The Ark

Today the voices promoting environmentalism frequently carry a strong spiritual message. Joanna Macy, one of its key promoters, tells how this happened.

Transcript

This transcript was typed from a recording of the program. The ABC cannot guarantee its complete accuracy because of the possibility of mishearing and occasional difficulty in identifying speakers.

THEME

Rachael Kohn: Whether you're Dark Green or Pale Avocado, the environmental movement has coloured your thinking and maybe your spiritual outlook.

Hello, I'm Rachael Kohn and on The Ark today I'm joined by one of the leading activists in the movement, Joanna Macy. She tells us about the 40-year evolution of environmentalism, from a few lone voices to a fully fledged spiritual commitment. It's even affected the major religious traditions. I spoke to Joanna just after she'd concluded an ecological retreat in Western Australia.

Joanna Macy: I had a remarkable experience down on the coast at a place called Denmark, there was a 30-day retreat or training for activists from around the world, and our topic was really the very direction of my work, which is the transition between the industrial growth society and a life-sustaining society.

So we were looking at what needs to happen and how can we sustain our motivation, and build our strengths for this revolution, it really is an epochal change from the industrial growth society to a sustainable civilisation.

Rachael Kohn: Well we've certainly come a long way since the 1960s when a marine biologist and sometime poet, Rachel Carson, wrote Silent Spring. Did she really kickstart the environmentalist movement?

Joanna Macy: She is generally regarded as having done so, and I think with total accuracy. She is one of our great heroes. She had to contend with the unremitting opposition of the corporations and the chemical industry, and many scientists too who were in service to industry. Her sense of connectedness with the natural world, her reverence and wonder. You might remember she wrote that beautiful book, Sense of Wonder. That sustained her, and that was sustaining us too in this retreat in W.A.

Rachael Kohn: Well it must have been difficult though in the 1960s to get people concerned about the earth when there were so many pressing social issues, like black civil rights, both in America and Australia.

Joanna Macy: And on either side of those issues, the earth was generally regarded as just a storehouse of resources for our ever-burgeoning market economy, both a limitless supply of raw materials and a limitless sink and this is what Rachel Carson saw, that we were using the earth, the soil, the very air we breathe as a sewer for our industrial manufacturing processes. And that she had the courage to sense that, to research it, and to name it, is really to her credit.

Rachael Kohn: Well she did inspire quite a few people, even professionals and people from the business world who drew together in an interesting organisation called The Club of Rome, and they commissioned a study called Limits to Growth.

Joanna Macy: That's right, and those two deserve, Dennis Meadows, Donella Meadows, and others, are also in our pantheon as they had the courage, because it took a lot of courage then to actually that we thought the sky was the limit, that we could keep advancing, build ever greater comforts in our consumer society, and they rang the alarm. Even though the data on what they drew was quite limited. And as you may know that has been reissued in the last year.

Rachael Kohn: Yes, it certainly needed to be revised because people realised that some of the predictions were a bit extreme, and I wondered whether that was a turning point for the environmental movement, to look, to turn away from the statistics and the predictions toward a realisation perhaps that the environment or the earth had inherent value.

Joanna Macy: That was a big move for all of us, and it happened for me personally when I encountered the thinking of the Norwegian philosopher, Arnie Naess, who coined the term deep ecology. I had already been encountering in my own work, that there was a love for the earth and a recognition of our inter-connectedness, that was coming forth in my brother and sister activists, when we were doing group work around what was hard for us, and what sustained us in our work for environmental sanity.

Rachael Kohn: Does environmentalism then have an inherent spirituality, do you think?

Joanna Macy: Well for me it does. Even the term 'environment' seems to be a misnomer because that puts the human species at the centre, and the rest of the world is something that just surrounds it, whereas the key insight which is common to all the earth wisdom traditions, indigenous thought, is that the human is but one strand in the exquisite ongoing intelligent sensitive web of life, and when environmental activists found that they were being sustained and inspired in their work by this very sense of connectedness with the sacred whole. And sacred you just define it as that, a whole on which you were totally dependent, this was a big moment, and has been a source of continuing inspiration and empowerment.

Rachael Kohn: Well Joanna, you started out as a Presbyterian, I think from New York?

Joanna Macy: That's correct.

Rachael Kohn: But became a Buddhist.

Joanna Macy: Yes.

Rachael Kohn: What prompted that change?

Joanna Macy: Well I loved the church and I loved their teachings, but I found that the assumption that there was no salvation outside the church, that sort of tendency towards thinking you have the sole right answer, was something I couldn't tolerate in the long run, and so I backed out, and then much later, I was in my mid-30s, we were working in India with the American Peace Corps, I found myself working with Tibetan refugees and encountering the ancient path of the Buddha Dharma, and I gravitated toward it with delight.

Rachael Kohn: Well is the Buddhist outlook of interdependent origination as it's called, or interdependence with the natural environment, although I now I know I shouldn't use that word, does that have a natural compatibility with deep ecology's notion of the ecological self?

Joanna Macy: Yes, yes, yes, Rachael, in spades, I believe that is true, and I have been plumbing that connection myself over the last 30 years. The ecological self is very close to what Buddhists call our true nature, that we are not separate, that the ego driven competitive self, that we are conditioned to assume we are, by a competitive civilisation, is actually just a convention, a construct, and that underneath that is a mutual belonging to a vast and sacred enterprise, the living body of earth.

Rachael Kohn: Are prominent Buddhists coming out increasingly in favour of ecological activism?

Joanna Macy: Oh yes, whether they're from South East Asia, like there's Vietnamese and Master Thich Nhat Hahn, who coined the term, engaged Buddhism, or like the Tibetan, His Holiness the Dalai Lama who talks increasingly of our necessity for recognising our interdependence, or the ecological nature of our very existence.

Rachael Kohn: I wonder if other traditions, such as the Christian churches, and Judaism have also adopted an ecological awareness as part of their spiritual outlook, because I recall that in 2001, Pope John Paul II did call for a greening of the church?

Joanna Macy: I find this in every tradition, Rachael, it is coming rapidly to the fore. I see it in the Jewish renewal movement. There's some beautiful writings coming forward, and use of ancient Jewish rituals and concepts that bespeak our inherent belong to the earth. I see it in creation spirituality and the Christian church as articulated by Matthew Fox and many others. And I see it in the Sufi tradition, in Islam, which also has this nature mysticism at its core. And I see it in women's spirituality, where there is a surfacing of what is imagined to be a prehistorical goddess religion, a sense of the radical eminence of the sacred in all of life and the rebirth of Wicca in witchcraft along the same lines. And certainly in the ancient voices of the indigenous peoples that are being heard more and more. This is an amazing change.

When I was in graduate school, just 40, 50 years ago, there wasn't a breath of this, there wasn't even a mention of the earth and the sacred in the same thought realm. Sometimes it feels that to us activists that change is slow, but actually when you look at these changes to which you just were pointing, it is a very revolutionary kind of rapidity with which we are opening our eyes.

Rachael Kohn: I think you've just pointed there to the ways in which the ecological consciousness has prompted other movements, like eco-feminism, and eco-spirituality and so forth.

Joanna Macy: Yes, and I just met a young man in Perth who is doing his thesis on eco-masculinity.

Rachael Kohn: Right, well it's about time. Well Joanna, you've been in Australia a few times, and I know that one of the reasons that you come here is to connect up with someone called John Seed, who founded Bodhi Farm. Now what role have they played in the eco-spiritual movement?

Joanna Macy: Well they were one of the first exquisite instances of rainforest, old-growth forest protection, and it was what happens to John there in the defence of Terania Creek up in New South Wales, and how he wrote about it, in a book we co-authored, Thinking Like a Mountain, and in the group ritual forum we co-created Council of All Beings that the practice of deep ecology, an experiential arm of deep ecology, that we can work together to shed all wounding notions of our separation from the natural world. This has had a tremendous impact, and the work that he has done and that we have done together has spread very far and wide.

Rachael Kohn: Joanna, I haven't yet mentioned Gaia, James P. Lovelock's name for the earth; has that been a helpful contribution to the ecological message?

Joanna Macy: Enormously, Rachael. He could have called his hypothesis the self-organising capacities of the planet, he could have named it that, but he had the good sense to listen to his friend, the novelist, I think Golding, to name it after the Greek Goddess, and he called the Gaia Hypothesis, and it's sense become the Gaia Theory, it's no longer just a hypothesis.

Well this word has helped people feel that they're coming home, that we belong to the great being, that this being is a self-organising whole as much as we are, and that we can sense, open our eyes to the beauty of it, and sense the power it gives us and the grace it gives us and the resources it opens us to as we work for a sustainable society. And we need it because it's hard now, it's really hard.

Rachael Kohn: Joanna, in your book Widening Circles, which is a memoir, one reads that you've been actively pursuing this for a long time. Is the warrior Joanna Macy going to lay down her sword any time soon?

Joanna Macy: Not on your life. One thing I find, I'm 75 now, and I find it keeps me young, and it keeps the blood pumping and it keeps laughter on my lips. There is nothing more fun than working with other people for the sake of the earth.

Rachael Kohn: Joanna Macy lives in Berkeley, California, and her book details are on The Ark website.

Next week, the woman who sold Cleopatra Soap and found it aroused a strange desire: to unwrap Egyptian mummies. That's The Ark, with me, Rachael Kohn.

THEME

Guests

Joanna Macy
is an internationally known activist, speaker and teacher on Buddhist philosophy, systems theory and deep ecology. The author of seven books, she lives in Berkeley, California.

Further Information

Welcome to All Beings
Joanna Macy's website.
http://www.joannamacy.net/

Publications

Title: Widening Circles, a Memoir
Author : Joanna Macy
Publisher: New Society, 2000