David Hume on Wounded Places

Today I came across an essay by the eighteenth century Scottish philosopher David Hume, "A Treatise on Human Nature." Turns out that in 1739, Hume was considering how what I call wounded places affect people. Here's what he wrote about the difference between places that have undergone some kind of emergency and those that are just not very attractive:

"A barren or desolate country always seems ugly and disagreeable, and commonly inspires us with contempt for the inhabitants. This deformity, however, proceeds in a great measure from a sympathy with the inhabitants, as has been already observ’d; but it is only a weak one, and reaches no farther than the immediate sensation, which is disagreeable. The view of a city in ashes conveys benevolent sentiments; because we there enter so deep into the interests of the miserable inhabitants, as to wish for their prosperity, as well as feel their adversity."

Now, we can (and should) argue that it is arrogant and insensitive to contempt for those who live in a poor, unlovely place. But what's interesting here is that three hundred years ago Hume was thinking about how nature strikes the mind and heart in different ways, depending on what has happened to it.

How can we move deeper into this question? How can we assess our own responses to a city torn apart by an earthquake... and a city falling into disrepair as a result of poverty? Where is the "environment" in each? Where is "Nature?" Where does our compassion lie in each circumstance?

James Hillman on Beauty

Here's something from that innovative and opinionated psychologist James Hillman:

"That the world is loveless results directly from the repression of beauty, its beauty and our sensitivity to beauty. For love to return to the world, beauty must first return, else we love the world only as a moral duty: Clean it up, preserve its nature, exploit it less. If love depends on beauty, then beauty comes first, a priority that accords with pagan philosophy rather than Christian. Beauty before love also accords with the all-too-human experience of being driven to love by the allure of beauty" (from "The Practice of Beauty" in Uncontrollable Beauty, ed. Bill Beckley, with David Shapiro).

Hillman goes on to say that what's really repressed in psychology today is not violence, not misogyny, not child abuse: it's beauty and the acceptance of how important beauty is to the well-being of people. Perhaps there wouldn't be so much absenteeism at work, he suggests, perhaps the attention span of school students would improve, if people could spend time in places that were lovely and cared for rather than sterile and ugly.

It's a great essay, worth buying the book for, although there are a lot of other interesting pieces in this collection as well.

A Brief Respite from (Electric) Power

I arrived home late Monday night after leading a workshop in Puget Sound, Washington, to discover that Hurricane Irene had knocked out the power in our rural community. Yesterday morning I was able to work on my laptop until the battery ran down, then my husband and I drove to Scranton, 35 miles away, and spent a few hours in a coffee shop, recharging our electronics and catching up on email.

We then bought some bags of ice and went home to move the food from the refrigerator into coolers. Even though practically everything on my to-do list involves the internet or the computer, I was looking forward to cooking dinner on the gas stove, then spending the evening reading by kerosene lamp. In late afternoon, however, the power came back on.

What, I wondered, would we as a culture do if the internet really went haywire? Forget the monumental problems that banks, airlines, governments would have keeping their systems running. How would we behave as individuals? I like to think that, despite the shock and initial inconvenience, we’d take some pleasure in the new reality. In the evening people might haul out old board games to play. Couples might sit in front of the fireplace holding hands and talking. Parents might tell stories to their children. Students on college campuses might once again exchange ideas in the student union instead of sitting in isolation over their smart phones. When the power was eventually restored, we would all be relieved. But perhaps we would also feel a tug of regret, as I did yesterday, that something creative, quiet, intimate, and sweet that had briefly touched our lives had now been snatched away.

Where Art Confronts Anxiety

An article in the Arts & Leisure section of today's New York Times discusses Andrew Moore's photographs of the crumbling grandeur of Detroit: the abandoned Beaux-Arts railroad station (above), the hollow steel skeletons of former assembly rooms in the Ford plant, a moldy carpet in what was once Henry Ford's office. Although some people, particularly residents of Detroit, have criticized Moore's work as "ruin porn" that presents only a negative view of the city, Moore obviously finds a strange beauty in what he sees. He describes Detroit and his photos of it as the place "where art confronts anxiety."

The emergence of art from waste and the grand visions of former times also suffuses the work of photographer Emmet Gowin, who took aerial black-and-white photos of the Hanford Nuclear plant, mining operations in Montana, and the battlefields of Kuwait.

What the work of both these photographers has in common with the philosophy of Radical Joy for Hard Times is a willingness to pause and look more closely at what would seem, on the surface, to be so ugly and obsolete that it requires nothing more than to be ignored. A quick look at the old Detroit train station evokes sadness; one at the Hanford Plant a sense of awe and fear. But Moore and Gowin show that the willingness to simply witness without judgment reveals new beauties.

In the work of Moore and Gowin, however, the human is absent, and the message is that in these places there is no threshold whatsoever over which humans can cross. It is as if all the people who built these places, worked in them, lived in them are as extinct as the activities that went on there. With Radical Joy for Hard Times, one actually enters those deserted places and spends time there. The resulting photographs would zoom out to show not just the place but the people contemplating the place, the people telling their stories about what the place meant and still means to them. Finally they would show the people making an act of beauty from found objects, so that deserted, desolate place acquires, quite simply, new meaning, new purpose, new beauty.

Solastalgia: The Pain People Feel When the Place They Love Is Under Assault

"Is There an Ecological Unconscious," by Daniel B. Smith was published in the New York Times Magazine more than a year ago, but it's such an important piece that it's worth recirculating. Smith explores the science and psychology in the relationship between humans and nature.

Smith opens the article with the story of Glenn Albrecht, the Australian philosophy professor who coined the term "solastalgia," meaning “the pain experienced when there is recognition that the place where one resides and that one loves is under immediate assault . . . a form of homesickness one gets when one is still at ‘home.’ ” Albrecht came up with the term after getting calls from people suffering from anxiety, stress, and depression as a result of the massive open-pit coal mining taking place around their homes in Hunter Valley, a formerly lush and beautiful place known as the "Tuscany of the South."

Albrecht has continued to study the effects of ecological damage on people's psyches. This link will take you to his blog, where he pursues the subject from many different angles.

That's Glenn Albrecht in the photo above. It was taken on June 19, 2010, as he and his wife participated in the first annual Radical Joy for Hard Times Global Earth Exchange. He writes: "The location was chosen as it has a commanding view of the desolation of the Hunter Valley by open cut coal mining. My wife Jill and I selected white stones in the immediate area to build an Earth Dove [Radical Joy for Hard Times bird]. The Earth Dove had an olive branch placed in its beak as a peace offering to the earth. The olive branch was taken from the garden of a person in the Hunter Valley whose life has been badly affected by open-cut coal mining. She has had to move from her ancestral home to a new location to avoid mining, but now it too is under threat from an expanding coal mine."

Mockery as Art & Rebellion

Nicholas Kristof, whose work is always brave and inspiring, wrote in his column in The New York Times on Sunday, April 17 about the creative use of mockery as a tool for rebellion. He described the Serbian youth movement, Otpor (resistance), which started with just a few members and eventually mobilized enough support to spearhead the downfall of Slobodan Milosevic.

Besides practicing non-violence, the young rebels rallied people to their cause by making fun of the despot who was universally feared and hated. One stunt was to put Milosevic's picture on a barrel and roll it down the street, inviting people to hit it with sticks.

After Otpor helped bring about the overthrow of Milosevic, they began holding seminars for other oppressed peoples, including several Egyptians, who went to Serbia to get ideas for their own recent revolution.

The use of humor as an antidote to fear, of wild creativity to fight rigid oppression, of singing and talking in public places to fight the rule of silence—these are important tactics, not just for overthrowing tyrants but for dealing with other regimes (corporate, industrial, political) in which we feel powerless, humiliated, and helpless.

Radical Joy for Hard Times confronts environmental assaults with beauty. This is not elite beauty, beauty made only by the recognizably talented, but beauty re-imagined by ordinary people. Expressing sorrow and compassion for a place in the moment, we use materials found at the wounded place to transform our relationship with the place. It's democratic, empowering, and creative.

I'm very interested in exploring how other Otpor tactics might work for the environment.

Highs and Lows with Dolphins

Last Sunday, the celebration of Earth Day at the Unitarian-Universalist Congregation of Binghamton, I gave a sermon called "Rebalancing Act," in which I reflected on different ways of thinking about the "balance of nature" under current global conditions. What prompted this subject was a memorable experience of witnessing dolphins swimming in the Gulf of Mexico last fall, just three months after BP capped its leaking well, and how we, the witnesses to their lovely, fluid play, responded.

I had flown to Louisiana for Gulf Coast Rising, a day of making beauty and generosity for the land and people affected by the BP oil spill. The event was sponsored by Radical Joy for Hard Times. A few of us met on the southern shore of Grand Isle, a long, narrow island south of the Louisiana mainland that, because of its vulnerable geography, stretched out from east to west in the Gulf, was particularly hard hit by the flowing oil.

There on the beach we could see rescue teams and vehicles cleaning up other beaches. But it was a beautiful fall day. The sun was shining, the sky was blue, gulls and pelicans flew overhead, and the water looked clean and clear. We made a labyrinth in the sand and filled it with birdseed. We were holding a ceremony just prior to walking the labyrinth for the first time when we noticed that a pod of bottlenose dolphins were swimming very close to the sea wall just a few feet away.

Immediately we left off the ceremony... or rather we went over to be with the dolphins, who seemed to have arrived just in time to participate in the ceremony. There were about ten to twelve of them not more than 15-20 feet out in the water. They were diving, arcing in the sunlit air, leaping and flashing. They were beautiful, and they exemplified playfulness, freedom, and fluid movement.

As we watched them, we were full of joy. And at the same time, we were full of sorrow, for we knew that these animals were living in a dangerous environment. Even though the water looked clean, we knew that the entire food chain, from microorganisms that ingested the oil and the dispersants that BP sprayed to break up the oil, all the way up to the fish and the dolphins themselves were toxic. We knew that the dolphins were at the top of that food chain. Our rapture in the moment was mixed with dread for the dolphins' future.

Joy and sorrow, rapture and dread: we stood in the balance, holding both. Perhaps receiving those two apparently contrary burdens and holding them both gently and mindfully, honoring the utter validity of both, will be our primary responsibility as we encounter ecological crises in the years to come.

(The photo above was taken that day. I didn't try to photograph the dolphins, because their presence at that moment seemed sacred and not to be "captured." However, that's the patch of water they visited. You can see the clean-up equipment in the distance.)

How to Ride the Wave

How do you ride into the wave in hard times? Reflections on the story of Susumu Sugawara, which I posted yesterday, about the Japanese fisherman who piloted his boat, Sunflower, right into the oncoming tsunami, survived, and ever since has been using the boat to ferry people, medicine, and supplies:

1. Don't attempt to flee. Head right into the thick of it.

2. Even though you're overwhelmed by your opponent, neither fight it nor capitulate to it. Find a rhythm with it and hang on.

3. When the onslaught ends, take a while to get your bearings.

4. Make your way back to familiar shores.

5. Reach out and help others using what you've brought back.

(Image above is "The Great Wave of Kanagawa" by the 18th century Japanese artist, Hokusai)

Heading Into the Tsunami

Susumu Suguwara was in his fishing boat, Sunflower, when he saw the tsunami racing toward him. Instead of turning back to shore, however, Suguwara did just the opposite. Saying a silent goodbye to fishermen in the other boats he passed and offering his apologies for not being able to save them, Sugawara headed for the wave.

"I talked to my boat and said you've been with me 42 years. If we live or die, then we'll be together, then I pushed on full throttle."

The fisherman was inundated by the thirty-foot wave, but when the water had slipped by him and he saw the shore, he knew he had survived. Four or five more waves followed, but in the end, Suguwara and his Sunflower were intact.

In the weeks since the earthquake and tsunami set off physical, emotional, social, and economic aftershocks in Japan, Susumu Sugawara has been working to transport people, supplies, and medicine to people. He charges no money for his services.

Beauty in London for the People of Japan

Eugene Hughes, director of People Brands in London, breached the wall of immobility that so many of us feel as we confront both our sorrow and our compassion for the people and the Earth in Japan. He wrote out the following poem by the great 17th century Japanese poet, Basho, and tied it to all the flowering cherry trees in his neighborhood.

Here's the poem:

If you will let me,

I will willingly wipe

Salt tears from your eyes

With these fresh leaves.

Where's the Temple?

A week ago, a gray, rainy afternoon the day before I left Bali, I impulsively asked my driver. Eka Merta Sedana, to take me to Tanah Lot. I had never been to this temple on the sea, only accessible at low tide, for it is known to be inundated with tourists who come to take photos of the sun setting dramatically behind the open-sided building. But I was curious and needed a lift. I was feeling sad because a Balinese friend is very ill, because the weather in Bali has been so unusually rainy (people blame global warming) that all flowers of the fruits and crops are being knocked off the plants, and because the situation in Japan is so sad and frightening.

What I found at Tanah Lot was not what I expected. The tide was coming in, and people from many places—Java, Japan, Australia, France, Bali, America—were wading out on the rocks to get a photo of the temple, still dramatic under gray skies. But the real drama was elsewhere. As the waves came in and people got splashed, they were shrieking with laughter and delight. It was a scene of joy, childlike play, and a momentary release of all the national differences and personal cares that usually bind us.

When I got back to the car, I was feeling so exhilarated that I babbled to Eka about what I had seen. I showed him the photos I had taken. "Where's the temple?" he asked in surprise.

But I had seen something more wonderful even than the temple: radical joy in hard times.

A Spontaneous Earth Exchange

Sometimes people tell me apologetically that they would love to do a Radical Joy for Hard Times Earth Exchange for a wounded place, but they just don't have the time.

The following story, which comes from Laura Staman, Director of Outdoor Programs at Sweet Briar College in Virginia, proves that anyone can do an Earth Exchange anytime at anyplace. All you need is a place, your own personal emotional attachment to it, and the willingness to bring those two elements together for a few moments.

I’d like to tell you about something that happened recently. It is related to the ongoing gift of hope and listening to the land that Radical Joy for Hard Times represents. In my neighborhood there is a wonderful section of woods I enjoy hiking through. It is a spot of wild in the city of Lynchburg. Well, when I was walking the other day I discovered that a patch of that woods had been cleared to build a home. Though it is not a terrible thing to build a home, I was shaken by the clearing of the woods and destruction of forest growth. At first I dropped my head, said a prayer and walked by sadly. The hardest feeling sometimes is helplessness.

But then I decided to walk back into the space and sit and listen. It was as if the land just needed to be acknowledged... like it was dissociated or something from the trauma. So I sat and listened. Moved into the space and then just prayed to bless this place and help the earth recover from the hurt and the dramatic change. I blessed the home that would stand there and hoped the Beings there could live in harmony. Then I created the Radical Joy for Hard Times bird out of roots that had been ripped from the earth.... and I felt like I had made a difference somehow to the place, and at least to my consciousness.

Change is inevitable, and sometimes destructive, and this time I felt empowered to acknowledge it and to offer peace. The bird, and the memory of the Global Earth Exchanges, gave me a vehicle for doing something. I felt I had a voice and was connected to something larger than myself, therefore not helpless.

As I think back over this simple act I gave to the land and the future home, I reflect on how it is much like the healing I am doing now from a childhood trauma. Facing it, bringing peace into my life, blessing myself, building art out of its roots, and creating a new home inside myself.

Bioneers by the Bay

Creativity is all about putting things together and seeing what happens. The Egyptians invented soap by mixing animal fat and alkaline and noticing that the resulting substance cleaned things. Picasso stuck bicycle handlebars to a seat and made a bull's head. And the Marion Institute of Marion, MA does it each year by bringing together a wide variety of dedicated people who are determined to change the way the world works.

October 22-24 was the sixth annual Bioneers by the Bay, a gathering devoted to exploring ideas and action in the areas of health and healing, sustainability, green economics, environmental education, spirituality, and creative and equitable ways of living together on the planet. The event runs in conjunction with the original Bioneers, a large gathering that takes place at roughly the same in San Rafael, CA.

A few of this year's highlights at Bioneers by the Bay:

Diane Wilson, the Gulf Coast shrimper who decided to take on the oil industry that was polluting her homeland, gave a keynote speech that make everyone in the audience feel like they could triumph over injustice!

Steve Brown, Toni Saunders, and Cassandra Saunders, a white man, an Africa-American woman, and a young poet who has cerebral palsy presented a graphic, occasionally uncomfortable, and unforgettable workshop on how power and privilege affect our lives in many ways—most of them subtle and taken for granted.

Young people attended in large numbers, presenting programs, telling their stories, and sharing their visions. If you ever assumed that American youth think only about retreating behind their cyber screens, it's not so! They are planting organic gardens at their high schools, taking a long look at the future and their own parts in it, working to end coal-burning in their states, singing rap songs about justice and inclusivity, and fired with determination to take care of their world.

Antwi Akom, founder of the Wangari Maathai Center for Economic, Educational, and Enviornmental Designn, talked passionately about the need to revolutionize education in America, especially in the inner cities. He is heading numerous project to synthesize green jobs, climate change, and educational equity.

My own workshop on Radical Joy for Hard Times was held in New Bedford's Whaling Museum. We began with everyone in the group talking about some aspect of nature that they're worried about, and then launched into a discussion of how we deal with these difficult feelings of loss, guilt, and anger. I offered a meditation for coping with what often seems like overwhelming despair and discouragement. At the end, for our Act of Beauty, we formed a human snowflake under the giant whale skeletons suspended from the ceiling.

It is estimated that about two thousand people attended the gathering. What invariably happened was that when any two or more of them got together for a few minutes, ideas, partnerships, and possibilities quickly arose.

Heartbreaking

Call it the click response. The grotesque images we’ve been seeing for the past two months, of sea birds gripped in carapaces of toxic oil and dolphins expelling black muck from their blowholes, are so hard to look at that we want to click immediately to a different website, turn the page of the paper, or switch the channel.

Yet those reactions of horror, revulsion, and pity actually indicate that we have a healthy capacity for compassion. Compassion means, literally, to feel with another. When that other is suffering, the compassion response that arises in us is painful, so we seek relief by turning away. And it’s hard to convince ourselves when we see the effects of BP’s non-stop gusher that those creatures aren’t suffering.

Some relatives of the eleven men who were killed when the Deep Water Horizon rig exploded on April 20 have complained that the media is focusing too much attention on the environmental impact of the accident, while ignoring the human victims. Said L.D. Manuel, the father of one of the men killed, “Everyone talks about the birds and the damage to the Gulf and everything, but they never talk about the guys that got hurt. That really bothers me.”

It is unquestionably tragic that innocent people died while simply doing their jobs; they were the first casualties of this calamity. We feel compassion for their loved ones, as well as for the many residents of the Gulf Coast whose lives and livelihoods may be changed irrevocably as a result of this spill. But we also feel sorrow about the destruction of the animals and fish, the wetlands, and the ocean itself. And that sorrow is not only for the natural world, it is also for our human relationship with it.

Frequently, those who express regret about the loss, or potential loss, of some wild place or species are accused of caring more about nature than about people. Someone who objects that proposed industry or development in a place will adversely affect an owl, a snaildarter, or an ash tree is criticized for “anthropomorphizing.” Afraid of being thought over-sensitive or “soft,” the ecologically incriminated hasten to excuse themselves (as I just did above) and try to temper their concern about the natural world with hearty assurances that, no, no, they really do care about people, too.

It’s time to accept that, as sophisticated beings capable of compassion, we humans are touched and saddened not only by assaults on people but by those on nature as well. It’s time to acknowledge that regretting loss in nature does not mean that we are indifferent to people. It is time, finally, stop apologizing for loving the natural world.

Nature—the rocks, waters, plants, fish, birds, and animals that surround us, or environ us—preceded us humans onto the planet. They are, quite literally, our ancestors and they have been a constant presence throughout our entire evolving existence. The biologist E.O. Wilson speculates that the propensity our prehistoric ancestors developed to get along comfortably in nature eventually evolved into a genetic trait Wilson calls “biophilia,” or “the connections that human beings subconsciously seek with the rest of life.”

The ways humans love nature are infinite and individual. A hunter sitting in a deer blind on a cold fall morning, a skier skimming down powdery slopes, a biologist peering at microbes through a microscope, and a backpacker trekking through remote Alaskan wilderness are all absorbed in and by that partly familiar, yet always somewhat unknowable presence we call nature. Nature inspires us with its resilience, gives us solace when we’re sad, mirrors our joy, and lifts our hearts in unexpected and surprising ways, when, for example, we look up from work into a blazing sunset or hear a robin singing in the pre-dawn darkness. Nature fascinates, in our own backyard, at the far side of a scenic overlook on the highway, and as we imagine it in remote places. An estimated 100 million Americans watched the eleven-part TV documentary, "Planet Earth" last year. Nature gets along fine without us humans, yet it is often in trouble because of us.

And so our hearts break when we see these Gulf Coast birds and animals dying of oil, because we know that an ineffable source of meaning, beauty, and inspiration is being destroyed in us as well. That is heartbreaking. Knowing and accepting so makes us human.

Seven Continents!

On June 19, 2010, about sixty groups, on every one of the seven continents of the planet, met at ecologically wounded places for the first annual Global Earth Exchange, sponsored by the non-profit organization Radical Joy for Hard Times.

They gathered at polluted rivers, clear-cut forests, and the sites of abandoned factories. They went to coal mines and the sites of gas drilling. They honored endangered bats, dolphins, and wild horses. In Antarctica a scientist focused on the glacier that is retreating farther and farther each year rom the window of the research station. In New South Wales, Australia, Glenn Albrecht, the philosopher who coined the term solastalgia, meaning "the pain one feels on recognizing that the land one loves is under assault," did an Earth Exchange on the hill above Hunter Valley, where open pit coal mining has wreaked constant noise, light, and pollution on a community.

The size of the groups ranged from one to 36. In Boulder, Colorado a woman had private a Earth Exchange at a house she bought that had been a meth lab and where a murder had taken place. In southwest Washington, a group (pictured above) gathered at the site of a forest that had been cleared. And three people met at dawn to drum on the beautiful white-sand beach at Navarre, Florida, where the first oily globs from BP's broken rig have begun washing ashore. When a passerby asked if they were members of a band rehearsing for a show, one member of the Earth Exchange responded, "Oh no, we're not a band. We just came to be with a sick friend." There was a pause, and then the man who had asked the question said, "Thank you for doing this."

At each location, people talked about or reflected on their feelings about the destruction of lands and animals and spent time sitting or walking on the land, bearing witness to it in its present condition.

Each Earth Exchange concluded with an "Act of Beauty," something given back to the place or species that has given much to humans. In most cases this act included the construction of a stylized bird, the Radical Joy for Hard Times symbol, made of found materials.

Said one woman who participated in the San Antonio River Earth Exchange in Texas, "I will remember this day for the rest of my life."

Barry Lopez to Join Global Earth Exchange

Barry Lopez, the acclaimed author of many books, including the Arctic Dreams, which won the National Book Award; Of Wolves and Men; and the recent anthology, The Future of Nature, will participate in the Global Earth Exchange sponsored by Radical Joy for Hard Times.

On that day, people around the world will gather at ecologically wounded places to share their stories about what the place means to them... spend time sitting, walking, and "listening" to the land... and give back an Act of Beauty (a song, a dance, a prayer, a sculpture, etc.).

Lopez, who last month was the featured guest on the very last show of Bill Moyers's forty-year career, will participate privately in rural Oregon, where he lives.

Here's what he wrote about the Global Earth Exchange: "It's wonderful of you, and important, to sponsor and encourage this work."

What Is Nature Anyway?

A person who calls him- or herself an environmentalist is presumed to love nature. More than that, you could say that an environmentalist is someone who perceives a threat to nature (e.g. extinction, pollution, clearcutting) and wants to alter circumstances that are creating that threat.

But what is nature anyway? The dictionary defines nature as the physical or material world and its phenomena, in other words, that which is not created by humans. Most of us think of nature as the world of plants, rocks, hills, seas and beaches, and animals, entities that “surround” (environ means to "surround") human beings and exist independently of them. The Norwegian ecologist, Fern Wickson writes that, if “nature” is a place that is uninfluenced by humankind, then, really, there is no nature on the planet at all. “However, even if one sees nature as including humanity, the concept becomes so all-encompassing as to be practically useless…. An atom bomb becomes as ‘natural’ as an anthill.”

Culturally, we live with two contrary depictions of nature. On one hand nature is a fragile, tender thing that needs protecting from large, brutal forces that would destroy it. This is nature as the cute baby seal on the rock, imminent victim of cruel hunters with harpoons.

On the other hand, nature itself is the brutal force. This is the version Hollywood favors. This nature can—and will—get out of control and wreak havoc. People are going about their ordinary lives, rather like the seal on the rock, when relentless nature swoops down upon them in a terrible and deadly form: volcano, tornado, plague of insects, forest fire.

Nature is like that famous image that tests your ability to perceive dualities: look at it one way and it’s a vase, rearrange your gaze and see it as two profiles regarding each other. Nature swings back and forth: victim/villain, victim/villain. Cute and cuddy/ugly, terrifying, and out of control. What the current ecological crisis presents us with is an image of nature that is both these visions at once: Nature about to go amok and destroy the world because of climate change, and nature victimized and killed because of climate change. Nature is the perpetrator of disaster and nature is the victim of the disaster.

What do you think nature is?

Barry Lopez Reflects on Nature, Horror, and Beauty with Bill Moyers

As he prepared to retire after four decades in broadcast journalism, Bill Moyers thought long and hard about whom to invite as his guest on the last broadcast of his Bill Moyers Journal. In the end, he decided that the honor should go to author Barry Lopez, whom he described as "someone whose curiosity about the world, and pursuit of it, have set the gold standard for all of us whose work it is to explain those things we don't understand."

During the thirty-five-minute interview Lopez, the award-winning author of many books of fiction and non-fiction, spoke eloquently about nature as what he called "the full expression of life," the whole picture of the earth and its inhabitants, not simply a collection of majestic landscapes like those that appear on the pages of calendars.

Despite the fact that the phenomena of the natural world play the starring role in all his books, Lopez insisted that "I'm not writing about nature. I'm writing about humanity. And if I have a subject, it is justice. And the rediscovery of the manifold way in which our lives can be shaped by the recovery of a sense of reverence for life."

Moyers and Lopez also talked about the relationship of beauty and horror. Lopez began by saying that, even though he has lived for forty years in the Oregon wilderness, he loves New York City, especially when the sky is a particular shade of blue, as it was on this April day in 2010 when Moyers was conducting the interview.

Moyers replied that the sky in New York was that very color on the morning of September 11, 2001, when the two airliners were crashed into the World Trade Towers. What does that do to any idea of beauty? Moyers asked his guest.

Lopez responded: "Real beauty is so deep you have to move into darkness in order to understand what beauty is.... What you must do is build a system of civilization that is as aware of darkness as it is of beauty."

Click here to watch the complete broadcast of Bill Moyers's interview with Barry Lopez.

Humans Don't Desire Like Bettongs Desire

One of the most fascinating sessions I attended at the Parliament of the World’s Religions was called “Enabling Response: Contributions of the Ecological Humanities toward an Environmental Culture.” Freya Mathews, Associate Professor in the Philosophy Program at Melbourne’s La Trobe University and author of several books, including one I particularly admire, The Ecological Self, talked about the problem environmentalists run into when they try to persuade people to rein in their desires for the sake of a sustainable planet.

“We have to want what the biosphere needs us to want,” Mathews said. Unfortunately, humans have the capacity to want in much bigger, more creative ways than their biology demands. Unlike the bettong, for example, a small Australian mammal also known as the rat kangaroo, “which only wants to eat truffles,” humans have very complicated desires, desires that are fed by fantasy, ego, envy, and many other enticements. “Can we imagine a synergy between humans and nature?” Mathews queried.

In my book, The World Is a Waiting Lover, I unfold an arc of desire from raw, potent physical attraction to the longing to transcend and become intimately united with the great mystery of being. The force I explore is the archetypal Beloved, the inner flame of passion that allures us all our lives to connect with the people, ideas, and acts that will bring out our higher self. This path can be a joyful one and very rewarding, but it is basically solitary.

We all have an inner Beloved, but how can we get those Beloveds together on behalf of the Earth?

Mathews discussed the need for activities that would create meaning for people through what she calls onto-poetics (ontos is the Greek word for being), since “the language of the world is the language of poetics and symbol.” Examples would be festivals, pilgrimages, invocations expressed in language that plumbs below the surface and stirs what a colleague of mine calls the indigenous-mind.

The outcome of such practices? “We are sure to be ravished,” Mathews concluded.

Street Arts for the Earth

The Balinese barong has been described as a cross between a lion and a caterpillar. With a carved wooden head worn by one dancer and a long body made of raffia or palm fiber, the far end of which is worn by another dancer, the barong is a benevolent creature that appears at Balinese sacred dance performances to bring peace and well-being.

On Sunday, December 6, at the Parliament of the World’s Religions in Melbourne, Australia, a different kind of barong came to life, and in a way that well suited this particular gathering, whose theme is “Hearing Each Other, Healing the Earth.”

The World Peace Barong was conceived in 2003 at an international gathering called "Sharing Art & Religiosity," held in the vicinity of the temple Pura Samuan Tiga in Bedulu, Bali. Painter I Wayan Sudiarta from the village of Peliatan got the idea of creating a barong made of materials offered by people from any culture and faith. The mask of the barong was carved by Tjok Alit, a maskmaker in Singapadu, Bali. Elements that arrived from twenty-three other lands to adorn it included prayer bells from Japan, cow bells from Switzerland, feathers from India, and fabric from Assisi, Italy.

As the barong prepared to journey to Australia, parliament officials became concerned that its many natural materials would prevent it from clearing customs smoothly. As a result the World Peace Barong traveled with new black velvet garments. Garuda Airlines designated it executive class. At Melbourne's airport, customs officials greeted it graciously, charmed by its gentle, smiling face. But once the seventeen-kilo barong arrived at the Melbourne convention center, there was no place to put it. The sacred barong actually spent one night in the kitchen convention center, laughed Suprato Suyodarmo, Indonesian movement artist and founder of the Padepokan Lemah Putih school in Solo, Central Java.

The barong danced "Tri Yoni Saraswati" with eight artists from Bali and South Sulawesi for the International Plenary of sacred music. Although it was scheduled for an interactive session with parliament participants in one of the meeting rooms of the convention center, Suprato conceived of another idea.

He had noticed a strange figure, dressed in black and bearing a dire warning, who stood all day every day at the entrance to the convention center. Benny Zable, of Nimbun, New South Wales, and Woodstock, New York, wore a gas mask and a long black cloak on which were painted the words, FOSSIL FOOLS and THERE ARE NO JOBS ON A DEAD PLANET. Day after day he stood there, his hands rising and falling in mute supplication or despair. A few people stopped to look at him, but most rushed past.

Because Suprato Suryodarmo is interested in the relationship of sacred theatre and the natural environment, he asked Zable if the World Peace Barong could join him on the plaza. Late on the afternoon of the 6th, when most of the parliament participants were attending sessions inside the convention center, Suryodarmo and Diane Butler, an American dancer who has lived and danced in Bali for many years, carried the barong out to the front of the convention center and arranged it with offerings on the pavement. After sitting on the ground and praying softly, Suryodarmo rose and began to dance. His feet moved with slow-motion precision, turning in perfect balance. His hands and long fingers created mudras, formal patterns of meaning. Then Benny Zable began to move in response. Both the Indonesian dancer and the Australian street artist moved in harmony, their movements reflected in the tall plate glass windows of the convention center as the barong stared benignly out at the passing crowd.

One dancer brought a message of peace through the form of a figure from an ancient religious tradition; the other delivered a message of environmental urgency through artistic improvisation. One was dressed in traditional ceremonial clothing, one in a hand-made costume. Together they wove a message that religious leaders of many faiths were attempting to spread inside the convention center all week: in matters of environmental stewardship and peace among nations, it is only through creative collaboration, the willingness to listen to others, and the invention of new forms of expression that change can occur.