John Seed and the Council of All Beings Part III
(Page 5 of 10)
May/June 1989
By Pat Stone
The book goes much, much further. Indeed, Seed wrote, "The power of the last chapter of Diet for a New America was such that, as I read it, at one stroke all animal products fell from my diet. Painlesslywithout effort or sacrifice."
RELATED CONTENT
A Portable Environment, A Portable Environment, or...How To Survive The Ice Age, In Comfort! Januar...
A Plowboy Interview with William Ophuls whose 1973 Ph.D. dissertation was on the management of poli...
On October 15, blogs around the world are writing about environmental issues. We are, too!...
Energy & Environment October/November 2002
For cruising or commuting...
Building and installing an alternative energy solar panel on the roof of a house or pole, including...
MOTHER: John, we've been talking about stopping bulldozers and boycotting timbering, but what I just finished doing was adopting the role of Insect-and you, that of Rock-in the ceremonial Council you hosted here. What's the connection?
I am Insect;you insult me and call me Bug.You are repulsed andspray me- in your homes,your yards and your farms.But I do much goodandhave my rightful placein the order of things.I ask you tolook before you spray,to see bow many strandsof the web of life you roughly shake,and to seeka gentler way.
Seed: After doing a lot of work trying to educate the public through news media, films and books, I began to realize that environmental lethargy in the developed countries is not due to a lack of information. True, a lot of people don't know the full extent of these horrors, but basically anyone who reads the newspaper or listens to the radio has a sense of the trouble we're in. Yet that knowledge doesn't really change behavior. I began to think we had to figure out ways to get beyond merely providing information -to help people get ecological identities instead of just ecological ideas.
A lot of this thinking is based on deep ecol ogy, a term coined by Arne Naess, professor emeritus of philosophy at Oslo University in Norway. The basic idea of deep ecology is that humanity is only another member of the biotic community. The world isn't a pyramid with us humans on top. We're not the crown of creation, the measure of all meaning. Instead, the world is a web and we humans just one strand in the web. Other species have just as much importance and right to exist as we do.
Naess wrote that when most people think about conservation, they think about sacrifice. This is a treacherous basis for conservation, because most people aren't capable of working for anything except their own self-interest. And, unfortunately, society has bequeathed to us a narrow, shrunken sense of what that self is. It doesn't even include the air we breathe, although all we have to do is hold our breath for two minutes to realize how realistic that is. Our actual self is part of all of nature. We're not skin bags separate from everything else.
Naess argued that we need to find ways to extend our identity into nature. Once that happens, being out in front of bulldozers or whatever becomes no more of a sacrifice than moving your foot if you notice that someone's just about to strike it with an ax. Naess stated that we need community therapy to get rid of this illusory sense of separation, to develop ecological self.
Page:
<< Previous 1 |
2 |
3 |
4 | 5 |
6 |
7 |
8 |
9 |
10 |
Next >>
