Plan C

How to find spirit in the sludge

Pat Thomas

 

It was with some trepidation that I recently  tweeted an unconventional prayer for the Gulf of Mexico. Bang goes my badass eco persona. And possibly my intellectual credibility.

It’s extraordinary that those of us who identify as ‘spiritual but not religious’ (SBNR – there’s even a facebook page) are so often afraid to admit to our esoteric sides for fear of being dismissed as incapable of rational thought or scientific understanding – or worse lumped in with the extreme end of the spectrum goofy narcissistic new-agers.

Nuts to that – I won’t be pigeon-holed.

My longheld belief is that we need to look at and understand the world, and each other, and current events from a lot of different perspectives in order to keep our thinking sharp and our souls courageous.

Besides, it wasn’t just that the poem that moved me. It was also my growing unease with the media scramble to be first with the biggest exclusives, the freshest perspectives and the hardest facts on the Gulf disaster. In newsrooms across the globe you can smell the testosterone, even amongst the women, as everyone elbows everyone else out of the way in the battle for a prominent byline and a place in the history of the event.

For politicians, likewise, the BP disaster is an opportunity to tough talk the spill in terms of national pride, economics, political gain and stock market prices. It’s a hot potato in the apparently ‘special’ relationship between the US and the UK. Same again with social network sites like Twitter which, at their best, can be rich sources of different perspectives and original thought, but which have become awash with received opinions and endless retweets of the same old (BP) stories.

The melee has plunged us into information overload. We are drowning in a sludgy sea of everything from number crunching the gallons of oil lost, to the bookies' odds on which endangered species will drift into extinction first. It’s an overwhelming tidal wave of ever longer strings of adjectives describing the horror of unfolding events.

I think I must be suffering from Gulf Fatigue, and I can’t help but wonder: if we continually respond from our heads, or worse from our competitive, cavemen (and cavewomen) selves aren’t we in danger of reinforcing the same kind of cultural shallowness and even arrogance, that led to the explosion in the first place? Doesn’t the overload follow the same dreary business-as-usual way of being and threaten to endanger certain things in us as human beings? Perspective for one. A thoughtful felt response for another. And I suppose a sense of spiritual wounding as well.

When I talk about a spiritual response to the Gulf, I am speaking less about lighting candles and burning incense and chanting and more about a well-rounded response that includes the raw facts, the number crunching, certainly, but also one that acknowledges the fear, the shock, the symbolic nature of the event and the grief. I am speaking of both head and heart.

Thus, in my state of spiritual and emotional Gulf exhaustion, those recent stories that have really grabbed me have been the ‘softer’ ones which are rich in the symbolism of the event and help connect, in a human way, with a disaster that would otherwise be abstract and incomprehensible.

For instance at Planet Waves, where civil action and political commentary meet thoughtful astrology (and a touch of liberated sexuality), the inimitable Eric Francis  riffed on the totem meanings for Pelicans (help us float above the surface of the water when life's trials and tribulations get intense), Turtles (guardians of time, and representative of the Great Mother) and Dolphins (guardians of breath, which take us to another dimension of reality) and looked at the watery overtones of the current planetary setup and the watery emotional dimension of the spill:

“Now we have an uncontrolled toxic release from below the bottom of the sea, contaminating the realm of feelings, dreams and visions. More significantly, the sensitive, fertile meeting places where land meets water are taking the worst beating, and will take the longest to return to a position where they can sustain life. This region where land meets water is where we go for inspiration, rejuvenation and those rare moments of relaxation. And now that space, on the Earth and in our psyches, is being fouled.”

At Common Dreams, Jill S. Schneiderman, Professor of Earth Science at Vassar College described the spill as “as a bellwether of slow violence” – a term coined by Rob Nixon to describe acts whose “lethal repercussions sprawl across space and time.”

She writes:

“Devastated communities and environmental refugees, dead or injured living beings, and absolutely altered land, water, and air...brutality in the guise of slow-moving and spatially extensive environmental transformations that are out of sync with the nano-second attention spans of the 21st century. But what will enable us unflaggingly to confront slow violence?

“In her memoir, Faith: Trusting Your Own Deepest Experience, Sharon Salzberg writes, ‘When we stand before a chasm of futility, it is first of all faith in this [the] larger perspective that enables us to go on.’ Some might scoff at the idea that faith has any place as a healing quality, a refuge, during this calamity and in the future it foreshadows. But human beings must begin to live and act in accordance with the reality of connectedness famously articulated by John Muir: ‘When we try to pick out anything by itself we find that it is bound fast by a thousand invisible cords that cannot be broken, to everything in the universe.'"

Amen. This is writing for the soul – as necessary as writing for the mind and too often absent from the ‘news’  in times of crisis.

What is more, this isn’t the SBNR new-ageism of yesterday with its 'me, me, me' overtones. With its spiritual materialism and chanting for abundance, for that lottery win and for that shiny new Hummer in the garage. This is intelligent spiritualism focused more on 'us, us, us'. On our interconnectedness, on our interdependence, on the solid understanding that our actions have consequences and on the bigger picture.

As the markets continue to collapse and BPs’ shares take a nosedive, there are some groups and individuals who are focusing on a nexus of economics and spirituality and who believe that the economic life of a nation is reflective of its spiritual attitudes. There are a lot of hurdles before we can start humanising economics; not the least of which is what green economist Molly Scott Cato calls the Rational Economic Man (REM) – the antithesis of the Earth Mother, who lives obsessively in his head and not in his body and nurtures a self-image of invulnerability and intellectual superiority. For me at least, the image of REM made the issue of economics personal again and reinforced my belief that we can’t get through all the tough times ahead by thought alone.

When we tackle the crises like Deepwater Horizon with our heads only we are aping Rational Economic Man, or Rational Political Man (or in the case of my profession Rational Journalist Man) winning at all costs but failing to get to the heart of things, failing to see where change needs to happen, and failing to feel our own sense of connectedness and responsibility. Without that spiritual and emotional IQ we’re only half as smart as we think we are.

It’s spiritual maturity or bust for our planet and its people. You choose. Which is it going to be?

A longer version of this piece can be found at Pat’s website Howl at the Moon, here.

Let’s talk about failure

David Key and Osbert Lancaster

with PatThomas

"I tell clients we can beat climate change, I don't say we might fail",  says a leading sustainability adviser. "It's like coaching a football team going up against strong competition, you tell them they can win. You don't tell them the opposition's tough and they're likely to be thrashed."

Variations on this analogy dominate discussion of climate change – especially communications to build public support for a strong and binding deal in Cancún in Mexico in November: “We've got to win, if we all try hard enough we will win...”; “Don't mention failure, no one will be inspired and we'll fail...”

As Football World Cup fever grows, flags are waiving and the chants of “win, win, win” are getting louder. But lose at football and you can play again. Lose at the climate challenge and climate related disasters affect hundreds of millions of people;  economic impacts could be hundreds of billions of dollars and sea level rises could affect 1 in 10 of the world's population.  And there’s no rematch.

'Got-to-win' is simply the wrong approach to communicate about situations where the possibility of failure is real, the impact of doing so significant and the opportunity for recovery limited.

We need honesty about the possibility of failure. Unless failure is an option, you can't make contingency plans. Without realistic contingency plans in development we lose valuable time if things do go wrong.

This notion of failure raised its head recently in the lengthy debate between George Monbiot of the Guardian newspaper, Paul Kingsnorth of the newly established Dark Mountain Project and a multitude of readers. The debate itself began with Monbiot’s question of whether Dark Mountain Project’s call to withdraw from the fight against climate change and instead concentrate on building a culture that was strong enough to withstand the inevitable changes was an effective way to go. Monbiot thought not and suggested that a ‘sit back and wait’ approach simply conspired in “the destruction of everything greens are supposed to value”. Readers’ comments became more aggressive and focused on ‘got-to-win’ as confusion between a political movement and a cultural one became more entrenched.

Plan C’s Pat Thomas weighed-in briefly with a question about ‘failure’. She wrote: “Although superficially positioned as a response to the world out there, Dark Mountain seems to me to be more of a projection of an inner struggle that a many of us are currently facing. If what we have devoted our lives to, and what we know, has no real influence, if what we try to do isn’t working, or not working fast enough, if we have failed to communicate effectively, have we failed and, more significantly, are we failures?”

The question was ignored in a show-down between George and Paul that was just so... male. Even more of the same intellectual, techno-scientific, oppositional thinking that has created the mess in the first place.

At Footprint, our feeling is that the Dark Mountain Project challenges something fundamental and shadowy in environmentalism and in the wider world: the myth of control – and by association, of doing, of winning at all costs. It’s fascinating to see the environmental movement struggle with this myth – when control is a feature of the very system most of them are trying to oppose!

The challenge is to integrate into our lives our increasing clarity about not being in control. But this needs to be done in a healthy way rather than a nihilistic one.

The qualities of relationship that are healthy are always the same, whether they refer to our relationships with ourselves, other people or the rest of nature. Trust, empathy, compassion, humility, acceptance of a power greater than the individual – apply these to any relationship and healing will emerge.

In this respect, the idea of palliative care for our species is powerful and helpful. The obvious conclusions about death are easy to draw. But the truth is that palliative care – because of the emphasis on Being (the relational qualities) rather than doing – can lead, counter-intuitively perhaps, to healing. This is not uncommon. This healing arises from authentic acknowledgement and acceptance of death itself. 

Acceptance is the starting point to healing, not the point of resignation to the apparently inevitable.

It’s not that we should 'do nothing', nor should we enter some manic cycle of eco-anorexia where we all starve our souls in the process of trying to save all that we perceive as external (the planet). Like the Dark Mountain Project, we need to be honest about the likely outcomes of our current path (which we show no signs of stepping off) and start the hard work of accepting and then integrating this realism into our lives. 

The delightful irony is that this integration is likely to be congruent with living more lightly. It is not congruent with 'doing nothing' which requires the same type of denial as 'doing until you drop'.

In the mean time the debate around the Dark Mountain Project will either continue to polarise until it ossifies and gets totally stuck, or acceptance will dawn and, after a period of anger, sorrow and despair – a process of grieving – the healing can begin.

Perhaps this grieving is what we are witnessing now. Let’s hope so.

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David Key and Osbert Lancaster are directrors of Footprint Consulting, the mission of which is to promote ecological sustainability and social justice through personal and organisational development.