If money is the keystone of the arch of modern society, the foundation is surely science. When someone demands we be realistic, often they are referring either to money, or to scientifically verifiable fact. Science provides our culture’s main map of reality. If climate change indeed faces us with an initiation into a new phase of human civilization, then we might expect that science, like money, will undergo a profound metamorphosis.
Except among the religious fringe, science is a primary locus of authority in our society: for at least a century to be “scientific” has been among the highest sources of legitimacy in business, government, medicine, and many other fields. Even those who consciously reject some of science’s teachings aspire to it. As our culture sees science as its foremost means to discover truth, to reject what science says seems the epitome of irrationality, tantamount to a willful denial of truth itself.
I have argued that the portrayal of the climate debate as a clash between the forces of truth and the forces of deception leaves a lot out. This is no mere battle between the intelligent and the stupid, the backward and the advanced, the corrupt and the ethical. The rejection of science, or at least of “what science says,” portends a tectonic shift in the bedrock of civilization as we know it.
Science in our culture is more than a system of knowledge production or a method of inquiry. So deeply embedded it is in our understanding of what is real and how the world works, that we might call it the religion of our civilization. It isn’t a revolt against truth we are seeing; it is a crisis in our civilization’s primary religion.
The reader might protest, “Science is not a religion. It is the opposite of a religion, because it doesn’t ask us to take anything on faith. The Scientific Method provides a way to sift fact from falsehood, truth from superstition.”
In fact, the Scientific Method, like most religious formulae for the attainment of truth, rests on a priori metaphysical assumptions that we must indeed accept on faith. First among them is objectivity, which assumes among other things that the formulation and testing of hypotheses don’t alter the reality in which the experiments take place.1 This is a huge assumption that is by no means accepted as obvious by other systems of thought. Other metaphysical assumptions include:
Philosophers of science might reasonably dispute some of these precepts, which are crumbling under the onslaught of quantum mechanics and complexity theory, but they still inform the culture and mindset of science. Starting from this implicit metaphysics, consider these other ways that science resembles religion.2 Science has:
The point here is not to dismiss science on the grounds that it is, after all, nothing but a religion. To do so would be to commit a subtle error: adopting science’s own conception of religion as a term of critique. If, however, we reject the implicit devaluing of religion that comes from contradistinguishing it from science-as-the-royal-road-to-truth, then to name science as a religion is no longer to disparage it. Instead it opens up new questions. We might ask “What are the limitations of the kinds of technology that are available from within this worldview?” and “What other religions—systems of metaphysics, perception, and technology—might be born of the current crisis and needed to address it?” We also might inquire as to what science might become if we abandon some of its metaphysical assumptions. What does it become when we recognize that observer and observed are inextricably entwined? When we recognize the consciousness and agency of all matter? When we cease privileging quantitative over qualitative reasoning?
Science is not alone among religions in having a shroud of dogma and institutional dysfunction around a core spiritual truth. The spiritual essence of the religion of science is the opposite of its institutional arrogance: the Scientific Method embodies a deep and beautiful humility. It says, “I do not know, so I shall ask.” When science is healthy, that humility takes form as critical thinking, patient empirical observation, hypothesis testing, and perhaps most importantly, communities of knowledge seekers who criticize, refine, and build upon each other’s work. The true scientist is always open to being wrong, even at the cost of funding, prestige, and self-image.
Held by a culture of practice, these qualities of humility and experience over time are what make a path of knowledge into a science. My call here is therefore not to discard science but to expand it, to include what it has ignored.
Ecofeminists and deep ecologists have critiqued science for its propensity to abstract, isolate, and distance the observer from the beingness of the observed; to render the world into an object. Francis Bacon conceived the experimental method as an interrogation of nature, even a rape of nature, forcibly penetrating to her deepest mysteries. How might it change if we conceive it as a conversation, not an interrogation; a lovemaking and not a rape? What if we saw science not as a means to force nature into our categories, but as a way to expand the reach of our senses in order to better behold the beloved?
I raise these questions with a certain trepidation, since the conventional view is that any rejection of science is a step backward into long-discredited myths, irrationality, and superstition. I don’t want to be lumped in with the ignoramuses. It seems quite evident to most people that the problem today isn’t too much trust in science but, to the contrary, too little. Consequently, you might think that even if my previous points are, perhaps, philosophically valid, to bring them up in the context of climate change is a strategic error that will embolden climate change deniers and give cover to polluters. I raise them nonetheless, because both the metaphysical assumptions of science and its institutional expression are part and parcel of the system that has laid waste to the world. Science’s reduction of reality to number mirrors the conversion of nature to money. Its universalization of matter into generic particles mirrors the standardization of people and commodities in the industrial economy. And the technology that comes from science facilitates both.
Though it is evolving, science as we have known it (and still to a great degree) has trained us:
The anti-science public may, for all its apparent ignorance, be tapping in to an authentic intuition about the limits of science as a decision-making compass and the ultimate arbiter of truth. We have to stop seeing public rejection of science and authority in general as some kind of troublesome insubordination, but rather look for the uncomfortable truth within it.
When we say, “Trust the scientific consensus on climate change,” we are also implying:
In various ways, all of these things we have trusted have contributed, and continue to contribute, to the ongoing devastation of the biosphere. This presents the more radical environmentalist with a conundrum when invoking science in the fight against climate change, because it requires a buy-in to the very same systems of intellectual authority that have long presided over and defended our ecocidal system. In addition, the urgency of action invites the further empowerment of existing institutions, which are the only ones capable of immediate action. The climate activist finds herself in the uncomfortable position of championing and fighting the establishment at the same time.
We are on shaky ground indeed if we are to rely on trust in the institution of science, and by extension trust in authority generally, to deliver us from climate catastrophe. On the rhetorical and strategic level, we need to reach beyond the good little schoolboys and schoolgirls who trust science and believe what the teacher tells them is important. And we need to cleanse ourselves of the stink of self-righteousness that comes when we hold in contempt those who don’t understand science (or patronize them as recalcitrant rubes to be “educated” in a dumbed-down version of it). “Science says” is not going to reach the farmers, hunters, ranchers, and other people who (in the United States) typically have conservative political identities, voted for Donald Trump, and are polarized into the climate skeptic position. Nor will it much impress working-class people who feel, quite understandably, that the establishment has betrayed them.
Recent political events like Brexit and the Trump election point to a growing popular rejection of established authority. Normally attributed to bigotry, xenophobia, and, tellingly, “irrationality,” these events point to a morbid crisis in the legitimacy of our dominant institutions and the elites who run them. It will only worsen as the concentration of wealth intensifies and the social contract frays further. It will worsen as the mainstays of our society—medicine, education, and law—veer closer to absurdity in their dysfunction. It will worsen as progressive and conservative governments alike fail to fix the political system. It will worsen as people realize the power and beauty of what has germinated outside the bounds of normalcy, in the “alternative” realms.
Many people have direct experiences that contradict what science and authority generally tell them is real and possible. A friend’s lifelong menstrual cramps disappear for good after a few acupuncture sessions, in spite of her extreme skepticism. A woman recovers from “incurable” stage four pancreatic cancer. A man experiences direct communication with his ancestors in an iboga ceremony and ends his drug addiction. Rival gangs meet in a restorative circle and come to peace. My son’s teenage friends see a UFO. Experiences like these open people to further experiences. When the “impossible” happens, we begin to question the bounds of the conventionally possible.
Some of the most highly educated people I know are devoted to astrology: an academic philosopher, a law professor, a medical anthropologist. These are not people who are too stupid to understand that the gravitational influence of other planets is negligible. Nor are they ignorant of confirmation bias, nor of the mind’s proclivity to perceive illusory patterns in random noise. These are highly intelligent, self-reflective people. You can write them off as superstitious nincompoops who are less rational than you are, but on what evidence? Because you just know that the worldview of institutional science, and its account of causation, is identical to reality itself? Likewise, can you be sure that cultures around the world that have maintained divinatory practices for thousands of years were simply oblivious to the mind’s capacity for self-deception? Is it that we are wise and they are stupid, that we are advanced and they are primitive, and that our historical duty is to replace their inferior ways of knowing with our superior ones? That mentality seems more like part of the problem than part of the solution.
Ironically, many of the very same people who embrace energy healing, astrology, crop circles, and so on also add their voices to the call for “science-based policy” on climate. Meanwhile in their own lives, they apply I Ching–based policy, Tarot-based policy, or astrology-based policy. This exemplifies the wall of separation that keeps spirituality and politics in separate realms. That is a division that must crumble. The key to our salvation lies beyond what science currently offers—it lies in facing the world as a living being, a sacred being, and a beloved being. From that place, technologies and practices emerge far beyond what science thinks is possible today. The astonishing results of regenerative agriculture are just a taste of what can happen when we think, “Land, I know you want to heal. Please tell me how to serve you. Land, I know you want to give. Please tell me how to serve you. Land, I know you want to fulfill your highest purpose. Please tell me how to serve you.”
This is the state of heart and mind from which the insights of regenerative agriculture and ecological healing arise.
Science can be a powerful tool to ask these questions and hear the answers. I am not advocating replacing it with Tarot decks, or indeed with the divinatory practices of other cultures who did indeed use exquisite rituals to maintain balance with the land. What needs to change is the impulse behind the science: the manipulation of a world it sees as dead—atoms and void. When that view changes, science will morph into something we can hardly recognize. It will share the animating force of indigenous ways of communicating with nature; it will be a step toward recovering our own indigeneity. That word must mean to be truly of a place, to be intimate with a place and all its beings. In the end, it does not matter if we enact the technological rituals of science, or some other religion. What matters is that we return to love.
Look at it this way. You don’t enact “science-based policy” in affairs of the heart, do you? You enact, I hope, love-based policy, or maybe hate-based policy or fear-based policy. You might dress them up with reasons, but love is not reasonable. If we want to enact unreasonable commitment to the healing of the earth, we need to make our relationship with it into an affair of the heart. Otherwise, the catastrophists may be right.
It is not only Western climate catastrophists who warn of a great dying to come. Many indigenous people also see a great peril upon us. Their warning does not invoke rising levels of greenhouse gases; it references another matrix of causality that involves the desecration of life itself. This deeper causal system also suggests a deeper set of responses, all of which come down to holding life and matter sacred again. It offers new hope, an exit from the futility of the endless “fight” against climate change.
It won’t be surprising to anyone who has read chapters 4 and 5 of this book that many of their warnings are on one level simply about ecosystem destruction. Here are the words of the remarkable Yanomami shaman Davi Kopenawa from the book The Falling Sky:
The forest is alive. It can only die if the white people persist in destroying it. If they succeed, the rivers will disappear underground, the soil will crumble, the trees will shrivel up, and the stones will crack in the heat. The dried-up earth will become empty and silent. The xapiri spirits who come down from the mountains to play on their mirrors in the forest will escape far away. Their shaman fathers will no longer be able to call them and make them dance to protect us. They will be powerless to repel the epidemic fumes which devour us. They will no longer be able to hold back the evil beings who will turn the forest to chaos. We will die one after the other, the white people as well as us. All the shamans will finally perish. Then, if none of them survive to hold it up, the sky will fall.3
Here Kopenawa expresses a belief widespread among indigenous people: that human activity, including ritual activity, is part of the glue that holds the world together. When we forget our proper function and cease to serve life, the world falls apart.
The tribes of the Colombian Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta (of whom the best known are the Kogi) have a similar belief.4 They believe that a black line, a network of hidden connections, links all the sacred places on Earth. If that line should be broken, calamities will ensue, and this beautiful world shall perish. Destroying a forest here, draining a swamp there, might have dire consequences across the globe. The shamans cannot perform their work of maintaining the balance of nature much longer in the face of our depredations.
How are we to interpret these warnings?
Several interpretations occur to the Western mind, all unsatisfactory. Most of us would no longer be so crude as to dismiss the warnings as the magico-religious rantings of benighted primitives whom we must awaken from their silly superstitions. Today we have more sophisticated ways to deafen ourselves to their message.
The first we might call “ontological imperialism.” It would be to say, “Yes, the indigenous are onto something after all. The black line is a metaphor for ecological interconnectedness. “Xapiri spirits” is code for the hydrological cycle. The indigenous are keen observers of nature and have articulated scientific truths in their own cultural language.” That sounds fair enough, doesn’t it? It gives them credit for being astute observers of nature. However, this view takes for granted that basal reality is that of scientific materialism, thereby disallowing the conceptual categories and causal understandings of the indigenous. It says that fundamentally, we understand the nature of reality better than they do.
If their message were merely “We must take better care of nature,” then the above understanding would be sufficient. But people like Davi Kopenawa and the Sierra Nevada tribes are inviting us into a much deeper change than that. Do we understand the nature of reality better than they do? It once seemed so, but today the spawn of our supposed understanding—social and ecological crisis—gnaw at our surety.
A second and related form of deafness is what Edward Said called “Orientalism”—the distortion (romanticizing, demonizing, exaggerating, reducing) of another culture to conform it to a comfortable and self-serving narrative. Accordingly, we could turn the Kogi into a kind of cultural or spiritual fetish object, subsuming them into our own cultural mythology, perhaps by making them into an academic subject and stuffing their beliefs and way of life into various ethnographic categories. In that way we make them safe, we make them ours. It is another kind of imperialism.
We might do the same by inserting their messages into a comfortable silo called “indigenous wisdom,” elevating the indigenous to superhuman status—and, in the process, dehumanizing them as well. It is not true respect to worship an image—the reverse image of our own shadow—that we project onto another culture. Real respect seeks to understand someone on their own terms.
The Sierra Nevada tribes are famous today thanks to two films, From the Heart of the World and Aluna.5 I have always been a little uncomfortable with documentaries about other cultures, because they of necessity objectify their subjects, turning them into the material of a (video) “document.” By documenting them, we incorporate them into our world, into a safe educational or entertainment or inspirational frame, and into the Debordian society of the spectacle. Fortunately, these films are not documentaries.
Who is the filmmaker here? Ordinarily one would say it was Alan Ereira, a former BBC producer who came in with his cameras and crew. But that’s not what Ereira says, and that’s not what the Kogi say either. According to them, the elders noticed the accelerating degradation of the planet and contacted the outside world to deliver a message that we must stop the destruction. They did so first in the early 1990s with From the Heart of the World, after which they again withdrew from contact.
Obviously, we didn’t heed their message. “We must not have spoken it clearly enough,” they concluded, and so they sought out Ereira again to make a sequel. The cynical observer, practiced with the tools of post-colonial analysis, might think that the assertion that “the Kogi have requested this film be made in order to convey their message” is a mere cinematic trope, or a way to preempt charges of exoticism, Orientalism, and cultural appropriation. However, that analysis is itself a kind of colonialism that sees the Kogi patronizingly as the helpless pawns of the filmmaker, and discounts their own explicit assertion that they have called the filmmaker back in order to transmit an important message to “little brother” (us).
Dare we take the Sierra Nevada elders at face value? Dare we hold them in full agency as authors not only of this film, but of a message sent to us on their initiative? To do so reverses the power relations implicit in even the most post-colonially sensitive ethnography, in which the distinction between the ethnographic subject and the ethnographer is usually preserved in some form (and institutionalized when, with all due disclaimers, it appears in academic publications). Anthropologists don’t normally grant ethnographic populations agency as the originators of messages to academia.
In these films, the colonial gaze is turned back on us: sternly, imploringly, and with great love. The elders tell us, “You mutilate the world because you don’t remember the Great Mother. If you don’t stop, the world will die.” Please believe us, they say. You must stop doing this. “Do you think we say these words for the sake of talking? We are speaking the truth.”
Why hasn’t little brother listened? It has been nearly thirty years since the Kogi elders first spoke their message to the modern world. Perhaps we have not listened because we have not yet come to humility. We continue to try to somehow box, contain, and reduce the Kogi and their message so that it can rest comfortably in our existing Story of the World.
In this book I have proposed that our reductive Story of the World underlies the world’s literal reduction: extinction, soil impoverishment, ecosystem collapse, etc. The Kogi offer a similar teaching. They say that thought is the scaffolding of matter; that without thought, nothing could exist. (This is not an anthropocentric view, because they do not consider thought to be merely a product of the human mind. Thought is prior to human beings; our minds are but one of its receivers.) The official Aluna website describes the Kogi’s view thusly: “We are not just plundering the world, we are dumbing it down, destroying both the physical structure and the thought underpinning existence.”
Thankfully, the requisite humility to truly hear the Sierra Nevada elders is fast upon us, born of—what else?—humiliation. As our cultural mythology falls apart, we face repeated humiliation in the failure of our cherished systems of technology, politics, law, medicine, education, and more. Only with increasingly strenuous and willful ignorance can we deny that the grand project of civilization has reached a dead end. We see now that what we do to nature we do to ourselves; that its plunder brings our poverty. The utopian mirage of the technologist and the social engineer recedes ever further into the distance.
The breakdown of our categories and narratives, the breakdown of our Story of the World, gives us the gift of humility. That is the only thing that can open us to receive the teachings of indigenous people—to truly receive them, and not merely insert them into some comfortable silo called “indigenous wisdom,” as if they were a museum piece or a spiritual acquisition.
I am not suggesting that we adopt, part and parcel, indigenous cosmology. We need not imitate their shamanic practices or learn to listen to bubbles in the water. What we must do is embrace the core understanding that motivates the attempt to listen to water in the first place: the understanding that nature is alive and intelligent. Then we will find our own ways of listening.
The Western civilized mind does not easily comprehend the idea of the intelligence of nature except through anthropomorphizing or deifying it—another attempt at conquest.
Granting subjectivity and agency to nature and everything in it does not mean to grant human subjectivity and human agency, making them into storybook versions of us. It means asking “What does the land want?” “What does the river want?” “What does the planet want?”—questions that seem crazy from the perspective of nature-as-thing.
Materialism, however, isn’t what it used to be. Science is evolving, recognizing that nature is composed of interdependent systems within systems within systems, just as a human body is; that soil mycorrhizal networks are as complex as brain tissue; that water can carry information and structure; that the earth and even the sun maintain homeostatic balance just as a body does. We are learning that order, complexity, and organization are fundamental properties of matter, mediated through physical processes that we recognize—and perhaps by others we do not. The excluded spirit is coming back to matter, not from without but from within.
So the question “What does nature want?” does not depend for its coherency on anything supernatural, no external intelligence. The wanting is an organic process, an entelechy born of relationship, a movement toward an unfolding wholeness.
In that understanding, we can no longer cut down forests and drain swamps, dam rivers and fragment ecosystems with roads, dig pit mines and drill gas wells, with impunity. The Kogi say that to do so damages the whole body of nature, just as if you cut off a person’s limb or removed an organ. The well-being of all depends on the well-being of each. We cannot cut down one forest here and plant another there, assuring ourselves through the calculus of net CO2 that we have done no damage. How do we know we have not removed an organ? How do we know we have not destroyed what the Kogi call an esuana—a key node on the black thread scaffolding the natural world? How do we know we have not destroyed a sacred tree, what the Kogi call “the father of the species,” upon which the whole species depends?
Until we can know it, we’d best refrain from committing further ecocide on any scale. Each intact estuary, river, forest, and wetlands that remains to us, we must treat as sacred, while restoring whatever we can. Davi Kopenawa and the Sierra Nevada elders agree: we are close to the dying of the world. This warning does not contradict the possibility I raised in chapter 7, that humanity might yet survive in a ruined world, a concrete world, a dead world. The world might die and yet we might live.
Science is beginning to recognize what many cultures have always known. An invisible web of causality does indeed connect every place on Earth. Building a road that cuts off the natural water flow at a key site might initiate a cascade of changes—more evaporation, salinization, vegetation die-off, flooding, drought—that have far-reaching effects. We must understand that as exemplifying a general principle of interconnectedness and aliveness. Otherwise, we are left only with the logic of instrumental utilitarianism as reason to protect nature—save the rainforest because of its value to us. But that mindset is part of the problem. We need more love, not more self-interest. We know it is wrong to exploit another person for our own gain, because another person is a full subject with her own feelings, desires, pain, and joy. If we knew that nature too were a full subject, we would stop ravaging her as well. As an elder says in Aluna, “If you knew she could feel, you would stop.”
If you knew she could feel, you would stop. Isn’t it obvious too, that as long as we don’t know she can feel, we will never stop? Isn’t it obvious that we need a Story of the World that helps us to know that she can feel?
The problem with the mechanistic view of nature-as-thing is not only that it numbs our compassion and facilitates our plunder. It also cripples our ability to serve as agents of positive transformation. One reason is that from the mechanistic perspective we cannot fully understand the needs of land, ocean, soil, water, or forest, just as I could not fully serve my son’s needs if I saw him as a biomechanical robot merely requiring precise inputs of various substances.
Another reason is that it leaves us without allies. If the world outside ourselves lacks purpose, intelligence, and agency, then change is entirely up to ourselves, dependent on how much force we can exert on matter.
Without allies in the cause of ecological healing, the situation is grim. As I asked before, can we beat the military-industrial-financial-agricultural-pharmaceutical-NGO-educational-political complex at its own game—the game of one force against another? If we have no allies, if humans are the sole possessors of intention in a random world, then we are lost.
What becomes possible when we believe we have companions inconceivably more powerful than ourselves with whom we can align? What becomes possible when we seek to participate in a larger ordering intelligence?
Older cultures commonly believed that mountains, rivers, animal species, the ancestors, and other seen and unseen beings participated in human affairs and could alter the course of history. Can we access these beings as allies too?
A word of caution here: this is not the kind of alliance that we are accustomed to in war thinking. We are not enlisting an even bigger force in a contest of force versus force. In fact, the allies abandon us when we inhabit that mentality, which is kindred to the story of nature-as-thing. That mentality casts us into a universe in which the allies do not exist. They become invisible to us through the lens of instrumental utilitarianism, through the lens of “resources,” minerals, commodities, and profit. One might ask, “If the powers of nature are so great, then why haven’t they put an end to the destruction?” If there is, as indigenous people tell us, a power in the land, in the mountains, in the forest, in the waters, that is greater than human power, why are all of these dying at human hands? It is because theirs is not a power of force versus force.
Stephen Jenkinson puts this poignantly in his magnificent book Come of Age:
The wild doesn’t play by the rules as we know them. But the wild is governed by a kind of ruthless etiquette; it does not preserve itself by subverting its wild soul. Who among us has not been on some camping trip or the like and seen the inexorable creep of civilization coming on, the intrusion of distant neon on what was once a dark night? How many times have you heard older people remember a time, not so long gone, when every developed part of your life was a field of Queen Anne’s lace and deer spoor? How many of you have harbored a wish that something of the wild would rise up and smite Big Pharma, or Big Agra, or the Military Industrial Complex, or your local bad guy equivalents, Armageddon-movie style, just enough to reinstate the boundary line and lend us a little hope, and then forgive the rest of us enough to allow a little conscious ecotourism to help with the maintenance costs? The wild seems terribly vulnerable in our time. To respond in kind to the indignities and rapacious practices we oblige it to endure would be to practice our kind of “desolation by payback,” our kind of retributory justice—the very undoing of the wild’s other-than-human ways of being itself. So this defenselessness sustains the wild’s soul, you could say. It is heartbreaking. And if the wild expires at our hands in decades to come, species by species, place by place, it does so as the wild does, not in soullessness, not in punition, but in silence.6
Yet this does not mean we cannot come into relationship with these beyond-human powers. We cannot impose our terms upon them or pervert them to our ends, but we might align ourselves with the tiny sliver of theirs with which we intersect.
The Australian activist Daniel Schneider told me a story about a protest against a fracking project in New South Wales. Thousands of people, including many aborigines, occupied the site, set up a camp for three months, blockaded the roads, chained themselves to cars, and sat on top of poles to block heavy equipment from entering. “Basically, we were preparing for battle,” Dan said. They found out that a force of eight hundred police was being prepared to move in the next week, along with agents provocateurs to create a pretext for mass arrests. The protesters prepared for a showdown—not to actually fight the police of course, but to battle for public attention and media exposure. They had drones and cellphone cameras sending live feeds to global activists. They were prepared to win the war of public perception and expose the villainy of the police and the government.
As tensions were reaching their peak, Dan proposed an idea to a group of aborigines at the site. Everyone felt the foreboding that they were entering a losing battle, so why not try something else? Since they knew media helicopters were coming, why not make giant art installations visible from the air for them to film, instead of the usual script of police arresting activist hippies? The aborigines loved the idea, brought out their dreaming stories, and soon had sketched designs for two-hundred-foot giant rainbow serpents and other figures to be drawn on the ground with sacred ochre. They also planned to greet the police ceremonially, with giant fires making sacred eucalyptus smoke, and five hundred men painted in ceremonial colors with clapping sticks and didgeridoos.
The next morning Dan got a phone call. The government had canceled the fracking license.
Later an indigenous elder woman came to him. “Thank goodness we let go of conflict. That is why we were successful. I’ve seen it before,” she said. “Usually it is the same story. The police come in, all the blackfellas get arrested, lots of the whitefellas get arrested, and the project continues. But this time, because we let go of conflict and entered into art and ceremony, the ancestors of the land could come in and exercise their power.”
I heard a different version of this story from my dear friend Helena Norberg-Hodge, who lived an hour from the site. According to her, the victory came thanks to the “knitting ladies”—older women, white and aboriginal, who, as they quietly went about their knitting, kept peace in the encampment, restrained the fighting and drunkenness that broke out among the men, and opened up backdoor communications channels with the police. Working behind the scenes, they shifted the dynamic away from confrontation; furthermore, by humanizing the protesters they disabled the narrative of “environmental extremists” that would have facilitated a police invasion.
I see these two versions of the story as complementary, not contradictory. How do the “ancestors of the land” exercise their power, if not through the quiet faith of the knitting ladies? What power sustains those women? What holds them in peacefulness against the onslaught of us-versus-them thinking?
In the story of force versus force, the deeper sponsoring assumption is that if anything purposeful is to happen, we have to make it happen. It has no room for the agency of other beings to engineer synchronicity. It locks us in a world where the ancestors and the powers of the land have no room to operate. Nor does it allow the women to wield their feminine power to hold the peace so that the ancestors and the land can do their work. In fact, it says to them—women, ancestors, and earth powers—“We don’t need you. We don’t acknowledge you.”
This mentality is akin to the geomechanical view of climate change, which also discounts the ability of living systems to maintain conditions for life. They can—if only we let them. But we do not let them; instead we actively degrade and destroy that capacity. We kill forests, lakes, mountains, and swamps in part because we see them already as dead, using the same vision that excludes the powers of the land from operating in ways that are more mysterious than regulating the carbon cycle, the water cycle, and the surface albedo.
By the same token, we must let all these beings “maintain conditions for life” by aiding us in the realms of technology and politics. When we engage in confrontational tactics or fight the destroyers in court, we must remember that it is not all up to us. We must remember that purposive change is possible beyond what we direct ourselves. We must remember that this is not a fight we can win just by fighting.
Have you ever noticed in life that the most striking synchronicities seem to happen in times of uncertainty? When one moves to a new city without a plan, or travels without an itinerary, or does something out of the ordinary with no idea of what will happen, then quite often an amazing (sometimes life-changing) meeting or stroke of luck or “chance” encounter occurs. They rarely happen when everything is planned, predictable, and controlled. It is as if the spirits have no room to come in.
To enter the realm of synchronicity, the aid of the ancestors, and alliance with the powers of the land is not the same as sitting around doing nothing and wishing it will happen. It is not enough to “send positive energy.” A sacrifice of some sort is required, something that involves risk or loss. It might be the sacrifice of time, energy, and money. It could be a sacrifice of certainty or control, an act that feels like a step into the true unknown. It could be a demonstration of commitment that feels real to you. It might be the sacrifice of “winning”—of having the satisfaction of seeing your opponent admit he was wrong. It might be to sacrifice setting up the situation so that you get to be the leader or get credit for the success. It might be the sacrifice of a polarized, dehumanizing view of the other side that makes you out to be the good guy. It might be the sacrifice of a self-image; for instance, being the one with the answers.
Another way to understand the necessity of a sacrifice is that who I am right now is not in full alignment with the more beautiful world I wish to help create. In order to be its effective servant, and in order to inhabit the reality in which it is possible, I must undergo a transformation. Something will be lost and something will be gained. I must give something up to align with the future that calls to me.
The sacrifice I speak of is usually not deliberate, but the result of a realignment of the self to a different life purpose or creative goal. What is deliberate is to commit life energy in service of the prayer, to take action in the 3D world. Conventional actions, especially those demanding hard work, significant money, or risk of imprisonment, constitute a commitment ritual that communicates to the unconscious and to all who are watching, “I am serious about this.”
That which hears our prayers gets fed up with prayers that aren’t serious. Often in our culture, we wish for things to be one way but act in direct contradiction to that wish. So the Listener wonders, “Do you really mean it? Let me make sure.” The Listener then creates a situation—a challenge or a setback—that gives the wisher a chance to clarify whether she really means it.
The environmentalist Mark Dubois told me a story about a campaign he and other environmentalists waged in the 1970s and early ’80s to stop the New Melones Dam from being built on a pristine stretch of the Stanislaus River. Their group of activists tried everything from legal challenges to petitions to lobbying for legislation to physical direct action (Mark chained himself to a boulder to prevent the authorities from filling the reservoir), all to no avail. They poured so much of their hearts and souls into the campaign that when they finally lost, their pain and grief were so great that many could not bear to visit the flooded canyon. It felt like a total defeat. Yet, the New Melones project marked a turning point. It was the last dam of its size built in the United States; since then, every new dam project has met with stiff opposition, and more dams have been removed than have been constructed.
Certainly, one could cite mundane explanations for the end of the dam-building era. Few viable sites remain in North America; the visibility and cost of the New Melones fight made the authorities lose their appetite for further projects; the resistance heightened public awareness of the damage dams cause. All true, yet on another level we might understand the failed campaign as a kind of prayer. When we put everything we’ve got into the service of a vision, the world takes notice and reality shifts. Our failures are our prayers. This is not to suggest we commit to an impossible cause, hoping that performing the rituals of protest will magically bring the impossible result we wish for. It means doing the best we can based on the knowledge we have, knowing that our sincere commitment will impact the world. No sincere action is ever in vain.
We cannot be sure our prayers will be answered in the form we expect. We can be confident though that our prayers are at least heard. We are not alone here. Something is watching. Something is listening.
I can imagine my evangelical Christian friends saying, “Yes, that ‘something’ you are talking about is God.” I agree with them, except that they conceive God as an immaterial being, a spirit that directs matter but is separate from it. Holding matter itself as insensate, they agree with scientific reductionism. I would say that the “something” that is listening is everything: earth, sky, water, air, rocks, trees, animals, plants … along with beings we do not see and that have no name (in English, anyway). Matter is sentient, watching, listening; God, you might say, is in all things, and nothing is not God.
The more closely we participate in the affairs of earth, sky, soil, rocks, and so on, the easier it is to see the God in all things. This is not a perception exclusive to animistic cultures. The poet David Whyte recounts a visit with a Scottish fisherman on a remote island, who lived the traditional ways. He said a prayer for every significant act of the day: a prayer for getting out of bed, a prayer for drawing the curtains, a prayer for breaking bread, a prayer for getting into his boat, a prayer for casting the net. His was a world thick with being. Something is always watching, always listening. He was never alone, because the whole world was alive.
The reanimation of our world is crucial to ecological healing. If we live in the perception that the world is dead, we will inevitably kill what is alive.
How does reanimation happen? You might hold highly developed philosophies of nondual spirituality, animism, pantheism, or panentheism, but act automatically from the old story when push comes to shove. Our entire cultural conditioning militates against the deep trust that comes from knowing that God sees everything, from knowing that all beings are alive and listening, from knowing that every action has cosmic significance. To mentally embrace a new story is a first step, but alone it is insufficient to undo generations of cultural programming.
Go ahead and try talking to a tree or a pond. If you are like me, a voice in your head will hector you: “It isn’t really listening. It can’t understand you. You are being silly.” And even if it seems like the tree is talking back to you, do you wonder if maybe it is just your imagination? Normally, people need some help to inhabit the Story of Interbeing deeply enough to consistently act on it.
The help comes in the form of a direct experience. We can’t force the other beings of this world to reveal themselves in their beingness, but we can ask them. The way to ask is to give attention to your longing: your longing to rejoin the living universe, to be companioned.
I will give an example of such help that I received a couple years ago, when I visited Taiwan on my way to hold a retreat in Indonesia. I used to live in Taiwan, and I think a piece of my heart is still there. My old friend Philip picked me up from my 5 a.m. flight and we drove straight into the mountains, nearly an hour on narrow, winding roads, to a spot where he’d heard there was a sacred grove of trees. We parked in a lot near the trailhead and hiked up a steep, narrow trail that required the use of ropes in some places. But after a couple hours of hiking, we still hadn’t found the grove, and we needed to turn back soon because we were tired and I was supposed to speak at 3 p.m. in Taipei. When we came to a nasty muddy uphill section, we considered turning around.
“Let’s go a little further,” I suggested, “up this hill. Maybe we’ll be able to see it from there.” We got past the muddy section and there wasn’t a view there, just another rise, but then we saw a little sign that said, “Come on! The sacred grove is only 5 minutes away!”
It was as if the sign were written just for us.
Soon we arrived at the grove. The trees were incredible. Two-thousand-year-old massive trees, trunks fifteen feet or more in diameter, with ancient branches thicker than I am tall, covered with ferns and other plants, each a whole ecosystem unto itself. It was impossible to look at them without a nearly overwhelming feeling of being in the presence of a divine being. We were awestruck. Neither of us spoke for quite some time.
I thought about how the whole forest used to consist of trees like these. They’d all been cut down except these seven or eight grandfathers, spread over maybe an acre of woods. I wondered if the trees were angry that humans had cut down all their companions. “Do you think the trees are mad at us?” I asked Philip.
He knew exactly what I meant and took the question seriously. After a while he said, “No. They are happy that we are here.” His words rang with truth.
Later I understood why the trees were happy. They were happy that I had even asked the question and that Philip had taken it seriously. Because that question came from a place of actually seeing the trees as real beings that could be angry or sad, instead of seeing them the way the timber companies had seen them, as the mere stuff of profit, or as most hikers saw them, as mere spectacles to photograph. Dear reader, have you ever had the experience of finally being seen for who you are? Women and black people especially know what it is to be seen as less than a full being, but even my fellow white straight males know what it is to be a mark, a sales target. So I think the trees were happy that we humans were rejoining them in the community of all being.
As we descended the trail back to the car, something odd happened—a subtle shift in reality, as if we had entered into a dream world where everything took on a symbolic resonance. A troupe of monkeys visited us, swinging directly over our heads. When we got to the parking lot Philip said, “I’m a little worried about the keys. They don’t seem to be in my pocket.”
We looked everywhere in his backpack and on the ground. Finally I looked in the car and there they were, stark and taunting on the front seat. The car was locked and the windows were up. It was like a dream: “The key to the vehicle is locked in the vehicle itself.” I suppose there must be a spiritual teaching there.
My friend got anxious, and the more anxious he got the more relaxed I became, wondering what adventure the universe (or the trees) had arranged for us. I was certain we would somehow make it on time, without being concerned at all whether we would. Everything felt perfect.
This was a remote spot—the nearest village was twenty minutes (driving) away. Philip got out his cellphone to call someone to come get us. Of course the battery was dead. There was a little house nearby and we asked the guy there if he had any tools to break into the car. No. How about a garage or locksmith? He let us use his phone but didn’t have the number of anything useful except the nearest police station. I called them and they said they’d send someone.
An hour later a police car came. The police were businesslike and gruff at first, but only because they were embarrassed that they had no clue how to get into the car either. They called a garage but when they were told the price, they were indignant on our behalf and told the garage not to send anyone. So there we were, four dudes without a clue, shuffling our feet. Finally one of them said, “You’re just gonna have to break a window.”
This is like a dream, remember? So how many blows with a rock did it take to overcome my inhibitions and break the window? Three blows. And a little shard of glass flew out and drew a single drop of blood from my finger.
Trying not to be late, we were driving really fast but suddenly a fruit stand called out to us and it turned out to be selling native varieties of apples and tangerines, little Taiwanese ones less than two inches in diameter, organic, and amazingly flavorful, as if all the flavor of a big one were packed into each. Everything was perfect. I shared my sentiment with Philip, who, facing the prospect of returning the car to the friend he’d borrowed it from, was understandably less enthusiastic about our day so far, although touched by the magic of the trees as much as I was. Wryly he asked me, “Is there anything else I can do to make the day even more fulfilling for you?”
“Well,” I said half-jokingly, “you know those ‘earth guavas’?” (These are tiny guavas that grow in Taiwan and are almost never sold commercially.) “I’d sure like some of those.”
“I don’t know if I can help you there.”
We showed up to the venue exactly on time and I gave my speech splattered with mud. Just before I began, an old friend whom I hadn’t seen in twenty years came up and gave me a bag. “I thought you might like these,” he said. In it were boiled peanuts, lingjiao, and, you guessed it, earth guavas.
It was like the island of Taiwan was saying, “You don’t believe me that I love you? Well, here are some earth guavas just to make sure.”
Of course it could all be coincidence, but it seemed like the trees gave me that gift, using my friend as their instrument. “Dang,” I joked to myself, “if I’d known any wish would be fulfilled, maybe I would have asked for more than guavas.”
I offer you this story to suggest that when we enter the world-story in which all beings are sentient, the world comes alive with them. We begin to experience synchronicities that confirm the universe is intelligent. Or is it that we are just noticing them more? The mind of separation wants proof to precede belief, but I find it is often the other way around. Thus we face a choice. Which world shall we live in? It echoes the choice posed in chapter 7: a concrete planet, or a planet profuse with life? A beautiful world or an ugly world? A living world or a dead world?
If we want a living world, we have to act from the place where the world is alive.