It’s like every conversation has to be about Covid-19, which in this digital age means the viral has gone viral. So what’s the ecomythic angle? What would we hear if we heard Nature Calling, if we tuned into the stories that are arising out of the earth, communicating to us about how we live on this planet? How we live as human animals, but also beyond the limited consciousness of the mortal; in the body, but also from the imagination, which flies beneath, below and above the physical frame, from the stars to the embers, as cosmic consciousness embodied here and now …
Well, think of it like this. What do you call an invisible enemy, which attacks your life support system from within, can be contracted by touching a surface that shows no sign of the infection, either stops you breathing altogether or merely gives you a dry cough, mutates occasionally as it crosses hosts, appears and disappears without a trace, sometimes not even showing up for the diagnosis, even with the best of modern medicine at hand? And what about when it creates total chaos around the world, shuts down the capitalist system, keeps nearly everyone cooped up at home and inspires panic buying of essentials like toilet paper, even when it can’t be seen?
Covid-19 has been talked about in terms of its symbolic potential (eg by Charles Eisenstein), and most importantly its ‘meaning’ in terms of the ecological crisis, but what about its ecomythic spirit? What kind of creature is this, that appears out of nowhere and has such powerful effects, completely rearranging human life almost overnight? A superstitious witness to such events would want to know what demonic spirit let this evil force loose upon the world, as well as what the victims did do to deserve it. This touches on the karma of the situation too, which points us back to the rise of the various plagues that have afflicted humanity over time. An objective observer would have to ask – has this got something to do with the way humans treat animals; seeing as living in close contact with them has something to do with it, and you’re doing this in order to eat them, skin them and trade them?
The existential level of questioning gets pretty brutal pretty quickly, but this is appropriate if you want to look the truth in the face (or as closely as you can get to this before you feel the need to look away). Joseph Campbell pointed out that compared to the human ego, the mythic universe is ‘adamantine’ in its challenge – harder than a diamond and as unflinching as nature when it comes to dishing out just rewards. If the human race is about to reap what it’s sown, over millennia of ecocidal abuse, then we should prepare for a near future of disastrously epic proportions. This looks like apocalyptic sci-fi on steroids, as the oceans begin to repel excess carbon and heat (its time of being a passive soak for our bad behaviour is effectively over). The only reason we can’t face the reality of this situation is because it is too horrible to digest; such a truth would make a mockery of all our plans, our love for our children and grandchildren, our hopes for the beautiful life this planet supports. But now that climate scientists have taken the gloves off, having admitted they’ve been too polite for too long, it’s time to face the future and its ecomythic power – to upset our dream of never-ending human glory, as even conservative commentators are now admitting (even if sometimes begrudgingly).
The dream of endless growth is closely associated with fantasies of immortality and these can be tracked across the history of human myth. Although such wishes exist in every culture, the dream of living in everlasting peace with an ultimate power (for example a Christian God) or in a field of deathless energy (such as the Buddha’s nirvana) seem like harmless fantasies compared to the scale of what modern, technologically developed societies do with the human lust for immortality. Because our modern world rejects both Gods and the liberation offered us by a mythically-informed depth psychology, we make our desires manifest instead, in desacralised rites of consumption.
That’s right folks, if we can’t have eternal afterlife we’ll just fill up right here, thanks. The sensual thrill of satisfying appetite – of fancy foodstuffs, of cars and hotel rooms and exotic holidays and sofas and sex & drugs & rock ‘n roll and electric light and everything – fills in for the spiritual paradigm we lost on the path to our materialistic paradise. This one, which is costing us the earth. Ironic, no? But wait, there’s more …
The paradox of ephemeral satisfaction – of feeling we have overcome the limits of life in the body, life on earth, in a materialistic orgy of consumption – is an ‘all feast, no famine’ deal we made with technology. It comes as a historical result of the agricultural myth (from around 10,000 years ago), that we can profit from the earth and not pay the ultimate cost, which is then dialled up by the machine age of the industrial revolution (starting around 250 years ago), then made global by colonisation, then exponentially skyrocketing over recent decades, as digital technologies concentrate our dream of being both primate and god at once. How about that? The more worldly and less seemingly religious we have become, the more the great spiritual ideal of living free and forever has taken hold of our imagination, like a feverish dream.
This is the karmic law of Covid-19. It’s not just that we reap what we sow, that we deserve to die en masse for treating the earth and its other animals like disposable resources for our profit. It’s also an Oedipal paradox: as we try to escape the traditional versions of our subliminal desires (for God/Nirvana), they revisit us in exotic new forms, from behind and below, in our dreams, when we’re not looking. We treat the earth like dirt and it gives birth to new lifeforms, some of which threaten to wipe us out in its name. It’s viral karma, joining the unprecedented bushfires and magnified superstorms and every other fury unleashed by the earth we thought we’d controlled for our own purposes.
Just as Freud saw, the primal desire of ‘man’ (if not all men) to consume the mother’s body in a pervasive rite of carnal satisfaction cannot often be fulfilled by the individual male at large in society; but we can find myriad other ways to feel filled up on mind-blowing power, to feel fully nourished and filled with love, warmth and self-fulfilment. Sadly, many of these ways are not so wholesome or respectful of ‘the other’ that is required to satiate our desires. Many of the ways a patriarchal capitalist framework like ours offers to satisfy our inner needs are very far from being kind to others, or to our planet.
We cannot help wanting stuff, as embodied beings, but we have a choice as to how we satisfy our desires. Sure, if we are born (or ‘fated’, as the ancients would say) to be a certain type of person, to want certain things as a way of feeling satisfied, it can seem almost impossible to change that. Put another way, we are coded towards certain predispositions, both as a race and as individuals. We seek nourishment, shelter, company, as a species; and perhaps lust, intoxication, the thrill of the gamble, any other sin to any degree, or none of them – perhaps the quiet life, a simple family existence, escapism or hard work. In any number of ways, we have a program from birth, a personality type, things we can change and things we cannot. As the old saying goes, wisdom is the capacity to discern which is which, to try and change what we can for the better and to accept what we cannot. The aim of a wisdom tradition is to offer guidance so that we don’t get lost in the labyrinth of our own desires, so that we come through the darkness of our challenges and find new light, integrating what we learn from our weaknesses and foibles and expanding our sense of self, so that we become greater and more spiritually generous, not giving in to our base desires and becoming more mean and selfish.
By contrast, contemporary capitalist society is 360 degrees of influence aimed at exactly the opposite outcome. It directs you to your cheapest thrill, your most immediate appetite, offering to satisfy it so long as you play the game. Likewise, modern politics – especially since the rise of the ‘Big Man’ era [find link?] – is designed to appeal to your fear of the other, to target difference as the problem, to become more judgemental and aggressive about your opinions. It’s only a small step from fighting over toilet paper to supporting war, and the same drive informs both – we are right, they are wrong, and we have a lot to profit from beating them. War is the Fourth Horseman of the Apocalypse, riding across the horizon, following the Fires, Plague and Floods let loose by anthropogenic climate change. And all of this acts as a reflection and a logical result of how large-scale, colonising, capitalising societies like the West and China have been treating nature for millennia. Only now do we see what our unleashed power looks like, in the mirror of the world, as it unravels to reveal the hidden desire beneath those ads on television, that screen you’re reading this on, the constant news of the destruction of our world: the horrible irony that we have unleashed the demons of death by trying to run away from them. Only this time, according to the global power of unrestrained corporate greed and the military industrial complex (as we used to call it), the death we wanted to avoid is revisiting us on a planetary scale.
Oedipus was warned he would kill his father and marry his mother. Horrified, he ran to escape his fate, thereby making sure it happened, just as the seer predicted it would. We were warned too, by the sober deliberations of climate science, yet rushed headlong to our collective demise in the rush to satisfy the gamut of our desires, as if there were no limit. Ultimately, the ancient Greek tragedy has its redemptive aspect; Oedipus ends up a lot wiser and even has a sacred place named after him. It’s unlikely, short of a miracle of transformation, that our esteemed leaders will be afforded any such respect by future generations, if they are even to appear.
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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Here is a letter that is less than 1 page long and is designed to gather support for the Global Climate Strike on Friday 20th of September. Please feel free to adapt, sign as your own, share widely and use to initiate a conversation in your workplace or with anyone.
On Friday the 20th of September, we have an opportunity to show our support for a movement that is focussed on building a new way of life for humanity: one that does not take our planetary home for granted and works to protect it for future generations and for other species. Without this transformation, we will continue to do irreparable damage to the environment, to our soils and rivers, seas and fellow creatures.
This is just one day of the year, dedicated to the biggest issue facing the entire human race. No matter how important our work is, we can find a way to strike in support. If we work in a caring field, or anywhere that safety is an issue, we can suggest that those who don’t want to strike are rostered on to work. Management may be open to this, if they recognise the unparalleled danger that we face. If not, we can apply for leave. But however we do it, we have to strike. We have to show that business as usual is a death sentence for life as we know it.
The devastating impacts of human-induced climate chaos are increasing daily. Animals and plants are becoming extinct in frightening numbers. 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.
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 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: adapt and sign your own name here freely!]
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.
Animists like me believe the world is alive. It goes beyond an intellectual idea, but it’s more than just a feeling, too; many traditions from around the world recognise the possibility that consciousness flows through the universe, that intelligence is a property of the physical world. It shows in the way animals are born to move, knowing what to look for in their environment and where to go from birth, even across the planet sometimes, then back to breeding grounds regardless of the ebbs and flows of their life and without maps or signs. At its most primal, the intelligence of life is expressed in the way that plant life lifts out of soil and trust its face towards the sun, even that way tides shift in accord with lunar movements.
Taken to its logical conclusion – even though some people, trapped in ‘the iron cage of reason,’ as German sociologist Max Weber, called it, think that logic has nothing to do with it – this means that the planet is alive. This is what most traditional societies understood, native Australian populations included. More scientists now claim that “The Earth is Just As Alive As You Are”, following the controversial Gaia Hypothesis made famous by James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis. The sticking point was always sentience; does the Earth want to give birth to and sustain life, or does it just happen by coincidence? As Climate Scientist Professor Will Steffen explained to me during the filming of Nature Calling pilot episode, it’s not necessary to be so concerned about this that we either embrace or dismiss Gaia: we live on one earth system, where everything is connected and everything matters.
This is a neat piece of writing by Ferris Jabr, of the New York Times.
Here’s a song that accepts this perspective and dances its truth, out in the open, with intuition and the poetry of the earth built in. As Will has long said, we need the humanities and the social sciences, including psychologists and media analysts, to change human behaviour in accord with the requirements made of us by runaway, anthropogenic climate change. Songs of the Earth are part of this response; inspiring tunes that make us think in new ways or align with our wishes for a safe and flourishing planetary home. Planetary Rumpus, by my band Severins, brings animism alive in a modern sense; it is informed by scientific thinking sparked with Nietzsche’s idea of Dionysian frenzy, asking us to drop into that realm with all of our senses intact – and the recognition that we need a new compass for these wild and changing times.
Planetary Rumpus expresses the instinctual drive within, our genetic coding, which we feel surging through our bodies and veins like a double helix rising out of the primordial soup towards the heavens. It asks us to feel the sun on our skins at dawn as if we are being awoken to a brand new day, as if sunrise were a ritual of rebirth and another chance at realising the great fortune of our lives, as consciously self-aware primates on a living planet … this is the archetypal music of the cosmic serpent in our double helix DNA body/minds, right now. Turn it up and let rip.
