The Fire that Lights Our Times

Evolution and Environmental Consciousness

Dr. Mary Evelyn Tucker

Dr. Mary Evelyn Tucker is a visiting professor at the Institution for Social and Policy Studies at Yale University, and an associate in research at the Edwin Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies at Harvard.

Dr. Tucker is a member of the Interfaith Partnership for the Environment at the United Nations Environment Program, and is a member of the International Earth Charter Drafting Committee between 1997 and 2000.

The following is drawn from a speech that Dr. Tucker delivered at the 2007 North America Shumei Natural Agriculture Conference, which was held at Shumei America's National Center.

The text has been edited for use in the March/April 2007 issue of Shumei Magazine and Shumei.org.

Japan is a very special place for me. It was in the spring of 1973 that I went to Japan as a recent college graduate. It was during the time of the Vietnam War and the civil rights movement and our country was burning in many ways. To go to Japan at that time and to experience some of the various religions there—Buddhism, Zen Buddhism, Shinto, and Confucianism—was a great gift in my life, and has a great deal to do with what I have done in my work in world religions and ecology. I am very grateful to the Japanese people, their culture and traditions, and how we are together weaving new cultural patterns across the world.

We are a planet that is on fire with all kinds of huge issues, but the deepest fire is the one that can keep us alive, despite the external fires that we see all around us. I think the great fire of our times is this ecological crisis—this sense that the Earth is burning, which penetrates our consciousness. We can only assimilate it so much because it is so powerful, so strong, so urgent, and puts us in a state of fear, panic, even despair. I think everyone has tremendous concern for what is going to happen to the innocents in this next generation. Many of us are awake at night wondering what will happen to all species, not just humans.

This life crisis is caused in large part by an explosion of our species, in just one century, from two billion to six billion humans. At the same time, rapid industrialization has gripped the globe so that resources are being strained and pollution is spreading. After fourteen billion years of universe evolution and 4.7 billion years of Earth evolution humans are changing the face of the planet.

What we need now are ways to put us back in touch with the amazing evolutionary story of the Earth and the extraordinary rhythms of the natural world. Complex life emerged from the galaxies of stars and planets with the formation of our water planet, which could bring forth life under just the right conditions: just so far from the Sun, just the right temperature, and just the right atmosphere. All of these elements were singing to us—the water, the air, the fire—everything was just right here on this blue–green planet to give birth to life. When flowers first birthed themselves several hundred million years ago and color came into our green planet, we began to celebrate and express the deep interconnection of Heaven, Earth, and humans, from the great dynamics of the Confucian and Taoist sensibilities of East Asia, through Japanese ikebana flower arrangements. All of these beautiful flower arrangements sing to us of the deep connection of life that we have in our souls and the beauty that Japanese art brings us.

This sense of the beauty of nature is very much present in this conference and in the kind of works being done in the special planetary pockets of Shumei Natural Agriculture1 in Santa Cruz, the Catskills, and Hollywood.2 These gardens, these special sacred spots on a planet that is on fire, are nurtured by caretakers of our planet. These are people doing the great work of survival, with certain kinds of techniques and an understanding of the graced aliveness of this world. When you hear them talk, you know they are talking with, speaking with, resonating with the seeds, the soil, the plants, and the forests that surround them. They are relearning an ancient language of cultivation.

These are now the sacred places of our planet where the new conscious sensibilities are being regenerated, restored, and understood once again. These are heroic people who are giving us food for life that not only feeds our bodies, but also feeds our souls. There is an energy that comes through our food, and you can feel the energy of this kind of food. You can see why the caretakers of these great traditions and values, which we hold precious for future generations, are caretakers to a planet that needs this kind of midwifing and birthing. We are in hospice care to a planet that needs hospice care. The new caretakers who are being born amongst us will be caretaking a planet that is in a very critical state. We have ethics for homicide or suicide, but we do not yet have ethics for biocide or geocide.

Through Natural Agriculture, the elements are speaking to us again and telling us that we are partners with creation. There is new resonance being born in the human spirit because we are an endangered species. We need to go back to the soil on our knees where the elements will show us our path home, because this is our home and we do not want it to burn. The Japanese have a word for the heart, ‘kokoro,’ which means, “I think, I feel, I am alive,” and that is what we are learning. We are alive through our feelings, through those vibrations that pass through us, making us want to dance, stand up and shout for life. We are in touch with a new kind of sacred energy that will empower the human spirit.

Let me tell you a story of where I think we are on our planet at this moment. It is a story of a dark night, but also a story of great hope and vitality. It is a story about the Hokuleans, from Hawaii, who have been attempting to discover their identity as planetary, Pacific, ocean–going and ocean–floating people. Just as we are rediscovering how to converse with the elements, they have been rediscovering their conversation with water, wind, and the stars for navigation. ‘Hokule'a’ is the name of the first ship that was built by the Hawaiians in the late 1970s to recreate the voyages made six hundred years earlier from the South Pacific to Hawaii. It was an ancestral voyage going back to their forefathers and grandmothers, who were pioneers that navigated across the great ocean without the benefit of modern technology. The wayfarer Nainoa Thompson gathered a group of young Hawaiians, who were disaffected with modern life, living out of empty technologies and consumerism, and said to them “We must do this. We must recreate the flame of who we are and the techniques that brought us forward from the past into our present and will take us to our future.” They recreated their outrigger canoe from all natural woods. But what they did not have, which I suggest humans do not fully have yet, except in people who are caretakers of our planet, were navigational techniques. They did not have anyone who understood how to read the stars, waves, and the wind, especially in the great open seas. So Nainoa went to the South Pacific, to the great navigator, Pius Mau Piailug, of Satawal, Micronesia and said, “Will you teach us these techniques? Will you help us to relearn our voyage?” Mau came up to Hawaii and taught them the techniques of reading the great oceans, just as if they were learning to read the land again. When they went on their first voyage, they could not figure out how to navigate at night under a cloudy sky, when they could not see the stars or the moon.

They could not find their way forward on a dark, cloudy night, which is exactly where we are as a planetary people. The sense for navigation then came from Mau who lay down in the front of the canoe where he felt the deep imprinting of the waves, where the volcanic islands in the Pacific give different patterns to the waves. As a child he had been placed into the canoes as his people went fishing, so he was able to use his sense of the rhythms of the waves and his deep knowledge of reciprocity with the land imprinted in his body, to figure which way they were supposed to go. When the Tahitian people came out to greet the Hawaiians, singing their chants and ancestral songs of rediscovery and community, it was the largest gathering ever of the indigenous Pacific peoples from that part of the world.

What I am suggesting here is that this Earth–ocean dance that we live amidst, this blue–and–green beauty that surrounds us, is giving us again its language and its stories. It is again giving us its music, rhythms, and heartbeat. It is calling us to awaken to who we are as geological and biological beings, not just historical beings. We are connected to a life planetary force, contained in this huge vast universe, which is much larger than we can imagine. We are a living Gaian planet floating radiantly in a deep ocean of space, while relearning how we can be a new kind of planetary human being. A new kind of planetary civilization is being born amidst this dance of blue water and green land, and that is the great significance of the caretakers recovering this knowledge. Imagine the energy that it takes to see an 8,000–foot mountain on fire in the forests of San Bernardino, as artist Kamran Moojedi3 did while finding the fire within himself, and expressing that fire energy in beautiful paintings. That fire means we can make this transition to a new planetary people and civilization that recognizes our differences and our great unity.

Recovery of spirit in nature is indigenous and instinctive to us because it overcomes a certain break that has occurred between humans and nature with the coming of modernity, specifically a loss of the feeling of being a part of nature. We can blame it on many things—such as, we can say the Enlightenment period separated humans from the natural world; there have been many analyses on how this break occurred. But the fact is there is a huge alienating break in knowing our identity. We are lost because we are separated from each other and from nature, and instead identify more with science, technology, and industrialization. We find ourselves caught up in the rivers of death called freeways that divide us from the land.

This is a hugely divisive consciousness that we have created, of massive artificial intelligences all over the world that have made this great dis–ease and huge dis–equilibrium in the human spirit. Thus there is a vast sickness of mind and body that is expressed in addiction to drugs and alcohol and over consumption because we are so alienated from spirit in nature. We need to recognize this break for what it is, and however it has been created, however we want to define or blame the past, the present is what is important. We can read the past to understand where we are, but we need to understand and re–experience this deep bonding with nature so as to heal ourselves and heal the planet.

How can we heal ourselves and a planet that is in danger? Let us look at a large sweep of human history and the great agricultural revolution where we evolved from being solely hunter–gatherers to becoming farmers, which happened somewhere from ten to twelve thousand years ago. These humans living off the land, often near rivers, created great agricultural civilizations and revolutionized how humans would live. They recreated society in relation to food: how it would be stored, shared, grown, and cared for. That revolution needs to be repeated through a new Natural Agriculture Revolution.

Now let us continue this sweep and observe that the next large revolution for human consciousness, civilization, and society was the scientific and technological revolution around the 17th century. The sciences of studying nature and objectifying the natural world have brought many benefits. Let us not say science and technology are all bad; after all, we now live with light and heat in our homes. We know for sure that the scientific and technological revolution changed human consciousness forever. Now we are in the midst of, and giving birth to, an ecological revolution as we come back to live within and in relation to the Earth and all her systems. I am suggesting that this ecological revolution needs to have within it a great spiritual awakening—an eco–spiritual revolution, if you will, which could possibly be the greatest in world religious history. That is the transformation that we are trying to navigate through and find our way forward. For it is this eco–spiritual revolution that will give birth to a sustainable future for the Earth community.

The ways that we can imagine an eco–spiritual revolution happening are numerous, so I am just going to suggest a few. First, we need to see ourselves as a part of, and not apart from, Earth's processes, using a new visual of the bio-historical being we call Earth, from space. We are elements that came bursting forth out of the supernovas, and we can see the stars literally as our ancestors in this new understanding of our bio-historical cosmological being. First we imagine it, second we see it, third we begin to feel it, and fourth we begin to create from it. We feel the unifying life force of Nature, the non-duality and interconnection of nature and spirit, or ‘ch'i,’ as it is called in spiritual traditions of East Asia. It is the vital matter–energy of the universe, described in quantum physics as one connected pole in the movement of particle and wave and the intersection of the two.

This is about the energy, the ch'i, the aliveness of the universe, and how we are a part of it: the tremendous art of T'ai Chi, which teaches a spiritual dance with grasshoppers, birds, and animal forces, imitating the movements of the living, breathing world. We have to learn how to breathe with and feel the ch'i, the unifying life force of the Earth and universe. It is the sixth sense we need to cultivate, that of identifying with, being connected to, and being a part of Nature in its myriad forms. In this way we are re–inspired to build with a feeling for ecological design and to recreate through the arts the symbolic quality of the natural world, symbols that are present in all of the world's religions.

The indigenous peoples knew that Nature is speaking to us constantly. My husband is a specialist in indigenous religions, and we visit the Crow reservations each summer in Montana. The quality of the praying and living connection with the forces of the universe, amid the destruction of a culture, is extraordinary. This incredible connection is especially evident in the Sun Dance, which evokes the power of our great star, The Sun, which is giving off a primal, sacrificial light by burning itself, giving itself in its transformation from hydrogen to helium, thus making our Earth alive with photosynthetic plants. In this way of identifying with the power of the sun that causes the explosive biodiversity of the planet, we live amidst its mystery in beauty and awe.

We are re–embedding ourselves in Nature's rhythms, through dawn and dusk, that breaking open of light out of darkness, and that sense of going back into darkness, both primal, powerful, magical moments of the day, when the great traditions would often have meditation and ceremonies. There are rhythms, too, of the four seasons, and the great changes of the equinox or the solstice, which is why religious traditions have created Christmas at solstice or Easter at the spring equinox. They seek to imbed cultures and their religions with the spirituality inherent in the rhythms of Nature.

This act of re–embedding ourselves in Nature's rhythms, then brings us back to connecting with our food, which nourishes, sustains, renews, and gives us sparks of creative energy exploding into our culture. One such spark comes to mind, a book written by Michael Pollan4 that covers many food issues, socially, economically and politically, including how we treat animals in factory farming. Many of these issues are beginning to explode into consciousness, such as the lamentation, “Chickens can't be bound up like this, even if you're going to kill cattle it must be done humanely, you can't herd them into these kinds of barns.” There is a new sense of humane food farming, based in faith. There is even a new initiative out of the Humane Society of the U.S., called “Food, Farming, and Faith,” that says, “Let us rethink this industrial agricultural mentality.”

All of the world's religions have a sense of food as sacred and have rituals around food, such as the Eucharist of the Christian tradition. The Eucharist is a ritual of giving thanks for bread and wine, which are both born out of the land. If we consume wheat that has been genetically altered or wine from grapes grown with pesticides, what does that mean for our sense of sacrament? What does that mean for the Eucharist, which is the binding sacrament and ritual for the Christian communities around the world? What does it mean for baptism if in baptizing a child into a new kind of communion we use polluted water?

What does it mean for the Jewish Passover or Seder, or Friday Sabbath where the family is supposed to gather in a ritual ceremony and celebrate the connection of family bonds in ritual with food? For the Jewish people the lighting of the candles and breaking of the hallowed bread is absolutely sacred and important. Extraordinary rituals for food are all over the world. In the Japanese–based Shinto tradition, rice is a sacred quality, not just a commodity. Ancestors are offered rice in ceremony in many homes, every day. Even in present day Japan, the Emperor will ritually plant rice for the beginning of the season, and will ritually harvest rice in a small paddy in the imperial palace. There is a profound sense that the whole nation depends on the quality of rice, the way it is grown, and the seasonal dimensions of it. There is a splendid magic to the East Asian countryside in the spring when you see those terraced hills flooded and the beautiful little rice plants begin to come up. If you ever see those rice paddy fields at night with the moon and a dance of stars reflected in them, you will know why the poets were deeply inspired by their beauty. Food, in all of the world's religions, is absolutely central to rituals, a sense of community, a sense of family bonding and even celebration.

I want to conclude by talking about the project that we did at Harvard on world religions and ecology, just to give you a feeling of that. First I have been trying to talk about this planetary moment in which our planet is now burning, and how we are creating a community of caretakers for this planet, including many of you and your children.

The conference series at Harvard included scholars, environmentalists, and people from all over the world just like you who are concerned about the future of our planet, our grandchildren, and all the species we love and care for, including the great apes or the polar bears that are losing their ice floes. It is no longer just the human species we care about. We care as never before about all life forms.

Why this consciousness is breaking through right now is a great mystery, but I suggest that many women primatologists have helped that happen, such as Jane Goodall,5 or Diane Fossey.6 When you see a picture of Jane Goodall shaking hands with a chimp, you realize that, with the work of this deeply intuitive woman, a species connection was made in a post–industrial moment, and we are now able to imagine learning the communication of dolphins or the songs of whales. Who would have thought we could actually hear these songs? Paul Winter gives us the songs of the animal world, bird world, mammalian world, and the water world, in his beautiful music. So at this moment, what we are discovering as a human species is how we can feel, breathe, dance, and sing ourselves back into the whole community family of life as a part of who we are.

When a woodpecker, thought to be extinct, was rediscovered in Arkansas, about a year and a half ago, scientists and birdwatchers all over the country were lit up by the realization that bird did not go extinct. I have heard scientists say they cried. Why? We are living in a moment when life is being snuffed out because of our presence, when scientists and environmentalists are watching species go extinct daily.

There is a re–sparking of tremendous care and concern when dolphins and whales are beached because they are confused about where they are, or when salmon cannot get back to their place of spawning because we have dammed every river possible. Past generations did not dam rivers, so salmon could still swim thousands of miles and find their home in the ocean. Some salmon go to Japan and back, and find their way up those river ways to spawn and give their lives for the bears, the forest, and the fecundity of those ecosystems.

We are calling to the religions of the world to say, “You have been containers of human values: love, forgiveness, transcending resentment, survival of tragedy, death, and disappointment.” Religions are keepers of wisdom and meditation practices for us. They give us rituals that make us come alive or give us the ability to bear the loss of a child, a spouse, a grandparent, or even a pet. We know that religions are also finding their way forward, are sometimes confused, imperfect and far from the aspirations of their founders. In the spirit of human growth and sharing, we are trying to say to the religions, “Find your ecological self, wisdom, and faith, and bring it forward for the life community, the ecosystem of our planet.”

What will it look like when the great traditions of the East and West, Buddhism, Shinto, Confucianism, Taoism, Hinduism, Jainism, Sikhism, Islam, Judaism, and Christianity, all of which have birthed civilizations around the world, stand up together and say, “We cannot destroy our sacred forests or pollute our sacred rivers as they are part of us and we are part of them.” All these great traditions have guided and held families and communities together, all have a new challenge, are coming forward, and arising to it. What we were trying to do at Harvard, was bring scholars, who studied these traditions, medieval texts and rituals, to say: how can this change be brought forward into our present moment? Let us retrieve the past of these traditions and re–examine them in our present environmental and social problems, and see, for example, what eco–justice looks like for the poor.

Eight hundred scholars came from all over the world over a three–year period, all before the tragedy of 9–11. The excitement of people meeting people from North Africa, South Africa, the Middle East, India, Central Asia, all the way over to Indonesia—and saying “Yes, we have wisdom in these traditions,” was one of those magical moments of grace when the human community was rethinking itself. All of these traditions did a new dance, re–thought themselves, and re–energized themselves together. The indigenous conference had people from every continent where culture and religious identity are in great stress because of all kinds of pressures from modernity and industrialization. When the native peoples of North America, South America, Africa, and Asia found solidarity in realizing they had common problems and could come together, they all stated, “We will survive.” Many of the indigenous peoples survived the great onslaught of Westernization, industrialization, and modernity, because they have caretakers among them. These survival communities have something to say for re–lighting our hearts at this moment of loss, destruction, and burning.

The focus of the other part of that conference series, from 1996 through 1998, was to bring scientists, ecologists, economists, and policy–makers into the conversation, forming a group we called SEEP for Science, Economics, Education, and Policy. We asked the question, “How can we interfuse this conversation of the religions, rediscovering their ecological gifts to us, with science, policy, and economics?” We had several conferences at Harvard, one at the United Nations, and one at the Natural History Museum in New York. A thousand people came to the Natural History Museum, and there was mutual fire within us that this multi–religious conversation and interdisciplinary dialogue, between the two disciplines, was emerging.

When we went to the provost at the Natural History Museum in New York, we were a little timid because religion is a little on the outside of science, as you know, and he is a very distinguished scientist who has done all kinds of work in Mongolia on the evolution of birds and dinosaurs. I asked him, “Can we imagine a conference of scientists and policy–people and religious spokespersons?” and within ten minutes he said, “Yes, we need the voices of the world's religions here. We want a spiritual perspective. We are in search of an ethical vision.” Then he gave us a huge theater rent–free and said, “Why do we need you here? We need you here because we have just had a search for ornithologists—birdwatchers—and of the six finalists who were ornithologists, four of the graduate students have had their birds go extinct while they were studying them.”

Every time I tell this story, I feel it in my heart as I see some of you feel it in your hearts. This scientist said it was such a wake–up call for the museum. It was a moment that said, “What are we doing? Are we studying things going extinct or are we going to be also advocates for life? Are we going to speak for the ecosystems and the other species amidst us? Yes, we need this conversation.” Bill Moyers7 came and interviewed participants for an entire day, and not one of the people, who came from far or wide, took an honorarium or one cent to participate.

The spirit of human community is alive, generous, and wanting to make this transformation to a sustainable future happen. We will make this happen, and this is the fire that we can light up in our times, a great, generous, ongoing creative effort of the human spirit to be caretakers for the Earth and creators of the new Earth community. To be imaginers of a flourishing multi–form planetary civilization: that is the fire that is being born in our hearts.

Footnotes:

1. Natural Agriculture is a spiritually based horticultural practice created by Shumei's founder, Mokichi Okada. The essence of the Natural Agriculture approach is having reverence for nature and cultivating the food crops in a manner close to how plants thrive in a natural setting.

2. Santa Cruz, the Catskill Mountains, and Hollywood are all locations of Shumei Natural Agriculture farms and gardens in North America.

3. The artist Kamran Moojedi's exhibition “Fire Next Time” was on display at the Shumei America National Center Gallery from October 2006 to January 2007. The landscape series mirrored the artist's experience of the San Bernardino Mountains fire of 2003.

4. Michael Pollan is the author of “The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals,” “The Botany of Desire: A Plant's-Eye View of the World,” and “A Place of My Own.” Mr. Pollan now serves as the Knight Professor of Science and Environmental Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley.

5. Dr. Jane Goodall is the foremost authority on chimpanzees. Her discoveries and writing have made revolutionary inroads into scientific thinking regarding the evolution of humans. She is the author of the books “Wild Chimpanzees” and “In the Shadow of Man.”

6. Dr. Dian Fossey (1932–1985) founded the Karisoke Research Center of Rwanda to study mountain gorillas. While living among these primates for eighteen years, she became the world's most famed authority on these great apes. She is author of the book “Gorillas in the Mist.” Since her death, her Gorilla Fund continues to support ongoing efforts to protect gorillas.

7. Bill Moyers is considered one of the finest political analysts and media commentators that America has produced since Edward R. Murrow. He first caught public attention while serving in the Lyndon Johnson administration, and later went on to become one of television's foremost journalists. He has received over thirty Emmys and virtually every other major television journalism prize, including a gold baton from the Dupont Journalism awards, a lifetime Peabody award, and George Polk Career awards

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