cell913blog.com #18

It is, currently and has been for several decades, those passionate, articulate and dedicated writers on the environment who have been making the case for a world-wide effort to ‘save the planet’ and in that process ‘save us from ourselves’. William Vogt, in his Road to Survival (2015), penned these words, prophetic then and more searing nearly a decade later:

Drastic measures are inescapable. Above everything else, we must reorganize our thinking. If we are to escape the crash we must abandon all thought of living unto ourselves. We form an earth-company, and the lot of the Indiana farmer can no longer be isolated fromj that of the Bantu…An eroding hillside in Mexico or Yugoslavia affects the living standard and probability of survival of the America people…Today’s white bread may force a break in the levees, and flood New Orleans next spring. This year’s wheat from Australia’s eroding slopes may flare into a Japanese war three decades hence…..When I write ‘we’ I do not mean the other fellow. I mean every person who reads a newspaper printed on pulp from vanishing forests. I mean every man and woman who eats a meal drawn form steadily shrinking lands. Everyone who flushes a toilet, and thereby pollutes a river, wastes fertile organic matter and helps to lower a water table. Everyone who puts on a wool garment derived from overgrazed ranges that have been cut by the little hoofs and gullied by the rains, sending runoff and topsoil into the rivers downstream flooding cities hundreds of miles away…..Especially do I mean men and women in overpopulated countries who produce excessive numbers of children who, unhappily, cannot escape their fate as hostages to the forces of misery and disaster that lower upon the horizon of our future…..The freebooting rugged individualist, whose vigor imagination, and courage contributed to much of good to the building of our country (along with the bad), we must now recognize where his activities destroy resources, as the Enemy of the People  has become…Above all, we must learn to know-to feel to the core of our beings-our dependence upon the earth and the riches with which it sustains us. We can no longer believe valid our assumption that we live in independence…..We must-all of us, men women and children-reorient ourselves with relation to the world in which we live…We must come to understand our past, our history, in terms of the soil and water and forests and grasses that have made it what it is. We must see the years to come in the frame that makes space and time one….As we are crowded together ..on the shrinking surface of the globe, we have set in motion historical forces that are directed by our total environment…If we ourselves do not govern our destiny, firmly and courageously, no one is going to do it for us. To regain ecological freedom for our civilization will be a heavy task. It will frequently require arduous and uncomfortable measures. It will cost considerable sums of money. Democratic governments are not likely to set forth on such a steep and rocky path unless people lead the way…So that the people shall not delude themselves, find further frustration through quack nostrums, fight their way into blind alleys, it is imperative that this world-wide dilemma be made known to all mankind. The human race is caught in a situation as concrete as a pair of shoes two sizes too small. We must understand that, and stop blaming economic systems, the weather, bad luck, or callous saints. This is the beginning of wisdom, and the first step on the long road back. (from themarginalian.org)

Imagine those words as a ‘letter to Mandela’ and then try to imagine his response to such a ‘mandate letter’.

Here are some glimpses of the young boy, Mandela, in his own words:

From an early age, I spent most of my free time in the veld playing and fighting with the other boys of the village. A boy who remained at home tried to his mother’s apron strings was regarded as a sissy. At night, I shared my food and blanket with these same boys. I was no more than five when I became a herd-boy, looking after sheep and calves in the fields. I discovered the almost mystical attachment that the Xhosa have for cattle, not only as a source of food and wealth, but as a blessing from God and a source of happiness. It was in the fields that I learned how to knock birds out of the sky with a slingshot, to gather wild honey and fruits and edible roots, to drink warm, sweet milk straight from the udder of a cow, to swim in the clear, cold streams, and to catch fish with twine and sharpened bits of wire. I learned to stick-fight—essential knowledge to any rural African boy—and became adept at its various techniques, parrying blows, feinting in one direction and striking in another, breaking away from an opponent with quick footwork. From these days I date my love of the veld, open spaces, the simple beauties of nature, the clean line of the horizon…As boys we were mostly left to our own devices. We played with toys we made ourselves. We molded animals and birds out of clay. We made ox-drawn sleights out of tree branches. Nature was our playground. The hills above Qunu were dotted with large smooth ricks which we transformed into our own roller coaster. We sat on flat stones and slid down the face of the large rocks. We did this until our backsides were so sore we could hardly sit down. I learned to ride by sitting atop weaned calves—after being thrown to the ground several times, one got the hang of it. (Nelson Mandela, Long Road to Freedom, pps. 9-10)

The perspectives of two men, living on opposite sides of the planet, both in their own way revering nature, both rooted in its preservation, protection. Nature is and never can be separated from humans or humans from nature. However, a philosophical perspective, known as anthropocentrism, argues that ‘human beings are the central or most significant entities in the world. This is the basic belief embedded in many Western religions and philosophies. Anthropocentrism regards human as separate from and superior to nature and holds that human life has intrinsic value while other entities (including animals, plants, mineral resources, and so on) are resources that may justifiably be exploited for the benefit of humankind. Many ethicists find the roots of anthropocentrism in the Creation story told in the book of Genesis in the Judeo-Christian Bible, in which humans are created in the image of God and are instructed to ‘subdue’ Earth and to ‘have dominion’ over all other living creatures. This passage has been interpreted as an indication of humanity’s superiority to nature and as condoning an instrumental view of nature, where the natural world has value only as it benefits humankind. This line of thought is not limited to Jewish and Christian theology, and can be found in Aristotle’s Politics and in Immanual Kant’s moral philosophy. Some anthropocentric philosophers support a so-called cornucopian point of view, which rejects claims that Earth’s resources are limited or that unchecked human population growth will exceed the carrying capacity of Earth and result in wars and famines as resources become scarce. Cornucopian philosophers argue that either the projections of resource limitations and population growth area exaggerated or that technology will be developed as necessary to solve future problems of scarcity. In either case they see no moral or practical need for legal controls to protect the natural environment or limit its exploitation. Other environmental ethicists have suggested that it is possible to value the environmental without discarding anthropocentrism. Sometimes called prudential or enlightened anthropocentrism, this view holds that humans do have ethical obligations toward the environment, but they can be justified in terms of obligations toward other humans….Prior to the emergence of environmental ethics as an academic field, conservationists such as John Muir and Aldo Leopold argued that the natural world has an intrinsic value, an approach informed by aesthetic appreciation of nature’s beauty, as well as an ethical rejection of a purely exploitative valuation of the natural world. In the 1970’s, scholars working in the emerging academic field of environmental ethics issues two fundamental challenges to anthropocentrism: they questioned whether human should be considered superior to other living creatures, and they also suggested that the natural environment might possess intrinsic value independent of its usefulness to humankind. The resulting philosophy of biocentrism regards humans as one species among many in a given ecosystem and holds that the natural environment is intrinsically valuable independent of its ability to be exploited by humans. (britannica.org)

From the European, academic perspective, we now turn to the indigenous perspective. In KAYANERENKO:WA, The Great Law of Peace, we read these words:

One fundamental principle that flows from the Creation story is the relationship between human beings and the natural world. The Book of Genesis gives human beings ‘dominion’ over all parts of the natural world and suggests that everything was created to serve the needs of humanity. More recent Christian thinkers have struggled to insert the concept of ‘stewardship’ into these words. While logic agrees with the approach, fundamentalists who see an obligation to develop and exploit wage theological war with environmentalists who feel a need to conserve. The Haudenosaunee Creation story places human beings squarely in the midst of a natural world in which they form an integral part and in which each part has been given responsibilities. Sotsisowah* explained:

The Haudenosaunee Creation Story, which we can assume predates the foundation of the League, is replete with symbols of a rational universe. In the Creation Story, the only creature with a potential for irrational thought is the human being. All the other creatures of Nature are natural, i.e. rational.

Nature is depicted as a threatening and irrational aspect of existence in the West’s cosmologies. The Haudenosaunee cosmology is quite different. It depicts the natural world as a rational existence while admitting that human beings possess an imperfect understanding of it. The idea that human beings have an imperfect understanding of the rational nature of existence is something of a caution to Haudenosaunee in their dealings with nature. Conversely, the idea that the natural world is disorganized and irrational has served as something of a permission in the West and may be the single cultural aspect which best explains the differences between these two societies’ relationships to Nature.

The reason it’s so important to get people to cease fearing nature is that negative emotions invade one’s ability to think clearly. People who are afraid of nature have much more difficulty defending it than people who are not. All of those negative emotions give you permission to enact violence on nature. (p. 33-34)

*Sotsisowah: Native perception of philosopher-thinker-activist John Mohawk (Sotsisowah). Mohawk’s intellectual approach is keenly universal while founded in the practice of his ancient longhouse culture. (hks.harvard.edu)

In a footnote we read:

John Mohawk has suggested that the difference between Haudenosaunee (and other natural world) religions and Christianity is the difference between magic and miracles. Haudenosaunee ceremonies call upon the power of the natural world for assistance: if the power is beyond human, Western observers tend to call this ‘magic.’ Haduwi, for example, the power behind the b asked medicine societies, is in some ways a culmination of the forces of the natural world that we cannot control. Haudenosaunee medicine societies tend to be reflections of natural forces-the help of the Bears, the Otters, and the Buffalo, for example. Christianity, on the other hand, sees ‘miracles’ as unnatural by definition. If a cure attributed to a saint’s intervention can be shown to have been the result of a natural cause, it is no longer considered to be a miracle. (Op. Cit. p. 34)

Hershey Professor of Buddhist Studies at Harvard Divinity School, Janet Gyatso, interviewed on October 29, 2019, for a piece entitled, Attending to Animals, (on hds.harvard.edu) answers the following questions in this manner:

HDS: One of the courses you teach is called ‘Forms of Life: Buddhist Ethics for a Post-Human World. What do you mean by ‘post-human’?

Janet Gyatso: We live in the Anthropocene era. For the first time in the earth’s four-and-a half-billion-year history, human beings are the primary force shaping the planet’s climate and environment. That’s a pretty dramatic development, and it’s the result at least in part of a belief that humans are superior to all other species and deserve to control the planet. That’s a deeply held view in pretty much all the world’s major religions, including Buddhism. Today, the prospect of catastrophic climate change not only threatens nearly every other species on earth, but also humanity itself. A lot of people see the climate crisis as a result of the failure of humans to appreciate the danger of their desire to control the planet, and see the importance of their relationship with nature and other species. And so, post-human studies are about how to get beyond that, to stop placing human needs above all else, for one thing, because we’re digging our own graves, but even beyond that, it’s just wrong.

HDS: Wrong How?

Janet Gyatso: The degree of suffering, the misery that we put animals through is wrong, whether we’re talking about factory farming or scientific experimentation or the way that some people mistreat their pets or farm animals—which is every bit as wrong as mistreating humans, in my opinion. This is where this work does touch on my study of Buddhism. Compassion for all other sentient beings—really caring for them, wanting them to be happy, and not wanting them to suffer—that’s a straight Buddhist idea. There is also the Buddhist notion that you can only truly be happy if you have a realistic sense of your place on the planet and an understanding of who you are in a way that’s free of ideology and other kinds of stories that we tell ourselves. And so, if we overuse our resources and if we blot out all the life around us, we’re not in sync with the material reality of where we ae, and ultimately, we can’t be happy. That’s an idea that a lot of religions, in some way or others, try to get at.

HDS:…As we acknowledge the importance of animals more ethically, do we run the risk of anthropomorphizing them—thinking of them in human terms rather than their own?

Janet Gyatso: There are two problems there: anthropomorphizing and speciesism. With anthropomorphizing, we project our humanity onto animals. ‘They’re just like us.’ But we also have this idea that we’re totally different, that we can’t possibly know anything about them, and that anything we think we know is merely anthropomorphizing. I think both of those extremes are wrong. We share a lot in common with animals and we can understand a lot more than we think we can. There’s a difference between understanding them and anthropomorphizing them. The trick is to be simultaneously aware of difference and of sameness, which is actually a good way of describing what we try and teach students throughout the HDS curriculum…..

HDS: So, at the core of your thinking, is a rejection of binaries, of absolutes, of the notion that one should always do, or one should never do. It seems like that, in itself, is as much of a problem to you as anything.

Janet Gyatso: Yes, and that’s why some of what I’m saying is a little bit transgressive. My approach isn’t just post-human, it’s a little bit post-religion. I’m really interested in getting us back to into the material realities and building out from there, which for me means moving away from religious beliefs that are about salvation or about enlightenment. I’m not sure I believe in enlightenment-at least not in the sense of perfectibility…..I do think that there is a kind of self-cultivation through which people can attain a very high degree of realization, but I don’t think that anything ever gets perfect. Even the Buddha died, you know?

After adhering to a strict policy of non-violence for some fifty years, without achieving its goal of a nonracial democratic society, the African National Congress, following Mandela’s reluctant, yet sober, decision to consider an armed ‘wing’, demonstrated not only a high ethical and moral commitment but articulated the change in strategy in his own defence in the courtroom:

We of the ANC have always stood for a nonracial democracy, and we shrank from any action which might drive the races further apart than they already were. But the hard facts were that fifty years of nonviolence had brought the African people nothing but more repressive legislation, and fewer and fewer rights. It may not be easy for this court to understand , but it is a fact that for a long time the people had been talking of violence—of the day when they would fight the white man and win back their country, and we, the leaders of the ANC, had nevertheless always prevailed upon them to avoid violence and to use peaceful methods. While some of us discussed this in May and June of 1961, it could not be denied that our policy to achieve a nonracial state by nonviolence had achieved nothing and that our followers were beginning to lose confidence in this policy and were developing disturbing ideas of terrorism. (Nelson Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom, p. 364)

Not only can the binary of nature and man as separate entities be sustained no longer, neither can the absolute commitment to a highly warranted ethical principle, like nonviolence, be sustained in the face of intractable concrete oppression.