Deep Ecology & The Conservation of Nature with John Seed

A benefit for the Great Koala National Park.  The EXPERIENCE of Deep Ecology through narrative, poetry and ceremony.

I had been working for the rainforests since 1979 first in Australia and then elsewhere around the world. Although many of our early efforts were crowned with success, I couldn't help but notice that for every forest we were able to save, worldwide 100 disappeared. Clearly we weren't going to be able to save the planet one forest at a time. One green Earth or a bowl of dust.  Unless somehow a profound change of consciousness was to sweep the globe we could kiss the forests goodbye, the ones we had "saved" alongside the rest.

In 1982 I first heard the term "deep ecology" and immediately realised that this was a key to the change that was needed. After thousands of years of conditioning, the modern psyche is radically alienated from the air, water and soil which underpin all of life and this is reflected in the rapid shredding of all natural systems in the name of economic development. The world is not a pyramid with humans on top but a web. We humans are but one strand in that web not the spider in the middle,  and as we pull the web to pieces, we destroy the foundations for all complex life including our own.

As long as we maintain a self-image created in the matrix of such anthropocentric views, a shrunken and illusory sense of self that doesn't include the air and water and soil, we will experience nature as "outside" our self and fail to recognise that the nature "out there" and the nature "in here" are one and the same.

So, what to do? It is all very well to have this understanding but, as Arne Naess (the Emeritus Professor of Philosophy from Oslo University who coined the term deep ecology) pointed out, “ecological ideas are not enough, we need ecological identity, ecological self”. Wrestling with these issues, in 1986 I attended one of Joanna Macy’s  "Despair and Empowerment" workshops. In  the days following the workshop Joanna and I developed The Council of All Beings, a series of processes or rituals which combined  the ideas of deep ecology and the powerful techniques of personal transformation.

Many people INTELLECTUALLY realise that we are inseparable from Nature and that the sense of separation that we feel is socially conditioned and illusory. These processes enable us to deeply EXPERIENCE our connection with Nature, in our hearts and our bodies.

After much research, I was  unable to find a single example of indigenous culture which didn’t include such rituals and ceremonies.   Everywhere traditional human communities regularly and respectfully acknowledge our interconnectedness with the rest of the Earth community and in so doing ensure that the human doesn’t drift away into merely social conceptions of self.  but remains grounded in the Earth which brings us into being.