Spirituality & Environmental
Activism
By Jesse Wolf Hardin
Now more than ever we need a deepening of social consciousness and environmental
activism, not only for the sake of the natural world we depend on but also for
the good of our natural selves. And the most powerful activism is usually
inspired, fed and sustained by a spiritual connection to the living Earth of
which we are forever a part.
In fact I cannot talk about myself, my work or beliefs without talking first
about my home. It is the very ground of my being, and the source of my every
surviving truth. I live in the Gila, in the Southwest corner of New Mexico. In
the ancestral lands of the San Francisco culture, the Sweet Medicine People who
migrated out and down to the Rio Grande valley over a thousand years ago now. It
is home to the bear tribe and mountain lion clan, the deer and elk people. The
home of dove and duck, hawk and heron, ringtail cat and raccoon. Of scarce coat-amundi,
threatened minnows, the endangered Spotted Owl and Red Willow Flycatcher. Of the
Mexican Gray Wolf, only recently reintroduced to the wilds after nearly two
decades of extirpation and captivity.
It is home to echoing crimson cliffs and singing volcanic rock, ponderosa and
pinon, alamo and willow, healing herbs and flowering cacti. And for a quarter of
a century now, it’s been a full-time nest to me. It is the place for which I
would risk death. The place where I will one day die. The place that has taught
me what it means to be fully, responsively alive.... and to do whatever is
necessary to protect and nourish the land in return.
Off and on for 20 years now I’ve traveled the country giving talks and
performing concerts that resulted not only in the formation of new environmental
groups, the raising of support and funds for the various regional campaigns, and
the inspiration of our audiences — but often in their participation in direct
actions following the shows. We enlist art and ritual in the service of old
growth forest protection, grizzly habitat, and the restoration of riparian
zones. The events sometimes conclude with group hugs, in powerful circles of
teary-eyed seekers, in howls and hopes, and spiral dances that burst out of the
school halls onto the grass and into the rain.
When pressed to describe the Deep Ecology Medicine Show, one student said “It
was like a ceremony affirming life, a ritual awakening my power to do something
about the many problems we face.” And my talks to even the most scholarly
audiences, become rituals through the depth of sharing and the power of magical
intent.
While they may not be aware of the fact, most if not all ecological activists
are informed and inspired by an emotional, cellular, energetic connection to the
imperiled Earth that is nothing less than spiritual. And it has always been so.
Creator of a new land ethic, Aldo Leopold described his experience killing a
she-wolf, “watching the green fire in her eyes die,” as a spiritual epiphany.
John Muir, grandfather of the American conservation movement, was a wild-eyed
Irishman given to dramatic exclamations and acts. Books show grainy black and
white images of an aging man resting at his desk, posing uncomfortably in a
photographer’s studio, or standing placidly on a Yellowstone overlook with an
unperturbable President, Theodore Roosevelt. But I picture him as he was when he
was most moved — hootin’ and hollerin’ on a makeshift whitewater raft, in rapt
intercourse with a line of forest ants, or struck breathless by awesome new
vista.
Perched at the spindly top of a giant conifer tree in the middle of a raging
storm, swept by the wind into a giant arc, his eyes lit up by flashes of
lightening: now there’s an image of a man whose explorations of the natural
world were nothing less than revelatory. He was, in every way, enraptured. In
the ways of plants and beasts he found deep communion, and this revelation
included a calling to protect and preserve that which he had grown to love.
There’s a powerful story in the way the village women of the Southern Himalayas
banded together to stop deforestation uphill of their villages. They acted not
only to reduce the instances of dangerous mudslides, but to honor and protect
the devas or spirits of the trees themselves. Because of their risky tactic of
throwing their arms around pines about to be cut, their cultural and
environmental movement is called “Chipko,” a Sanskrit word meaning literally “to
embrace.”
Australian rainforest activist, John Seed, talks about a nurturing a spiritual
connection between himself and the trees, to the degree that when the chainsaw
bites into their flesh, he feels it ripping into his own side as well. Redwood
heroine Julia Butterfly writes that it was her spiritual connection to the tree
she called “Luna,” that allowed her to stay up in it so many months while
besieged with police loudspeakers, loggers’ saws and winter storms assaulting
her tiny aerial platform.
The construction of giant telescopes atop Arizona’s “sky island” Mt. Graham has
been vigorously opposed by both environmental groups and native traditionalists.
Resistance and ritual go hand in hand in the “sacred runs” regularly held by the
Apache. In July of 1993, I participated in one of many protests involving Earth
First! and the Mt. Graham Coalition. We ignored the Sheriff’s orders not to
proceed, and walked the rest of the way up the mountain to the chain link fences
surrounding the scopes.
Sweating from the heat of the ascent, and deeply moved by the destruction we
saw, everyone dropped to the dusty ground in a spontaneous circle of grief and
prayer. Through our tears we spoke as witnesses, shared our pain, begged
forgiveness for being part of a culture that disregards the relevance of
wildness, of places of power, and the beliefs and traditions of the resident
indigenous people. One man spoke for the endangered Mt. Graham red squirrel, and
a woman heavy with child bemoaned giving birth in an age when nothing — not even
the Earth we depend upon — is held sacred anymore. Together we asked for
guidance from the spirits of the mountain, the strength to continue the struggle
of love and life no matter what the obstacles or results.
When deciding what actions are needed in defense of the Earth, we are called to
go directly to the source. By silencing the verbose mind and opening to the
meaning-filled signals from the rest of the living planet, we create the
condition of respect necessary for rapport. It is our natural, if often
suppressed ability to communicate with the other agents of the earthen whole, to
serve as a conduit for their _expression, and to send our own response back to
the whole, informing it as it informs us. And acting in ways that heal self,
community and planet — as instruments of the whole and holy all.
Whatever one calls it, there’s an undeniable force that courses through this
planet, a vibrational unity, an underlying if mysterious pattern — an entity of
inclusion that animates, inspires, enlightens, and fuels the evolution of the
spiritual as well as bodily forms of its participant beings. Even the most
mental, the most clueless of us can get it. We know it as children, but then at
some point we agree to join the collective denial? something numinous just
beneath the pavement, pregnant with swelling seed and palpable purpose: a
wildness of spirit, and the Spirit of the Earth.
Our ancient ancestors believed and acted as if the world would end if ever they
failed to properly carry out their rituals on time. And in essence it was true,
for these ceremonies grounded the people in right relationship with the Earth,
without which the people could not survive. A people divorced from the ways of
Nature must eventually perish as a result of this estrangement, and then for
them at least, the world would have indeed come to an end. It is no different
for us now. Without a reciprocal, ritual relationship with the natural world,
without those feats of ceremony and sentience that reunite us with the Earthen
body, we are fated to endlessly repeat our most debilitating mistakes.
All that stands between a healthy planet and nuclear or biological meltdown is
us ourselves, and the ways we choose to perceive, relate to, and resacrament the
living world of which we are a part. We too can develop rites and ceremonies
that mirror and focus our shared connection to the customs of culture, the
relations of family, fiestas, celebrations and demonstrations of grief that
characterize them. These ways of being and acting are not New Age, but “first
nature:” of our nature, and of the natural world.
Earth-informed “New Nature Spirituality” promotes groundedness, connectedness,
consciousness, and celebratory existence. It encourages full individual and
cultural freedom, in essential combination with reverence for life, diversity
and that essential quality we call “wildness.” It is embodied in the child,
saddened by the sight of a butterfly bounced off a windshield onto the shoulder
of some numbered road, and in an old woman finding reason to go on living in the
slow unfolding of a window-box flower.
It is voiced in the sermon-scream of falcons spiraling through downtown New York
City, in the spontaneous living prayers of outlaw dandelions erupting in the
cracks of every aging sidewalk, in a liturgy recorded in the spiraling reggae of
the DNA helix and the twisting samba-line of ants ascending a gnarled
cottonwood.
Its only commandments are “written in stone” in the many “rocks of ages:” a
testament in limestone, granite and quartz, a demonstration of and demand for
authenticity and substance, the weight and substance of one’s commitment to
place. Its message is carried on the lift of robin’s songs, and delivered on the
backs and in the hearts of every activist devoted to this Earth’s protection.
Spirituality is not just the inspiration and reward. It is part of the great
work, the means to fulfilling our most meaningful purpose. It is both the
literal and liturgical ground for a new start. It is activism’s true heart.
Jesse Wolf Hardin is an acclaimed teacher of Earth-centered spirituality,
living seven river crossings from a road in an ancient place of power. He is the
author of Kindred Spirits (Swan-Raven 2001) and Gaia Eros: New Nature
Spirituality (New Page 2004). Wolf and Loba share the riverside sanctuary where
he offers men’s quests and intuitive counsel, and she hosts women for quests,
wildfoods gathering, special resident internships, and the annual Wild Women’s
Gathering each June. For more info, contact The Earthen Spirituality Project &
Sweet Medicine Women’s Center, Box 820, Reserve, NM 87830, send e-mail to:
mail@earthenspirituality.org or visit
www.earthenspirituality.org
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