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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A new type of seaweed, I thought. Black – I haven’t seen this here before. But it isn’t seaweed, washed up on the beach this morning. It’s ash. We’re 25km south of the fire that has just ravaged over 70,000 hectares of forest between Batemans Bay and Bawley Point, where I first lived when I moved to the coast. I drove 35km through that forest every weekday for 6 months. But the numbers don’t add up. The forest is dead. The buildings are protected, the human homes saved. But the trees are gone and with them the nests, the birds and the insects, the lizards and wombats, the life. And its dust is washed up on the tides, carried away by the ocean, deposited here to let us all be reminded – a great fire is coming and we are all in line.
At first it looked just like seaweed …
I’ve gotten used to the Shearwater carcasses lining the shoreline by now. But this is new – a colourful parrot, strewn across the beach, and then a magpie. Charred by the fires and thrown into the waters, to be spewed up here by the ocean. We can only imagine the horror of its last moments, its world incinerated by a monstrous explosion of fire, its feathers burning crisp as it crashed into a death spiral and the waves below.
There have always been fires, like floods and droughts, in Australia. But the ferocity, the intensity, the extent of their devastation is new. This is what scientists warned us about 20 years ago and this is what fire chiefs reiterate now. Now we reap what we sow. Centuries of farming for what we could get, on this land, and millennia of profiteering across the globe, behind it. The relentless logic of capitalism, built out of the greed that drove colonisation since the age of agriculture began, turbo boosted by the machine age of industrialisation and now the exponential skywards march of the digital age. Straight up, go the growth figures; and straight back down, they will come. This is timeless wisdom, dressed up as prediction, made easy by the stupidity of our ‘leaders’.
I still swim in the salty sea waters I love. The ash isn’t too bad once you’re in. The scent is off-putting, though; not as bad as burnt hair, but a whiff of death is in the air for sure. The sun glows an eery red but the surfers are still out too, looking for a wave. I still go to work. Life goes on. But it’s changing, this year, and it’s going to keep on getting worse while we fail to face, let alone act on, the realities of anthropogenic climate change. The crisis is washing up on our shores, just as it is lapping at the feet of the Pacific Islanders, melting glaciers, extending deserts and torching even rainforests. While our ignorant PM waffles on about the cricket and anything but the emergency, the only ashes that matter this summer are already here.
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In Anima, Thom Yorke follows a trail that was set out for his soul when his European ancestors crossed paths in the great forest.
For this new audiovisual feast from Paul Thomas Anderson is fairy tale, folks, mark my words. And as a writer who has long explored the deep trails made across our psyches by the play of light and darkness since time immemorial, the idea of ancient tales with modern significance is something dear to my heart. This isn’t myth as falsehood, but myth as powerful storytelling, opening doors to our secret longings, our hidden hopes, our romantic selves.
So how does this modern mythmaking work? Well, where once wise old crones shared secrets beneath the wild spreading branches of an oak or elm, or curious children allowed themselves to become enchanted by the thrilling call of a songbird until they were lost in the forest, Yorke is drawn along this heartfelt tale by similar instincts. His character in this romance is on the scent of the chase, following a girl of his dreams, yearning to return her lunch case, which is as precious to him as any other form of lost treasure could be. By the time he has woken up on his crowded train, dodged countless commuters on crammed escalators, and faced other barriers to his distant love interest, Yorke is following the golden imperative of the mythic journey: the hero is inspired to set things right, by returning the case and maybe meeting someone to care about in the deal. The foes and barriers, the challenges to his path, the obstacles that threaten to derail the fruition of his dream … these are all inevitable in the hunt, or life is not being lived. The thorns cross the path, the villain stands in the way, the mountain must be climbed. Our goal may seem just out of reach, but it is in such a quest that we are reminded of our power, as Joseph Campbell so often reminded us.
But while the chase is timeless, the imagery of Anima reflects our new ‘natural environment’: the city. The opening, submerged in the subway, enfolds us within a train shooting along a tunnel, like a probe into our everyday underworld. We don’t want to over-analyze the film – as Martin Shaw wrote, the best stories remain dark around the edges, they leave us in mystery, grappling with our own inner truths and conflicts, unsure rather than overly confident in our self-knowledge. But the nodding of the commuters, Yorke included, seems to stand as the inevitable process of socialization, a dance we all join in order to get by, a way of being that lets us be in the world. Turning it into dance is the magic that art, in this case film, allows us – to settle into the truths of our lives while also making them part of a greater whole. We play the game, we know we play the game, but we know we are also more than this, that we come from a place of unlimited potential and ultimately we belong in that place, as much as we do here, in our world of limit and dissolution.
In this world, Yorke and Anderson play with the familiar while feeling out its edges. As soon as Yorke glimpses his Anima – a Jungian term for the feminine within – his otherwise tired character is opened out into new worlds of excitement, with the possibility that everyday life might not leave us flattened but invigorated; that something might change for the better, after all. The chase includes a classic flying dream sequence, as well as epic scenery, and Yorke’s character responds with passing episodes of passive acceptance, fleeting anger, playful exploration and hopeless resignation in turns. All of these human responses are bound within another mythic signalling: towards the wonder of awe. Can it be true? Is it real? The dream of Anima speaks of these gentle inner experiences, which we all know and hold dear but too often let slide along the rigmarole of modern life.
The eventual meeting, the reuniting of two lost souls who complement each other in the endless dance of being around being, rolling along a laneway wall, is a testament to the hope of our unquenchable longing. Anima draws us down and reminds us where we come from and where we belong. This is Home, a place we have sometimes forgotten is also a planet with limits, forests and lakes, seas and other creatures that need protecting.
Whatever parts of us face the world – our Persona to society, family and each other – find relief in the depths of Anima. Psyche, or mind; self, the individual, you person, the mind/body, your vehicle for getting by … that person seeks their dance partner beneath the surface, where she lives and breathes and waits for us to remember. Take the trip, again …
Geoff Berry wrote his PhD on the symbol of light, his MA on dreams and myths, and sings along similar themes with Melbourne post-punk band SEVERINS.
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.
