A secular breviary for meditations
on ecological meanings and values
(an extension of the Schools and
Communities Agenda 21 Network)
1 The joy of belonging
One of the key figures in shaping a modern
educational movement to end the lonely, often desperate, isolation
of Homo sapiens from other species was the American Joseph
Wood Krutch(1893-1971). "We are all in this together," he
concluded in 1949, not long after he finished writing a biography
of Henry Thoreau. Once a rather melancholic humanist, Krutch
now became a kind of pantheist or ethical mystic, caught up
in the joy of belonging to "something greater than
one's self."
Reading Thoreau again and again was partly
responsible for the radical change in Krutch's outlook. The
other chief stimulus was a self- education in ecological
principles. "Every day," he observed, "the science of ecology
is making clearer the factual aspect as it demonstrates those
more and more remote interdependencies which, no matter how
remote they are crucial even for us." Krutch's self-tutoring
in science confirmed him in an organismic sensibility, partly
pragmatic, but more fundamentally
ethical.
It is now widely accepted that we must be a part
not only of the human community, but of the whole ecological
community. We must acknowledge some sort of oneness not only
with our neighbours, our countrymen and our civilization, but
also have some respect for the natural as well as the man
made community. Ours is not only "one world" in the sense
usually implied by that term. It is also "one earth."
It is abundantly clear that our species requires behavioural
adaptations for long term survival, based on the
political and economic interdependency of nations and communities.
It is not a sentimental but a grimly literal fact, that
unless we share planet Earth with creatures other
than ourselves, we shall not be able to live on it for
long. This behavioural change will involve making conservation
management central to economic development.
Science has led directly to a moral awakening: a
new sense of biological relatedness and communalism. However,
Krutch perceived that ecology, "without reverence or love,"
could become naught but "a shrewder exploitation of what it
would be better to admire, to enjoy, and to share
in." His own approach to the science helped turn him from the
pursuit of self toward a "sense of the community of
living things." Spirituality makes the
connection.
The persistence of this kind of moral undercurrent
in ecology as an increasingly quantified discipline means,
for one thing, that mid- twentieth-century ecology belongs to the
lay mind to the amateur naturalist the conservationist and
'the man in the street' as much as to the scientific
establishment. Like Thoreau in his time, it is important that
collectively we do not wholly surrender this science to
academic experts.
Ecology has always been unusual among the sciences
in its accessibility to the ordinary student of
nature. Throughout its short history it has been shaped
by and responsive to the everyday life of all sorts of
people: farmers, gamekeepers, foresters, bird watchers,
travellers. More than this, it has consistently appealed to
many who are otherwise hostile to scientific explanations: As
long as ecology has a lay input, it can continue to teach the
gospel of organic community, whether or not this is
subject to empirical validation.
In practice this means endorsing conservation as
one side of the coin of political economy. The problem is
that a culture that tends towards conservation management of
its natural resources could be a dying culture if others
around it do not adopt the same constraints on
consumption.
2 Moral naturalism
The hope that nature will show humanity the way to
sound moral values is part of Krutch's faith, and certainly
that of the 'Age of Ecology'. But this view has long been a
beacon for Anglo-American culture, at least since the
eighteenth century. Indeed, few ideas have been recycled as
often as the belief that the factual "Is" of nature must
become the moral "Ought" of man.
Many have contended that a pronounced pattern or
observed direction in nature provides man with all the
guidance he needs for "should-ness." If nature is found to be
a world of interdependence, then human beings are obliged to
consider that characteristic a moral dictum. But if we have
to first follow nature, which road do we take? Whose map do
we use? How can we keep to the road?
The perennial hope has been that science will show
the way. In the case of the ecological ethic, its proponents
picked out their values first and only afterward came to
science for its stamp of approval. What is really required is
a deeper sense of integration between man and nature, a
more than-economic relatedness and to let all the appended
scientific arguments go. "Ought" might then be its own
justification, its own defence, its own persuasion, regardless of
what "is."
With the decline of religion and its moral
tradition in our own time, science has become the universal
standard, and for many, it maintains an aura of absolute
sanctity. It is seen as an oracle of objective truth, located
well above the shaky ground of moral choice, and therefore a
perfectly trustworthy source not only of knowledge but of
value. Others, noting how often scientists reflect their
cultural milieu, are more sceptical of science's claim to
detachment; the quality of trust is strained. But even the
sceptics look to science for the validation of certain truths. If
science cannot, by itself, save society, neither can
society be saved without it. The moral values inherent in
scientific models cannot be accepted without examination, but
the guidance such models provide is indispensable. To judge
which of these attitudes is the most valid requires
presenting them within an educational framework where "Is"
and "Ought" are distinct and unique concepts, but which
demonstrates that any attempt to rigidly separate them is probably
misguided.
The idea of truth or fact outside the moral
context has no meaning for the human mind. Whether
imperialist, arcadian, organismic, or something else, values
have always been woven into the fabric of science. So much so
that when scientists most firmly insist that they have
screened out everything but demonstrable fact, the rest of us
should nevertheless anticipate moral consequences. In
his thoughts about his homeland of Concord Thoreau was beginning to
assemble a guide to attaching moral values to our
various uses of the environment. These web pages are a
development of Thoreau's secular breviary to guide personal
actions of atonement that lighten the guilt of humankind for
initiating metamorphoses that have been more destructive than
creative.
Another key thinker in this area is Albert
Schweitzer with his central ethical concept is "Reverence for
Life". He sees this as stemming from a fundamental
will-to-life inherent in all living things that,
in self-conscious beings such as ourselves, establishes
a drive towards both self-realization and empathy with other
living things. Unlike Nietzsche's will-to-power, it is not
egoistic or individualistic. As living beings we are not only
concerned for our own lives and development but also for
the lives of other living beings and the environments in
which we live. Along with the inclination towards self-
perfection that this drive engenders, it gives rise to a
nature-centered spirituality and to a form of ethical
idealism. Rather than obeying moral rules which are conceived
of as external impositions, the soul of the ethical life for
Schweitzer is the drive towards fulfillment and authenticity.
Insofar as we are a will to live, such authenticity will be
felt as a need to show reverence for life in all its
forms. The virtues that this gives rise to Ó which
include compassion, gratitude, justice, hope, and the pursuit
of peace Ówill be understood not as norms or principles
to be followed, but as ideals and values in the light of
which particular decisions must be made creatively and
sincerely. Martin's text is especially valuable in outlining
these virtues and showing how they constitute a body of
dispositions unified by the fundamental attitude of reverence for
life.
The nature-centered spirituality which was central
to Schweitzer's thought replaced the Lutheran Christianity in
which he was brought up and constitutes a kind of pantheistic
faith which led him to be a precursor of some strands of
contemporary environmental philosophy. Such a
philosophy values nature not just as a necessary resource for
human flourishing or even as a repository of beauty and
revitalization, but as the very ground of our being and source of
motivation. Such ideas also led Schweitzer to an
interest in Eastern religions with their stress on compassion for
all living things. In this comparative contex
there are two time scales, the horizontal and
vertical.
3 Poetry of climate
change
"Global warming" means the rapid overall warming
of the planet because of an increase in the production of
greenhouse gasses by human activity. Global warming may in
turn lead to regional climate change affecting temperature,
humidity, precipitation, wind, and severity of weather
events. The leading edge of these effects can be observed
today. Poets are keen observers with skills
for conveying their environmental awareness into a cultural
setting. For example, it has been pointed out by
Bill Silverly and Michael McDowell, writing in the journal
Windfall, that poets in Alaska and northern Canada live
where melting glaciers and thawing tundra are evident. Further
south, the north coast of Alaska and the Rocky Mountains
to the Pacific Coast has experienced increasingly damaging
weather events. Tim Flannery, citing the work of Camille
Parmesan and Gary Yohe, writes: "[Since 1950] right around
the globe, a strong pattern has emerged. This manifests itself
as a poleward shift in species' distribution of, on average,
4 miles per decade, a retreat up mountainsides of 20 feet per
decade, and an advance of spring activity of 2.3 days per
decade." Gardeners have noticed that in recent years spring
comes earlier and summer lasts longer. Here the imagery is at
hand that should enlarge the perception and emotional
understanding of us all.
In 2007, after months of dry weather, rain did not
arrive in Portland until September 28-and then it came in a
deluge-on what proved to be the rainiest day of the year. One
poet, Judith Barrington, has drawn upon this effect in a poem
that appeared in the spring 2004 issue of
Windfall:
GLOBAL WARMING
Almost Hallowe'en and no rain
yet.
Yellow leaves spotted brown like an old
hand
clog the creek, congregate at the
bend,
pile against rocks which long for a break in
the heat.
Too long their dented gray pates have
baked
in morning sun. Too long the dipper has landed
on rocks,
curtseyed to the maples that
handed
her crisp bouquets. Twigs float in her
wake.
Somewhere downstream, salmon grow
anxious,
nosing into the current, ready and
fertile.
I watch in vain for the first thrashings under
the bank-
What if there's no rain by
Christmas?
What shall we do then-the fish grown
prehensile,
boulders sighing for the touch of a silver
flank?
The salmon is one of the bioregion's great
indicator species. One of the dire effects of global warming
is the increased number of extinctions due to the inability of
plants and animals to adapt to rapidly changing climate and
habitat.
Another poem on global warming, by Shelley
Kirk-Rudeen of Olympia, Washington, appeared in the fall 2006
issue of Windfall. Zumwalt Prairie is located in eastern
Oregon near the Imnaha River, and much of it is a grassland
preserve of the Nature Conservancy:
ZUMWALT PRAIRIE
The shadows of clouds race
northward.
Above the shush of wind in pine and
grass,
listen: timbers
groaning,
the ark creaking to
life.
This will be no gathering of two by
two.
There will be no one place to call
home.
Everything on the move,
leaving
to become native to new
places
as the old homes
change,
traveling by windblown seed, by
wing,
by cloven hoof and padded
foot,
in bellies and in dung,
in water's flow.
And what of the ones who
travel
by rhizome's reach,
by the exquisite slowness of slime
trail?
And what of the ones who must
stay?
Is it only their names we will carry
forward?
Animals and plants "travel" to compensate for
global warming, which they do, though some are slower (plant
rhizomes and snails).
4 Hinduism: a
model of spiritual ecology
The human niche is defined as the spatial and
social sphere that includes the social partners, perceptual
contexts, and resource ecologies necessary for the survival of
human individuals and communities. It is the context for the lived
experience of humans today as it was for earlier humans and their
communities, where they shared biological and social kinship, and
ecological histories. And where they created and participated
in shared knowledge, social and structural security, and economic
development across generations.
Towards the end of the Pleistocene the human niche
came to involve a range of material items that reflect both
aesthetic and symbolic actions/perceptions by early humans. This
reflects a capacity for the creation of symbols creation and their
use that underlies/precedes/forms a basis for our current ability
to develop a metaphysical orientation to the world. This in
turn facilitated the emergence of structured religious
beliefs.
The anthropologist Maurice Bloch has argued that
we can see this transformation in our lineage as the move from a
group of beings who engage in transactional sociality, which most
animals do, even if in a very complex manner, as do many primates,
to the kind of beings that add a suite of transcendental
relationships to their mode of social and environmental
interactions. In other words, we have evolved as
simultaneously transactional and transcendental beings. This
new reality results in a landscape of meaning and an
associated imagination that acts as an ecological system. It
facilitates an array of other symbolic and meaning-laden aspects of
human behaviuor and experience that are core components of our
current ways of being in the world.
This ecological system is the basis of
Hinduism. Hindu religion's reverence for the sea, soil,
forests, rivers, mountains, plants, birds, and animals stems
from its broader view of divinity. Unlike many other
religions, Hindus believe that all things and beings in the world
are various manifestations of the Ultimate Reality(Brahman,
and nothing exists apart from It. The whole emphasis of Hindu
scriptures is that human beings cannot separate themselves from
nature.
Thousands of years ago, Hindu sages realized that
preservation of the environment and ecological balance were
necessary for the survival of mankind. To create an awareness among
the common people for preservation of the environment, the
priests taught that earth has the same relationship with man
as a mother with her child. In the Vedic literature, the earth is
addressed as Mother Earth and personified as goddesses. Five
thousand years later the world experts addressed earth
as Mother Earth for the first time at the Global Conference in
1992 in Rio de Janeiro.
In Hinduism each human being, regardless of
religion, geographic region, gender, colour or creed is
in reality pure and divine (atman) clothed in a physical body.
Since atman is inherently pure and divine, every human being
is potentially divine. The Hindu view is that a man is not born a
sinner, but becomes a victim of ignorance under the
influence of cosmic ignorance, called Maya. Just as darkness
quickly disappears upon the appearance of light, an
individual's delusion vanishes when he gains
self-knowledge.
Hinduism explains that the atman (the Innermost
Self) is eternally yearning for perfect, unlimited
and everlasting happiness. But the atman is mistakenly
searching for this happiness in the mayic world where one
finds only transitory pleasures followed by
disappointments.
Human life alone
gives us a chance to know our true identity, which has its basis in
the one true thing called Brahman. All else has a
dependent reality because nothing except Brahman can exist on
its own. Our relationship with God is like the wave in an
ocean. The ocean exists with or without the waves, but the
waves have no independent existence without the ocean. When
the waves become enlightened they know they too are water and
are liberated from the notions of limitedness. This is called
Moksha or liberation, and can be achieved while living. To the
Hindu priest, compassionate love is the highest vehicle
to union with creation. In pursuing creation in this way one
becomes more god-like, and from this inner source comes an
outward manifestation of selfless love for all
creation.
5 Imagination and place
As early as 1806, John Forster in his Essays in a
Series of Letters to a Friend, trying to define the essence
of the romantic had written:
"Imagination
may be indulged till it usurp an entire ascendency over the mind,
and then every subject presented to that mind will
excite imagination instead of understanding to work;
imagination will throw its colours where the intellectual
faculty ought to draw its lines; imagination will accumulate
metaphors where reason ought to deduce arguments;
images will take the place of thoughts and scenes of
disquisitions. The whole mind may become at length something
like a hemisphere of cloud scenery, filled with an ever-moving
train of changing melting forms, of every colour, mingled with
rainbows, meteors and an occasional gleam of pure sunlight,
all vanishing away, the mental like this natural
imagery, when its hour is up, without leaving anything behind but
the wish to recover the vision. And yet, . . . this series of
visions, may be mistaken for operations of thought, and each
cloudy image be admitted in the place of a proposition, or a
reason; and it may even be mistaken for something sublimer
than thinking."
Forster's fears of the predominance of imagination
over judgement in the evaluation of place were not a problem
to later writers. Charles Kingsley's fictional character
Alton Locke the Chartist poet of the Victorian urban fringe,
discovers the work of Tennyson and is overwhelmed by the
pleasure of imaginative recognition.
... he has
learned to see that in all Nature, in the hedgerow and the
sandbank, as well as in the alp- peak and
the ocean-waste, is a world of true sublimity - a minute
infinite - an ever fertile garden of poetic images, the roots
of which are in the unfathomable and the eternal, as
truly as any !..... phenomenon which astonishes and awes the
eye. The description of the desolate pools and creeks where
the dying Swan floated, the hint of the silvery
marsh mosses by Mariana's moat, came to me like revelations. I
always knew there was something beautiful, wonderful,
sublime, in those flowery dykes of Battersea Fields; in the
long gravelly sweeps of that lone tidal shore; and here was a
man who had put them in words for me. This is what I call
democratic art - the revelation of the poetry which lies in
common things. And surely all the age is tending in that direction;
in Landseer and his dogs - in Copley Fielding and his
downs, with a host of noble artists - and in all authors
who have really seized the nation's mind from Crabbe and
Burns and Wordsworth to Hood and Dickens, the great tide sets
ever outward, towards that which is common to many, not
that which is exclusive to the few . . ."
The concept of
thin places is at the centre of imagination in place. Thin
places are defined as spots where one feels that their heart is
being cleaved open " so that pain can escape and joy flood in". The
sensation can come on a long walk in the mountains or in the
forest, or standing on a deserted beach and feeling the tide roll
over your feet, and can even appear under the harsh lights of a
hospital room watching someone dear stoically take a last
breath. The idea is very old. For example, it is said
that the early Celtic Christians believed that there were mystical
spaces, called "thin places," where the veil between the holy and
the human is traversed. The physical and spiritual worlds are knit
together, and if we are so attuned, we can transcend the ordinary
for a glimpse of the infinite. In such places of poetry there is a
mental jarring of the mind and simply by your presence, you are in
someway changed.