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Save the World by Becoming the World with John Seed
0 Playsin 8 hours
Can birdsong heal your hearing? Can a rainforest recruit humans to protect it? What is deep ecology, anyway?
Of all the approaches to “saving the world”, this one has my heart. Join me in conversation with elder John Seed as we get to the marrow of the environmental crisis, from the illusion of separation between human beings and nature, to the rituals, ceremonies and stories that can heal it.
About John Seed
Just last year at age 79 John was arrested for strapping himself to logging machinery in the Bulga State Forest, and has been awarded the Order of Australia medal for his services to the environment. John launched the Rainforest Information Center, has initiated global rainforest action networks and campaigns, developed The Council of All Beings with Joanna Macy, co-authored Thinking Like A Mountain with Joanna Macy Pat Fleming and Arne Ness, and spent decades facilitating experiential deep ecology workshops.
IN THIS CONVO
John’s story of being called into service by Nature
Collaborating with Joanna Macy
The root of the planetary crisis
Community therapies to heal civilisational wounds
Business As Usual, The Great Unravelling, The Great Turning
The Work That Reconnects
Activism as ceremony
The antidote to cultural amnesia
Why John loves podcasts!
How not to judge gross human behaviour
Honouring our pain for the world
Feelings as ancient intelligence
Can anyone run a grief circle?
The council of all beings
The cosmic walk
🧙♀️ LINKY POOS
The Rainforest Information Center
[read online] Thinking Like A Mountain by John Seed, Joanna Macy, Pat Fleming & Arne Ness
🧡Support Reskillience on Patreon🧡
Field recording credit: Thrushes, golden whistlers, yellow faced honeyeaters and a spotted marsh frog by Afro408 License: Attribution NonCommercial 4.0
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Transcript
Introduction and Setting
00:00:03
Speaker
race scallia Hey, this is Katie and you're tuned into Riskiliants, a podcast about the hard, soft and surprising skills that'll help us stay afloat if our modern systems don't.
00:00:18
Speaker
These words are travelling to you from Bundjalung country, north coast New South Wales, where it is warm enough to expose your legs, sun your shoulders, air your pits, and all that is bloody awesome, except that I only packed one pair of shoes.
Nature and Connection
00:00:32
Speaker
My old faithful leather redbacks, chunky and worn, stinky and torn, and they look absolutely ridiculous with a dress. So I've mostly been going barefoot, which is not a bad thing at all.
00:00:45
Speaker
And it was in my bare feet that I tiptoed out of our van and onto the spongy grass before dawn last week to watch the lunar eclipse. Perhaps you caught it too.
00:00:57
Speaker
We were camping at the showgrounds in Bellingen, which is a lovely little town of Bohemians and tree changers, and the air smells like jasmine and damp earth and sticky chai. So I set my alarm for 4am to see the full moon cloaked in Earth's shadow, a phenomenon that won't happen again for a while.
00:01:16
Speaker
And as i crept out of the van and looked to the west, there hung the moon, silent, smudged, a ruddy menstrual red, looking fragile and dramatic.
00:01:27
Speaker
And the grass under my feet was so cool, and the night so hushed, and the air so balmy. And as far as I could tell, no other campers had slithered out of their tents or left the womb of their camper vans to witness this cosmic mischief. It was just me and the moon.
00:01:44
Speaker
And as we held each other's gaze, a shooting star skidded across the sky, and a bird that I always loved to hear, the fan-tailed cuckoo, started calling its melancholy call from the shadowy tree line,
00:01:57
Speaker
surely the first bird to sing that morning. And I thought of something John Seed said in the interview that you're about to hear. something that he learned from the late Joanna Macy, that the earth never pushed us away, that the illusion of separation is all on our side, that as soon as we make the smallest gesture of reconciliation, standing on the wet grass before dawn to gaze at the moon, as soon as we make a gesture like that, the earth comes rushing in to meet us.
Introducing John Seed
00:02:28
Speaker
Today we are indeed hearing from deep ecology elder John Seed, which is A true honour and peak podcasting moment here on Ruskillians. John went from systems engineer to meditating hippie to, in the late 70s, defending a patch of ancient rainforest near his home that turned out to be the first direct action of its kind for forests in Australia and the world.
00:02:52
Speaker
He launched the Rainforest Information Centre, initiated global rainforest action networks and campaigns, developed the Council of All Beings with Joanna Macy, co-authored Thinking Like a Mountain with Joanna Macy, Pat Fleming and Arnie Ness, which has now been translated into 12 languages, was awarded the Order of Australia Medal in 1995 for his services to conservation and the environment, has pushed back against the Borneo timber mafia, stood up for elephants in Asia, planted trees in India and Kenya,
00:03:24
Speaker
and spent decades facilitating deep ecology workshops, which have no doubt been the catalyst for many thousands of reunions between human and nature. I tried not to dwell on these accolades as I entered the online recording suite with John, my palms sweating, parked in our van at Narara Eco Village, where John lives with his family.
00:03:47
Speaker
Unfortunately, we couldn't do the interview in person because John was unwell that day, but his commitment to sharing this work is so strong that he soldiered on despite feeling absolutely ratty.
00:03:58
Speaker
And for that reason, we ended up recording this conversation in two parts. You'll hear us switch somewhere around the 37 minute mark. And honestly, what John talks about, this is the stuff that gets me most excited.
00:04:11
Speaker
That feels real to my marrow and most resonant of all the rally cries out there. And I'd love to know if it has that effect on you too. You can leave a comment on this episode or email me directly at katie.com.au or attend a workshop with John or read his book, Thinking Like a Mountain, which is actually available online for free.
00:04:31
Speaker
And I quickly wanted to say a massive thank you to everyone who's given Reskilliance five stars or a glowing review on Apple Podcasts. It's just awesome to know that you're digging the show and it really helps Reskilliance's self-esteem.
00:04:43
Speaker
So if you have a few spare minutes and love the show, that would really mean a lot to me. All right, let's get into this deep ecology deep dive with the remarkable John Seed.
Immersion in Nature
00:04:56
Speaker
Well, one of the first things that I usually do when I come to a new place is take a wander and try and meet some of the beings in the they're in the surrounds to acquaint myself and I just took a little walk into your magnificent forest that borders the eco-village here and was awed by the bunya pines and the tangled vines, so different from the bush that I call home. And one familiar voice was singing to me, which was the fantail cuckoo, in that really distinctive trill, like the brrrr sound, and it reminded me
00:05:33
Speaker
of a few years ago when I woke up to the fact that I was hearing this sound all around me, this bird call, but I couldn't put a face to the call. I had no idea what this bird looked like. And so I started tracking that sound in the bush near where I was living at the time. and it would be quite frustrating because I would come closer and closer to that call and then it would recede, dematerialise into the forest and I could never get a visual on this beam.
00:06:02
Speaker
And one day after a very long wander, I finally... glimpsed the fantail cuckoo which is quite a beautiful bird sitting right up high in a gum tree and it did a shit and then flew off and that was my moment of revelation but I was thinking of this John because I know that your story started at least in the forest activism and deep ecology space with quite a distinctive call from the more than human world that you heard and acted upon without even knowing where you were going.
00:06:35
Speaker
And I wonder if you would care to share that story with us today. Sure, I'd be happy to, Katie. But before I do, I'd like to say that I've been having a very special relationship with the birds around here lately that I've started.
00:06:52
Speaker
um ah I've had a sitting practice on and off most of my life, and I just started sitting seriously every morning. and sitting outside and I just find myself, find that the birds are a little bit like a a meditation bell or a wake-up or something like that.
00:07:11
Speaker
And I'm so um um'm so excited by the sounds and ah the nuances, do you know, that it's like, oh, that particular species, they don't all sound the same. There are differences between them and so on.
00:07:26
Speaker
And then I'm hearing birds from further and further away. And simultaneously, I'm having um you know age-related hearing loss. And I believe that the birds are repairing my hearing because I'm hearing birds fainter and fainter, further and further away.
The Journey to Activism
00:07:44
Speaker
And I think that my hearing is improving as a result.
00:07:48
Speaker
On that note, John, I was just thinking something very similar because I have historically terrible hearing right from when I was a small child. And I was thinking, but I can hear the birds. I can't hear some of these lower muffled, more mechanical sounds, but I can always hear that bird song. So I live in hope that maybe you're right and it can actually reattune my ears and I'd rather be hearing bird song than the rumbling of trucks any day. That's right.
00:08:15
Speaker
Yeah, so the story I asked about was it started on a particular day. it started on a Monday in August of 1979 when i was living in a hippie Buddhist meditation community near Nimbin, near the Channon in northern New South Wales. And we were, um you know, living that hippie dream of the 60s and 70s. And some neighbours appealed for help, saying that the rainforest at the end of Terrania Creek Road was
00:08:49
Speaker
going to be logged the next day. so this was a Sunday and it was going to the logging was going to start on Monday and we have to stop it and could we please help?
00:09:01
Speaker
And so um I had no idea there was a rainforest at the end of Terrania Creek Road. I'd never been to the end of Terrania Creek Road, though I'd lived a few kilometres away for years, and I didn't know anything about rainforests.
00:09:15
Speaker
You know, I love the trees. The trees are beautiful. We were living among the trees. but Anyway, but i I was into helping the neighbours and so I showed up and then everything changed. Something happened to me that day and in the following weeks, which, you know, my life just shifted direction, you know, like it was like a 90 degree turn unexpected and I lost interest in the things that I'd been doing up until then, sort of being a hippie farmer and
00:09:47
Speaker
organising meditation retreats and just began to get into campaigning and direct action for first that forest and then rainforests in other parts of Australia and Tasmania and far north Queensland and then our closest neighbours in Papua New Guinea and the Solomon Islands and eventually all over the world and so on I don't know you know exactly like I can't say what happened but It was just must have been pretty profound because it just it just um spun me around and gave me a new identity and I just became a different person, more or less, from one day to the next.
00:10:28
Speaker
And that happened to a few people at that time. And sometimes I think that this particular rainforest... Many years later, we discovered that it was a refugia, meaning that over the you know vast deep time epochs, the rainforest in Australia would expand and retreat according to climatic conditions.
00:10:52
Speaker
and when it retreated it always retreated to the same refugia and then when the climate became favourable again that's where the gene pool was stored and it would come out again so that I suspect now that the incredible intelligence of that rainforest which as far as I can see subsumes human intelligence that we humans are just one of 10 million species that have evolved out of that rainforest, that that intelligence saw the importance of enlisting some of its minor creations in its defence and just plucked me from the comfortable life that I was living and turned me loose.
00:11:40
Speaker
And do you return to that patch of forest, John? I do. I mean, it's it's a long way from where I live now, but my son lives nearby. My eldest son lives nearby, and um I do go back there.
00:11:56
Speaker
So I'd love to tease out some of the finer threads of that story because what I notice in myself and other people i speak with is that it's one thing to hear the call or feel the tug at the hem and quite another to orient yourself to be able to follow that path, whether that's because of financial obligations or mental constructs, beliefs we have about who we are and what we're here to do. So i'm so very curious, John, about how you were able to, you know, in that nutshell story that you told, just completely pivot and beyond this new trajectory.
00:12:32
Speaker
What was in that, though? Was there confusion? Was there some disentangling with your old life? Was there fear that you weren't going to be able to make ends meet? If you could unpack that a little bit for us, I'd be very grateful.
00:12:45
Speaker
ah yeah, absolutely. There was a lot of confusion. At first I felt like I must be suffering from some kind of a mental problem because none of the none of the conceptual framework of my Buddhism or my ah sort of, you know, anything that I'd run into up to that point was any use in understanding what was going on.
00:13:06
Speaker
But the feeling was so intimate and warm that in the, you know, it it was easy because of the strength of the call. So why I was so lucky as to be on the receiving end of such a strong call, I couldn't say, except that the times called out for it, you know. and um You know, it's interesting because when I think about anything that had happened to me earlier in my life that might have prepared me for this,
00:13:39
Speaker
or that might have set me up in any way, I suddenly remembered living in London 10 years earlier, working for IBM, coming home from work, getting stoned and watching television, and watching the news one night, and there was this, I think it was a Dutch ship trying to dump 44-gallon drums of radioactive waste into the ocean, and there was this Greenpeace inflatable that was trying to get underneath the 44-gallon drums and trying to catch the 44-gallon drums so that they couldn't drop into the ocean.
00:14:17
Speaker
And I looked at and was like, those guys are crazy. Like, if they manage to get into place... then the 44-gallon drum would still go into the ocean, but they'd go into the ocean with it, you know, like anyway. But somehow somehow that was like a depth charge that was laid in me and then 10 years later at Terrania Creek in the rainforest it revealed itself, something like that.
00:14:46
Speaker
Yeah, that's a really fascinating memory to hark back to watching the antics or the the the trials and tribulations of that Greenpeace, those Greenpeace activists. And it speaks to me of how I sometimes struggle with traditional activism because it either seems to be martyring oneself to the cause, you know, having sludge poured all over yourself but trying to stand up and do the right thing regardless, or ineffective or giving more energy to
00:15:19
Speaker
um the status quo, which then is co-opting those people and those movements and, you know, digesting them and making them their own. So I wonder in this life, this incredible life that you've had as a rainforest stalwart, an activist, and coming from that direct action that was very effective in the 70s to then moving into your work in deep ecology and the work that reconnects with Joanna Macy, which is far more... um introspective in many ways and subtle and indirect.
00:15:51
Speaker
I wonder if you could speak a little bit about where you are as an activist today. i guess my life is full of turning points and the next one after the rainforest was Deep Ecology when I first ran into Deep Ecology and then after that it was meeting Joanna Macy and um so the philosophy of Deep Ecology says that underlying all of the symptoms of the environmental crisis is the illusion of separation between human beings and the rest of the natural world.
00:16:23
Speaker
And Aunty Ness, the The late Arnie Ness was Professor of Philosophy at Oslo University and according to him that this is so deeply embedded in us as a result of millennia of anthropocentric culture, seeing human beings at the centre of everything and not recognising that we aren't the apex of some pyramid, we are like one web one strand in the web of life and so on.
00:16:52
Speaker
And
Deep Ecology Philosophy
00:16:53
Speaker
so Arnie Ness said that we're not going to be able to think our way out of this mess. He said that ecological ideas won't save us. What what we need is ecological identity or ecological self.
00:17:04
Speaker
And so I feel like that's what happened to me at Terrania was that I just ran into my ecological identity. So for a couple of years after discovering the philosophy of deep ecology, I was very taken with it. I i went around grabbing people by the lapels and shaking them, trying to, get them to understand, but as Aunty Ness said, the ideas won't do it.
00:17:28
Speaker
And he said that in order to move from ecological ideas to ecological identity, what he thought we needed were community therapies to heal that illusion of separation.
00:17:39
Speaker
And it was that piece that arrived when I met Joanna, is that she had the and profound spiritual psychological processes that that when combined with the philosophy of deep ecology, i ah thought and she agreed we might be able to find a way to move Arnie Ness's project forward.
00:18:04
Speaker
So one of the things that Joanna spoke about is that we, chi different narratives, there's the narrative of business as usual, you know, we just keep doing what we've always been doing.
00:18:17
Speaker
There's the great unraveling, which is taking place all around us. And there's the great turning away from the industrial growth society towards a life affirming society. And she identified three different positions that one could take in the great turning. And one of these is the holding actions like Terrania Creek, protecting a forest, protecting a language, protecting indigenous people and so on.
00:18:45
Speaker
The next one is structural change, creating the new forms, the new structures, even while the old continues to dominate. Ecovillages, like the one where we're both sitting at the moment, permaculture, transition towns and so on.
00:19:00
Speaker
And finally, there's work on consciousness directly, and that's deep ecology workshops and meditation and spiritual work.
00:19:11
Speaker
Yeah, it's really helpful to have that framing, and I'm... curious about finding our roles in this great turning. And that's another thing that I feel many of us get stuck on or a bit confuzzled by. It's what what is mine to do? Is it is it enough?
00:19:27
Speaker
And um how do I even hear above the din of modern civilization? And I do feel like it's quite logical to me that we are we are nested like cells within organs, within bodies, within, you know, it's holes upon holes.
00:19:44
Speaker
And When I think of the cells in my body doing their job, they seem to be very clear on their duties and happy to do whatever it takes to fulfill them. But I'm wondering, John, about some strategies for understanding those instructions. I know you have practices such as the letter from Gaia, which is always very revealing and mysterious in its own way. But yeah, if you could speak about getting clear on those those roles that we can play in The Great Turning, that would be wonderful.
00:20:18
Speaker
Well, I mean, for me, the answer to that, or ah maybe maybe I should say an answer to that, but the answer that I've been guided to represent is the work that reconnects, is experiential deep ecology, that whenever a group of people gets together for a couple of days,
00:20:39
Speaker
and immerses ourselves in the intention to heal that illusion of separation, the intention to find out what it is that we're called to do, that there's always the earth always answers us. that One of the things I learned from Joanna is that if there's any separation it's all coming from our side that nature never pushed us away in the what moment that we make a gesture of reconciliation the earth comes rushing back in and that's the amazing experience that people always have in the context of the work that reconnects and
00:21:18
Speaker
Towards the end on Sunday afternoon of a weekend workshop, um the process, we start and end with gratitude.
Cultivating Connection
00:21:25
Speaker
It's the gratitude that gives us the the ability to tolerate the anguish and the terror that comes from opening ourselves to the enormity of what it is that we're facing.
00:21:38
Speaker
But ah before the second gratitude, the last process before that is called going forth. And in going forth, there's a little ceremony that allows us to find what it is that we might offer to the great turning.
00:21:55
Speaker
And there are many people who find ourselves stuck in our life in some way where, yes, we have a fantastic weekend, but pretty soon, you know, we're enveloped by wherever it was that we came from.
00:22:09
Speaker
But there are always some people who use that as a kind of a, a rubber band to eject themselves from that previous life and to hurl themselves into their future.
00:22:20
Speaker
And um I'm ah always excited, you know, when I run into somebody and they say, oh, I was the marketing executive with so-and-so and then I came to your workshop and now I'm doing, you know, the direct action coordinator for Greenpeace in Ireland or something like that, do you know.
00:22:40
Speaker
And so I know that some people are able to use these workshops ceremonies to her make profound changes in our lives. You know, for me, direct action in the forest is only another ceremony. Like, it's not something like you can't stop the logging by standing in front of a tree.
00:23:02
Speaker
You know, you can raise awareness, you can show your commitment, it does all kinds of things, but you know And you can't save the planet one forest at a time. that There has to be this profound change in consciousness, change in identity.
00:23:16
Speaker
We have to understand who we are, that we have no independent existence, that we are part of this earth. Like you were saying, we're one cell in this larger body and what happens to the body happens to us.
00:23:28
Speaker
So intellectually that's not so much of a stretch but what we need is things like the work that reconnects to help us to turn those ideas into an experience.
00:23:40
Speaker
who And what about the all-pervasive, very irritating amnesia which seems to afflict so many of us and myself included having done some of this work and felt so moved and then just life-blessed continues and I find myself sometimes never making contact with the ground or tuning my ear to the bird song or you know relentlessly typing away at my computer without absorbing some of the sun's nutrients it just seems to happen so easily that I slip back into that forgettery as Sue Dennett loves calling it the forgettery of of old age but also of any age where we we simply feel severed from that
00:24:21
Speaker
deep connection with the web of life how do you experience these things often enough John to keep that fire and the spirit alive well I mean I'm just like you of course and everybody is and i mean one of the things that I've come to understand is that the reason why all Indigenous societies that have maintained their ceremonial life regularly put down their social day-to-day and meet in ceremony with music and with chanting and and so on, ah it's because it doesn't last. It's ephemeral, you know. It's it's ineffable.
00:25:03
Speaker
It's like, you know, a psychedelic where where you're in the middle of it, you know that you can't possibly forget this. And 24 hours later, you're scratching to try and remember anything about it.
00:25:15
Speaker
So that's just the nature of things. And there's no there's no point in i regretting that. But it it means that um it's not a matter of a workshop here or a workshop there, but of creating a culture of connection like those Indigenous people and making sure that there are regular events that punctuate our lives, that allow us to slip back into a memory of who we really are underneath that social mask.
00:25:43
Speaker
Yeah, beautiful. And what does that culture look like in the village here? Oh, no, the village wouldn't be a really good example of that, I don't think. It's a very beautiful example of many things and many people from the village have participated in deep ecology workshops now, but there's probably only two or three who will regularly come back to this.
00:26:09
Speaker
um And so um I don't, um I'm um'm afraid i haven't really got too too much in the way of answers. That's totally fine. i I suppose it was more a question of how are how do you embody these things often enough Oh, well, it's easy for me because all I have to do is organise another deep ecology workshop.
00:26:30
Speaker
It's more difficult for other people.
Spreading Awareness
00:26:32
Speaker
But one of the things that I'm hoping, I just counted and I see that this is the 15th podcast that I've done this year and I just totally believe that podcasts is the way to move deep ecology into the mainstream and with any luck,
00:26:48
Speaker
we may be creating the conditions where other people will be able to fill workshops as well. you know like Of course, there are other people, especially in the United States and Europe, and there's a few other people in Australia. But I think I'm really looking forward to just expanding the pool of people who may be interested in creating a culture like that.
00:27:13
Speaker
Well, I'm so glad to hear that you feel that way about podcasts because I definitely believe, I mean, and I love radio. I think it leaves the imagination to wander whilst having that intimacy of a conversation. There's so much solidarity and sparkful conversation that can be present wherever you are. And I've been, you know, sometimes I feel like, oh, it's just another piece of content that that I'm churning along with the rest of all of us content creators. But no, a bigger part of me believes that they're very powerful. And and even as you're saying, a point of a remembering, a reminder, a reaffirmation of who we are and what we care about that you can tune into wherever you are. So I'm i'm heartened to hear that, John.
00:28:00
Speaker
Well, that's right. And I mean, they each time like this gives me the opportunity to remember something what I remember, you know, like I was thinking about i was thinking about being sex sick with a gastric thing a couple of hours ago and now i'm thinking about deep ecology and about how to create the conditions for life to continue to flourish on the earth. So, you know, we have to just create spaces in our lives that continually remind us of what's important.
00:28:33
Speaker
So I want to speak about more about our ecological niches and our callings and whatever words people want to wrap around that that spirit of being compelled by something and how to tune into that. And I've been kind of amused sometimes writing letters. And just to explain to the listener, there's a practice called letter from Gaia, or I'm not sure if you have another name for it, but essentially you sit down with a pen and paper and write a letter it to yourself from the more than human world, from mother earth, and just see what flows through the pen.
00:29:06
Speaker
And I've done this quite a few times and regularly I i discovered that there's a lot of comedy and irreverence in Gaia's ways and words. And She often says, just get your eating and excreting right. You know, there are these fundamental things that you can do, like every other animal that contributes so much to the ecosystem that are just around what you put in your mouth and what comes out of your ass, basically like eat and compost your shit, like pretty simple stuff. And I'm, I'm very on board with that.
00:29:39
Speaker
But I also feel like there's a simplicity that ah modern kind of aspirational mind can want more from, you know, it's not very glamorous just to say that I'm here doing my bit, eating and making humanure, even though that is actually a really worthwhile thing to be doing with our time.
00:29:59
Speaker
What do you think about, you know, when our niches or roles don't necessarily line up with the identity we we have constructed for ourselves or you know the person we thought we would be.
00:30:12
Speaker
I guess I just feel like the most important thing I think is to get together with other people who are aligned with your highest visions for yourself and try and spend as much time as you can with them. I forget the study but there's something like you end up being the average of the seven people that you see the most ah of or that you know the best or something like that so make sure that that those people are ah moving you in a good direction.
00:30:41
Speaker
And then there was another study which I really liked. It was quoted in Ian McGilchrist's book, The Matter With Things, where it was a study that they gave a difficult problem to a large number of individuals.
00:30:57
Speaker
And it was so difficult that only one in 10 could solve the problem. But when they gave the same problem to small groups of people, 80% of the groups were able to solve the problem.
00:31:09
Speaker
And so we are social mammals and we're not supposed to be doing this by ourselves. You know, that we weren't, the natural selection didn't create that opportunity.
00:31:21
Speaker
And so, um you know, so recognising that, just, ah you know, find your people.
Interconnectedness
00:31:28
Speaker
That's step number one. And the workshops are good for that because if if what you're aligned with is wanting to get closer and less disconnected from the more than human world, well, you can be sure that everybody who's there on the weekend has got the same vision.
00:31:49
Speaker
We've spoken a little bit about the the illusion of separation between humans and the more than human world. And I'm also thinking about what I experience sometimes, which is the separation from the human world, a bit of a misanthropic sense of not wanting to be part of this human race and appalled by the things that I'm seeing and claustrophobic in urban settings and I'm sure of feelings that a lot of people listening can relate to. And I wonder if you've had those feelings of maybe disdain or judgment for your fellow humans and how you retain
00:32:28
Speaker
a modicum of compassion and, you know, continued passion for doing the work that you do, which involves humans, obviously. um Yeah, how do you kind of solve that judgment that can arise when it feels like we're on the right path or doing this good and connective thing and just can't understand how people don't see the world as we do?
00:32:52
Speaker
Well, ah deep ecology um suggests that The root of the problem is anthropocentrism, that that's what leads to that illusion of separation, that we humans are the crown of creation, we're the measure of all being, the world consists of human beings and resources.
00:33:11
Speaker
But the reality that we can learn from the science of ecology and from the wisdom of Indigenous peoples is that um we are... one strand in the web. We're just one leaf on this vast tree of life and the sap of that tree connects us to every other leaf that we have a universal common ancestor with everything else that we're connected in that way. that's the We understand that intellectually. We know that to be true.
00:33:39
Speaker
If it's true that I am just one cell in this larger body of the earth, then it makes no more sense for me to take the blame for everything that's happening than it does to take the glory, do you know.
00:33:55
Speaker
The reality is that we didn't choose we didn't choose to be like this. We didn't choose to be who we are. You know, when I look back on history I'm just listening to a podcast about Genghis Khan and how, you know, 800 years ago was all just like utter pillage and murder and mayhem. And it's been that way every step of the way, you know, that history is just like that's where we've come from. And so I just feel like all of us are staggering around now with kind of PTSD from thousands of years of this awful
00:34:32
Speaker
kind of mayhem that we've been part of and we didn't choose it to be like that. you know We didn't choose natural selection. We didn't choose any of those things.
00:34:43
Speaker
And so ah think that leads to more compassion for ourselves. that it's um It's so hard to be ah monkey that um that can foresee its own death and that can foresee the death of its children and it's so hard to You know, find ourselves born into a world where, you know, where the only thing that forces us to leave this nice snug cave, which is safe, into a world where the sharp teeth of our predators are waiting for us is the hunger that we've got no choice, you know.
00:35:21
Speaker
And the very things that we most hate about ourselves today, the greed and the the violence, were the very things that allowed us to succeed in that world that we've come from.
00:35:36
Speaker
And so the question then becomes if if we can stop blaming ourselves and just kind of, I don't know, just take a more disinterested kind of a stance and just look at it and it's just like how would you expect anybody who's just come through 10,000 years that we've just come through to be any different to me, and you know, then the miracle is where did the love come from? Where did the, where did you know, the beautiful flowers that, you know it's all it's all kind of, it's all a mystery but I just feel like
00:36:09
Speaker
it's To me, it's just as anthropocentric to see human beings as being the cancer that's consuming the world as it is to see us as being the reason why, the source of all value, you know, as being the reason why the world is here is as a as a playground for one species.
00:36:31
Speaker
You're now entering part two of my conversation with John Seed. So just to orient the listener to this new audioscape that they'll be listening into now, we've recorded this conversation in two parts and I'm now in the Coffs Harbour Library.
00:36:46
Speaker
People might hear the heavy breathing of the ducted air conditioning and some laughter from outside the door, which is quite nice in a solemn library setting. So we are back, John, picking up where we left off.
00:36:59
Speaker
And I believe we were talking about how humans have ended up here and having a little bit of understanding and compassion for you know the the historical reasons why we've landed in this place and the inevitability, really.
00:37:13
Speaker
And it seems to me that we've been great at exploiting that inheritance, those fossil fuels and creating technologies that let us transcend our limits, essentially.
00:37:25
Speaker
Unlike any other creature that I can see in the ecosystem, we really don't have that feedback anymore of what we're actually doing to the places we live or the far off places that we don't see. so Starting back into this conversation, John, I was curious to know how how you see we could establish some or re-establish some limits for ourselves.
00:37:45
Speaker
If that's possible with, you know, all the ice cream in the freezer, all the fossil fuels still at our disposal, are we able to consciously and wisely create some checks and balances on our behaviour or are we simply going over the cliff together?
00:37:58
Speaker
Well, that is the question. And um I can't say that I have an answer, but I have a hypothesis, which is that um if we were to dispel the illusion of separation between ourselves and the rest of the natural world,
00:38:17
Speaker
we would be in a better position to have a chance of recognising the cliff and making a different decision. It's as if we're noticing that there's a leg stretched out onto the road and a boat motor vehicle is approaching that leg and we think if I was a good person, i might help to pull that leg out of the way of the motor vehicle.
00:38:42
Speaker
But if we actually inhabited this body and understood, just a moment, that's my leg, then we don't need to be a good person any longer. It's just a matter then of self-preservation and our instincts will take care of us.
00:38:57
Speaker
And so the question is how to ah reconnect our instincts with the actual situation that we're in, where we're in grave danger, but because there's ice cream in the fridge, um it's difficult for us to experience.
Rituals and Community Grief
00:39:15
Speaker
I'd love to ask you about some of the the rituals and activities that you lead through your work and if you have a favourite ritual or ceremony that you invite people to participate in and what tends to happen when you create those spaces.
00:39:32
Speaker
It's not so much a favourite, but the key to everything else is what Joanna Macy called honouring our pain for the world. And I'm trying to remember whether we already talked about this in the first... I don't think we went into it, so it would be great to go there. Well, then... um ah What I learned from Joanna was that we live in a culture of denial, that there's this profound denial of just elements of our humanity, and we are never encouraged to express our deepest feelings of anguish and rage and terror before.
00:40:12
Speaker
And indeed, we're we're taught to fear these feelings, that if I were to fully experience the depths of distress that must be there when I consider like what I know about the world and what's happening to to my world, that surely I would be crushed by those feelings. There must be good reason for me to have learned from a very, very young age how to suppress those feelings and how to be oblivious of them.
00:40:41
Speaker
What I learned from Joanna is that if we create a safe container that invites those feelings and welcomes those feelings, not only am I not damaged in any way, they're just feelings, they're just part of my humanity, but that a huge... um amount of energy and intelligence is released that has been suppressed alongside those feelings. These feelings are pushing up with the force of natural selection behind them. They're part of our intelligence. that
00:41:13
Speaker
If I look back on 4,000 million years of successful evolution, I have to acknowledge that every single one of my ancestors during that entire ah period was intelligent enough to reach the age of reproducing itself before it was consumed, without exception.
00:41:32
Speaker
And the vast, vast, vast majority of that time preceded cognition, that this wasn't thinking intelligence, this was what we call feelings, is what remains in us, of the ancient intelligence where we knew by instinct or intuition or feeling ah when to run, when to hide, when to stand and fight,
00:41:54
Speaker
when it was safe, when it was dangerous, all of these kind of things. And that as we suppress these feelings, we suppress that ancient intelligence. And we, you know, the cognition is very beautiful, but in the absence of the passion that the feelings bring, cognition is sterile, that we know what needs to happen, but we feel paralyzed, we're unable to engage.
00:42:19
Speaker
And so there's a tremendous release of empowerment and of energy when these feelings are honestly welcomed into our circle.
00:42:31
Speaker
And so everything else that follows, follows on the heels of that. And are you talking about crying alone in a room or gathering together with other human beings and holding a space for our tears?
00:42:48
Speaker
Oh, well, um both. But certainly by doing this in community, which is what Arnie Ness called for, the yeah ah professor of philosophy who coined the term deep ecology, the late Arnie Ness said that what I needed are community therapies to heal that illusion of separation.
00:43:06
Speaker
And so that as we recognise not only our own feelings, but the feelings of all of our people, the people around us, um that that this is where I think real change starts from.
00:43:19
Speaker
Yeah. And in honouring our grief for the world, if people listening haven't been part of a grief circle in the past, it's almost something that we have to be guided in because we may look naturally or reflexively for the hopium or the positive spin and even in expressing our pain might try to end on a high note or something of that nature. So John, is there a right and a wrong way to do this?
00:43:48
Speaker
that Yes, there is. And ah luckily, there are a large number of communities around the world now where people are exploring these things. And so I guess the first step would be to find like-minded people who are already exploring this and to work together with them.
Facilitation and Workshops
00:44:10
Speaker
But that's not to minimise the value of crying alone in your room.
00:44:19
Speaker
Do people need to be highly attuned, like a tuning fork to the cosmic resonance and really deeply steeped in this work to be able to facilitate this kind of this kind of space? Or can anyone have a go?
00:44:35
Speaker
I'm not quite sure of the answer. I'd like the answer to be that anyone can have a go, but it's very, very powerful energies that get released and um I think that it would be safer to um apprentice oneself to somebody who's been working in this in in this space for a while and put a toe in the water before jumping Yeah, i noticed that on the Work That Reconnect's website, it is open source and people can learn and follow along at their own pace and kind of do that with their own initiative or without having to pay a large sum of money or any money. So I just wanted to say to people that that's there as an incredible generous offering for anyone who wants to learn more.
00:45:26
Speaker
as you As you know, we're travelling on the coast at the moment and the last few days I've been delighted to see whales pretty close to shore flapping their fins and slapping the water with their tails and it's probably not unusual to wonder what their thinking and feeling and doing, and it looks so joyous, but I have no idea what it's like to be a whale.
00:45:50
Speaker
And I'm amused at the idea of AI helping us understand whale song so that then we can better understand how to protect the oceans. And I feel like to me, that just sounds...
00:46:03
Speaker
quite ridiculous. And I'm sure people have a lot of different opinions on that. But I wonder, John, in your work, especially with things like the Council of All Beings, what experiences you've had seeing through the eyes of the more than human?
00:46:18
Speaker
First, um I'm not sure how much I've actually seen through the eyes of the more than human. I've certainly taken part in um some very valuable role plays.
00:46:30
Speaker
I guess you could say it's the theatre of moral imagination, that as we attempt to see what the world looks like through um a non-human being, we Many things are revealed, ah whether they're revealed about that non-human being or about ourself, that remains to be seen. and But I've noticed that merely by entertaining the possibility that
00:47:02
Speaker
I'm capable of experiencing the world in a way that's different than the way that the dominant paradigm that I've grown up in has taught me.
00:47:12
Speaker
it's It's tremendously liberating. And to be in a circle of people who are all exploring by extending themselves into unfamiliar spaces, um it's a very liberating kind of an experience.
00:47:27
Speaker
Mm-hmm. Can you briefly describe that process for people who aren't aware of what the Council of All Beings entails? Well, um the Council of All Beings is the first of the experiential deep ecology processes that Arnie Ness coined the term deep ecology and set the deep ecology approach.
00:47:46
Speaker
movement going. And he said that ecological ideas won't save us. What we need is ecological identity, ecological self. And in order to nourish our ecological identity, to break free of our merely social identity, he called for community therapies.
00:48:06
Speaker
And it was in meeting Joanna Macy in 1985 that I first saw the possibility of how to construct those experiential deep ecology processes that Arnie Ness was calling for.
00:48:21
Speaker
And the first of those that Joanna and I created was the Council of All Beings. In the Council of All Beings, each of the participants finds an ally in the non-human world, a plant or an animal or a feature of the landscape.
00:48:36
Speaker
the Pacific Ocean or a drop of water or the Milky Way galaxy, anything in the cosmos except for humans. And some people include humans in the Council of All Beings, but I feel like we have every opportunity to hear from humans and this is a chance for the voiceless ones to be heard. So my Councils of All Beings exclude humans.
00:48:58
Speaker
And then we make a mask to represent that ally just out of a paper plate and some crayons and scissors and we pass through ah ceremonial portal and enter the Council of All Beings where we speak in the first person for our ally, I am gum tree, I am Microrisee, whatever it is, and then just see what happens.
00:49:26
Speaker
At first, people may feel a bit awkward and it feels kind of a bit, um you know, constructed, but very, very soon, we're always astonished to hear voices that we've never heard before. We hear things being said that we've never heard before.
00:49:44
Speaker
And that includes me, who's done hundreds and hundreds of these councils of all beings, and always I hear things that I've never heard before. And often um giving us ah a kind of a perspective on the world that we return to that changes things, that changes our options, that changes things.
00:50:04
Speaker
our ah ah decisions and the directions that we're going to move. Thanks for that. You also have a beautiful deep time ah embodied kind of perspective keeping around where we are right now and this vast swath of time and forces that have shaped us.
00:50:24
Speaker
I'd love to hear you describe that the way that. The way that you can move from these things being merely knowledge, merely intellectual, merely ideas to actually experiencing ourselves afresh is through ceremony.
00:50:39
Speaker
And the particular ceremony that I use at the moment is called the Cosmic Walk. And it was developed by Sister Miriam Therese McGillis, a Catholic nun from a community called Genesis Farm in New Jersey, who was a colleague of the late Thomas Berry, who was the greatest theologian of his age, the latter part of the last century.
00:51:03
Speaker
And late in his life, he realized that he had now become a geologian rather than a theologian. His attention turned away from the image of divinity the image of spirituality that he'd had all of his life from the Old Testament and the New Testament.
00:51:22
Speaker
And he saw that the earth itself was the testament, that the earth itself was the fountain from which every religion and every belief system and every spirituality had emerged.
00:51:34
Speaker
And that, you know, when you look back at the timeline of the cosmos, the 13.7 billion years of the cosmos, the 4 billion years of the earth, Just a split second ago, human beings began to try to understand who we are and where we've come from and to start to just develop poetry and stories to try and give expression to the incredible mystery of where we find ourselves.
00:52:01
Speaker
And so um the Cosmic Walk is one such ceremony where we create a scale model of ah the universe, 13.7 billion years represented yeah in my workshops by a ball of hemp 50 metres long.
00:52:19
Speaker
uncoil that into a spiral. There are 23 beads appropriately ah woven into that spiral, and these represent 23 stories of the emerging universe.
00:52:34
Speaker
And so right at the beginning of the spiral, in the center of the spiral, there's a bead that represents the extraordinary fact that anything exists at all. And so we just stop for a moment and consider that It might have turned out, had any of the constants of physics been a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of a percent different, nothing would exist.
00:52:58
Speaker
But indeed, all this exists. And so we celebrate that and we light a candle there and then we move around that spiral lighting candle after candle and this spiral of light emerges.
00:53:13
Speaker
Four billion years ago, there's a candle to represent the explosion of the grandmother star, the debris from which formed our sun and solar system.
00:53:24
Speaker
And very, very shortly thereafter, there's a candle to represent the first cell of life on earth. And then life emerges from the water and we go around lighting candle after candle.
00:53:38
Speaker
And we suddenly realize that we're you know, 30 centimetres from the end of the spiral and it's still all dinosaurs. There's no sign of anything familiar yet.
00:53:49
Speaker
And we realised that it wouldn't be possible to have a candle small enough to actually to accurately depict the place of the human in this incredible story.
00:54:02
Speaker
But the point of this story is not so much that this is the universe we inhabit, this is the universe within which we live, but rather that the universe has now become conscious in the human in know in a fashion that has perhaps never been conscious before.
00:54:21
Speaker
And the universe can, looking through human eyes, the universe can see itself in a new way. And the jaw of the universe drops in astonishment to see the trail which it's trod.
00:54:36
Speaker
We are the universe at that moment when the universe has become conscious of itself and that this is what's celebrated and this is the the burgeoning of our ecological identity when we actually begin to experience ourselves in this way rather than this just being a story in a book about cosmology or a book about evolution.
Conclusion and Gratitude
00:54:58
Speaker
o Such a glorious description. I hope to take that walk one day soon. And just finally, John, besides watching Wales this morning, I was also reading an article about something called the reverse Flynn effect. And basically there was a fella, um James Flynn, who started noticing that our IQ collectively was rising after World War two and people were getting smarter and smarter according to that metric anyway. And Lately, it's been revealed in the reverse Flynn effect that our IQ intelligence is dropping.
00:55:34
Speaker
And whether or not that has to do with Instagram or our smartphones in general is still up for debate. But I wonder what intelligences or what type of intelligence you would suggest taking into the future, if it's not going to be IQ, or if it's not hopefully us nosediving into some you know, kind of vegetative state, what would you say to that?
00:55:57
Speaker
Well, i i must say that I'm concerned myself because i I remember when I was a young man, you used to find your way around by car by having ah a book called Gregory's, which was a map, and you'd have it open on the seat beside you and you'd glance down and you'd find your way through a labyrinth of streets turning pages as you went.
00:56:20
Speaker
And there's no doubt that having a yeah ah map on your phone or a map in your car, ah very, very quickly ah you lose those skills. And so that the more that we outsource our intelligence to our machines, ah the more I feel... um i mean, I remember reading about one creature which starts its life in the ocean as a free-swimming creature, but at a certain point it it ah hunkers down on a piece of rock.
00:56:53
Speaker
And the next thing it does is that it absorbs its own brain. It no longer needs a brain because, you know, and so um if we if we behave in certain ways, there's no doubt that we can that we can reverse that Flynn effect.
00:57:10
Speaker
So I'm seeing a bit of mollusk behaviour in my future. might not be so bad. Well, maybe if we see it coming, we can correct for it. o And I'm just so glad that your work is out there in the world and that the rainforest recruited you into this cause and you've been generous enough to share your time with me and the listeners ah for these two conversational sessions, John. It's just such such a pleasure and thank you so much for your words.
00:57:39
Speaker
Oh, thank you, Katie. My pleasure.
00:57:44
Speaker
That was the legendary John Seed, and I've linked everything you need in the show notes. And take heed, this deep ecology business could just feed your soul like nothing else has before.
00:57:56
Speaker
I'll be back in a fortnight with another conversation from the Reskillians road trip. And meanwhile, I wonder if you can, like we've been doing Get up really early and catch the sunrise each morning or wake up in the dead of night to see what the moon is up to.
00:58:13
Speaker
You might be surprised by how alive that makes you feel. Catch you next time.