Reckonings: a journal of justice, hope and history

A cultural cocoon

Michael Kahn reminded us recently of Arnold Toynbee’s conception of a “creative minority” culture, a cocoon that is woven beside and beyond a dominant and dying culture, nourishing the seeds of succession, life that accompanies and follows the dominant culture's failing and demise.

To speak or write of two contrasting cultures is caricature, as are the two images I sketch below. They may nonetheless be useful if they serve fairly to describe a challenge and an opportunity, as I hope they do.

Our still prevailing culture (or what I’m calling a culture) has been named the “industrial growth society” by Joanna Macy, “the military industrial complex” by Dwight Eisenhower, and just “the empire” by David Korten. Whatever its humane accomplishments, for 200 years it’s been relentlessly shutting down the essential life systems of the earth. One of those life systems is human development—the integrated growth of our bodies, hearts, minds and souls, our gifts of companionship and imagination.

Today’s dominant culture of industrial empire is pathologically adolescent rather than truly adult or mature, as if the developmental path was lost in the pre-transformative, pre-right of passage stage of adolescence. So the culture is largely egocentric, anthropocentric, hierarchical, materialistic, competitive, violent, conflict-driven, racist, sexist and ageist, riven by economic and social inequity, unsustainable and fundamentally unnatural because its relationship to the earth is instrumental or alienated, neither organic nor intimate. (I am particularly grateful here to the work of Bill Plotkin.)

The successor or alternative culture I have in mind—the cocoon or embodiment of Toynbee’s creative minority—is life-sustaining and life-nourishing. It is eco-centric (nature or earth centered) and soul-centric (let’s say imaginative, holistic, integrative, spiritual, conscious of the whole web of life). It is egalitarian and democratic, cooperative, community-based, just, compassionate and sustainable. We could call the movement, as David Korten has, a transition “from empire to earth community.”

The scope and vitality of that movement is the subject of Paul Hawken’s recent book, Blessed Unrest (2008). “Life is the most fundamental human right, and all of the movements within the movement are dedicated to creating the conditions for life, conditions that include livelihood, food, security, peace, a stable environment, and freedom from external tyranny. Whenever and wherever that right is violated, human beings rise up. Today they are rising up in record numbers, and in a collective body that is often as not more sophisticated than the corporate and governmental bodies they address" (p 67-68).

When I see compassion as describing and driving our mission and our practice, I am imagining our service to that alternative culture and that transition, and our membership in that community and movement.

A note on compassion

As many readers of Reckonings know, for many years - over 30 now - I have worked for The Christopher Reynolds Foundation. The focus of our attention has evolved during that time, but I think a spirit has remained constant. On the one hand, we of the Reynolds board have never sought to capture that spirit in words; and on the other, our conversations with each other and our dialogues with grantees during all that time are always trying to describe it in words.

During the past year, as our work on Cuba and Cuban-American relations has continued, we have begun anew to discuss our core values and our mission. This spring, as part of that ongoing dialogue, I began to take note of my own thoughts. The recent postings on Reckonings - ideas of Joanna Macy and Bill McKibben, and my responses to Paul Hawken's book Blessed Unrest - are part of that musing. So too are the following two postings, the first a suggestion that compassion is at the heart of our intention, the core substance of our gift and our practice; the second, indebted particularly to Paul Hawken and to Bill Plotkin's recent book, Nature and the Human Soul, is an effort briefly to describe the larger movement of which we experience ourselves as members.

I thought it might be useful to post abbreviated versions of these two reflections here on Reckonings, in the hope that they might provoke a discussion or elicit suggestions of additional resources we should explore. Thoughts can be added as comments here or addressed to john@reckonings.net.
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I have in mind a holistic conception of compassionate attention to healing suffering and nourishing the quality of lives, human and otherwise. At Spikenard Farm, for example, it’s a conception whose interactive components include education, the arts, farming and community building, with farm and apiary as organizational core. I can imagine other kinds of programs pursuing essentially the same conception of holistic growth and healing that aren’t on farms – they could be anywhere - schools, hospitals, libraries, churches, animal shelters and wildlife sanctuaries, penal colonies come to mind.

Could we describe a mission as informed and inspired most deeply by a spirit of compassion, expressive of the Buddhist commitment to metta or loving-kindness , or the Judeo-Christian tradition’s grounding in love of God and neighbor? The Christian contemplative Thomas Merton wrote, beautifully I think, “Compassion is the keen awareness of the interdependence of all things." The word’s origin, I learn, is Middle English : via Old French from ecclesiastical Latin compassio(n-), from compati ‘suffer with.’ We could as well use the word love, or mercy, working to diminish the suffering of all sentient beings.

Nourishing compassion for self and for others is the core of mindfulness and the Buddhist practice of meditation. Compassion is essentially relational, synergistic, holistic. Empathy for others and for oneself are naturally and necessarily integrated, extensions of one another.   And in turn, psychologist Christopher Germer writes, “… as mindfulness begins to dissolve the artificial boundaries that define our separateness, we begin to experience our innate affinity with all beings.” (Germer, et al, Mindfulness and Psychotherapy, Guilford, 2005) 

Compassion can describe and comprise a mission and a practice: what we seek to embody and to nourish with our grant-making and what we might call our field work, our ongoing learning and companionship with grantees and their other companions and beneficiaries, who become then our fellows in compassionate practice.

We ourselves and our grantee-fellows-in-compassionate-practice may not use that language, but if it is our mission and our practice, and we take the time to learn about and truly know our grantee companions’ world and their practice, we can choose essentially to be in the business of nourishing the compassionate practice – and diminishing the suffering - of others. 

Some wise words from Joanna Macy

“The most remarkable feature of this historical moment on Earth is not that we are on the way to destroying the world—we’ve actually been on the way for quite a while. It is that we are beginning to wake up, as from a millennia-long sleep, to a whole new relationship to our world, to ourselves and each other.”

Paul Hawken's book "Blessed Unrest," Part 2

Hawken’s central organizing theme in Blessed Unrest is the emergence, interaction and merging of three developments in American culture and history, an environmental movement, a movement for social justice, and specifically a movement for social and environmental justice for indigenous peoples and cultures. He is an especially skillful and informed student of that branch of 19th century American environmentalism for which the classic texts are Emerson’s Nature and Thoreau’s Walden, a perspective in which humankind and the natural world are of a piece, “with all divisions between them arbitrary and dangerous.” As his friend Bronson Alcott wrote, “Thoreau is himself a wood, and its inhabitants. There is more in him of sod and shade and sky lights, of the genuine mold and moistures of the green grey earth, than in any person I know.”

It is wisdom that has its deepest spiritual roots in the traditions of indigenous cultures, and that has survived and taken on new richness in the scientific world of modern ecology. Rachel Carson said in 1963 that the time has come for human beings to “admit their kinship with other forms of life… We must never forget the wholeness of that relationship. We cannot think of the living organism alone; nor can we think of the physical environment as a separate entity.”

Hawken is at his best in writing of the interconnectedness, the integrity of the strands of environmental and social activism, whether in his discussion of the Mi’kmaq people’s knowledge of the world through sound and the cycles of the moon, the environmental and human disaster in Bhopal, or a network of NGOs taking on the world’s biggest beverage company, Coca-Cola, over concerns about water pollution, toxicity, product safety and worker rights.

Paul Hawken’s concluding paragraph – introducing a preliminary collection of organizations and programs working on behalf of social, economic and environmental justice and human rights, the first embodiment of a larger database gathering on Wiser Earth (www.WiserEarth.org) is worth quoting in full.

“It is axiomatic that we are at a threshold in human existence, a fundamental change in understanding about our relationship to nature and each other. We are moving from a world created by privilege to a world created by community. The current thrust of history is too supple to be labeled, but global themes are emerging in response to cascading ecological crises and human suffering. These ideas include the need for radical social change, the reinvention of market-based economies, the empowerment of women, activism on all levels, and the need for localized economic control. There are insistent calls for autonomy, appeals for a new resource ethic based on the tradition of the commons, demands for the reinstatement of cultural primacy over corporate hegemony, and a rising demand for radical transparency in politics and corporate decision making… Everyone on earth will be an environmentalist in the not too distant future, driven there by necessity and experience… The world is a system, and it will soon be a very different world, driven by millions of communities who believe that democracy and restoration are grassroots movements that connect us to values that we hold in common.”

We are indeed “at a threshold in human existence” of the kind Hawken describes. We – and the entire natural world of which we are inextricably members – are experiencing that cascade of ecological crisis and destruction, that suffering and extinction to which he refers. I wish, at the end of such an admirable book, he was not offering such an anthropocentric vision, but he is surely right that humankind is the source of such suffering and extinction and will, as it is ameliorated and reversed, bear virtually the entire responsibility for succeeding in that creative and restorative process.

I suspect the momentum of that process will undergo a qualitative acceleration only when our largely western world of wealth and privilege is palpably, obviously in decline, only when the human suffering reaches those who still possess the wealth, the comfort and the power to compound the world’s illness or redeem it. The record thus far, for all the creativity and inspired resistance Hawken describes, is still predominately one of growing inequity and destruction. Bill McKibben, Paul Hawken and yes, millions of others are working to tip that balance, to create and restore the kind of world they so well describe. Morally and practically, I believe there is no viable alternative. In that sense we can embrace, as Hawken clearly does, those words of Joanna Macy:

“The most remarkable feature of this historical moment on Earth is not that we are on the way to destroying the world—we’ve actually been on the way for quite a while. It is that we are beginning to wake up, as from a millennia-long sleep, to a whole new relationship to our world, to ourselves and each other.”

__________________________

Hawken’s central organizing theme in Blessed Unrest is the emergence, interaction and merging of three developments in American culture and history, an environmental movement, a movement for social justice, and specifically a movement for social and environmental justice for indigenous peoples and cultures. He is an especially skillful and informed student of that branch of 19th century American environmentalism for which the classic texts are Emerson’s Nature and Thoreau’s Walden, a perspective in which humankind and the natural world are of a piece, “with all divisions between them arbitrary and dangerous.” As his friend Bronson Alcott wrote, “Thoreau is himself a wood, and its inhabitants. There is more in him of sod and shade and sky lights, of the genuine mold and moistures of the green grey earth, than in any person I know.”

It is wisdom that has its deepest spiritual roots in the traditions of indigenous cultures, and that has survived and taken on new richness in the scientific world of modern ecology. Rachel Carson said in 1963 that the time has come for human beings to “admit their kinship with other forms of life… We must never forget the wholeness of that relationship. We cannot think of the living organism alone; nor can we think of the physical environment as a separate entity.”

Hawken is at his best in writing of the interconnectedness, the integrity of the strands of environmental and social activism, whether in his discussion of the Mi’kmaq people’s knowledge of the world through sound and the cycles of the moon, the environmental and human disaster in Bhopal, or a network of NGOs taking on the world’s biggest beverage company, Coca-Cola, over concerns about water pollution, toxicity, product safety and worker rights.

Paul Hawken’s concluding paragraph – introducing a preliminary collection of organizations and programs working on behalf of social, economic and environmental justice and human rights, the first embodiment of a larger database gathering on Wiser Earth (www.WiserEarth.org) is worth quoting in full.

“It is axiomatic that we are at a threshold in human existence, a fundamental change in understanding about our relationship to nature and each other. We are moving from a world created by privilege to a world created by community. The current thrust of history is too supple to be labeled, but global themes are emerging in response to cascading ecological crises and human suffering. These ideas include the need for radical social change, the reinvention of market-based economies, the empowerment of women, activism on all levels, and the need for localized economic control. There are insistent calls for autonomy, appeals for a new resource ethic based on the tradition of the commons, demands for the reinstatement of cultural primacy over corporate hegemony, and a rising demand for radical transparency in politics and corporate decision making… Everyone on earth will be an environmentalist in the not too distant future, driven there by necessity and experience… The world is a system, and it will soon be a very different world, driven by millions of communities who believe that democracy and restoration are grassroots movements that connect us to values that we hold in common.”

We are indeed “at a threshold in human existence” of the kind Hawken describes. We – and the entire natural world of which we are inextricably members – are experiencing that cascade of ecological crisis and destruction, that suffering and extinction to which he refers. I wish, at the end of such an admirable book, he was not offering such an anthropocentric vision, but he is surely right that humankind is the source of such suffering and extinction and will, as it is ameliorated and reversed, bear virtually the entire responsibility for succeeding in that creative and restorative process.

I suspect the momentum of that process will undergo a qualitative acceleration only when our largely western world of wealth and privilege is palpably, obviously in decline, only when the human suffering reaches those who still possess the wealth, the comfort and the power to compound the world’s illness or redeem it. The record thus far, for all the creativity and inspired resistance Hawken describes, is still predominately one of growing inequity and destruction. Bill McKibben, Paul Hawken and yes, millions of others are working to tip that balance, to create and restore the kind of world they so well describe. Morally and practically, I believe there is no viable alternative. In that sense we can embrace, as Hawken clearly does, those words of Joanna Macy:

“The most remarkable feature of this historical moment on Earth is not that we are on the way to destroying the world—we’ve actually been on the way for quite a while. It is that we are beginning to wake up, as from a millennia-long sleep, to a whole new relationship to our world, to ourselves and each other.”

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A short bulletin from Bill McKibben on the old culture and the new

I've put together below some brief excerpts from Bill McKibben's current work, the first from his book Deep Economy (2008), a critique of the concept of economic growth and persuasive case for a new economic model based upon sustainable local economies. The second - in a sense the expression of need to which Paul Hawken in Blessed Unrest offers at least an interim response - is drawn from an essay McKibben contributed to the current issue of Yes Magazine. Bill McKibben teaches at Middlebury College and is a much admired journalist whose writing focuses primarily upon environmental issues. One of his current movement-building projects, attentive particularly to global warming, is described at 1sky.org. He has also suggested need for a vision of generosity bearing similarity to the Marshall Plan concept of Michael Lerner and the Network of Spiritual Progressives, and intriguingly, to the Christopher Reynolds Foundation's early focus on the US and China.

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"The old realism—an endless More—is morphing into a dangerous fantasy…In the face of energy shortage, of global warming, and of the vague but growing sense that we are not as alive and connected as we want to be, I think we’ve started to grope for what might come next. And just in time… [T]he new, deeper economy will be built, in pieces and from below. It’s a quiet revolution begun by ordinary people with the stuff of our daily lives.”

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"We need a movement. We need a political swell larger than the civil rights movement—as passionate and as willing to sacrifice. Without it, we’re not going to best the fossil fuel companies and the automakers and the rest of the vested interests that are keeping us from change."

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"The kind of extreme independence that derived from cheap fossil fuel—the fact that we need our neighbors for nothing at all—can’t last. Either we build real community, of the kind that lets us embrace mass transit and local food and co-housing and you name it, or we will go down clinging to the wreckage of our privatized society.

"Which leaves us with the one piece of undeniably good news: we were built for community. Everything we know about human beings, from the state of our immune systems to the state of our psyches, testifies to our desire for real connection of just the kind that an advanced consumer society makes so difficult. We need that kind of community to slow down the environmental changes coming at us, and we need that kind of community to survive the changes we can’t prevent. And we need that kind of community because it’s what makes us fully human.

"This is our final exam, and so far we’re failing. But we don’t have to put our pencils down quite yet. We’ll see."

Earth Day Reflections on Paul Hawken's "Blessed Unrest" - Part 1

It is Earth Day, an appropriate occasion to begin a review of Paul Hawken's new book.

Hawken begins Blessed Unrest with an overview of the world-wide movement devoted to re-imagining and recovering social justice and environmental sustainability, in his view an organic and sacred web of tasks entailing "deep listening" as well as activism, essentially "restoring grace, justice and beauty to the world." They are ancient tasks of compassion possessed of an entirely new urgency, for "the planet has a life-threatening disease, marked by massive ecological degradation and rapid climate change," fueled by thoughtless consumption and the rapaciousness of a capitalist fundamentalism devoted not to true sustenance but to a narrow conception of economic growth.

It is fundamentally a movement based not only on human rights but the rights of all sentient beings - all life, as we are essentially one collective and interactive being. As John Muir wrote, "When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe." It is a perspective common to the world's religions - especially Buddhism's conception of co-evolution and the sacred traditions of indigenous cultures. Like evolution and hope, it arises from the bottom up.

Whether such a diverse collectivity of creative and resistant organizations deserves the name movement may be a matter of personal judgement; but with Hawken I think it is more than that. It surely embodies one dictionary definition--"a change in policy or general attitudes seen as positive." It is, as Hawken realizes, not a singular enterprise, nor is it driven by a singular ideology. I am drawn to one use of the word--the progressive development of a poem or story. It is coextant with the regenerative character of life itself.

Paul Hawken's extraordinary new book

Blessed Unrest: How the Largest Social Movement in History is Restoring Grace, Justice and Beauty to the World (Penguin 2008) is Paul Hawken's remarkable new book, a sweeping portrait of the environmental and social justice movements, which together are "addressing two sides of a single larger dilemma. The way we harm the earth affects all people, and how we treat one another is reflected in how we treat the earth."

Hawken has also been instrumental in establishing a database of the astonishing number--one or two million he says--of organizations now working toward ecological sustainability and social justice in every corner of the earth. The database may be found at www.wiserearth.com, and is an open-source, user created and edited "community directory and networking forum that maps and connects non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and individuals addressing the central issues of our day: climate change, poverty, the environment, peace, water, hunger, social justice, conservation, human rights and more."

Over the next month or so I want to address and assess Hawken's portrait and analysis of that vital community, including his persuasive argument that for all its dispersed, local to international, tiny to worldwide, determinedly independent, and largely bottom-up organizations, it is indeed a movement, in Hawken's view the largest in human history.

Look for a series of postings here in Reckonings over the next few weeks, beginning here.

- John Boettiger

Retire that metaphor!

On reflection, I think it's time to retire the metaphor of canary in the mine, at least in our assessment of environmental well-being. I nominated honey bees for that role a couple of days ago, and their disappearance is dramatic and ominous. But any review of the range of precipitous species decline and destruction offers so many other candidates for that grim distinction that I imagine a mine more full of innocent birds and beasts than miners. Consider only the birds. I don't know how canaries are faring, but Audubon Society research published in 2004 says 70 percent of grassland bird species, 36 percent of shrub-land birds and 25 percent of forest birds are declining.

Disappearance of Bees

Honey bees have become the canaries in our mines; their mysterious and massive disappearance reveal the manifold costs of human misappropriation, exploitation and destruction of nature. Chip Ward is a former public library administrator and grassroots activist turned writer/advocate. His book, Canaries on the Rim: Living Downwind in the West, is an account of his campaigns to make polluters accountable, and Hope's Horizon: Three Visions for Healing the American Land explores the cutting edge of America's conservation movement. He writes from Torrey, Utah. The following passages are taken from his July 2007 essay, "Diesel-Driven Bee Slums and Impotent Turkeys: The Case for Resilience," which appeared in TomDispatch.

One of The Christopher Reynolds Foundation's current grantees, Spikenard Farm in Illinois, is devoted to understanding and renewal of natural honey bee communities.

Also: read Elizabeth Kolbert's essay, "Stung," in The New Yorker issue of August 7, 2007. And listen to Kolbert's 8-minute discussion, "Bearish on Bees," by clicking here.


Our current economic system is designed to maximize outputs and minimize costs. (That's what we call efficiency.) Efficiency eliminates redundancy, which is abundant in nature, in favor of finding the one "best" way of doing something -- usually "best" means most profitable over the short run -- and then doing it that way and that way only. And we aim for control, too, because it is more efficient to command than just let things happen the way they will. Most of our knowledge about how natural systems work is focused on how to get what we want out of them as quickly and cheaply as possible -- things like timber, minerals, water, grain, fish, and so on. We're skilled at breaking systems apart and manipulating the pieces for short-term gain.

Think of resiliency, on the other hand, as the ability of a system to recover from a disturbance. Recovery requires options to that one "best" way of doing things in case that way is blocked or disturbed. A resilient system is adaptable and diverse. It has some redundancy built in. A resilient perspective acknowledges that change is constant and prediction difficult in a world that is complex and dynamic. It understands that when you manipulate the individual pieces of a system, you change that system in unintended ways. Resilience thinking is a new lens for looking at the natural world we are embedded in and the manmade world we have imposed upon it.

In the world today, efficiency rules. The history of our industrial civilization has essentially been the story of gaining control over nature. Water-spilling rivers were dammed and levied; timber-wasting forest fires were suppressed; cattle-eating predators were eliminated; and pesticides, herbicides, and antibiotics were liberally applied to deal with those pesky insects, weeds, and microbes that seemed so intent on wasting what we wanted to use efficiently. Today we are even engineering the genetic codes of plants and animals to make them more efficient.

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Bees Drop Dead

The recent collapse of honeybee colonies across the United States provides a compelling example of how we removed resilience from a fundamental ecological service -- pollination -- to make it more efficient and the unexpected blowback we are now suffering from that. In this case, there is little resilience in the manmade system of food production that relies on healthy populations of commercial bee colonies to pollinate crops and too little resilience left in the natural world for bees to recover quickly from whatever is wiping them out.

Pollination is a fundamental process that happens many ways -- birds do it, bees do it, even butterflies and moths do it. But humans who grow food rely almost exclusively on bees; and not the hundreds of species of wild bees either, but one bee, the European honeybee. Sometimes resilience in nature is the availability of diverse options to fall back on in times of disturbance, but even when there is one choice, like bees for pollinating crops, there are still resilient features, redundancies that we eliminate at our peril. For hundreds of years, numerous dispersed and varied bee populations meant that a scarcity of bees here could be compensated for by an abundance of bees there. Not anymore. We have grabbed this key ecological process to maximize its use and have wrung out what resiliency there was.

Although the widespread disappearance of bees from our landscapes sounds like the stuff of melodramatic science fiction, like those movies about Ebola virus or asteroid strikes, the situation is both dire and all too real. Bee-tracking experts estimate that, across 26 states, between a half-million and a million of 2.4 million bee colonies have collapsed this year. Because many fruit, vegetable, and seed crops, worth about $12 billion annually, rely on the most affected bee, the European Honeybee, for pollination, bee loss will translate into increased food costs for consumers and a potential loss of food variety as well.

Click below to continue reading....

Barbara Kingsolver: Natural Places

Like most people, I came to know and admire Barbara Kingsolver first as a novelist, initially as author of that  rollicking, lyrical, passionate quasi-trilogy starting with The Bean Trees in 1988 and continuing with Animal Dreams (1990) and Pigs in Heaven (1993). With The Poisonwood Bible five years later, Kingsolver sustained the lyricism, humor, moral compass and fine characterization of her earlier three novels, and added a new depth and range of human struggle as well as a new geography.  In Prodigal Summer (2000), the most recent of her novels, she returned to her own birthing ground of Appalachia, her love of--and our need for intimacy with--the natural world, and in particular to one of my totem animals, coyote. (Read it as well, if you haven't, for Lusa Landowski's devotion to moths.)

While better known for those novels, it is her poetry, and one essay drawn from her most recent volume of essays, Small Wonder (2002), that I want to highlight on this page of Reckonings, because of their moving eloquence, their graceful melding of the political and the personal, their passionate oneness with the land, their offering, in the words of her fellow writer Sandra Cisneros, of palabras del corazon, words of the heart. Although I have--perhaps misleadingly--responded to her poetry as if it is manifestly autobiographical, it doesn't, in the end, make any difference. The poems, the novels, stories and essays are hers, of her life.

Kingsolver says to the reader of any of her books:

"What you hold in your hands right now, beneath these words, is consecrated air and time and sunlight and, first of all, a place. Whether we are leaving it or coming into it, it's here that matters, it is place. Whether we understand where we are or don't, that is the story: To be here or not to be. Storytelling is as old as our need to remember where the water is, where the best food grows, where we find our courage for the hunt. It's as persistent as our desire to teach our children how to live in this place that we have known longer than they have. Our greatest and smallest explanations for ourselves grow from place, as surely as carrots grow in the dirt. I'm presuming to tell you something that I could not prove rationally but instead feel as a religious faith. I can't believe otherwise.

"A world is looking over my shoulder as I write these words; my censors are bobcats and mountains. I have a place from which to tell my stories. So do you, I expect. We sing the song of our home because we are animals, and an animal is no better or wiser or safer than its habitat and its food chain. Among the greatest of all gifts is to know our place."

Click below to read some exemplary passages from the works of Barbara Kingsolver.