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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Sometimes we write or think things that we don’t want to believe; we dream of impossible or unthinkable things, we imagine utopian futures and grand possibilities, we fall for wish fulfilment or fall into paranoid delusions. Often such flights of fancy are just that, with no more meaning outside of our own personal psyche. But other times, we may slip into the world of intuition, of prescience, of a kind of knowing that could only emanate from the otherworld, from the dimensions where time is folded with other realms so that the future somehow pops up in front of us and we know what is coming. Writers of faery tale or myth have always explored these realms, while prophets and other wise ones access this space with skill.
Don’t you want to go there? Or at least be entranced by those who have …
But we have to be clear about how our mind works before we can start to trust these kinds of intuitions. Once we know the style of our desires and fantasies, we can be alert to them arising in our minds, and dismiss them on the way to more objective information. To do deep listening to nature, we have to quieten our personal mind and open up to our greater mind; the one that is talked about in ecopsychology, animism and spiritual realms as being the human mind that is at one with the greater reality, with the world, even with the cosmos and its mysterious gift of consciousness. This is what i mean by the ecomythic; the dimension from which appears such otherworldly yet ecocentric wisdom.
On December the 9th of 2019, i wrote that “A great fire is coming and we are all in line.” Everybody knows now that the whole south east of Australia is burning, but a bushfire near my home on the south coast of NSW had already been burning for weeks. In previous years, this would have been known as a serious fire; it took out a beautiful stretch of forest over 30km long, countless trees and animals had been scorched, and we were breathing in smoke and swimming in ash as we got used to the new reality. Life goes on and we adapt. But now we are preparing for a future of unknown collapse, just as climate scientists have been warning for years. We’re going to have to collectivise rapidly, coherently, with deep reservoirs of patience and generosity.
Mossy Point, where i lived for two years, with the cataclysm approaching nearby Rosedale
I didn’t know the ‘great fire’ i wrote about was going to spread from the one already burning and threaten my home and destroy so many others, as well as kill so many people and the countless other beings; but i knew it could. What i meant was that a great fire is threatening all of humanity now … that greenhouse gases had created a world hotter than we could handle, that traditional ‘Care for Country’, as Australian Aboriginals practiced for tens of thousands of years, had been dismissed by the new machine of modern agriculture, that the business of clearing, sowing and poisoning the land for ever-increasing yields and profits was creating a tinderbox that is ready to ignite all over the place and not go out until it has taken us with it. The amount of firepower out there nowadays; coal mines and power stations, oil refineries and endless vehicles burning petrol, nuclear power plants and of course an unconscionable pile of weaponry, from street level guns to tribal warfare capable dirty nukes, handheld anti-aircraft missiles and more, creates endless opportunity for the damaging aspect of fire to be unleashed as fresh hells on earth. Anthropogenic climate change and ecosystem destruction creates the tipping points we know are adding up.
Alongside the fires, there will be more devastating floods and hurricanes, sea level will continue to rise and destroy low-lying cities; in short, other horrors await us just around the corner. All of it is coming sooner and harder than predicted, which means we should be taking the climate science more seriously than ever, seeing as it is clear it has been overly conservative, in an effort not to be too alarmist. Ancient traditions have predicted this since before colonisation stole the lands of so many earth-loving peoples. The pueblo-dwelling Hopi of Arizona, where i spent some time in conversation with a spiritual leader some years ago, saw the signs of End Times everywhere, but also put this in a bigger picture perspective of worlds that come into being and pass away in cycles. This also inspired the visually stunning art film Koyaanisqatsi, a forerunner to more recent explorations such as Baraka and Samsara.
The Abrahamic religions tend towards linear timescales, where current events lead to degeneration and saviour for the faithful. The dualism common in western society is a constant feature, as a force of ultimate good finally defeats an evil power, after much thrashing about and the devastation of much that was good in the first place. Some fundamentalist sects even believe that the destruction of the human world could hasten on this ‘rapture’. Unfortunately, Australia currently has a Pentecostal Prime Minister, which may be part of the reason he has shown such deplorably poor leadership in terms of tackling the climate emergency and the bush fires.
Subliminally powerful, but socially irresponsible imagery of the Rapture. It promises endless glory; but it also says, “Give up on earth and return to your true home in the light!”
Eastern philosophies tend to favour cyclical time frames, wherein the end of one world would result in the birth of another. This reflects the traditional, animistic position, which followed the laws of nature to see that out of death new life emerges. Examples include the caterpillar withdrawing into the cocoon only to emerge as the butterfly – an image i have always found solace in – and the way Australian Aboriginal firestick, or cultural, burning, promotes new growth. These kinds of ideas can be extrapolated to faith in the ongoing life of the human soul beyond death; just as the snake sheds a skin, so we ‘shuffle off this mortal coil’ to arise new in another dimension. There is no reason to dismiss such beliefs, unless we are so trapped in what sociologist Max Weber called ‘the iron cage of reason’ that we can no longer accept any reality outside of the one we have been socialised into. Rather, an intelligent and open-minded person would understand that human culture evolved in close contact with nature and exercised refined senses to read subtle energies and ‘track’ psychic paths as we traversed the possibilities of consciousness outside of the physical realms.
My Zen training, alongside recent years of deep listening in nature, has opened a world of possibility like this. Generally, in Zen, we attempt to be as true to the moment as possible, focussing on the now even while always taking into account – or at least, not dismissing – the extent to which we are always also partly caught up in our personal histories and possible futures. But i have found that while dissolving the traps of personal disposition, compassionately letting go of our escapist fantasies and slipping out of the iron cage of reason, it is not only the moment that becomes more clear, more sparkling and evocative. There is also the ever-present realm of the ‘otherworld’, wherein deeper patterns of meaning that include the world of nature and psyche beyond our personal self become apparent.
And thus appears … Burning in the Sky. I was scared of this song at first, as it paints such a terrifying picture of the reality we are now speeding towards. But i knew i had to sing it and thankfully i’m in a band with 3 of the most amazing musicians, who could compose and play the music to make it a symbolic anthem for this time, as well as a call to those who want to continue to evolve and adapt, together. I knew immediately, as i heard it in my head in Tathra one night last year, that it was mystic prophecy. I just didn’t expect it to become so prescient, so quickly. Rebel for Life. Because a great fire is coming for us all and there will be a burning in the sky. Better to be forewarned than ignorant, even – perhaps especially – if the message is bleak.
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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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Being trained to read mythic symbols, i have sometimes erred on the side of caution when it comes to the classic “End is Nigh” predictions. I’ve often felt i was in a similar boat to the IPCC: if we warn people that it’s the end of the world as we know it, we get ignored, for doing crazy talk. Knowing how many times eccentric fundamentalist crackpots have predicted the end of the world makes it hard to join the ranks. But, in an attempt to be true to the times and to assert the sanity of mythic end times warnings in an era when they have finally become realistic, i present to you … How Come Dire Warnings that the End of the World is Nigh are finally to be filed under Current Affairs instead of under the Rantings of Religious Lunatics. Please read on if you think this might be of interest to you, fellow sane person …
The idea that this world is doomed is as old as fundamentalist cults themselves. Basically, a very confused God/dess sets up the world then decides it is just not worth the trouble. Humans turn out to be too evil, usually, as in the Noah’s Ark story, or simply too numerous and noisy, as in the Mesopotamian myth of Babel and its tower. Anyway, send in the Flood, or the Plague, and wipe them out! You can see how an outraged mystic with a vindictive and misanthropic streak could run with such a fantasy – wipe the slate clean, scream the freaks! How satisfying.
But carrying that sign is no longer the job of those disappointed in humanity en masse; it has now become the job of the sane, those who recognise that it is science that offers the signs today, not the entrails of a sacrificed bird or the vagaries of ancient scripture (endlessly open to new misinterpretations, which is why they persist as creeds). Ironically, it is now reason that alerts us to our existential, planetary danger, not mysticism. The true ‘myth’ of our times – the powerful story that carries us along in its wake, even though we know it isn’t rationally true – is unrestrained capitalism, which convinces us it’s OK to keep consuming as if life will continue like this forever.
This is the great reversal of our times: now, the raving lunatics own mass media/propaganda platforms and are accepted as model corporate citizens, as they tout the mantra of the fossil fuel fat cats (keep burning!), big pharma (stay stupidly unhealthy, we’ll cure you!), big tobacco and other drug lords, dealers and purveyors of beer and skittles (or bread and circuses). Meanwhile, those listening to well reasoned arguments, massive amounts of data and incredibly convincing climate modelling, are labelled as freaks, and scapegoated by the powers that be for threatening their profit margins.
That this reversal is itself a tactic of the capitalist lords should be obvious by now. I just wanted to point it out, in case it helps others bothered by the fact they seem to be on the side of lunacy when they are, in fact, on the side of well reasoned argument. We need every ally we can get, and explaining how we are on the right side of history and should not be befuddled by ecocidal disinformation designed to weaken our righteous anger, indignation and activism at the state of the world is just another string needed for the bow and arrows of truth today. Go forth, be alarmed at the direction of the world, and know that you are not a fanatic but a sane citizen of an insane world; because you are also an intelligent being capable of discerning truth and calling bullshit.
The first bird turned out to be alive, still. Only just though. It was so weak i could approach, nudge, and note its feeble movement in protest as my dog backed away from the scene.
The next one was certainly dead, turned up so that you could see its guts had been eaten out. Then the next, and the next. These were Shearwaters, which had failed their migration and fallen upon the beach, only to have whatever small amount of nutrition that was left in their stomach eaten out by whatever sea creature or other bird could get at it.
I’ve only lived on this coast for 4 years, so saying i haven’t seen this before doesn’t amount to much. But something stopped me in my tracks; more than just the individual deaths, more than the mounting evidence of the current and ongoing extinction event that is seeing the end of so many species we can’t even keep count. My favourite animal of all, the Monarch Butterfly, have lost over 80% of their population over recent years (see here).
I later found this report, about the Shearwaters not arriving at their usual destination in Victoria. It was updated only days ago, here. What’s happening is part of a larger pattern. Climate science makes this clear and calling it a Mass Extinction Event seems accurate (although our political leader’s self-serving inaction makes the term ‘extermination‘ more accurate, as suggested by Jeff Sparrow recently). Professor John Arnould cautions us not to panic abut the failed migration this year. But it’s just another sign. They’re adding up.
We’re going to need to get better at dealing with death and destruction as the climate emergency rains its blows down upon us over the coming months, years and decades. In many places, for many creatures, the chaos has already taken its toll. Some people think the planet would be better off without us, but right now, we’re holding the keys to the nuclear reactors and so many other places that could make everything much worse for much longer if we can’t maintain the little control we have left over the damage we are doing every day.
But it will be the grief that undoes us. The countless moments of loss and trauma as we watch our loved ones fall upon the earth, their stomachs empty as the crops fail; or the shock as our communities burn to ashes on the wind in the next horrific fire; or the anguish as we are swept away on hitherto unimaginably fierce storms … the actual details of our undoing will be sickening, so that we cannot celebrate the end of the anthropocene with a clear conscience. We’re going to have to get better at grieving loss, because just as it came for these few birds on my local shore, it is coming for all of us, whether we act now to make our fates less harrowing or not.
