selves and continue to grow a civilization on the scale we now mount it?

How will we hold ourselves to our best while death and destruction rain all around us? When refugees swarm at our borders, our doors? When there's not enough food for our fellow humans, let alone the creatures whose habitats we've robbed? I was hungry and you fed me. That will apply until the end, breaking the last crust of bread with the stranger. But what if it's a group of fifty desperate starving people? What happens when you must measure out compassion so that one in every eight survives? How will we choose?

I remember my fury when I read a memo from Larry Summers, recently resigned as president of Harvard, stating coolly that one of the poorest Latin American countries (Haiti?) should be left to collapse, that it wasn't worth the investment in a world with insufficient resources. But what would you or I do? Lester Brown has answers, and so do I: subsistence farming is a key one. Having overrun the planet and outstripped her resources, subsistence, not sustainability, must be our response until our numbers have been vastly reduced. Aran Island and its potato farmers will be gone, but we will farm the cement crannies as they once did their deep rock crevices, buckets lowered into the darkening loam.

Thich Nat Hanh says that the most important thing for us to do now is to hear the sound of the Earth crying within us. How do we feel both the pain of the earth and the pain of humanity? What does it mean to choose your battles in such a situation, when all of it is necessary and holy? Yet, to avoid the “blooming, buzzing confusion,” even perception requires that we choose. We need to learn how to align our ears and eyes and touch, even as we continue to choose our battles - without shutting down entirely. Our media endlessly lament, and thereby glorify, the slaughter at Virginia Tech. But what of the forgotten Iraquis? And who tolls the bell for the species as they pass behind the infinite black curtain of extinction?

Compassion not only for the earth and others but for ourselves. For if we don’t’ have that, then we have the hatred and anger of the activists who are having a final field day with this, our darkest moment (no wonder nobody will listen!). We can’t love the earth without loving other humans, and we can’t love them without loving ourselves.

Cultivate the compassion of the crucified God deep within all of creation. Dwell in it, rather than in how to escape it and get on with salvation, either through piling up material wealth, doing good works or becoming spirit-beings. Salvation is the temptation in a world where the shadow of capitalist cornucopia from an infinite earth, scarcity, has finally come to deeply shade the final fruits of a system that works by creating infinite desire while colonizing dear, immediate necessity. Even as ecosystems are in the early stages of collapse, the stock market reached new highs this week. Who is singing a requiem to the latest extinctions – both biological and cultural?

We scramble for oil, water, farmland. On the other hand compassion for all who lack that, who are starving, being beaten, tortured and raped, who thirst. Do you share your last glass of water with a roomful of refugees, and all die of thirst? Larry Summers' grim choice looms. Sophie's Choice is minor compared with the triage we will face by the latter third of this century.

To hunger and thirst after righteousness. Ecojustice, while we still have a chance this might include the poor and the marginal native peoples of the earth. It is narrowing, and will give way to Gaia's justice. The problem identified in Stephen Jay Gould's essay (“Nonmoral Nature”) comparing morality in the human world and the amoral world of nature. This root problem will be coldly exposed in a world of cascading extinction. Is justice itself the key human intervention, the one we have avoided, and the communist experiment failed to realize? If so, is there really something like ecojustice?

April 15 Celo Friends Meeting. I minister with Joan Baez' song, "Just a Little Rain" and speak of our moving from worries about Strontium 90 rains seeded by atmospheric testing to a shift in the entire Earth climate: what have they done to the rain? And then I wonder aloud at the contradiction between what we have wrought and the statement in Genesis that we are made in G-d's image.

At the end of meeting a young woman reads from Brother Nouwen: once we move into prayer mode, any thought becomes a prayer. Reflecting on my dark thought about our rapacious race, I realize that the infinite depths of compassion, the ability to suffer with our fellow human beings, the Earth with all her critters and plants, is also in the image of God. We have become as gods, and must therefore be God-like in our compassion for what we have brought to pass. From the Garden to the neolithic sweat of our brows to the doomed global industrial machine. And then, as the Earth takes back her due, the garden again, farming the paved cracks in the ghosts of cities. The inner city will be one big vacant lot waiting to be redeemed. And the broken and wounded will be everywhere, desperate for healing. Redemption is mine, sayeth the Earth. May the wave of destruction seed a whole tribe of Mother Theresas, flinging them into those same failed cities.

NEXT: Justice and Ecojustice in the Shadow of the Fearsome Wave

Labels: compassion, deep ecology, ecojustice, image of God, nuclear power

The Myth of Sustainable Development and the Great Die-Off

James Lovelock, in his haunting The Revenge of Gaia, points out the obvious when he says that “sustainable development” is an oxymoron. What we need, he says, is a “dignified retreat,” or in more contemporary language, negative development. Along with the deep ecologists, Lovelock argues that negative development would provide habitat for earth’s ongoing evolutionary project beyond the overbearing human. The earth passed the threshold of sustainability in 1985, after which the average global eco-footprint has exceeded the earth’s carrying capacity. At that point, we numbered 4.85 billion, and used slightly more than half the total energy we use now (with 6.5 billion people who are more “developed”). Since the Kyoto protocols went into effect, not one of the “developed” signatories have reduced their carbon emissions, and the US continues to increase more than the rest of the G8, though at a slightly lower rate than it did ten years ago. Meanwhile, China and to a lesser degree India, with their combined 2.3 billion people, are just getting revved up. In 2004 alone, China built more coal-fired power plants than Britain has its entire history – the home of the industrial revolution. Just yesterday, the UN changed its prediction of when China would overtake the US in carbon emissions from three years to later this year.

In terms of our energy discussion, without fossil fuels or nuclear power, 6.5 to 9 billion people (in 2050) cannot be serviced at a modest level (Costa Rica or Romania, say). Even with a ravaged earth, the one billion on earth at the beginning of the industrial revolution could be sustainable with subsequent technological improvements. I am no expert, but I seriously doubt that 4.5 billion would be. With assured global warming, the amount to which the system is already “committed” as the climate scientists say, added to the reduction in biomass since 1985, I suspect that the number we can sustainably support is from 2.5 to 4 billion – if we increase nuclear power capacity,* work to increase efficiency at all levels, conserve power (again, how much is enough?) and vigorously develop alternative sources of energy . But in order to build increased nuclear capacity as we decommission old coal plants, we will need a lot of capital, and as James Kunstler convincingly argues in The Long Emergency, capital is firmly built upon the platform of cheap oil. As soon as global markets realize that oil extraction has peaked, the markets will plummet, and with them our window of making any significant large-scale, capital-intensive conversion of business as usual. With peak oil immanent, we don’t have much time to achieve a new platform for a steady-state.

If the looming systemic adjustment of human population is going to make room for replenishment of biodiversity, then the number is probably going to be on the low side, perhaps in the long run closer to the number we supported at the beginning of the industrial era. Along with species extinction of 20% (committed) to 50% or more (probable), a human population collapse inevitable. Gaia will take care that there is a die-back, and the current momentum of pumping carbon from underground reservoirs into the atmosphere is pushing the earth system towards a human die-off of unprecedented magnitude. As significant players in concentrations of atmospheric gases, we are as gods, a “planetary power” (Brian Swimme), which, along with overexpanded terrestrial and oceanic habitat, is on the threshold of being brought firmly back into scale, animals subject like any others to population dynamics. Metaphorically, we are a cancer, but looked at more simply, we’re a population in dangerously overextended bloom due to the “petroleum interval.”

Planning can lessen the impact. Alternatively, an economic crash, which is virtually assured in some form by looming peak oil, would slow the surge in CO2, which correlates directly with economic growth. Either way, the sooner we curb our greenhouse emissions, the less the scale of die-off. But it is inevitably going to mean a lot of suffering for human beings. In a warming world of diminished resources creating tensions over oil and water, encroaching seas producing unprecedented numbers of refugees, and severely compromised farmland leading to widespread famine, compassion is the resource we are going to need to grow most of all, not just for fellow human beings, but extending to the entire web of life.

*When I argue that nuclear power is a necessity, I do not mean for unrestrained development and continued growth of material fulfillment (“development”) for an overpopulated world. With nukes, human beings in equilibrium with the web could still drive vehicles (electricity for plug-ins; hydrogen for fuel cells if that ever becomes viable), repair roads, sail ships, (though not fly). Public transportation and ride-shares in efficient vehicles would be far more necessary than private vehicles, which will become luxuries of the rich. We could maintain a grid, rather than having patchwork of independent distributed electrical generating sources. We could provide supplemental heat to underbuilt buildings, which might be able to maintain indoor plumbing during northern winters, though that is something of questionable value in a sustainable world, both in terms water usage and btu’s for space heating.

NEXT: The Challenge of Compassion in a World Ravaged by Global Warming

Labels: carbon emissions, deep ecology, die-off, eco-footprint, james lovelock, Kyoto Protocol, Long Emergency, Revenge of Gaia, sustainable devlopment

The overall moral issue is not nuclear power per se, but of how we care for the web of Creation. It is stewardship in an era when our numbers are overwhelming Gaia, multiplied by an extravagant lifestyle (look at the freezer and the clothes dryer, air conditioning and electric heat, the car and multiple-car families). We live in a world deeply, perhaps fatally, compromised by our industrial choices. As a human being struggling with moral choice I am deeply embedded in the accumulated world of infrastructure and culture built upon layers of thought, pre-existing decisions, my very perceptions structured by millennia-soaked predetermining gesture, thought, and decision.

Labels: deep ecology, ecocentrism, industrial morality, land ethic, modern slavery, nuclear power