It's Not Over Yet

When I started thinking about what to write for my final synthesis, I couldn’t help feeling cynical. I mean, looking over my notes from the semester, I just kept coming to the conclusion, does anyone know what they’re talking about? Perhaps this is the despair kicking in, but honestly, does anyone actually know where to start? I keep feeling that we just have no clue how to effectively deal with this problem. I love China’s Green Religion, for example, but can we actually fundamentally understand what it means to be porous with nature outside of a human frame, and without years of training?

This conundrum reminds me of Dogen sensei’s words from the Mountains & Rivers sutra, “Do not view mountains from the scale of human thought” (line 18). Is it actually possible to understand nature’s needs outside of our own? And do we even understand our own and other humans’ needs?

The MRO sutra gave me more comfort than many of the other texts we read. Grim and Tucker, for example, were far too confident in asserting the necessity of religion in ecology, and I just couldn’t identify with their argument. If I’m not grounded, oriented, transformed, nurtured in the natural world, can I still affect meaningful change for the environment? Can I still love and care for it? What if I’m oriented to the big City instead? Dogen seemed to say: you don’t know anything, and that’s the place from which you begin.

How does this relate to the Buddhist concept of dependent origination, or dependent co-arising? Similar to liquid qi, this is the belief that all things are contingent upon each other, are made from the same stuff. I can get on board with this, but I do not want to discount the particularities of individual experience, including those across human categories (religion, race, class, culture, etc) or species (what do the trees feel, how do plants think?)

Dependent origination is also the idea that our liberation from samsara is only possible if everyone is liberated (to paraphrase Rev. angel Kyodo Williams, and Audre Lorde). Through meditation, one learns their own true nature and thus, because everything is interconnected,  learns the true nature of all sentient beings and the reality of existence. (This is a very generalized, and potentially erroneous summary, but I’m just trying to relate what I know about Buddhism in the context of understanding the world around us and enacting environmental change). But is it necessary to fully “know” oneself and others in order to save them? Can we accept our ignorance and still move forward in a helpful way?

 

hi guys! this is already so much fun. i wanted to kick things off for myself by sharing a little information about a resource i grew up around.

I grew up across the lake from a sort of hippie institute known as omega. In 2006, Omega decided to build an environmental education center and a natural water reclamation facility. In my presentation, i mentioned that i grew up around a lot of meditation based in nature; my first group guided meditation experience was a women’s circle that took place in the OCSL.

Skip Backus, chief executive officer at Omega, sums the goal of the OCSL as such: “The OCSL is a dynamic, living and breathing demonstration of how interconnected we all are with the world around us. Our goal is to help people reexamine how they relate to the world by showing them what’s possible in terms of environmental sustainability, green energy, and regenerative design. At the OCSL, we wanted the public to be able to learn about the process of natural water reclamation, witness the latest developments in green building, and take courses that highlight their connection to the natural world and inspire greater sustainability in their own lives and communities.”

The idea to build it came about in 2005 when Omega realized that they needed to replace their aging wastewater septic system. They wanted to build a different kind of water treatment system, one that recognized and respected water as a precious natural resource. They identified three major criteria that they wanted this project to be founded on: 1) water reclamation using zero chemicals, 2) water reclamation using low energy, 3) educational opportunities for individuals and groups. The motto of Omega is “Service is compassion in action” and this structure is such a strong example for me of the necessity of education and community tied into respecting and preserving nature

When they began building the ocsl they discovered an endangered species, the northern cricket frogs. In order to preserve the frog’s habitat before moving on to the creation of the building, they built a three foot “frog proof” fence around the building site and trained crew members to monitor the area. Another threatened species, blandings turtles (Emydoidea blandingii), were found on the land and safely re-routed. These creatures served as a reminder for omega as to their “responsibility as stewards of our natural resources.”  how important it is to consider all beings when planning and building a new enviroment!

I have long since dealt and struggled with the idea of suffering, and by extension, despair. I thought it interesting how this chapter of Bauman opened on despair, drawing some parallel between the four noble truths of suffering in Buddhism. Within ecological reasoning and understanding the notion of ecological crisis as it applies to the human condition I was always confused how people were aware the end would come at some point yet still pushed for sustainable practice and environmentally friendly living. They seemed to not be paying attention to the larger issues at hand or atleast playing around the edges of the actual problem. I felt this even when we went to see the hunks of ice and we learned that the weather was volatile and within human existence we had merely gotten lucky with such developments. Within Bauman’s excerpt we can see that people (Hamilton) believe that accepting this inevitability actually empowers the movement more. Hamilton claims that it’s the optimism in the face of these mounting issues that comes from a very deep and specific denial. Despair is the recognition of the world’s issues and awareness of the fact that you can’t change the situation, but you can re-visualize the situation. Sanders then goes on to explain the situation in a way that shows if you work on a personal close level with the world you can perhaps make more change and do more good than if you had tried to take on all of the world’s problems at once. This is actually how I view my own personal mindset as well, I’m very much either a negative or positive sphere person and that allows me to be happier than I otherwise would. Until I started viewing things in a close interpersonal positive effect way I was more prone to anxiety, bad moods, and rumination-eqsue thoughts. In the wake of this change, which was largely assisted by my passion for daoism and psychology. At the core of this, psychology is what actually affects your quality of life. In the book we are urged to do what is right rather than what is popular. This too is accurate because doing what’s right often means doing things without credit, praise, or any sort of recognition from another person. This sort of behavior can become deeply validating in it’s own way, which can empower you to stick by your own choices, as it has me. By pursuing what is moral, ethical, and right for the world can be done on a very small scale, whether it be within a friendship, the workplace, or even a construct as nebulous as one’s community. This can instill an increased level of hope in one’s self and of the world, but also gives hopes to those who are effected and moved by the action itself. Though this hope is not grand, according to the book, it is achievable and it can bring in a legitamate form of happiness. And honestly, I have to attest to that.

“The world has always been a hard and dangerous place; human mistakes and human cruelty have made it more so.”

***

Reading the subsection “Working with despair” is an easy way to ruin a morning. I thought “bummer” might be an unfair description for a book that contained in it so many moments of healing and hope; by the time I got to reading about “environmental hospice,” I realized it had been a warning for the chapter to come.

Much of “Working with despair” calls to mind my conversations with Stephanie Wakefield in class last semester. The statement “sustainability implies the question of what, above all else, should be sustained” reminds me of a recurring question of hers: what do we want to bring into the new world? Despite having a more despair-focused worldview in which the end was near and getting nearer, Stephanie always encouraged us to mine that glimmer of hope.

I thought about one of her methods when thinking about “environmental hospice,” and also about a prayer I have heard used during end-of-life care. While I couldn’t begin to repeat the words verbatim, the idea of the prayer is that no matter, no energy is every truly lost; all things return, just differently. Stephanie’s work with the adaptive cycle, the teaching of how an end actually just means the abrupt reorganization of energy and matter into a new configuration, seems strikingly similar. Perhaps this way of thinking too is an attempt at avoiding the finality of an end, of easing our way into death– but if we accept that death is inevitable, what’s the harm?

Despite being the most depressing, the first path Bauman presents seems the most sensible. The second path and a focus on bioregionalism, a perspective I’m actually partial to, seems kind of hopeless in New York City, where “living simply” and “getting to know one’s neighbors” seems like madness if not totally impossible. While clearly the kind of personal accounting and peace-making described in this section is mentally and emotionally important, I wonder if it actually has any use beyond the strictly personal. The section describes this cultivation of hope as “modest,” and it is– depressingly so. If change can really only be effected on such a small scale, what’s the point of doing it at all? What’s the point of learning how to live in one specific place when it may be gone tomorrow? (I admit I may just be a grump– I haven’t had my coffee yet).

Regardless of my opinion of the first two paths, I agree with Bauman’s assessment of the third. We have already tried to induce a broad, revolutionary hope for the earth countless times, and no matter how glitzy the ad campaigns, it’s never really stuck. And totalizing discourses never work. I can only nod along when Bauman writes “we believe that the type of ‘wicked’ problems faced by human communities leave little room for more than partial and incomplete answers to global problems, so a sweeping hope for global solutions is inappropriate.”

(sorry this is late, I locked myself out of the damn blog)

“As authors and editors, we are worried that this book might be bit of a bummer…What’s more, while many exciting ideas and movements have been discussed in this book, none of them are conclusive solutions…” (Bauman 266).

Bauman begins his conclusion with the depressing possibility that humans may not be able to reverse the destruction that they have caused to the planet. This conclusion entitled, “Despair, hope, and action” urges its readers to accept their despair rather than reject the inevitable destruction. At first, I thought that Bauman was going to end the book with the claim that there is nothing that we can do and that’s it but he goes on to highlight the importance of despair. He acknowledges that even though there have been many solutions proposed in the book, many of them are not feasible. Instead, people need to be empowered by their despair in order to act. Knowing that one has no “normal future” left ahead, it becomes guaranteed that there is nothing to lose by fighting back and everything to gain from moving forward as activist Tim DeChristopher writes. When organizations only have hope at the foreground of their ecological response, human morale may lower because the acceptance of despair has not yet occurred. Buddhism encourages this reaction to the ecological crisis. Hope then blooms from despair.

“…it is time to acknowledge that the world as we know it will perish” (Bauman 269).

One alternative path of hope is grounding oneself in a concrete place rather than attempting to take on the task of the entire earth’s ecological crisis. “…not all environmental problems need to be understood globally…” (Bauman 270). To me, this sounds like the most feasible type of hope that many people are already engaging in without realizing. Rather than make a great plan, people should have smaller one’s for concrete locations. Another approach frequently mentioned is the creation and bonding over a newly created religion. If all the others have once failed the environment, maybe it is time to bond over a new one. This starts at merely encouraging communities to share ideas and interconnect. Bauman writes, “Thus, religious communities can come together to shape a new ethic that will guide humanity to a better and more just future” (Bauman 272).

Bauman also concludes that perhaps rather than using a single answer to engage in the struggle, people need to engage in the question of environmental degradation first. When people fail to even acknowledge it, nothing will ever be changed. Unlike my original opinion that this talk of despair and loss serves as unproductive, at the end of this book I felt like Bauman offers many great theories throughout the book that should be shared to even begin the ecological talk. It’s not depressing to mention this despair, but rather it serves as an acceptance and launch pad for future change. I really liked Grounding Religion and I feel like it did exactly as advertised: served as a field guide for beginners on how to begin the conversation on the environment.

I’m a fashionista. At least I’m a fashionista in my head. So the Met Gala was incredibly exciting for me to spectate, and has been for the past couple of years. This year in particular, I found it quite serendipitous that the theme was Heavenly Bodies: Fashion and the Catholic Imagination, since all semester long we’ve been talking about religion. This year, however, I was watching the Met Gala through some particular lenses; fashion sustainability.

There were so many beautifully crafted, gilted, and designed dresses and suits on the carpet that made my inner Miranda Priestly crack a smile, and the adherence to the theme in many of the pieces and their interpretations of it gave the creative in me inspiration. Blake Lively’s dress was definitely my favorite of the night. A stunning blood red gown with a nude bodice, sporting golden embroidery that was no doubt hand stitched to piece. In an interview before the Met Gala opening, Lively raved about her fashion team working on her dress, bragging to Vogue magazine that “they’ve already worked on it for 600 hours, and it’s not done.” This admission gave me pause, because, firstly, 600 hours is a massive amount of time to be working on one gown and, secondly, how many more man hours were put in to work on every piece of fashion that graced the Met Gala carpet? Adding to that, how many resourced were used to piece together these incredible works, not to mention the event itself?

The Met Gala is a staple of the fashion industry, of the celebrity community, and of New York. It’s an institution in it’s own right. But how much of it is sustainable? With its emphasis on gaudiness, glamour, and outstanding works, does finding a sustainable model that focuses less on over consumption and more on responsible exploitation work for the Met Gala? How many designers and celebrities would be willing to forgo the luxurious lifestyle that has so become part and parcel of New York City? It is at this point that Bauman’s ruminations on despair come to mind. These systems have been so solidified that re-engineering them seems a feat to colossal to undertake. Redoing the model of the fashion industry that has made billions from what already previously stands? How many years would that take? And do we have those years available to us to slowly wean ourselves off of profiting from indiscriminate exploitation of resources? In Bauman’s words, perhaps “the best thing we can do might be to let the dominant systems fail.”

As much as we want ecological change, we hold on to the structures that exist. Trying to re-engineer them may be a fool’s errand. I try to not let myself fall into too much despair about the situation, because as Bauman put it, at some point when we’re faced with disease and imminent death we have to plan for it. I just believe that trying to revamp our faulty systems, the ones that got us here in the first place, is holding on to the dashboard of a car speeding to a crowded cross walk hoping the our light is going to change to green. At some point we have to realize the existing structures need to be done away with to make positive change happen.

(This is a screenshot of a 1923 film of the Laysan island in Hawaii and a now extinct native bird to it, the Laysan Rail, a flightless bird.)

Declared Extinct: 1944, (Note: on its native island of Laysan, it was declared extinct the same year the film was shot.)

Cause of death: When rabbits were introduced to the island, there was no means of controlling their eating and breeding patterns, resulting in a quick growth in population that ate the vegetation that originally belonged to the Rail, destroying their habitat and supply of food. It was moved to neighboring Midway island with only two being seen still on their native Laysan by the 1920s, both died when being moved to Midway. Then rats were introduced to Midway, doing the same damage as the rabbits did on Laysan resulting in the species going extinct.

The harsh realities of our own exploitation of the natural world via means of expanding and wanting more rings true to the dangers as a species we’ve put the globe under. Still continuing to thrive in the latest of a series of mass extinctions over the past millions to billions of years with the last one, (the K-Pg mass extinction) happening over 65 million years ago. It’s strange, but yet saddening ordeal because of the revelation these catastrophes could of been avoided such as with the Laysan Rail which pigeon holes all people under the umbrella term “humanity” responsible for the tampering of the natural climate.

I sit here writing this beautiful morning, tea in hand, looking outside beyond the garden and trees in the background contemplating this “idea” of pigeon holing humanity. Resulting in a somewhat coming to peace with the realism behind making a claim, while it is blunt and generalized to say all humanity is responsible. It’s difficult to repair such huge damages in a time where we’re getting sporadic summer-esque days hitting the 80 and 90 degree temperature marks, to then days later go back to standard spring temperatures. I like to think the book this whole time, that despite all methods in hand to help the natural world, it was also building up to an idea of making peace with these drastic times.

Judging not, lest ye be judged.

As my title states, “Where do we go from here?” “Do we continue on the way we always were, going about our daily business like nothing is happening?” or “Do we make a difference in the world?” As I said previously what I believed the book may be presenting with its final chapter. It’s a matter of obtaining a sense of inner peace, without sheltering yourself to the destruction surrounding us on a daily basis, not just in the environmental field, but politics, economics, etc. Every action has a consequence and you can either continue on with your daily routine or make a difference, without the judgement of others, because it is not our right to do so due to playing a part in this too and there’s no escape from it all.

As Jesus himself once said:

“For a good tree does not bear bad fruit, nor does a bad tree bear good fruit. For every tree is known by its own fruit. For men do not gather figs from thorns, nor do they gather grapes from a bramble bush. A good man out of the good treasure of his heart brings forth good; and an evil man out of the evil treasure of his heart brings forth evil. For out of the abundance of the heart his mouth speaks.” (Luke 6:43-45, NKJV) (From my own personal Bible)

Lastly, I like to thank everyone for the time we have shared together and the fourth months of coming out of our shells with our own experiences and ideas accepted and discussed greatly. I wish everyone a great summer and good fortune for future endeavors.

Let me start by saying, I am eager to hear people’s responses to this final chapter. I have so enjoyed getting to know you all over the course of the semester and the thought provoking dialogues we’ve had. I will miss it.

This particular chapter brought up a lot for me because one of the reasons I decided to come back to school, at almost thirty, was because I truly want to make the world a better place. I had some ideas about how I might do that but through the course of this semester I found those ideas consistently coming up short. Namely they lacked a how and a to what end. Being a musical theatre performer by training I knew I wanted to break into a wider identity as an artist and use that art to talk about causes that matter to me, environmental and climate justice among them. However as time has worn on and my knowledge of this subject matter has deepened, I have felt incredibly hopeless and that hopelessness has made me question not only my artistic motivations but also the goal of that art. Is the aim to wake people to the damage of climate change? And then what do they do with that information? Do I address the impacts it has on the entire eco-system, human animals included? Do I jump to a possible future if nothing changes and paint that picture, again to what end? Ultimately I have just felt overwhelmed and lacking any direction on what to do next.

The idea of bioregionalism has been the most enticing as realm to explore, picture me clinging to a life raft,  because it seems to be honest in reflecting the inevitable change we will see as a result of climate change, and yet it finds space for some hope. I feel in many ways that I have been walking around wringing my hands, realizing we can’t save what was, we are past that. This has led me to feel stuck, not in despair, but in terror and grief. It has also made me unable to act, not in the dramatic sense, but act in reaction to this information in a meaningful way. I talk about the topic endlessly, yet I find it difficult to enact anything resembling productive action in the face of my terrorized grief.

I tell you this because the idea behind bioregionalism posed in this book has given me some sort of hope back. I don’t think a solution for stopping climate change will happen, but I certainly don’t think solutions will happen by people trying to act globally. I think that the concepts are too large and we did not evolve to consider people outside our bands of 50 or so members, let alone the global or planetary repercussions of our actions. However, it is easier to see, and arguably easier to get things done, when you see things broken in your own corner of the world. I think focusing on building the relationships between our multi-species communities in our corner of the world is far more likely to have traction. Indigenous traditions are known for this hyper awareness of place and traditions around specific places and natural processes. The authors write, “Perhaps a modest hope can be found learning from such traditions about how to be in a particular place, seeking not to save the entire world but instead to learn how to live in one specific part of it.”

I think the only hope I can find, and perhaps the only work worth doing for me, is one that looks at how to make things better for the plants, animals and people in my corner of the world and encourage others to do the same. Perhaps even use art to draw attention to the real harm we do when we think about trying to save a dying way of life and instead perhaps we should look to do better by all our community members and shape a new reality that is more holistic and mindful in it’s approach to living.

I lack a lot of hope these days and it literally pains me. Perhaps this idea of bioregionalism can give my passionate grief an outlet of some use. Here’s hoping.

…last note, can we also just take a moment to appreciate that the intelligent people who crafted this book ended it with a sentence that included the word bummer. I am going to try and take some of their humor and lightness into my approach because, come on, that’s funny.

 

So I started a small garden last week as a bit of a new spring tradition. Eight beautiful flowers. All the while I’m thinking about this idea that some people have a green thumb; this ability to garden that other people don’t have. My family has a history of livestock and planting and so I was thinking about whether I had a green thumb or not. And so I thought about whether talking to the plants and physically communicating with them contributes to someone’s green thumb because this was what I was taught to do from my dad. Then then question of green thumb hit me: Is someone’s ability to garden connected to their ability to commune with nature? Not in a shaman type of way, but in a porosity type of way. Does the opening up to the natural world allow for the thriving of plants?

It comes back to the sweetgrass population that thrives when near human populations. Just a thought.

Here they are top left to bottom right:

Garnet, Zola, Beychella, Lapis,
Diane, Jack, Azula, Goldilocks