The Rainforest Information Centre presents

DEEP ECOLOGY with John Seed and Friends

Details:

Tickets are sliding scale from $150-$600 - $150 student or unemployed, $600 well off, or somewhere in between.
25% of the proceeds will be donated to protect Ecuador’s rainforests.
Vegetarian meals will be provided, gluten-free and vegan options by request after booking.
Accommodation in rooms, dorms or your own tent/van

FROM JOHN SEED:

This is the second Melbourne workshop which I will be cofacilitating remotely. Two close colleagues, Stephanie Campbell and Pauline Galvin, with whom I have worked on numerous occasions, will be present "in the flesh," and I will zoom in 5 or 6 times throughout the weekend. I trialled this in Bellingen earlier this year and the workshop was clearly just as powerful and transformative as always.

I have worked for worldwide rainforests since 1979. Although many of our efforts succeeded, for every forest saved 100 have disappeared. Clearly, you can’t save the planet one forest at a time. It's one green Earth or a bowl of dust. Without a profound change of consciousness, we can kiss the forests goodbye, the ones we’ve "saved" alongside the rest.

Deep ecology is key to the change we need. To deep ecology, underlying all the symptoms of the environmental crisis lies a psychological or spiritual root – the illusion of separation from the rest of the natural world which stems from anthropocentrism or human-centeredness.

Conditioned since the Old Testament to “subdue and dominate” nature, the modern psyche is radically alienated from the air, water and soil which underpin life and this is reflected in the rapid shredding of all-natural systems in the name of economic development. Deep ecology reminds us that the world is not a pyramid with humans on top, but a web. We, humans, are but one strand in that web and as we destroy this web, we destroy the foundations for all complex life including our own.

While we maintain a self-image created in the matrix of anthropocentric culture, 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 nature "out there" and nature "in here" are one and the same.

Many people INTELLECTUALLY realise that we are inseparable from Nature and that the sense of separation that we feel is socially conditioned and illusory.

But as the late Arne Naess, Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at Oslo University, the man who coined the term "Deep Ecology" wrote:

"it is not enough to have ecological ideas, we have to have an ecological identity, ecological self".

But how can we nourish our ecological identity? In answer to such questions, Joanna Macy and I developed a series of experiential deep ecology rituals called the “Council of All Beings” and in 1986, with Arne Naess and Pat Flemming, wrote a book called Thinking Like A Mountain - Towards a Council of All Beings (which has been translated into 12 languages). Along with others, we have been facilitating these workshops around the world since then.

In this workshop we remember our rootedness in nature, recapitulate our evolutionary journey and experience the fact that every cell in our body is descended in an unbroken chain 4 billion years old, through fish that learned to walk the land, reptiles whose scales turned to fur and became mammals, evolving through to the present.

We further extend our sense of identity in the Council of All Beings itself where we find an ally in the natural world, make a mask to represent that ally, and allow the animals and plants and landscapes to speak through us. We are shocked at the very different view of the world that emerges from their dialogue. Creative suggestions for human actions emerge and we invoke the powers and knowledge of these other life-forms to empower us in our lives.

One of the rituals we will share is honouring our pain for the world: we grieve for all that is being torn from our world, the species lost, the landscapes destroyed. Only if we can allow ourselves to feel the pain of the Earth, can we be effective in Her healing. This is why the Vietnamese Buddhist monk, Thich Nhat Hanh, has said that in order to heal the Earth, "the most important thing that we can do is to hear, inside ourselves, the sounds of the Earth crying".

This workshop enables us to find an end to the illusion of separation and experience our rootedness in the living Earth.

Pauline Galvin is a Melbourne based ‘engaged citizen’ who has been actively involved in community groups around sustainability and the environment for many years. With degrees in Science and Public Health, she has a deep understanding of the mounting evidence on Climate Change and the need to act on this evidence to safeguard the health of people and the planet. She has seen the importance of coming together with like heart/minded people, to support each other as we work to create and sustain communities and cultures that embody our values, that can help to heal the wounds of the earth and her peoples, and that can sustain us and nurture future generations.

Stephanie Campbell has been part of the movement envisioning socially-just transformations towards an ecologically sustainable future for 15 years, as an activist, researcher, facilitator, practitioner, and advisor to NGOs and policymakers. Her research focuses on the potential for care work (whether providing spiritual, emotional, psychological, material, or other forms of care) to act as a site for transformative ecological justice and eco-centric cultural transformation in Australia. This is in service of creating flourishing more-than-human futures that truly centre those most affected by climate change and environmental degradation in Australian multi-species communities. Her primary research supervisor is the former Arne Naess Chair in Global Justice and the Environment. She is a Research Fellow at the University of Melbourne's Melbourne Climate Futures institute and a Research Affiliate in Spirituality and Planetary Health at the Contemplative Studies Centre. She co-facilitates deep ecology alongside John Seed, and is a board member of Soulcraft Australia and New Zealand.

For more information, rtpg47@gmail.com