For The Wild - JOHN SEED on Deep Ecological Identity ⧸98

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00:01:37.860 It's clear that given the threats that the world is facing at the moment,

00:01:43.640 nothing short of a miracle will save us

00:01:47.240 but it's also clear that the path that we've travelled with so far

00:01:51.080 is littered with miracles

00:01:52.720 it's just miracles every step of the way

00:01:55.080 so that's no guarantee that the miracle that we need

00:01:58.260 which I propose that miracle is a profound

00:02:02.300 and very, very fast change in consciousness

00:02:05.220 so that the thrall of anthropocentrism slips away

00:02:10.440 and we are permitted to define our ecological identity.

00:02:23.080 Hello and welcome to For the Wild podcast. I'm Ayanna Young. Today we are speaking with John

00:02:30.100 Seed. John is the founder and director of the Rainforest Information Centre in Australia,

00:02:35.620 which has engaged in the protection of rainforests worldwide.

00:02:40.420 Since 1979, he has been involved in direct actions

00:02:44.060 which have resulted in the protection of the Australian rainforests.

00:02:48.380 He has since created numerous projects

00:02:50.520 protecting rainforests throughout South America, Asia, and the Pacific.

00:02:55.460 In addition, he is an accomplished songwriter, filmmaker, and author,

00:02:59.620 writing and lecturing extensively on deep ecology

00:03:02.280 and conducting re-earthing workshops for the past 25 years.

00:03:07.640 John co-authored Thinking Like a Mountain

00:03:09.680 Towards a Council of All Beings with Joanna Macy, Pat Fleming, and Arnie Nass.

00:03:15.720 His most recent project with the Rainforest Information Center

00:03:18.840 focuses on the protection of Ecuador's rainforest

00:03:21.340 in the Los Cedros Biological Reserve.

00:03:25.360 Well, John, it is such a joy to be able to share this conversation

00:03:29.340 with somebody who has spent their life feeling the earth, respecting the force's intelligence,

00:03:36.600 and listening to and being called into action by the despair and pain our earth bodies are

00:03:42.680 experiencing. So thank you for your dedication and wisdom in this time of great unraveling

00:03:47.600 and just transformation. Thanks for inviting me, Ayanna, and thanks for the podcast.

00:03:52.820 Yes, absolutely. It's my honor. So back in 1979, when you first began taking direct action in defense of the rainforest in Australia, you heard the trees screaming for help. You wrote, quote,

00:04:08.380 If I went to see a psychiatrist and said that I heard the earth screaming, wouldn't my experience be reduced to purely personal pathology?

00:04:18.680 It would show that there was something wrong with me.

00:04:23.020 But of course, we know that these screams so many of us are hearing are extensions of ourselves, calling to be saved, calling us into action.

00:04:32.980 Do you believe dominant culture has made any meaningful steps in acknowledging the environmental crisis?

00:04:40.780 Or are we still trapped in our understanding of pain, a symptom of a personal pathology?

00:04:48.580 I think both.

00:04:50.080 I mean, I think that there have been some meaningful steps, but clearly nothing like enough, not within an order of magnitude of enough.

00:04:58.600 And the reason for that is, as you say, that we don't recognize that our feelings calling us to the protection of this, our larger body.

00:05:09.720 my teacher Joanna Macy first made it clear to me I guess it's more than 30 years ago now

00:05:20.320 that we live in a culture where there is a profound denial of many of our feelings that

00:05:28.140 we are taught from a very early age to suppress our grief and rage and terror among the many

00:05:37.260 consequences of this is the fact that a huge part of our intelligence is suppressed at the same time

00:05:45.380 I guess one thing that you could say about everyone who's listening to this program is that

00:05:51.280 each and every one of us can say without a shadow of a doubt that over the last four billion years

00:05:58.760 or so every single one of our ancestors was intelligent enough to reach the age of being

00:06:05.100 able to reproduce itself before it was consumed so that's an unbelievable

00:06:10.320 pedigree of success and of intelligence and in every generation that's selected

00:06:15.240 for that intelligence that any mammal that runs towards something wagging its

00:06:21.420 tail when it should be running away as fast as it can doesn't leave its genes

00:06:25.620 in the gene pool so ninety nine point nine nine nine nine nine nine percent of

00:06:31.560 that intelligence took place before we developed this bulge above our nose that allows us to

00:06:38.800 think our way through the world. So we've imagined now that intelligence only talks about our

00:06:47.240 thinking, but that thinking intelligence is the tiniest fragment of our larger intelligence,

00:06:53.300 and that larger intelligence is what we call feelings. That's how animals make the right

00:07:01.040 decision is that they feel their way into it. We can call it instinct. We can call it intuition.

00:07:07.040 It doesn't matter what you call it. What we call feelings in ourselves is what remains of that

00:07:13.040 ancient intelligence that has stood the test of time. So our thinking intelligence, I'm not

00:07:20.000 dissing that. Yes, it's very beautiful and a definite step forward. However, unless it is

00:07:26.360 supported by feelings, it's sterile. It doesn't lead anywhere. When we say, I was moved to

00:07:33.560 participate in something, I was moved to stop that from happening. When we say that I was moved to

00:07:39.260 do something, we're not talking about thoughts. We can think anything and it makes no difference.

00:07:43.860 Unless we feel some passion, we're not going to get involved. We're not going to do anything about

00:07:49.460 it and so it's kind of means that 35 years ago when I became involved in the environmental

00:07:56.060 movement I thought that our job was to raise awareness that once everyone was aware of what

00:08:02.840 was going on everything had changed but wrong now everybody does know what's going on very little

00:08:09.940 has changed and I propose that the reason for that is that we don't feel what's going on we

00:08:16.140 only know what's going on and knowing what's going on leaves us feeling helpless hopeless

00:08:22.360 what can one person do anyway it's probably too late and so on and so on i feel that jana's work

00:08:29.220 and that especially that part of her work that she calls honoring our pain for the world

00:08:33.920 is central to us being able to move forward we understand the directions that we need to go but

00:08:40.040 we seem to be incapable of of getting there and it's the absence of passion it's the absence of

00:08:46.120 rage. It's the absence of terror. And it's the absence of overwhelming grief for what's happening

00:08:53.840 to our world that stands in the way. I really agree with you that awareness and information

00:09:03.840 and statistics aren't enough. They're not working. If they were working, we would have

00:09:09.800 dealt with climate change and deforestation and resource extraction and pollution

00:09:14.300 50, 60 years ago. We've had the information for a really long time, but I think that we're able to

00:09:20.980 compartmentalize it and also we're not only compartmentalize it, but we, you know, a lot of

00:09:28.100 times these intense resource extraction projects are put in somebody else's backyard, so we aren't

00:09:34.180 feeling it because we aren't looking at it every day. Even with a lot of logging projects, they'll

00:09:39.780 leave a buffer zone on the road and they'll clear-cut just a couple hundred feet in where

00:09:44.440 people can't actually see it. They're not feeling it, especially people who are in suburbs or cities

00:09:51.380 who they're not face-to-face with the collapse of salmon or face-to-face with the melting glaciers

00:09:57.760 if they're not seeing them. And, you know, even myself when I read about things happening in

00:10:02.320 Louisiana with the Bayou Bridge pipeline, for instance, it's hard to always feel when we're

00:10:07.300 not in direct connection. But of course, there's strategy behind that, and I really appreciate you

00:10:13.600 bringing that up. I wanted to talk about this blockade at Terrania Creek that you were a part

00:10:20.360 of back in 1979, which set precedent for taking direct action to protect rainforests across the

00:10:27.200 world. It turns out that, and maybe I'm mispronouncing this, but the Terrania rainforest

00:10:33.400 is part of the original flora of Australia.

00:10:37.080 In fact, it was a part of the supercontinent called,

00:10:40.280 and I might mispronounce this one too,

00:10:42.000 but Gondawana Land,

00:10:44.180 which existed over 320 million years ago.

00:10:48.240 So I'm wondering,

00:10:49.260 how did that understanding impact

00:10:51.640 your acknowledgement of time and evolution

00:10:54.620 and your own ecological identity?

00:10:58.340 In 1979, when I arrived there,

00:11:01.440 I had no understanding of what was happening to the rainforest I didn't know what a rainforest was

00:11:07.120 I was a meditator I'd helped to build a meditation center and a meditation community

00:11:12.060 and I showed up to the blockade because some neighbors had appealed for help and we were into

00:11:19.880 working with the neighbors something happened to me there as you say I heard the trees screaming

00:11:24.740 and had turned my life around and in trying to understand how could it be that I would hear the

00:11:31.540 trees screaming I was struggling with the idea that it might be some kind of a mental problem

00:11:36.480 that I was suffering from and so on and it gradually dawned on me that I as a mammal had

00:11:43.020 evolved within forests like these over hundreds of millions of years before perhaps four million

00:11:49.140 years ago, my ancestors moved out onto the savannah to seek their fortune, then it became

00:11:55.520 less surprising that I would hear the trees screaming and more surprising that so few people

00:12:01.040 seem to hear it. And so, you know, one of the things that rainforest conservation and steeping

00:12:07.780 oneself in rainforests physically, one of the things that it brings is a deepening of one's

00:12:14.180 sense of time that, you know, we grow up thinking that our lives begin when we're born and somehow

00:12:21.720 our ecological identity, which says that actually every cell in my body is descended in an unbroken

00:12:29.520 chain from the first cell of life on earth and that there's all of this evidence in my body that

00:12:34.920 the vestigial tail and gills that I had while I was an embryo in my mother's womb and so on and

00:12:41.240 so on that there's all of this evidence that the story of evolution is actually my personal story

00:12:47.360 and this is what happened to me that I didn't begin 72 years ago when I was born I began long

00:12:55.580 long time before that and why wouldn't the memory of that past be accessible to me if I didn't have

00:13:04.060 a kind of intellectual walls built up that prevented me from you know becoming aware of it

00:13:09.640 And so the more that I opened myself to those kinds of ideas, the more my sense of who I am began to grow older and older.

00:13:20.700 And as I became more familiar with my ancestry, I realized that my sense of myself was growing into the future as well.

00:13:29.640 And I felt more and more loyalty, I suppose, to what was going to happen a long, long time after I died.

00:13:37.680 just the way in which you're thinking about how our lives didn't begin when we were born out of

00:13:46.080 our mother's womb but we were in a sense born with the earth and have that entire evolution

00:13:53.360 is within us and oh my goodness that's a real that's a real thought to chew on i'm gonna have

00:14:00.620 to take that with me this evening and think about that a lot more but i'd really like to transition

00:14:06.380 our conversation to the work of the Rainforest Information Center. Particularly, Ecuador is

00:14:13.420 known and lauded as being the first country in the world to establish the rights of nature in

00:14:18.640 their constitution. But this tremendous, really exciting legal success is starkly contrasted by

00:14:26.780 the reality that Ecuador is currently facing. In 2008, Ecuador defaulted on a $3.2 billion

00:14:33.580 dollar national debt, causing the country to be cut off from traditional lending sources.

00:14:39.360 And then in response, the government borrowed $15 billion from China, which was to be paid

00:14:44.320 back in the form of oil and mineral exports through 2024.

00:14:49.000 But in the last year, the Ecuadorian government granted over 4 million acres of indigenous

00:14:54.800 territories and forest reserves to transnational corporations without any free prior and informed

00:15:02.380 consent. So can you share with us what the Rainforest Information Center's most recent

00:15:08.560 campaign, Ecuador Endangered, is seeking to accomplish? Yes, we're seeking to accomplish,

00:15:15.180 in particular, to overturn the government's recent decisions that have handed over these

00:15:21.260 millions of hectares of what has up until now been protected rainforests and cloud forests

00:15:28.040 throughout the country and Indigenous reserves that were also protected

00:15:33.640 to hand them out as mining leases to corporations from Australia

00:15:38.140 and Canada and Chile and you name it, China, of course.

00:15:42.920 As part of that, we'd like to revitalise that spirit within Ecuador

00:15:48.560 that led to Ecuador becoming the first country to enshrine the rights

00:15:53.260 of nature and its constitution, and that undertone is still there,

00:15:57.740 of course in the country but it's been swamped by severe financial concerns and changes of

00:16:03.900 government and corruption of course the last vice president went to jail late last year for

00:16:11.120 forget seven years or something for corruption his department was the one that was responsible for

00:16:17.080 handing out these mining leases and so on and so on I mean our work has largely been to raise money

00:16:23.640 for civil society in Ecuador, where there are really good people

00:16:28.180 who are struggling against this, and to try to help them

00:16:33.680 to raise the conversation in Ecuador as to what is development

00:16:38.600 and is this really the way that we need to go to tear the country

00:16:42.420 up in this kind of way.

00:16:44.380 As Australian mining companies have been handed more

00:16:48.020 of these concessions than the companies from any other country

00:16:51.720 in the world, it gives us the opportunity to attack these companies back at home.

00:16:57.440 And a few months ago, I was outside the headquarters of BHP, Broken Hill Proprietary

00:17:04.340 Limited, the largest mining company in the world, in Melbourne.

00:17:07.960 We locked down and shut that building down for a day and trying to raise awareness within

00:17:13.540 Australia about the behaviour of our companies overseas.

00:17:18.760 Thank you so much for doing that.

00:17:21.720 Just to think that indigenous peoples of Ecuador have spent decades fighting extractive industry.

00:17:28.660 In response, the Ecuadorian government has persecuted over 200 indigenous activists under anti-terrorism laws.

00:17:35.560 This, of course, doesn't even begin to account for the countless activists who have been targeted, brutalized, and murdered by police forces.

00:17:44.180 So I have this train of thought, you know, what are the dynamics of international organizations and activists standing with indigenous activists and on behalf of the rainforest?

00:17:55.520 And how do you navigate these instances where international actors are privileged and that their lives are not in direct threat from the opposition?

00:18:04.740 Is this degree of separation one reason why it's so imperative for the global community to get involved in these issues?

00:18:11.920 And then at the same time, how does an organization like Rainforest Information Center maintain clear and open communication about the needs of communities who are experiencing violent retributions firsthand?

00:18:25.100 Well, there's no easy answer to questions like that.

00:18:30.100 I guess the answer is we do what we can.

00:18:32.600 Our hope is that if we can create the sense and hopefully the reality 0.99

00:18:40.060 that the world is watching, that the danger to Indigenous activists

00:18:45.440 will be less.

00:18:47.500 However, given the number of activists being murdered on a regular basis,

00:18:55.100 in Ecuador and many other countries in South America

00:18:58.880 and many other countries in the global south,

00:19:01.340 there's no way to feel like we've been very successful in that.

00:19:04.860 And I guess one of the things that I would add is that we try

00:19:11.640 to be very careful not to sort of goad people in countries

00:19:17.520 like Ecuador into doing anything.

00:19:19.820 We try not to take the lead.

00:19:21.560 We try not to make suggestions about do this or do that but rather to hang back in a support capacity where they're the ones who are going to be facing the dangers and they're the ones who understand what's going on on the ground and we wait for them to take a position, to take a stand, to make a move and then we see how we can support them in that rather than, you know, there's always the danger of some kind of eco-imperialism.

00:19:50.560 imperialism and the groups and the indigenous people in Ecuador are very aware of that and so

00:19:56.300 we just try and be very aware of it ourselves and understand that we are best positioned entirely

00:20:02.900 in support so basically what we're doing in Ecuador is fundraising accepting tax-deductible

00:20:09.460 donations in Australia and also through our partners the Earthways Foundation in the United

00:20:15.820 States and sending that money to the civil society in Ecuador to do whatever they want

00:20:21.080 to do in order to move this situation forward, in order to protect the rainforests and the

00:20:26.840 indigenous people.

00:20:28.120 And in Australia, we're taking actions that people perhaps can't safely take in Ecuador 0.91

00:20:34.560 and we're harassing the mining companies at home.

00:20:36.920 So later this month, there's a big mining conference that's being supported by the Australian

00:20:43.380 government's kind of, you know, support for the mining industry. And we're definitely going to

00:20:49.060 be wreaking havoc down there. I'm so happy to hear that. And yeah, it's such a very devastating

00:20:57.620 and tender situation when activists are threatened, their lives threatened, their children's lives

00:21:04.700 threatened. And it's really not something that we face in the same way at all here in the United

00:21:09.640 States. And I feel extremely grateful that to be an activist here, although there are some dangers,

00:21:17.060 it's nothing compared to our fellow activists in other countries. So I appreciate your work

00:21:24.880 trying to support them. To keep in the Ecuadorian conversation, last June an Ecuadorian court

00:21:32.100 suspended the mining activities of a Chinese corporation in the Caja Nature Reserve, citing

00:21:38.240 that the corporation had failed to consult the communities as required by the UN Declaration

00:21:42.840 on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples and Ecuador's constitution. This is the first time in the

00:21:48.840 country's history a court has ever shut down a mine. And in January of 2018, Ecuador's mining

00:21:55.900 minister resigned following the demands of indigenous and environmental activists that he

00:22:00.680 stepped down. So who do you think will prevail in Ecuador? And do you see Ecuador being able to

00:22:06.700 follow the footsteps of, say, Costa Rica, who banned open pit mining in 2010?

00:22:11.920 Well, that's certainly our hope. And that's, you know, our proposal to Ecuador is that this can be

00:22:18.500 done, that Costa Rica has better economic indicators than Ecuador in spite, or perhaps

00:22:25.220 because of having shut down open pit mining, because of course, all of the mining profits

00:22:30.640 end up in other countries, they don't end up in Ecuador or Costa Rica. So we're presenting this

00:22:38.100 argument and giving our support to the civil society in Ecuador to try and spread this

00:22:44.760 understanding. But as to who will prevail, of course, it's very early and hard to say.

00:22:50.540 What we can say is that there's a lot of interest in Ecuador as there is abroad in

00:22:57.060 the rights of nature, that more and more countries are coming to see that just as human rights

00:23:03.380 as a concept didn't even exist 100 years ago, and now it's taken the form of international

00:23:11.080 law and more and more countries are part of human rights conventions and so on, that we

00:23:17.860 have to move the rights of nature forward because, of course, there can be no human

00:23:22.300 rights without an intact nature for humans to be part of one interesting development in this

00:23:29.560 question is that a previous minister in the last ecuadorian government economist alberto acosta

00:23:37.320 has now written a scathing article which we've had translated into english in which we're trying to

00:23:45.080 spread far and wide where he criticizes the economic paradigm behind mining and he points

00:23:52.700 out why it's not going to deliver the goods that the mining industry and their running dogs

00:23:58.880 suggest that you know of course the mining industry says we'll all be rich and it's not true

00:24:04.800 only they may be rich but everyone else is going to be not only just as poor as they were before

00:24:10.860 But all of their other options will have been destroyed, the options for a kind of benign tourism and to use these forests as a veritable pharmacopoeia of the drugs, the industrial products and all of the other incredible bounty that lies still buried within the vast gene pool that will be destroyed if industrial activities destroy these forests. 0.84

00:24:40.860 The light and the meaning that sways her radical ways 0.93

00:24:44.180 That favor the many rooms she wrote

00:24:45.960 There is where you find no answer and questions to remember

00:24:49.680 But no door has been able, has been able to stop the war

00:24:53.260 Rain or shine, it doesn't matter

00:24:55.160 We are clear as the water that chooses to release

00:24:58.620 To release from the chambers up above

00:25:00.520 We are people, we are falling out of nowhere, can't deny it

00:25:04.380 And the stars rise and shine out of the same stone and fire

00:25:07.820 We are people, we are falling out of nowhere, can't deny it

00:25:11.680 And the stars rise and shine out of the same stone and fire

00:25:15.160 it's just insanity and to even think that i mean luckily this this other mining operation that we

00:25:43.260 just speaking of was shut down, but the fact that there was mining activity in a nature reserve,

00:25:49.860 and I just spent the last few months traveling up through the Pacific Northwest, through Oregon,

00:25:56.800 Washington, British Columbia, and Alaska, and to be going into these national parks and these

00:26:04.140 protected areas just to find out that there was active gold mining, polluting these areas that

00:26:11.520 we think are protected. It's insanity. It's insanity that we're going into the last remaining

00:26:17.340 intact places on earth and not just extracting. It's not just the extraction. It's all of the

00:26:24.080 pollution that comes along with it. And it's just crazy because in so many ways, I know most of us

00:26:30.400 think, oh, it's a national forest. It's a national park. It's protected. And really, you just peel

00:26:36.220 a couple layers of that onion and you realize, no, not at all. It's not protected.

00:26:41.520 I just think, you know, the Ecuadorian government's willingness to hand off 14% of the country's subsurface so that oil executives and government officials and middlemen can continue to get richer while indigenous communities are sentenced to a million deaths, waterways are contaminated, mass deforestation is set to occur, and we risk losing one of the world's most biodiverse hotspots and headwater ecosystems.

00:27:08.780 It's just a clear example that we are plagued by a psychological disease that enables and encourages us to habitually set fire to the house we all live in.

00:27:21.020 So in your opinion, you know, what is the root of this psychological problem?

00:27:26.620 It behooves us to spend some of our time turning away from the, you know, fighting one fire after another and to asking questions like that.

00:27:38.900 In about the mid-1980s, when we'd had a lot of success in Australia,

00:27:44.780 at Turania Creek in 1979, no one had heard of rainforests.

00:27:49.520 We didn't know that there were rainforests in Australia.

00:27:52.060 It wasn't called rainforests. 0.68

00:27:53.280 It was called the bastard scrub, and it wasn't considered to be romantic. 0.57

00:27:57.000 It was considered to be thorny and full of vines and leeches, 0.87

00:28:01.320 and it was dank and dismal, and it was the campaigns

00:28:05.120 to protect these rainforests and to spread the understanding

00:28:09.300 that they are the womb of life, home to more than half the species

00:28:13.080 of plants and animals in the world that lend to rainforests

00:28:16.360 becoming this much more romantic kind of view.

00:28:19.940 In New South Wales, after two years of arrests and campaigning,

00:28:25.620 an opinion poll found that over 70% of the people of our state

00:28:29.160 wanted an end to rainforest logging and the government legislated

00:28:32.640 with a huge series of national parks, including Terrania Creek.

00:28:36.560 And from there, we went to Tasmania.

00:28:38.620 New South Wales is rainforest, a subtropical rainforest.

00:28:41.800 Tasmania has temperate rainforests, and we did a huge campaign there.

00:28:46.500 More than 3,000 people came from all over the country

00:28:48.960 to this remote wilderness to blockade a dam that was being built.

00:28:53.780 More than 1,500 people were arrested at that action,

00:28:57.620 and we stopped that dam.

00:28:58.940 The following year, we went up to far north Queensland to protect the tropical rainforests and once again, national parks and eventual world heritage listing rewarded us.

00:29:11.960 However, during that time, basically the first half of the 1980s, for every forest that was being saved worldwide, a thousand forests had disappeared.

00:29:22.680 And it became clear to us that there was no way to save the planet one forest at a time.

00:29:28.940 Of course, these kinds of actions, blockades and so on are really important

00:29:34.220 and incredibly satisfying for the participants,

00:29:37.940 but for the future of the world, they'd be of no significance at all

00:29:41.400 unless we could find a way to address this, what you rightly call,

00:29:45.900 psychological or spiritual disease that allows us to imagine

00:29:50.200 that we can somehow profit from the destruction of our own life support systems.

00:29:56.420 Paul Ehrlich said, we are sawing off the branch that we're sitting on.

00:30:00.540 It doesn't matter how much the timber in that branch is worth. 0.98

00:30:02.980 Clearly a foolish move. 0.96

00:30:04.860 And that is what we're doing. 0.98

00:30:06.540 So how can this be?

00:30:08.120 How can Homo sapiens, you know, the intelligent ape, 1.00

00:30:12.620 how can it be so stupid as to be doing something like this? 1.00

00:30:16.360 Clearly we have the technology to flourish without sawing off the branch 1.00

00:30:21.160 that we're sitting on.

00:30:22.160 Why aren't we doing it?

00:30:23.200 And the more I thought about this in the mid-80s, the more urgent the quest became.

00:30:28.880 So it was with a huge sense of relief in about 1985 or 86 that I came upon a philosophy of

00:30:35.840 nature called deep ecology.

00:30:37.360 And for the first time, I felt that my questions were being answered in a plausible way.

00:30:43.960 So the term deep ecology was coined by the late Arnie Ness, professor of philosophy at

00:30:50.720 Oslo University, and himself an environmental activist

00:30:54.140 and direct actions blockades.

00:30:56.600 He chained himself to the side of a fjord to stop it

00:30:59.640 from being dead and so on.

00:31:01.800 And according to him, underlying all of the symptoms

00:31:05.420 of the environmental crisis, we find the illusion

00:31:09.480 of separation between human beings and the rest

00:31:12.940 of the natural world, the illusion of separation.

00:31:16.100 So this might sound a little bit mystical perhaps,

00:31:18.060 but all you have to do to understand down to earth what he meant

00:31:22.780 is hold your breath for five minutes while you think about it.

00:31:26.720 In other words, it's not something particularly mystical.

00:31:30.040 It's very, very practical.

00:31:31.540 It's very biological.

00:31:32.880 We can't exist for even five minutes without inviting the environment

00:31:39.160 inside ourselves.

00:31:41.680 In fact, we are constantly cycling the environment with every bite of food,

00:31:46.520 with every drop of water with every breath of air there is no out there for our pollution to go

00:31:52.720 it's all in here it's all we are inside this vast cycle and there's a failure of identification and

00:32:00.660 we fail to understand that there is no separation there cannot possibly be any separation we are

00:32:06.940 inextricably embedded in this living world and we have no independent existence so intellectually

00:32:14.420 Actually, nowadays, this is not much of a stretch, but Aunty Ness pointed out that the anthropocentrism or human-centredness that underlies this illusion of separation, anthropocentrism, the idea that human beings are the centre of everything, we are the crown of creation.

00:32:35.520 We are the measure of all being.

00:32:37.020 The world was created by God as a kind of a moral testing ground for one species, us, and everything else is just scenery, is just big players on the scene.

00:32:48.960 Humans are to subdue and dominate nature, and nature is to be in fear and trembling of us.

00:32:54.200 This has been around for so long, at least back to the Old Testament, that every institution of our society has been corrupted by the anthropocentrism that gives rise to this illusion of separation and makes us feel like outsiders in this world and gives us the sense that allows the destruction of our own life support systems to continue without us making really positive and useful steps to bring it to an end.

00:33:24.200 Thank you for explaining deep ecology in that way. It's a term that I've thought about a lot in the building of unlearn and rewild and for the wild, and I really appreciated hearing that.

00:33:37.080 I want to talk about the Council of All Beings, which is described as a series of re-earthing rituals created by you and Joanna Macy.

00:33:47.460 The rituals were created to encourage participants to think beyond their human selves, deepen their awareness, and revive their commitment to defend the living earth.

00:33:58.200 Typically, this begins by participants choosing a more-than-human being, species, or habitat

00:34:03.240 and developing a message about what that entity is currently facing.

00:34:09.660 So after 25 years of facilitating these and other deep ecology workshops,

00:34:15.480 can you share with us some of the most common messages that are released when people come together

00:34:20.480 in this time of ecological crisis?

00:34:23.760 Okay, yeah.

00:34:24.500 Well, I'll be doing a Council of All Beings again in 48 hours. 0.98

00:34:28.440 I do this a lot.

00:34:29.620 I did the other deep ecology experiential exercises last weekend.

00:34:34.700 I do this as much as I can because they were created by Joanna Macy and myself

00:34:40.420 starting in 1986, and Joanna's work at that time when I met her,

00:34:47.280 she called it despair and empowerment,

00:34:49.320 And now she calls it honouring our pain for the world.

00:34:53.420 And so before we go into the kind of experiential deep ecology, such as the Council of All

00:35:00.500 Beings, we always first have a circle, a despair circle, where the participants are encouraged

00:35:08.160 and given a safe container for us to safely express our deepest feelings of anguish and

00:35:17.100 rage and terror about what's happening to our world and what we see going on and the kind of

00:35:22.400 things that you can never say in polite company it brings everybody else down there's a taboo

00:35:27.600 against that kind of expression you never hear it said and so these circles are always stunning in

00:35:35.520 you finally you know have this sense that you're hearing you know what's been at the bottom of

00:35:40.480 your own heart for so long and never gets a chance and it's never invited to express itself

00:35:45.960 And only after that do we allow ourselves to go into other processes like the Council of All Beings.

00:35:54.020 And so in the Council of All Beings, each participant finds an ally in the non-human world.

00:36:00.840 And when I say finds an ally, the best way to do that is to be found by the ally. 0.85

00:36:06.740 So if we have enough time and if we're in the right place, we go out into nature alone, calling out to the world,

00:36:14.100 hey, I'm going to be in the Council of All Beings in an hour

00:36:17.980 and I'm available to speak for you.

00:36:21.500 Is there anyone out there who has anything to say

00:36:23.900 who would like to have a voice in the Council of All Beings

00:36:26.520 because I'm available and unoccupied at the moment?

00:36:30.680 And we wait and see what comes to us.

00:36:33.400 And, of course, if nothing comes to you, then at the end of the hour,

00:36:37.340 you can just choose your ally.

00:36:38.660 That's fine too.

00:36:39.400 But often, in a later sharing, we discover that for some people, that process of experiencing oneself being approached by some other energy than what we normally think of as being ourselves and being invited to represent that being in the Council of All Beings is the most important piece for those people.

00:37:04.340 Anyway, eventually, we all get back together again.

00:37:06.840 we create rough kind of masks we'll just use a paper plate and cut out a couple of eye holes and

00:37:12.560 you know we'll have some crayons and some string we'll all walk through a ceremonial kind of gate

00:37:20.060 to enter the council of all beings and then conversation begins like well we go around

00:37:25.620 once and introduce ourselves i am tiger i am micro risey i am the milky way galaxy basically

00:37:34.540 everyone is invited to the council of all beings except humans that's the way i do it anyway i

00:37:41.020 think joanna macy still invites humans to the council of all beings because obviously humans

00:37:45.800 are part of the council in fact that's the that's the whole reason for doing this work is for humans

00:37:50.960 to understand that they are a playing member of the council of all beings but i've just had bad

00:37:57.140 experience with human beings in the council they they take up all the space and so we hear lots

00:38:02.740 from humans here's a chance for everyone else to be heard and so we gather in council and

00:38:08.940 there's no facilitation at that point it's just a conversation takes place and we always hear

00:38:15.660 things that we've never heard before it's a very moving kind of experience the council of all things

00:38:20.320 and it's not that we end up believing that that actually was the spirit of iguana that spoke you

00:38:30.920 But somehow by putting aside our human identity and inviting some other identity to speak

00:38:38.540 through us, it unleashes a kind of a creativity that, as I say, there are always profound

00:38:46.520 conversations between these different creatures and different places and so on that make us

00:38:52.080 very, very thoughtful afterwards.

00:38:54.600 So that's the Council of All Beings itself.

00:38:57.020 Joanna now calls this work the work that reconnects.

00:39:01.100 So she doesn't use the term deep ecology that much because there was a lot

00:39:05.360 of controversy some decades ago where fights between deep ecology

00:39:10.860 and ecofeminism and this, that, and the other thing.

00:39:15.560 And she just, anyway, she calls it the work that reconnects.

00:39:18.700 And the cycle of that work is it starts from gratitude.

00:39:22.040 We start by rooting ourselves in remembering how grateful we are just to be here and to have this incredible opportunity to be alive and to meet with each other like this.

00:39:33.160 It then moves into honouring our pain for the world and then moves into what Joan calls seeing with new eyes.

00:39:40.980 And the Council of All Beings is one of the processes that allows us to see with new eyes.

00:39:47.060 And then finally, we go into going forth, which is there is always an experience of a deepening of our ecological identity and also an experience of incredible connection with the other people that we've shared this with.

00:40:02.740 So going forth is like, how do we take our new vision and understanding out into back into our lives with us?

00:40:09.440 And then finally, we end up with gratitude again.

00:40:11.980 Yes, I've been able to do that with Joanna at a retreat, and it was really meaningful to hear the group's response to this.

00:40:22.860 And you'd mentioned Arnie Nass, who coined the term deep ecology, and he once said, quote, responsibility or duty is treacherous basis for conservation, end quote.

00:40:34.660 and so much of the work that environmental advocates take part in is both reactionary and

00:40:41.680 in opposition. No pipelines, no to logging, no to dams, etc. So it's no wonder why so many of us

00:40:49.260 are overcome by burnout. And I'm wondering, how can rituals like the ones the Council of All

00:40:55.320 Beings provide nurture us with both relief and joy in moving forward? Very good question,

00:41:02.820 and that they are an antidote to burnout and how they do this I'm sure the answer is much larger

00:41:10.760 than I've been able to understand so far but one of the ways that they do it is that they allow us

00:41:17.480 to celebrate by doing our honouring the pain for the world by allowing ourselves to express

00:41:26.400 our deepest anguish and grief about what we see going on

00:41:30.400 by bearing witness honestly to the terror that we feel

00:41:34.920 at the kind of political and other events

00:41:39.220 that are sweeping the world towards oblivion, it would seem,

00:41:43.700 we give ourselves somehow permission then to celebrate authentically

00:41:50.160 and wholeheartedly and with gusto.

00:41:52.260 And so there are a lot of people who attempt to celebrate while in denial, but that's like, it's like being on quicksand as part of us that knows that underneath that celebration, there's this unexpressed fear, there's this unexpressed anguish.

00:42:10.980 But once we've expressed the fear and the anguish, then we're free to celebrate without restraint.

00:42:18.440 And it is.

00:42:19.520 It's like, wow, we have been 13.7 billion years this universe has been evolving, four and a half billion years I have been evolving on this beautiful planet.

00:42:31.400 And here I am now, a human being, at the point when the universe has become conscious in us human beings, has become conscious in a way that the universe can now turn around and look over its shoulder and gasp in awe and wonder at the trail that it has trod.

00:42:53.040 that we have this incredible vantage point through our sciences,

00:42:57.920 through astronomy, through cosmology,

00:42:59.780 to see the enormous scope of the universe and to see,

00:43:07.140 as Brian Swim said, this planet used to be nothing but molten lava

00:43:12.840 and now it sings opera.

00:43:16.360 So it's like, yes, we are part of a universe that not only is able

00:43:22.120 to move from molten lava to singing opera,

00:43:25.460 but obviously has a propensity or, dare I say, a desire to do so.

00:43:31.620 And when we consider the incredible miracles

00:43:35.020 that the study of evolution reveals to us,

00:43:39.360 I mean, fish learning to walk the land, give me a break.

00:43:42.940 You know, the actual story of how we come to be here

00:43:47.560 is so much more astounding and unlikely than the most bizarre creation myth

00:43:54.320 of an old man with a white beard, you know, pulling a rib out of,

00:43:58.500 you know, and all the rest of it, that it's clear that given the threats

00:44:04.220 that the world is facing at the moment, nothing short of a miracle

00:44:08.940 will save us, but it's also clear that the path that we've travelled

00:44:13.200 with so far is littered with miracles.

00:44:15.540 It's just miracles every step of the way.

00:44:18.460 So that's no guarantee that the miracle that we need,

00:44:21.180 which I propose that miracle, is a profound and very,

00:44:26.080 very fast change in consciousness so that the thrall

00:44:30.480 of anthropocentrism slips away and we are permitted

00:44:35.120 to find our ecological identity.

00:44:39.020 Because, of course, once we identify rather than merely know

00:44:43.740 our ecological selves once we understand that we are not the spider in the middle of the web

00:44:50.440 but we're just one strand in that web then we no longer feel like it's in our self-interest

00:44:56.760 to be dismantling the web it's it's only because we have a kind of a counterfeit sense of self

00:45:03.280 that we could be making that mistake so that's the miracle that we need in my opinion is for us

00:45:08.880 to just wake up to who we really are.

00:45:38.880 Con un corazón temblando por ella

00:45:44.680 Palabras sinceras y su alma viaja así

00:45:53.880 Cantando como, como un pajarillo

00:45:58.880 Curru, curru, ki, cantando es su destino

00:46:03.880 You've written, quote,

00:46:29.440 while we were protecting forest, holes were appearing in the sky and humanity threatens

00:46:35.140 to choke on our own exhaust gases and other byproducts of progress, end quote.

00:46:41.840 Can you tell us about the dawning in which you realized that for every rainforest you

00:46:48.380 successfully protected, hundreds were at the chopping block? How did you navigate the

00:46:53.840 overwhelming understanding that the planet cannot be saved one issue at a time while still being

00:47:00.060 able to dedicate yourself fully to the cause you are called to. And this is something I definitely

00:47:05.400 struggle with. How I did it myself was kind of very personal, and I'm not sure whether it

00:47:13.260 generalized, but the kinds of things that I did was to realize that I couldn't kind of work this

00:47:21.680 out I couldn't figure it out there was not like a mathematical thing where if I was very careful I

00:47:27.820 would come up with the answer it was like more like just like some kind of a life decision needed

00:47:33.100 to be made and I would do things like I was living in the forest and I would go to a part of the

00:47:39.280 forest and I'd lie down on the ground and I'd bury myself in leaves so that I felt like I was inside

00:47:44.700 the earth rather than on the earth you know and i'd meditate and i would remember i would

00:47:51.680 deliberately remember my evolutionary journey i would remember that this little person that i am

00:47:57.380 now is just the most recent moment in this vast vast ancient thing that i was like this tiny tiny

00:48:05.160 leaf at the moment but i was connected still to the tree of life on which that leaf was growing

00:48:11.040 and I could feel the twigs of my own personal ancestry, my parents,

00:48:15.740 and I'd let my mind take me through to the realisation

00:48:20.840 that I was born out of a womb that was born out of a womb

00:48:25.140 and it's just wombs and wombs and wombs going all the way back

00:48:28.720 to the first womb and then what happened before that and so on.

00:48:32.180 And so I would attempt to sort of inhabit that and then from that space

00:48:39.220 and feeling connected to the earth and feeling part of the earth,

00:48:44.180 I would ask this question, what am I going to do?

00:48:47.920 What is there for me to do?

00:48:49.860 And then I brush myself off and whatever I felt like doing after that,

00:48:55.620 that's what I do.

00:48:56.400 I just follow my enthusiasm at that point.

00:48:58.540 So that was my own very idiosyncratic way of making those decisions

00:49:05.840 because how can you decide?

00:49:07.080 Are the whales more or less important than the rainforest, you know?

00:49:12.780 Well, there's no answer to that.

00:49:15.020 But I imagine that there are – it's not like there's just one thing

00:49:20.300 that everybody should be doing.

00:49:22.060 There are 10,000 things that need to be done.

00:49:24.620 And if we surrender to the larger whole of which we clearly are a part,

00:49:30.920 It's like I am like one cell in the body of humanity

00:49:36.520 and humanity is like one cell in the body of the earth.

00:49:40.740 And when I was an embryo, the cells started dividing

00:49:44.200 and one cell went on and started the liver

00:49:47.120 and another cell went on and started the brain.

00:49:49.180 It's not like those cells had to decide what they were going to do.

00:49:53.820 It was just like they just relaxed and surrendered

00:49:55.820 and they went to where they were supposed to be and it all worked out.

00:49:59.220 So I guess I'm working on the assumption that if we humans can let go of that illusion of separation, if we can let go of the anthropocentrism and surrender back to being merely one cell in the body of the earth, then our enthusiasm will lead us to the most appropriate thing that we can contribute to the healing of our world.

00:50:25.640 And I guess one other thing I'll add to that is Thich Nhat Hanh,

00:50:29.800 the Vietnamese Buddhist monk who coined the term engaged Buddhism,

00:50:36.700 a new school of Buddhism which doesn't retreat from the world

00:50:40.260 but engages with the world as its spiritual practice.

00:50:43.820 He was once asked by some students, they said,

00:50:47.940 Sir, what is the most important thing that we can do

00:50:51.360 for the healing of our world?

00:50:52.620 And his answer stunned them.

00:50:54.940 He said, the most important thing that we can do for the healing of our world

00:50:59.300 is to hear inside ourselves the sounds of the earth crying.

00:51:04.180 What an amazing thing to say.

00:51:06.080 So this suggests first that, oh, you mean those cries that I hear inside myself

00:51:12.320 might not be only my own personal biographical pain?

00:51:18.620 You know, my mother didn't breastfeed me for long enough or whatever it was.

00:51:22.300 you know that the therapist talks about that could be the earth that we hear crying and the

00:51:28.700 second thing is that this is the most important thing that we can do and to my mind the only

00:51:34.700 reason that that could possibly be is because unless we're prepared to hear the sounds of the

00:51:41.300 earth crying we won't be able to act in a powerful way in her defense and so you know the other thing

00:51:48.980 that I did besides burying myself in leaves and surrendering

00:51:52.660 and then following my enthusiasm, which has never led me astray,

00:51:56.640 I may add, was to spend a lot of time in the deepest despair

00:52:00.960 and not be afraid of that despair, especially doing that in company,

00:52:05.560 in workshops, in circles with people, sharing these things

00:52:08.900 with each other and then discovering that the empowerment

00:52:11.920 that Joanna Macy promises when that is done correctly invariably follows

00:52:17.220 and then taking that power and throwing it at, you know, 1.00

00:52:22.500 whatever the next issue or whatever the next campaign

00:52:25.380 or whatever the next enthusiasm suggested.

00:52:31.220 Yes, yes.

00:52:32.380 Well, my last question for you, and it's a big one,

00:52:38.860 but you've stated more than once that you believe

00:52:42.640 we are nearing the end of humanity.

00:52:45.200 how have you worked through the despair to find empowerment in this trajectory

00:52:50.480 have you in this lifetime already began to say goodbye and or are there certain wisdoms that

00:52:59.100 have aided in your acceptance i i don't remember ever saying that categorically there's no doubt

00:53:06.760 in my mind that that is a strong strong possibility but i don't think i've ever had the

00:53:13.880 sense that that's inevitable. Anyone who denies that's a possibility has got to be deluding

00:53:20.120 themselves. You know, I think everyone has to accept the possibility that humanity may be

00:53:27.020 drawing close to, you know, to our moment in the sun. But for myself, no, I haven't. I'm 72 years

00:53:35.340 old and I now have a four-year-old son and I've got a lot of skin in the game and I propose that

00:53:44.300 avoiding the extinction of humanity, that can't be done without protecting vast amounts of wild

00:53:53.000 nature. So avoiding the extinction of humanity has to be the crucial question on everybody's

00:54:01.200 mind and certainly the crucial question on my mind and it's the only game in town once you've

00:54:06.060 seen this how on earth can you possibly sink back into i don't know what smoking dope um you know 0.91

00:54:14.660 becoming famous you know it's ridiculous and so uh it's not over till it's over yes it'd take a 0.59

00:54:21.580 miracle uh at this point to uh to save us but uh miracles are a dime a dozen and uh and we don't

00:54:29.240 know what the conditions are that might lead to that miracle maybe you know the hundreds monkey

00:54:35.040 maybe there's already 99 monkeys out there and uh wouldn't i feel like an idiot if i didn't show up

00:54:41.420 you know i might be the last monkey that's needed in order to turn this thing around and you know

00:54:47.500 to be part of that moment when humanity wakes up finally and uh takes the turn in time before

00:54:56.260 plunging over that cliff into oblivion. But just in case we aren't able to take that turn,

00:55:03.320 let's say that we are the last generation of humans. All of the mistakes that we've been making

00:55:11.280 bring this story of humans to a close. Well, first of all, nothing lives forever. Everything

00:55:17.640 becomes extinct sooner or later. And so there's no doubt that human beings are going to become

00:55:23.060 extinct the only question is when is it going to be i vote for another 100 million years or

00:55:28.580 dare i vote for 500 million years you know like i haven't had enough by any means you know i feel

00:55:34.120 like we're just beginning to figure out how to enjoy ourselves it would be ridiculous to exit

00:55:39.800 the stage at this point if that is what's happening then how am i to live and you know what am i to do

00:55:47.440 with my life? Well, I could jump into the rat race. No, I don't think so. So there's not that

00:55:54.320 many choices. So the first thing that I'd like to do is I'd like to celebrate with immense gratitude

00:56:00.940 for having been privileged to participate in this 13.7 billion year journey and to know that even

00:56:08.500 if we become extinct, all of the different bits that make us up, there's nowhere to go. You can't

00:56:13.760 fall out of this net we're just going to be recycled into other things as the dinosaurs

00:56:18.420 are still around in the birds and you know and so on and so on and by regularly doing the deep

00:56:27.180 ecology work I find that I can remain pretty upbeat nearly all of the time and to be able to

00:56:34.380 throw myself at the issues to do whatever I can do to avoid that ultimate catastrophe but

00:56:43.380 what happens after that uh is none of my business really well thank you john so much for

00:56:49.560 going into these deep questions with us and thinking aloud together it's been a lot of

00:56:57.220 a lot of depth in this conversation and i really appreciate your time

00:57:02.580 and thank you so much for all your work over all these years thanks a lot

00:57:13.380 Thank you for listening to For the Wild podcast.

00:57:32.980 I'm Ayanna Young.

00:57:34.320 The music you heard today was from Ila Bamba.

00:57:38.220 The theme music is Silence Returns by Bo and Like a River from Kate Wolfe.

00:57:43.380 I'd like to thank our production team of soulmates, our producer and editor, Andrew Storrs,

00:57:50.560 our writer and research collaborator, Francesca Glassbell, and our music coordinator, Carter

00:57:55.720 Lou McElroy.

00:57:57.560 If you haven't rated us on iTunes, please take the time and do so.

00:58:01.700 It really, really helps get these messages to a wider audience.

00:58:05.700 Also, sign up for our newsletter at forthewild.world to stay attuned.

00:58:10.620 All right, until next week.

00:58:13.380 We'll be right back.

00:58:43.380 Thank you.

For The Wild - November 29, 2018

JOHN SEED on Deep Ecological Identity ⧸98

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