A LOVING FURY

It is May in the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont. Dandelions tell you that Spring has arrived, mud season is gone. The meadows wear a bright yellow blanket, a sight that looks and feels good. The flowers also flag the start of deerfly and tick season. A small price for the dayglo colors of Fall’s foliage display. An annual progression.

August of 2011 was an exception, the sequence interrupted by a powerful and destructive visitor: Hurricane Irene. On August 27, it hit North Carolina, then went in and out of the Atlantic Ocean as it zig-zagged its way up the East Coast. Its ninth and final landfall was in New York City, and from there it headed toward Connecticut, Western Massachusetts, and Vermont. Irene moved fast, it hit Vermont on August 29. It brought high winds and a foot of rain. Some headlines:

· “The flood level of the Deerfield River [exceeded that] measured during the 1938 New England hurricane – the only other tropical cyclone to make a direct hit on Vermont in the state’s recorded history.” 1

· “Throughout Vermont, numerous covered bridges [were] destroyed.” 2

· “The storm decimated multiple sections of US Route 4 [making] east/west travel through the central part of the state nearly impossible … Statewide the cost of repairs for roads and bridges was estimated to exceed $700 million.”3

I got to Vermont two days after Irene had moved on to New Hampshire and was headed for Quebec. Here, it was windy and raining but no longer blowing or coming down hard. There was no stream running through Danville, so the town was not flooded. I didn’t see any major damage to the homes in and around the town center, or in our neighborhood a mile from it. Trees down in wooded sections, and parts of some access roads washed away. Overall, much reason to be thankful.

I went to our general store to get a copy of the Vermont Free Press. The front page had a photo of a nearby town’s flooded main street with a man paddling a canoe on it. The woman at the checkout counter looked at the picture. She looked up and said: “Mother Earth is mad.”

A day later I ran into Earl, a general contractor who had done work on our house. “With all this rain,” I said, “you must be backed up on your outside jobs.”

“Way behind,” he said. A brief pause. “We’ve been messing with Nature,” he added, “polluting her land and waters. She’s striking back.”

So, Mother Earth is mad at us, we’re bad girls and boys. We’ve been undoing the world she created bird by bird, tree by tree, critter by critter, all informed to promote the health of the whole that is their chunk of the biosphere. Natural disasters are one way for her to enforce that cardinal law. Oh?

Okay, the Earth has gravity, it has a magnetic field, it spins on an axis whose angle it can change. But a living entity that is intelligent, aware, has agency and a law?

I began to think about the nature of our planet well before Irene entered our lives. It was in the early Seventies, when there was an explosion of interest in the Native American world. There were eleven bookstores in Harvard Square. Two carried only old editions of classics. All the others had a Native American section. My readings about them made me realize that there were two worlds, the one in which I lived and a parallel one inhabited by them. Everything in their world was alive. Spending time in it made me feel good, comforted in some way.

A few years later I was in a healing ceremony conducted by a Navajo medicine woman I’ll call Bella. We sat around a disc of earth that held red-hot coals. I told her how I felt when I entered her world. “My problem,” I added, “is that I can’t hold onto that good feeling when I go back to where I live.”

She looked at the fire, then at me. “You need to go all the way,” she said and turned to the next person in the circle. Her words rang true. A voice in my head said “She’s right! Never mind that it isn’t yet clear what ‘going all the way’ means.”

It did become clear. It did not mean go live in their world. It did mean take their way of seeing the world with you to wherever you live.

Some Native ideas about the nature of our world were not hard to adopt. For example, that all living creatures are our relatives, in many cases our teachers. And that trees, and other plants, are standing people. Much harder, for me, was the idea that Mother Earth, Father Sun, and The Great Spirit were more than metaphors.

I have degrees in physics and engineering. I no longer worked in a technical field, but the engineer in me was still around. To “go all the way” I had to get that part of me fully on board. I looked to our scientists for help.

“Today there is a wide measure of agreement [that] the stream of knowledge is heading towards a non-mechanical reality; the universe begins to look more like a great thought than [a] great machine. Mind no longer [seems to be] an accidental intruder into the realm of matter [but rather]as the creator and governor of [that realm] – not of course [our] minds but [that] of some Eternal Spirit.”

– James Jeans, a founder of the new physics 4

Life did begin in the rich brew of the Earth’s ancient seas, perhaps including molecules that arrived from outer space. But to take hold life needs energy, and that was provided by the sun. Rich material for metaphors: the nutrient-rich seas of Mother Earth impregnated by the rays of Father Sun to give birth to the Biosphere. Ma, Pa, and their children all moved by the pervasive, universal Mind of the Great Spirit.

But, other than in the thin skins of life on a few tiny orbs, isn’t the Universe a vast collection of dead matter, searing hot in and around its suns, deep-freeze cold elsewhere? That’s how I learned to think about it in school. Was there a way to live with both views, the metaphorical and the material? I found one in the thinking of the quantum physicist David Bohm.5 He says:

“I look at the process of evolution as the unfoldment of the potential of matter, which at bottom becomes indistinguishable from the potential of mind…This is not to say that I equate mind and matter or reduce the one to the other. They are, rather, two parallel streams of development that arise from a common ground … [We] do not have any knowledge of mind without matter, or matter disassociated from mind or life … For example, in a growing seed almost all the matter and energy come from the environment. The seed [provides that inanimate matter] with new information that leads it to produce the living plant or animal. Who is to say then that life was not immanent [in the matter] even before the seed was planted? … In the same way [the intelligence displayed by an animal] must also be immanent in the matter that constitutes [it]. If the immanence is pursued [more] deeply in matter, I believe we eventually reach the stream which we also experience as mind, so that mind and matter fuse.”

What is the common ground from which both mind and matter arise? It is, Bohm says, the vast ocean of energy that fills what we think of as empty space. In it, “the total energy of all known matter in the universe [is] merely a ripple.”

Do his equations say that there is a Cosmic Intelligence? No, he says, but they open a door to that possibility. They can’t go any further because they are the products of thought. To go beyond where thought can go you have to look to your intuition. That was the source of some of his insights into the nature of the subatomic world, affirmed later by experiments. But listening to your intuition can be tricky because what it reveals is displayed on the same screen as the one on which you project your ideas and wishes.

Bohm’s view of how matter and mind arise from a common source made me feel free to accept that intelligence was not the exclusive property of humans. It pervades the Universe and all its clusters of matter. That thought also feels right to my intuition. Until proved wrong I can go ahead and live with it.

“[The] land was full of caribou, and the people lived well [and] were happy. But the hunters only killed those caribou that were big and strong. Soon all that was left were the weak and the sick, and the people began to starve. The [First Woman had to call] Amorak, the spirit of the wolf [for help to make the herd] once again strong. [And] the people realized that the caribou and the wolf were one, for although the caribou feeds the wolf, it is the wolf that keeps the caribou strong.

– Inuit Creation Story

I live on an animate Earth that cares for all its children. The Earth is said to have a sacred order.6 An apt label. The root of the word sacred is the Latin sacre, holy, whose root in turn, is häl, whole. The word hale also means both whole and “free from disease, robust.”

What does the Earth’s sacred order mean to me? It means that the Earth’s rhythms and cycles and reciprocal relationships are designed to promote the well-being of the whole that is our biosphere. It means that the prime law of life on this planet is: live in a way that serves your needs and also those of others in your ecosystem. Don’t be an outlaw, don’t play zero-sum games with your relatives.

We, Homo Saps, have been around for two-hundred thousand years. James C Scott, author of Against the Grain,7 tells us that we lived at peace with the natural world for much of that time. Then, five-thousand years ago some of us took to the warpath, first against our neighbors and then the natural world. To justify our actions, we created gods with human faces who told us to go ahead and dominate our neighbors and our non-human kin, that it was our divine mission in life. That gave birth to walled cities, poxes, and the slave trade. And ultimately, World Wars I and II, and climate change that threatens our survival.

What would Mother Earth say to us now? A little talk:

Mother E.: “Why ask? You know that only you humans were given the option to become outlaws. To make that a free choice its consequences would not come in your lifetimes. But I also endowed you with long sight, if you choose to use it.”

Me: “You’re right. Is the harm we’ve done to your creation beyond repair?”

Mother E.: “Not in my lifetime, but quite likely in yours. How long you are around depends on whether and how quickly you quit being destructive and choose a different way of living, such as the one some of your economists have proposed. Look, you are my children, I love you, but I also love all my other children, a great many more of them. You know what will happen if you force me to choose. Be sad to see you go but the good of the Whole comes first.”

Thoughtful books, such as The Water Will Come and The Uninhabitable Earth, suggest we have a couple more generations of time to get off the path we are on before we set off irreversible reactions that will make our planet hell to live on. 8 Our modern way of life has led us into a consumption trap: continue to consume at an unsustainable rate or watch our economy collapse. There is a way out of that trap. It is called “degrowth,” and is championed by a growing number of economists including Tim Jackson, author of Prosperity without Growth.9

But inertia, addictive conveniences, and vested interests keep us glued to the path that leads to disaster. Our young people seem the least attached to our hyper-consumption lifestyle, perhaps because they are the ones who will have to live with the consequences of clinging to it. But most of them also seem unaware of the off-ramp. It would help if Jackson and his colleagues spent more time with the kids who will be the decision-makers of tomorrow than with their parents who have that role today but are stuck in the consumption trap.

It would also help if the economists and their young audiences were both more aware of one more thing. Doing the work needed to put our economies on this off-ramp will have a positive impact on the health of those involved in the effort.

As historian and cultural critic Theodore Roszak put it:

“[Our] environmental crisis has become the news of the day every day. [But] it is a story without a center, endless accounts of disaster, menace, impending doom, [like] gunshots fired by a sniper in the night. Our life is at stake, [there] are facts and figures about the threat, more than [we] can take in. At [some point we] grow numb and turn off [the news].

[But our] predicament is a great deal more than this —more personal, more threatening, more radical. [More] and more of what people bring before doctors and therapists—agonies of body and spirit—are symptoms of the biospheric emergency registering at the most intimate level of life. The Earth hurts, and we hurt with it. [Mother Earth’s] umbilical cord links to us at the root of the unconscious mind.” 10

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References

1. Newscast, WCAX TV, August 28, 2011.

2. Terri Hallenbeck, Burlington Free Press, August 2011.

3. Bob Kinzel, Vermont Public Radio, September 27, 2011.

4. James Jeans, The Mysterious Universe (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1931).

5. David Bohm, A New Theory of the Relationship of Mind and Matter (Philosophical Psychology, Vol.3, No.2, 1990 pp 271-286).

6. Barry Lopez, Story at Anatuvik Pass, in The Graywolf Annual Three: Essays, Memoirs & Reflections, Scott Walker. Ed. (Saint Paul, MN, Graywolf Press, 1986).

7. James C. Scott, Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2017)

8. Jeff Goodell, The Water Will Come: Rising Seas, Sinking Cities, And the Remaking of the Civilized World (New York, Boston, and London: Little Brown and Company, 2017); and David Wallace-Wells, The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming (New York: Penguin Random House, 2019.)

9. Tim Jackson, Prosperity Without Growth: Foundations for the Economy of Tomorrow (London and New York: Routledge, 2017).

10. Theodore Roszak, The Voice of the Earth: An Exploration of Ecopsychology (Grand Rapids, MI: Phanes Press, 2001.)

Amarjit Chopra: I am an innovation facilitator and writer. Publications include: Finding Hope (Gaia Lit, Issue Three, Summer 2022); The Other Self (The Humanist Magazine, May/June 2020); The America I made my home: Will it endure? (Meat for Tea: The Valley Review, December 2018); and Managing the People Side of Innovation (Randolph, Vermont: The Public Press, 2014).