It’s 2020 and Covid-19 has sucked the life out of so much.
We can’t go out and play together.
Everything has become a challenge worthy of a strategic planning meeting: work, school, shopping, home.
But let’s not forget that this is just the start, as far as climate science has been telling us for decades.
This is the carbon we released in the 90s. Spiking towards the sky, swirling up the stormclouds, breeding new diseases, creating the conditions for the worst bushfires in Australian history. Even the original peoples, here for tens of thousands of years, don’t have a story for that kind of damage. And if they don’t have a story for it – the people that were here when you could walk across Bass Strait from the mainland to what we now call Tasmania, who hunted across the plains of what is now Port Phillip Bay in Melbourne before the last great deluge – then it is truly unprecedented.
Now that we’re beginning to see what anthropogenic climate change looks like, we might as well get used to it, as we have to prepare to be lashed by the 30 years’ worth of carbon that has been discharged since this greenhouse began getting pumped full of hot gas.
The storms that lashed the Buddha, as he faced his final spiritual battle before the complete and irreversible awakening that would be the apotheosis of a lifetime of meditative practice, can be seen as metaphorical. Whether they were psychic entities tormenting him towards his great overcoming, or real elements of malevolence, the earth continued to live and breathe beyond the scene. Our reality is the ecological version – real storms and the breakdown of the physical world – but maybe it’s time to treat them as a spiritual challenge too.
To prepare best for the worst, stop thinking things are going to get better. That optimism will leave you victim to reality, shocked with every new assault upon your vision of the good life, unprepared for the horrors to come. 2019 was the best year you are ever going to remember – at least on a planetary scale. You may have better ones personally, but we’re on the downward slide now kids. Get used to it. Breathe deeply and find calm in the midst of the storm. Lean into it. Awaken the Warrior of Peace and Spirit.
While it’s also not enough to find solace in being protected by a great serpent, like the Buddha was, when the storms become truly threatening, it’s certainly one of the things we could be doing with our time, while we still have it. Keep agitating for change but balance that out with some concentration on spiritual liberation. This is your one wild life.
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There’s a beautiful tree out back of my place. I love its almost symmetry, the way it fans for the sky, maximising on the available sunlight and growing strong, even as we are still in drought, long term. Since the fires, trees have been getting cut down everywhere up and down the south coast. It’s slash and burn on the the roadsides, as there is an unusual amount of licence granted for those kinds of actions right now. Putting in fire breaks, cutting down trees, clearing out shrubby undergrowth, making areas around houses more safe.
Newly cleared roadside
Fair enough. I’ve seen examples down backstreets that were lined with dry, scrubby undergrowth, which the locals see as little more than unnecessary fuel left to burn. Some get grumpy about greens stopping them from burning off, some know that’s not right, many admit that regardless of the politics involved, it has also happened because we don’t listen to the Aboriginal knowledge about how to burn country so that it regenerates. We have the option of doing that now, which is why i am working with local elders to see it happen.
But sometimes you sense that some people are also enjoying this. Almost taking revenge on the bush, for being so difficult. Yeah, there’s a lot of it out there, but we’ve seen this summer how vulnerable it is. And we don’t actually have to perpetuate the archetype of the pioneer, always ready, willing and able to tear the bush down to extend the property.
Properties need to be made as safe as possible and traditional owners burnt in small patches to leave cleared spaces too … but geez we love to slash and burn don’t we?
Trees are not the problem, the way we’ve managed them are. A forest is not just a carbon sink and a home to so many animals and plants. It is a place to breathe and a generator of wellness for the entire ecosystem. In physical terms, forests help produce – along with the sea – the oxygenated air we breathe, so perfectly balanced for the sustenance of mammalian and so much other life. And in psychological terms, time spent in forests boosts our mental and emotional health.
One thing I saw, during the NYE fires in Broulee, was that people’s mental state during crisis is paramount to their outcomes. Both in the way they respond in the moment, to needs like getting hoses ready to fight ember attacks; and in the way they come through it, afterwards. There’s a real case for eco-grief work, taking into account people’s personal experiences (even when vicarious) in consideration also of the wider context of the climate crisis. My work with the International Ecopsychology Society is always a heartening reminder that we heal and grow through crisis with nurturing guidance and thankfulness practices.
We need to remember how to live in and with the forests, with love and respect, rather than either logging them relentlessly or leaving them untouched, which leads to dangerous fuel loads. There are many stories of Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people having profound layers of ecological wisdom when it comes to maintaining life in the broadest spectrum of ecosystems.
Bruce Pascoe in Dark Emu and Bill Gammage in The Biggest Estate on Earth have reminded us of how we can live within the natural world without compromising the very fabric of life that supports us. Traditional cultures have so often lived in this way.
By contrast, the process of colonisation, fuelled by more developed technologies (of agriculture, war, industry and now digital), is designed to extract wealth from the earth and accumulate it in urban centres. We need to shift away from this culture and back – as well as forwards – to one that respects its home. Traditional people like the Walbanja where I live know how to practice hunting and gathering, tending to Country, cultural burning, harvesting and ensuring future seasons are plentiful. We need to listen to them and learn better how to keep forests and grasslands healthy, how to propagate robust populations of plants and animals into the future, while the forests they live in and with help create rain as well as fresh air. Comparatively, excessive clearing creates drought, then allows more topsoil to run off when floods follow. We’re seeing it again. Let’s listen to the elders on Country, for better results.
Artwork generously supplied to SCAE by Raymond Carriage
Geoff Berry is CEO of the South Coast NSW Aboriginal Elders Incorporated Association, who create employment for Koori and at-risk youth with rebuilding and regeneration projects. SCAE aim to build culture and communities that respect tradition, and seek to perpetuate the best aspects of Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal cultures, for the good of all, in a modern context.
When i started the Nature Calling project, it was meant to support us to do more ‘deep listening’ – to wind down our minds from the hustle bustle and to check in with the ancestral wisdom that arises in our psyche and in our bodies, which speaks of our at-one-ness with nature as well as the way we negotiate our relationship with it. How we work with the other animals, the plants that are also our kin on earth, the elements and the places we inhabit. With the whispers from our ancestors, who evolved in close contact with the natural world, with the songs of the land and of the breeze, with the flow of the waters and the shades of light and dark we walk through and sit with.
But now we find ourselves in transition. 2019 has been the most momentous year yet for climate crises and people everywhere are waking up to the horrible situation we are in, since climate science has been ignored by the corrupt politics of fossil fuel subsidies and corporate handouts. Joanna Macy, heroine of the Work that Reconnects and Active Hope movements, points out that we are ‘awakening together‘. This is a good way of shifting up and out of the meditative space, where, if we quieten down enough, we can practice what Thich Nhat Hanh suggests: “What we most need to do is to hear within us the sound of the earth crying.”
The fires in Australia have been the earth raging, as if all the anger it felt at the way we have been treating it over recent centuries welled up and burst forth in a devastating conflagration. We Australians that want to care for our Country the way its Traditional Owners always did – with love and care for the places they knew were alive and listening, feeling and responding to us – wouldn’t be surprised if some pointed out the horrible karma of the current moment. As our ‘leaders’ plot to open new coal mines in the face of all climate science and ecological wisdom, we burn. As Australian ‘representatives’ hinder serious climate action at every level, our forests are razed by an inferno at a scale unimaginable mere months ago. As corporate interests, fossil fuel lobbies and evil mass media barons like Rupert Murdoch continue to undermine the conclusive evidence that we must completely transform modern society yesterday, millions of animals burn to death and the lands and waters that sustained their lives is destroyed, leaving only ash in its wake. This is Nature Calling today. Is it karma at its most brutal and immediate?
As usual, it’s more complex than that. If karma operated like this, there might be some justice to the way it wipes out ecosystems with a swipe of its hand. As it is, the rules of capitalist extraction have been based upon the law of colonisation – hit new territory, conquer the people (kill, divide and enslave), ‘discover’ the resources, and take them. For personal use, first, then for market. As such, the scenes of the worst devastation are often far flung from the centres of power that instigated the theft; the British deforest Ireland, the European powers leave abandoned gold mines everywhere, the Japanese strip Malaysian and New Guinea forests while protecting their own … the list is endless. But now that colonisation has left so many places bereft of the riches they once boasted, the powers that be must turn upon their own populations and feast upon them instead. The elite at the top of the pyramid must be fed on something and the slave classes that make up the majority at the base must send the profits up. Whether the bottom rung is black or white, far flung or close at home; this matters not. The ‘shadow places‘, as Australian ecophilosopher Val Plumwood once called them, can be beneath our feet now, if that is where the coal seam gas deposits lie.
Likewise, the ‘earth system’ itself operates in a way that means effects from one place, one people, one unsustainable practice can be felt further on down the river. As climate scientist Will Steffen explained to me in the Nature Calling doco, the ‘oneness’ of the earth’s biosphere, the way it all effects each of its parts in a whole system, is a kind of Gaia hypothesis without the necessity of intent or teleology being built in. All things being equal, life on earth will right itself, as if it were intelligent, according to its own laws, of which we are a part. But this system has been tampered with to such a degree that it is broken, at least in parts. When Traditional Owners burnt off small parts of each area, with low fuel fires in a mosaic design, new growth appears and many plants flourish in a sort of co-evolution. Game is flushed out of the forest and hunted in a strategic manner, new grass attracts foragers the next season, and many trees and other plants throw seeds out into the ash for regeneration, according to a timeless cycle.
When we burn too much fossil fuels and add to the greenhouse gases, we heat up the atmosphere. When we continue to build the ‘urban sprawl’ over arable land to extend our cities endlessly, with large houses that require air conditioning in summer and heating in winter because mainstream design fails to take advantage of the freely available energies of nature, we ensure unsustainable futures. When we carve out National Parks and don’t allow removal or burning of any fallen wood, we ensure fuel loads build up dangerously. When we clear and poison the land, log the forests and dam the rivers, it dries out and becomes a tinderbox. Where we used to have a serious bushfires at the end of summer – the February Dragon, as it was known – we now have almost year round danger and the most insane fire of all time starting before the year is out … then we have the result from a set of actions. Karma, if you like; causality, in terms of the laws of the physical world. “Unprecedented” became the word so many have used to describe it. The cumulative result of uncaring, selfish, human practices, adding up and multiplying according to the exponential logic of capitalism – and climate science – in the 21st century.
What nature is saying now is: wake up and treat me better. Or this is how you will be treated in response: burnt off like a pest from the planet’s back.
But what do the ancients say about karma, no matter how unflinching and seemingly unfair it may seem? They say we should learn from it. Dissolve greed, hatred and ignorance, attempt to dissolve personal ego, develop compassion, abide by your principles, work with your social and natural environment instead of against it, cooperate rather than compete, and deepen and prepare your soul to journey on beyond this life as if it will be weighed and tested upon your death. The Christian belief in an afterlife is just one version of this archetypal pattern: the Egyptian and Tibetan Books of the Dead both operate along similar lines, and countless other cultures reckon that this life is merely a glimpse into the oceans of time, a momentary opportunity to experience embodied consciousness, this time in a self-aware primate form on a beautiful, rare jewel of a planet.
So, here we are. With practice, we can evolve under the most trying of circumstances. In fact, the trying circumstances are the ones that test us and allow us to show what we are made of, to stand up under pressure, but also to give in when we need to. To let go of what we don’t need and to stop being so self-motivated when we can. Modern society has shown itself to be hopelessly anthropocentric. Take this opportunity to embrace all of life and treat yourself as both the centre of the universe and as a generous being capable of emptying your notions of self on behalf of life and its countless beings. This is karma; this is Nature Calling; this is the ecomythic; this is life.
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The School Strike for Climate started by climate action heroine Greta Thunberg has spread to the adult world (as predicted here in March). So now we can throw ourselves into support of the movement without worrying about whether or not we’re supposed to wait for our children to lead. Salutary times!
In an attempt to get as many people across the world to join the strike, to normalise civil disobedience and turn the insane tide of self-destruction to a global mobilisation of climate action, i have drafted a letter. It’s designed to get our colleagues, bosses, clients, customers and everyone involved in our workplaces and households to join with us in support of planetary care, without risking harm to the vulnerable in our communities.
Please feel free to adapt to your workplace and share widely! Start with the CEO or top management, see if you can get organizational support, then share with everyone else. If we follow the protocols of our workplaces we might just help to transform ‘business as usual’ forever!
*NB: this letter is written for the allied health and caring professions. Contact me for help with adapting it to your industry or field! naturecallinggeoff@gmail.com
General Strike for Climate – Friday 20th of September – a call for support
We in the allied health, mental health, social work and community development spheres do important work. We help people: to heal and find wellness, to grow as individuals and together, to make a better world. Through our work we show we care and because of this simple fact, our work is important, to us and to those we help. In our fields, we also have to take time to take care of ourselves, to avoid burnout or compassion fatigue. How we find that balance between self-care and helping work is a matter of personal import, which can be helped or hindered depending on our workplace and its culture.
Beyond this personal level of helping and healing work, staff and carers in these fields may also find alignment with a position that critiques the structural inequalities that make magnify the damage we encounter daily. The ‘facts of life’ that create inequality in the first place; the systems that marginalise those who don’t fit mainstream ideals, or leave behind those who aren’t on the side of the ‘winners’ in a competitive society, that let them slip through the cracks when someone else can’t be there to hold them together. There are historically traceable reasons why so many members of modern society are simply left behind by impersonal forces of ‘progress’ and development. We can choose whether or not we want to be more informed about these factors, just as we can choose to side with inner faith and our resolute determination to help regardless of the history that out us here.
But there is one situation growing more deadly by the day that none of us can afford to ignore anymore. This is anthropogenic climate change – the way the planet is heating up, due to the enormous amount of greenhouse gases being burnt by modern society, and the devastating impacts this is already having on people, on the environment and on the animals and plants that are becoming extinct in frightening numbers and with increasing rapidity. We are involved today in a struggle that is no longer ideological (about beliefs or ideas), or historical, but scientifically validated as an existential threat to living species on this planet right now. This is the most important moment to be alive in the history of humanity. No longer do our actions only matter to our local communities – although they still do. We must now give in to the call to “Think Globally and Act Locally”, for this emerging crisis affects us all, including our environment, our atmosphere, and the living world of plants, animals and other lifeforms that make up our beautiful jewel of a planet.
In the areas of allied health and social work, we already focus on the immediate needs of those around us. We work with love, compassion and kindness to alleviate suffering and promote healing and growth. On Friday the 20th of September, we are being asked – by leaders in the environmental movement, by school students who can see their very future crumbling before them, by climate scientists and communicators the world over – to strike for climate action. I call upon you now to
• commit to this action and to make your commitment public;
• talk with your colleagues about how to keep everybody safe (rostering skeleton staff who are prepared to stay on at work to ensure public safety while others strike);
• make a statement of support for the general strike’s aims, which are to call upon world leaders in politics and industry to support serious and immediate climate action such as complete transformation of energy to a carbon neutral world; and to
• enable your organisation, department or corporation to professionally and compassionately manage this day in support of climate action, as meaningful participants in the most important movement of our times, in ways that promote the transformation of our own work practices in alignment with a carbon neutral global society.
Yours in civil disobedience, Geoff Berry
*NB: Please feel free to use this form and sign off with your own name, to adapt in any way you see fit as long as you don’t edit out the environmentally activist intent, and share as widely and freely as you can.
I feel a little tug on my heart, as i find this creek running into the sea in Tathra today. It is the first time it has made it this far since i started staying here regularly a few years ago. Today is exactly one year since the devastating bushfires in this seaside community, so there was a lot of resilience and reconnection to celebrate, as well as a lot to remember in mourning. Recently it was also the 10 year anniversary of the Kinglake bushfires, which at the time shocked the world with their unassailable ferocity and loss of life, both human and non-human. My brother lost his property that day, but he narrowly escaped with his life, along with his wife and 1-year old son. Life is creation and destruction, birth and death, shut down and break through all the time.
But today, seeing this little creek making its way out to sea made my heart glad. So often it’s the subtle touches of nature connection that can make a difference to the way we feel; and, more importantly, to the way we act. Continuing to work with this foundation of ecopsychology (or ecospirituality) enables us to tune in to our part in the more-than-human life that we are part of. We’ve changed the world and damaged its fabric in this new era of the Anthropocene and, as a race, we haven’t yet proven able to pull out of the slippery slope of materialistic capitalism and take better care of our planetary home.
So why celebrate such a small matter today? Because the stream made it, the flow created breakthrough, and some days our hearts hurt and we need to be reminded that this is the ancient way of life. We take what we think we need and sometimes this is too much and we do damage. Then, we need to let the waters flow, to give away and to give back. Sure, it is natural for us to want to draw fresh water from a sparkling stream; to be refreshed by its soothing qualities and to give thanks for its gifts. But this is not what the military/industrial complex is doing. It offers engineering infrastructure to suck the rivers dry, to create mega-dams and turn the taps onto crops of cotton and rice and whatever else are doused in the chemicals designed and pushed by Big Pharma, to be sold and controlled according to the machinations of predatory capitalism. We all know this, but it is proving to be a ‘wicked problem’, to dislodge the machine and allow the earth to regrow from beneath such withering machinations and their shadow.
I grew up in Port Adelaide, which meant that my school holidays were spent on local beaches, in the desert fringes of the Flinders Ranges, down the Fleurieu Peninsula and along the Might Murray River. I always felt deep kinship with the salty sands and gentle dunes along my friendly beachfronts, and was never quite so much at home along the river, with its spooky dead trees in places, and its steady one-way flow. But then i visited the Coorong for the first time, and my heart sang for the river and the sea at the same time.
The Coorong in South Australia, where the Murray River meets the sea – sometimes.
Here, when i was a kid, a mighty river flowed into the sea, with much of its overflow captured in salty lakes and lagoons surrounded by my favourite landscape feature of all, the sand dune. There were mysteriously quiet coves, dead flat crystalline beds of salt, endless blue skies and crashing oceanic waves on the other side of a fragile dune system. It was many years before i would learn why the Murray stopped flowing into the sea, how the river mouth was closed up and the inland lake system dying. The story of criminal irrigators stealing vast quantities of fresh water upstream, in other states of Australia, is now coming further into the light, as the tragedy of millions of dead native fish hits the headlines and the public become outraged at the stupidity and recklessness of the ‘system’ again. It’s no coincidence that the remote communities mostly affected are largely Aboriginal, while it is wealthy industrial farmers (not the caring smaller scale ones) that profit. Again.
Local fish death tragedy, Wallagoot Lake, caused by low water levels, drought and heat.
The fish death phenomenon is largely out of the 24/7 spectacle of news media already, although it has just hit home (albeit on a smaller scale, thank goodness) in our local area. Since then, we have enjoyed a dense bank of rain such as we haven’t seen around here in ages. It’s been sweet to fall asleep to the sound of raindrops on the roof – and maybe even to wake up to it too. And so, this little creek flows into the sea. Something seems right about this; something we have missed. Like so many of the symptoms of the runaway climate destruction we are now witnessing, it’s as if part of our souls have been splintered away, as the earth groans under the weight of modern industrial capital and its inevitable commodification and degradation of every ‘resource’ it can get its greedy hands on.
In ancient Mesopotamia, the place where the two waters – fresh and salty – mingled was renowned as a place of fertility. Many Aboriginal Australians know the same truth; that such places are rich and should be protected. Rivers are meant to run and we should take their fresh water for use and not for greed. If they don’t make it to the sea for too long a period, death follows. It’s just another ancient law we ignore at our peril. Long live the spirit of flow and letting go and allowing for breakthrough, both in our fragile environment and in our souls – which end up being the same place, when we open our minds and bodies to our place in nature.
