Deep Ecology Quotes

The desert and the ocean are realms of desolation on the surface. The desert is a place of bones, where the innards are turned out, to desiccate into dust. The ocean is a place of skin, rich outer membranes hiding thick juicy insides, laden with the soup of being. Inside out and outside in. These are worlds of things that implode or explode, and the only catalyst that determines the direction of eco-movement is the balance of water. Both worlds are deceptive, dangerous. Both, seething with hidden life. The only veil that stands between perception of what is underneath the desolate surface is your courage. Dare to breach the surface and sink.

Deep ecology does not see the world as a collection of isolated objects but rather as a network of phenomena that are fundamentally interconnected and interdependent. It recognizes the intrinsic value of all living beings and views humans—in the celebrated words attributed to Chief Seattle—as just one particular strand in the web of life.

No settled family or community has ever called its home place an “environment.” None has ever called its feeling for its home place “biocentric” or “anthropocentric.” None has ever thought of its connection to its home place as “ecological,” deep or shallow. The concepts and insights of the ecologists are of great usefulness in our predicament, and we can hardly escape the need to speak of “ecology” and “ecosystems.” But the terms themselves are culturally sterile. They come from the juiceless, abstract intellectuality of the universities which was invented to disconnect, displace, and disembody the mind. The real names of the environment are the names of rivers and river valleys; creeks, ridges, and mountains; towns and cities; lakes, woodlands, lanes roads, creatures, and people. And the real name of our connection to this everywhere different and differently named earth is “work.” We are connected by work even to the places where we don’t work, for all places are connected; it is clear by now that we cannot exempt one place from our ruin of another. The name of our proper connection to the earth is “good work,” for good work involves much giving of honor. It honors the source of its materials; it honors the place where it is done; it honors the art by which it is done; it honors the thing that it makes and the user of the made thing. Good work is always modestly scaled, for it cannot ignore either the nature of individual places or the differences between places, and it always involves a sort of religious humility, for not everything is known. Good work can be defined only in particularity, for it must be defined a little differently for every one of the places and every one of the workers on the earth. The name of our present society’s connection to the earth is “bad work” – work that is only generally and crudely defined, that enacts a dependence that is ill understood, that enacts no affection and gives no honor. Every one of us is to some extent guilty of this bad work. This guilt does not mean that we must indulge in a lot of breast-beating and confession; it means only that there is much good work to be done by every one of us and that we must begin to do it.

Social ecology is based on the conviction that nearly all of our present ecological problems originate in deep-seated social problems. It follows, from this view, that these ecological problems cannot be understood, let alone solved, without a careful understanding of our existing society and the irrationalities that dominate it. To make this point more concrete: economic, ethnic, cultural, and gender conflicts, among many others, lie at the core of the most serious ecological dislocations we face today—apart, to be sure, from those that are produced by natural catastrophes.

Seafood has less of an ecological impact, and pigs are smart," said Tory. "You shouldn't eat anything that knows how to play fetch. It's rude.

The dominant culture eats entire biomes. No, that is too generous, because eating implies a natural biological relationship. This culture doesn't just consume ecosystems, it obliterates them, it murders them, one after another. This culture is an ecological serial killer, and it's long past time for us to recognize the pattern.

...we do not lend the hearth quite the importance that our ancestors did, Greek or otherwise. Yet, even for us, the word stands for something more than just a fireplace. We speak of 'hearth and home'. The word 'hearth' shares its ancestry with 'heart', just as the modern Greek for 'hearth' is kardia, which also means 'heart'. In Ancient Greece the wider concept of hearth and home was expressed by the oikos, which lives on for us today in economics and ecology. The Latin for hearth is focus - with speaks for itself. It is a strange and wonderful thing that out of the words for fireplace we have spun "cardiologist', 'deep focus' and 'eco-warrior'. The essential meaning of centrality that connects them also reveals the great significance of the hearth to the Greeks and Romans, and consequently the importance of Hestia, its presiding deity.

Despite the wishful thinking of evangelicals impatient for the Rapture or deep ecologists who believe that Gaia would be happiest with a thin sprinkling of hunter-gatherers, megacities like Los Angeles will never simply collapse and disappear. Rather, they will stagger on, with higher body counts and greater distress, through a chain of more frequent and destructive encounters with disasters of all sorts; while vital parts of the region’s high-tech and tourist economies eventually emigrate to safer ground, together with hundreds of thousands of its more affluent residents.

Let’s face it, our representative democracy has broken down. Our government primarily represents the big money boys and stacks the deck against reform movements. Playing only by the system’s rules limits you.

For the natural polytheist who finds her gods in the rivers and mountains, in the deep-rooted giants looming above the canopy and in the tiny creatures that move beneath them, ecology gives us a glimpse into a kind of living anatomy of the divine, a theology of physical as well as spiritual life. - Alison Leigh Lilly, "Anatomy of a God

It may be said, in broad-brush terms, that the primary purpose of life is the continuation of life. A deep program for survival and reproduction underwrites the complex cycles of life, in which death is the grand equalizer. There is, however, a peculiar novelty: human awareness of the cycle of life and a capacity to anticipate our own, individual death.

The obvious pollution occurring in many places - worst of all, in the planned societies- has encouraged the growth of the environmental movement, which, however, as shown in previous chapters, has an agenda that goes far beyond clean-up and beautification, far beyond the stewardship of nature that is commanded by ancient religious tradition. Embracing the "biospheric vision" in the "spirit of deep ecology", the movement sees human beings as the chief enemy in the struggle on behalf of a deified Nature. The environmental movement, therefore, is the perfect vehicle for population control. It is popular - people do love trees and animals and beautiful scenery - and it is unequivocal in its devotion to reducing human numbers. The environmental agencies of the United Nations, with their chilling blueprints for "demographic transition" and a standardless, undefined but totally planned and controlled "sustainable development", combine the fervor of nature worship with the lack of accountability of an unelected, international bureaucracy.

Biologists often talk about the “ecology” of an organism: the tallest oak in the forest is the tallest not just because it grew from the hardiest acorn; it is the tallest also because no other trees blocked its sunlight, the soil around it was deep and rich, no rabbit chewed through its bark as a sapling, and no lumberjack cut it down before it matured. We all know that successful people come from hardy seeds. But do we know enough about the sunlight that warmed them, the soil in which they put down the roots, and the rabbits and lumberjacks they were lucky enough to avoid?

Humans are a terrestrial species biased toward attributing the forces we see around us to familiar forces on land. But the more we look, the more we learn that everything arises from the sea and everything falls away to the sea, and the deep blue home is home to every one of us, whether we are beings of water, air, rock, ice, or soil.

Hidden beneath localism’s DIY attitude is a deep pessimism: it assumes we can’t make large-scale, collective social change,” worries Sharzer.

When God finished putting together Dicky Roper, He took a deep breath and shuddered a bit, then He ran up our Jonathan to restore the ecological balance.

What finally turned me back toward the older traditions of my own [Chickasaw] and other Native peoples was the inhumanity of the Western world, the places--both inside and out--where the culture's knowledge and language don't go, and the despair, even desperation, it has spawned. We live, I see now, by different stories, the Western mind and the indigenous. In the older, more mature cultures where people still live within the kinship circles of animals and human beings there is a connection with animals, not only as food, but as 'powers,' a word which can be taken to mean states of being, gifts, or capabilities. I've found, too, that the ancient intellectual traditions are not merely about belief, as some would say. Belief is not a strong enough word. They are more than that: They are part of lived experience, the on-going experience of people rooted in centuries-old knowledge that is held deep and strong, knowledge about the natural laws of Earth, from the beginning of creation, and the magnificent terrestrial intelligence still at work, an intelligence now newly called ecology by the Western science that tells us what our oldest tribal stories maintain--the human animal is a relatively new creation here; animal and plant presences were here before us; and we are truly the younger sisters and brothers of the other animal species, not quite as well developed as we thought we were. It is through our relationships with animals and plants that we maintain a way of living, a cultural ethics shaped from an ancient understanding of the world, and this is remembered in stories that are the deepest reflections of our shared lives on Earth. That we held, and still hold, treaties with the animals and plant species is a known part of tribal culture. The relationship between human people and animals is still alive and resonant in the world, the ancient tellings carried on by a constellation of stories, songs, and ceremonies, all shaped by lived knowledge of the world and its many interwoven, unending relationships. These stories and ceremonies keep open the bridge between one kind of intelligence and another, one species and another. (from her essay "First People")

In all honesty, I don’t envy you the possession of this power over memory, nor do I admire you. Because humans are usually completely unconcerned with the memories of other creatures. Human existence involves the willful destruction of the existential memories of other creatures and of your own memories as well. No life can survive without other lives, with the ecological memories of other living creatures have, memories of the environments in which the live. People don’t realize they need to rely on the memories of other organisms to survive. You think that flowers bloom in colorful profusion just to please your eyes. That a wild boar exists just to provide meat for your table. That a fish takes the bait just for you sake. That only you can mourn. That a stone falling into a gorge is of no significance. That a sambar deer, its head bent low to sip at a creek is not a revelation . . . When in fact the finest movement of any organism represents a change in an ecosystem.” The man with the compound eyes takes a deep sign and says: “But if you were any different you wouldn’t be human.

If you can manage to see yourself from the outside and accept yourself as a vulnerable organism within the biosphere, rather than focusing on the narrowness of your own needs and considering yourself the center of reality, you will be amazed at how the world positively overflows with suffering beings, each with needs and appetites of their own. Something odd occurs when one has that experience: Suddenly, the soul is filled with deep compasion for the world. This is the only attitude adequate to the task of scaling the dark mountain of the ecological catastrophe we face: without any illusion that it is possible to change human beings based on the strenght of better insights. But with full-fledged empathy for this creation, among which things are so hard precisely because it is creation. And with equally strong gratitude for this creation beneath a graciously warm sun and its affirmative light: where we have already been given everyhing we need to live, before we ever thought to desire it.

I thought of my river, the Afon-Lwydd, that my father had fished in youth, with rod and line for the leaping salmon under the drooping alders. The alders, he said, that fringed the banks ten deep, planted by the wind of the mountains. But no salmon leap in the river now, for it is black with furnace washings and slag, and the great silver fish have been beaten back to the sea or gasped out of their lives on sands of coal. No alders stand now for thy have been chopped as fuel for the cold blast. Even the mountains are shells, groaning in their hollows of emptiness, trembling to the arrows of the pit-props in their sides, bellowing down the old workings that collapse in unseen dust five hundred feet below. Plundered is my country, violated, raped.

Our deep irrational feelings of death anxiety have been attributed to multiple sources. In part, they may arise from evolved self-protection mechanisms or survival responses of being a victim of predators. They might, conversely, stem from unconscious fear (or guilt) of retribution resulting from our own acts of harming or predation. According to existential psychologists, the most powerful form of death anxiety comes from our general ability to anticipate the future, coupled with conscious anticipation of inevitable personal demise.

The emergence of Aids, Ebola and any number of other rain forest agents appears to be a natural consequence of the ruin of the tropical biosphere. The emerging viruses are surfacing from ecologically damaged parts of the earth, like Mount Elgon. The tropical rain forests are the deep reservoirs of life on the planet, containing most of the world’s plant and animal species. The rain forests are also its largest reservoirs of viruses, since all living things carry viruses. When viruses come out of an ecosystem, they tend to spread in waves through the human population, like echoes from the dying biosphere.

From this vantage point, Christianity has nothing—absolutely nothing—to teach Indigenous people about how to live in a good way on this land. In fact, Christians have only demonstrated that there is something profoundly wrong with the cosmology and worldview behind more than five centuries of carnage—carnage that has yet to even slow down. Christians have so much negative history and dogma to overcome within their own tradition, I do not believe the religion is even salvageable. The world is deep in the throes of an ecological crisis based in Western economies of hyper-exploitation. The planet will not survive another 500 years of Christian domination.

Biologists often talk about the “ecology” of an organism: the tallest oak in the forest is the tallest not just because it grew from the hardiest acorn; it is the tallest also because no other trees blocked its sunlight, the soil around it was deep and rich, no rabbit chewed through its bark as a sapling, and no lumberjack cut it down before it matured.

Humans are only one species of millions. To kill millions of species for the benefit of one is insane, just as killing millions of people for the benefit of one person would be insane. And since unimpeded ecological collapse would kill off humans anyway, those species will ultimately have died for nothing, and the planet will take millions of years to recover. Rapid collapse is ultimately good for humans because at least some people survive. And remember, the people who need the system to come down the most are the rural poor in the majority of the world: the faster the actionists can bring down industrial civilization, the better the prospects for those people and their landbases. Regardless, without immediate action, everyone dies.

As a boy, Theodore, you sat for long hours On the shore of the turbid Spoon With deep-set eye staring at the door of the crawfish's burrow, Waiting for him to appear, pushing ahead, First his waving antennae, like straws of hay, And soon his body, colored like soap-stone, Gemmed with eyes of jet. And you wondered in a trance of thought What he knew, what he desired, and why he lived at all.

Trees stand at the heart of ecology, and they must come to stand at the heart of human politics. Tagore said, Trees are the earth’s endless effort to speak to the listening heaven. But people—oh, my word—people! People could be the heaven that the Earth is trying to speak to. “If we could see green, we’d see a thing that keeps getting more interesting the closer we get. If we could see what green was doing, we’d never be lonely or bored. If we could understand green, we’d learn how to grow all the food we need in layers three deep, on a third of the ground we need right now, with plants that protected one another from pests and stress. If we knew what green wanted, we wouldn’t have to choose between the Earth’s interests and ours. They’d be the same!” One more click takes her to the next slide, a giant fluted trunk covered in red bark that ripples like muscle. “To see green is to grasp the Earth’s intentions. So consider this one. This tree grows from Colombia to Costa Rica. As a sapling, it looks like a piece of braided hemp. But if it finds a hole in the canopy, the sapling shoots up into a giant stem with flaring buttresses.” She turns to regard the image over her shoulder. It’s the bell of an enormous angel’s trumpet, plunged into the Earth. So many miracles, so much awful beauty. How can she leave so perfect a place? “Did you know that every broadleaf tree on Earth has flowers? Many mature species flower at least once a year. But this tree, Tachigali versicolor, this one flowers only once. Now, suppose you could have sex only once in your entire life. . . .” The room laughs now. She can’t hear, but she can smell their nerves. Her switchback trail through the woods is twisting again. They can’t tell where their guide is going. “How can a creature survive, by putting everything into a one-night stand? Tachigali versicolor’s act is so quick and decisive that it boggles me. You see, within a year of its only flowering, it dies.” She lifts her eyes. The room fills with wary smiles for the weirdness of this thing, nature. But her listeners can’t yet tie her rambling keynote to anything resembling home repair. “It turns out that a tree can give away more than its food and medicines. The rain forest canopy is thick, and wind-borne seeds never land very far from their parent. Tachigali’s once-in-a-lifetime offspring germinate right away, in the shadow of giants who have the sun locked up. They’re doomed, unless an old tree falls. The dying mother opens a hole in the canopy, and its rotting trunk enriches the soil for new seedlings. Call it the ultimate parental sacrifice. The common name for Tachigali versicolor is the suicide tree.

It would be tedious to continue piling example upon example, statistic upon statistic. For at a certain point, a feeling of deep lethargy sets in, and our reaction is: 'What's the use?' or 'What can one man possibly do?' If we respond in this manner, we are lost. For it is precisely by shifting problems from the trivial to the tragic plane, by forsaking a personal view for a cosmic one, that we rationalize and manage to shrug off our own personal responsibility.

Where does a girl who’s lost her religion go to find meaning? What replaces the hole that faith, cast off, leaves behind? Until her conversation with Hilde, Stacey had had no conception of how deep and aching this chasm inside herself was. Before that strange confluence of Hilde and Gaia she’d never really considered herself as part of any ecological system, and this came to astonish her later. How people walk through their lives nearly in a coma, unaware of the physical substrate that surrounds them.

This way of thinking allowed one to deploy the vocabularies of sixties radicalism—ecological awareness, anticorporate agitation, etc.—in order to justify the reproduction of social inequality. It allowed you to redescribe caring for your own genetic material—feeding Lucas the latest in coagulated soy juice—as altruism: it’s not just good for Lucas, it’s good for the planet. But from those who out of ignorance or desperation have allowed their children’s digestive tracts to know deep-fried, mechanically processed chicken, those who happen to be, in Brooklyn, disproportionately black and Latino, Lucas must be protected at whatever cost.

Fundamentally, the task is to articulate not just an alternative set of policy proposals but an alternative worldview to rival the one at the heart of the ecological crisis - embedded in interdependence rather than hyper-individualism, reciprocity rather than dominance, and cooperation rather than hierarchy. This is required not only to create a political context to dramatically lower emissions, but also to help us cope with the disasters we can no longer avoid. Because in the hot and stormy future we have already made inevitable through our past emissions, an unshakable belief in the equal rights of all people and a capacity for deep compassion will be the only things standing between civilization and barbarism.

Sand burns outside their windows in every direction. Compass needles spin in their twinned minds: everywhere they look, they are greeted by horizon, deep gulps of blue. People think of the green pastoral when they think of lovers in nature. Those English poets used the vales and streams to douse their lusts into verse. But the desert offers something that no forest brook or valley ever can: distance. A cloudless rooming house for couples. Skies that will host any visitors’ dreams with the bald hospitality of pure space. In terms of an ecology that can support two lovers in hot pursuit of each other, this is the place; everywhere you look, you’ll find monuments to fevered longing. Craters beg for rain all year long. Moths haunt the succulents, winging sticky pollen from flower to flower.

Make no mistake, they are connected, these disease outbreaks coming one after another. And they are not simply happening to us; they represent the unintended results of things we are doing. They reflect the convergence of two forms of crisis on our planet. The first crisis is ecological, the second is medical. As the two intersect, their joint consequences appear as a pattern of weird and terrible new diseases, emerging from unexpected sources and raising deep concern, deep foreboding, among the scientists who study them. How do such diseases leap from nonhuman animals into people, and why do they seem to be leaping more frequently in recent years? To put the matter in its starkest form: Human-caused ecological pressures and disruptions are bringing animal pathogens ever more into contact with human populations, while human technology and behavior are spreading those pathogens ever more widely and quickly. There are three elements to the situation.

You Are What You Eat Take food for example. We all assume that our craving or disgust is due to something about the food itself - as opposed to being an often arbitrary response preprogrammed by our culture. We understand that Australians prefer cricket to baseball, or that the French somehow find Gerard Depardieu sexy, but how hungry would you have to be before you would consider plucking a moth from the night air and popping it, frantic and dusty, into your mouth? Flap, crunch, ooze. You could wash it down with some saliva beer.How does a plate of sheep brain's sound? Broiled puppy with gravy? May we interest you in pig ears or shrimp heads? Perhaps a deep-fried songbird that you chew up, bones, beak, and all? A game of cricket on a field of grass is one thing, but pan-fried crickets over lemongrass? That's revolting. Or is it? If lamb chops are fine, what makes lamb brains horrible? A pig's shoulder, haunch, and belly are damn fine eatin', but the ears, snout, and feet are gross? How is lobster so different from grasshopper? Who distinguishes delectable from disgusting, and what's their rationale? And what about all the expectations? Grind up those leftover pig parts, stuff 'em in an intestine, and you've got yourself respectable sausage or hot dogs. You may think bacon and eggs just go together, like French fries and ketchup or salt and pepper. But the combination of bacon and eggs for breakfast was dreamed up about a hundred years aqo by an advertising hired to sell more bacon, and the Dutch eat their fries with mayonnaise, not ketchup. Think it's rational to be grossed out by eating bugs? Think again. A hundred grams of dehydrated cricket contains 1,550 milligrams of iron, 340 milligrams of calcium, and 25 milligrams of zinc - three minerals often missing in the diets of the chronic poor. Insects are richer in minerals and healthy fats than beef or pork. Freaked out by the exoskeleton, antennae, and the way too many legs? Then stick to the Turf and forget the Surf because shrimps, crabs, and lobsters are all anthropods, just like grasshoppers. And they eat the nastiest of what sinks to the bottom of the ocean, so don't talk about bugs' disgusting diets. Anyway, you may have bug parts stuck between your teeth right now. The Food and Drug Administration tells its inspectors to ignore insect parts in black pepper unless they find more than 475 of them per 50 grams, on average. A fact sheet from Ohio State University estimates that Americans unknowingly eat an average of between one and two pounds of insects per year. An Italian professor recently published Ecological Implications of Mini-livestock: Potential of Insects, Rodents, Frogs and Snails. (Minicowpokes sold separately.) Writing in Slate.com, William Saletan tells us about a company by the name of Sunrise Land Shrimp. The company's logo: "Mmm. That's good Land Shrimp!" Three guesses what Land Shrimp is. (20-21)

Art—real art—connects artists, and their art, and those who experience their art, to the metaphysical background of the world, to the imaginal world that lies deep within the physical. That is, in part, its ecological function. And that is why the continuing assaults on the imaginal (and its explorers) are so pervasive, why the schooling of artists—of writers, musicians, painters, sculptors—has become so mechanical, so oriented toward surfaces, toward form. For if we should recapture the response of the heart to what is presented to the senses, go below the surface of sensory inputs to what is held inside them, touch again the “metaphysical background” that expresses them, we would begin to experience, once more, the world as it really is: alive, aware, interactive, communicative, filled with soul, and very, very intelligent—and we, only one tiny part of that vast scenario. And that would endanger the foundations upon which Western culture, our technology—and all reductionist science—is based; for as James Hillman so eloquently put it, “It was only when science convinced us that nature was dead that it could begin its autopsy in earnest.” A living, aware, and soul-filled world does not respond well to autopsy.

It is clear, then, that the desire for certainty shapes our spaces of possibility, our perceptions, and our lives both personally and professionally. Usually, this need saves us. But it also sabotages us. This produces an ongoing tension between what we might think of as our conscious selves and our automatic selves. To overcome our inborn reflex that pushes us to seek certainty (sometimes at any cost), we must lead with our conscious selves and tell ourselves a new story, one that with insistent practice will change our future past and even our physiological responses. We must create internal and external ecologies that… celebrate doubt! This means the biggest obstacle to deviation and seeing differently isn’t actually our environment as such, or our” intelligence, or even—ironically—the challenge of reaching the mythical “aha” moment. Rather, it is the nature of human perception itself, and in particular the perceived need for knowing. Yet the deep paradox is that the mechanisms of perception are also the process by which we can unlock powerful new perceptions and ways to deviate. Which means that mechanism of generating a perception is the blocker… and the process of creating perception is the enabler of creativity

A SOLAR OASIS Like everywhere else in Puerto Rico, the small mountain city of Adjuntas was plunged into total darkness by Hurricane Maria. When residents left their homes to take stock of the damage, they found themselves not only without power and water, but also totally cut off from the rest of the island. Every single road was blocked, either by mounds of mud washed down from the surrounding peaks, or by fallen trees and branches. Yet amid this devastation, there was one bright spot. Just off the main square, a large, pink colonial-style house had light shining through every window. It glowed like a beacon in the terrifying darkness. The pink house was Casa Pueblo, a community and ecology center with deep roots in this part of the island. Twenty years ago, its founders, a family of scientists and engineers, installed solar panels on the center’s roof, a move that seemed rather hippy-dippy at the time. Somehow, those panels (upgraded over the years) managed to survive Maria’s hurricane-force winds and falling debris. Which meant that in a sea of post-storm darkness, Casa Pueblo had the only sustained power for miles around. And like moths to a flame, people from all over the hills of Adjuntas made their way to the warm and welcoming light.

I do not believe that we have finished evolving. And by that, I do not mean that we will continue to make ever more sophisticated machines and intelligent computers, even as we unlock our genetic code and use our biotechnologies to reshape the human form as we once bred new strains of cattle and sheep. We have placed much too great a faith in our technology. Although we will always reach out to new technologies, as our hands naturally do toward pebbles and shells by the seashore, the idea that the technologies of our civilized life have put an end to our biological evolution—that “Man” is a finished product—is almost certainly wrong. It seems to be just the opposite. In the 10,000 years since our ancestors settled down to farm the land, in the few thousand years in which they built great civilizations, the pressures of this new way of life have caused human evolution to actually accelerate. The rate at which genes are being positively selected to engender in us new features and forms has increased as much as a hundredfold. Two genes linked to brain size are rapidly evolving. Perhaps others will change the way our brain interconnects with itself, thus changing the way we think, act, and feel. What other natural forces work transformations deep inside us? Humanity keeps discovering whole new worlds. Without, in only five centuries, we have gone from thinking that the earth formed the center of the universe to gazing through our telescopes and identifying countless new galaxies in an unimaginably vast cosmos of which we are only the tiniest speck. Within, the first scientists to peer through microscopes felt shocked to behold bacteria swarming through our blood and other tissues. They later saw viruses infecting those bacteria in entire ecologies of life living inside life. We do not know all there is to know about life. We have not yet marveled deeply enough at life’s essential miracle. How, we should ask ourselves, do the seemingly soulless elements of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, zinc, iron, and all the others organize themselves into a fully conscious human being? How does matter manage to move itself? Could it be that an indwelling consciousness makes up the stuff of all things? Could this consciousness somehow animate the whole grand ecology of evolution, from the forming of the first stars to the creation of human beings who look out at the universe’s glittering constellations in wonder? Could consciousness somehow embrace itself, folding back on itself, in a new and natural technology of the soul? If it could, this would give new meaning to Nietzsche’s insight that: “The highest art is self–creation.” Could we, really, shape our own evolution with the full force of our consciousness, even as we might exert our will to reach out and mold a lump of clay into a graceful sculpture? What is consciousness, really? What does it mean to be human?

Nor do piecemeal steps however well intended, even partially resolve problems that have reached a universal, global and catastrophic Character. If anything, partial `solutions’ serve merely as cosmetics to conceal the deep seated nature of the ecological crisis. They thereby deflect public attention and theoretical insight from an adequate understanding of the depth and scope of the necessary changes.

There is another way in which Arne Naess characterized deep ecology. “The essence of deep ecology,” he wrote, “is to ask deeper questions” (quoted by Devall and Sessions, 1985, p. 74). This is also the essence of a paradigm shift. We need to be prepared to question every single aspect of the old paradigm. Eventually, we will not need to abandon all our old concepts and ideas, but before we know that, we need to be willing to question everything. So, deep ecology asks profound questions about the very foundations of our modern, scientific, industrial, growth-oriented, materialistic worldview and way of life. It questions this entire paradigm from an ecological perspective: from the perspective of our relationships to one another, to future generations, and to the web of life of which we are part.

We have only begun to see how deep and infinite cosmic creativity really is. The human brain doesn’t have the market cornered on this playful creative process. Just look through a telescope, through a microscope, or even just around you at all the other creatures that fill your world; look into the eyes of your nonhuman friends. We share more than our planet; we share deep and primordial creative connections that pervade the universe.

There is a violent contrast here, in this country, between the growing abstractness of a unclear universe and a primary, visceral, unbounded vitality, in sex and bodies, as well as in work and in buying and selling. Deep down, the US, with its space , its technological refinement, its bluff good conscience, even in those spaces which it opens up for simulation, is the only remaining primitive society. The fascinating thing is to travel through it as though it were the primitive society of the future, a society of complexity, hybridity, and the greatest intermingling, of a ritualism that is ferocious but whose superficial diversity lends it beauty, a society inhabited by a total metasocial fact with unforeseeable consequences, whose immanence is breathtaking, yet lacking a past through which to reflect on this, and, therefore fundamentally primitive... Its primitivism has passed into the hyperbolic, inhuman character of a universe that is beyond us, that far outstrips its own moral, social, or ecological rationale.

We might be excused our ignorance in this case, because ocean-atmosphere systems are, after all, almost inconceivably complex. Less easy to excuse is our astounding lack of knowledge of much more visible features of our planet’s natural resources and ecology—features that have a direct impact on our well-being. For instance, we know surprisingly little about the state of the planet’s soils. While we have good information for some areas, like the Great Plains of the United States, soil data are sketchy for vast tracts of Africa, Asia, and Latin America, where billions of people depend directly on agriculture for survival. So we can’t accurately judge how badly we’ve degraded these soils through overuse and poor husbandry, though we do have patchy evidence that the damage is severe and getting worse in many places.18 Similarly, despite extensive satellite photography, our estimates of the rate and extent of tropical deforestation are rudimentary. We know even less about the natural ecology and species diversity inside these forests, where biologists presume most animal and plant species live. As a result, credible figures on the number of Earth’s species range from 5 to 30 million.19 And when it comes to broader questions—questions of how all these components of the planet’s ecology fit together; how they interact to produce Earth’s grand cycles of energy, carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, and sulfur; and how we’re perturbing these components and cycles—we find a deep and pervasive lack of knowledge, with unknown unknowns everywhere. Our ignorance, for all practical purposes, knows no bounds.

We human beings see with plants and animals just as poets see with words. Deep down, other life-forms are what make our own perception possible. When it comes to the realm of our own identity, we are blind, deaf, and dumb without other creatures - robbed of sensory organs important to the act of being. Without them, we are not, for all being is reciprocity and reflection. Only with others are we alive, present in the enlivened flesh of this Earth, which brought us forth and carries us. We have too quickly forgotten this fact. Now that many of us procures its food processed and packaged in the supermarket, it is no longer obvious that we nourish ourselves with life in order to be alive ourselves - physiologically, as well as emotionally.

Taking into account fair labor wages for fishermen and canning employees- and the damage inflicted to the ocean through overfishing and the ecological impact of the slow annihilation of sharks- a single can of tuna isn't the bargain it's often made out to be

[T]o develop a deep ecological consciousness we can change the way we see the world. First, we need to see that humans are a part of nature, embedded within the interdependent web of existence. Second, we need to eliminate the anthropocentrism, or human-centered thinking, so prevalent in modernity. It is not all about us humans. And finally, the re-sacralization of Nature could be an important change in our modern worldview, reaffirming the importance of the natural world, increasing our ecological consciousness, and promoting an ethic of care in which we treat Nature with reverence and respect. Through appreciative attention to the concrete particularities of our local environments we can foster experiences of the sacred in nature. As we awaken to our connections to the world in which we live, and come to see that world as filled with spiritual significance, this can amount to a radical paradigm shift in which a deep ecological consciousness transforms our everyday actions and our relationship to the natural world

in the middle of the Covid-19 crisis, I looked around us... This was, I realised the only time in my life the world had truly slowed down. A terrible tragedy had forced us to do it - but there was also, for many of us, a hint of relief. It was the first time in centuries that the world chose, together, to stop racing, and pause. We decided as a society to value something other than speed and growth. We literally looked up and saw the trees. I suspect that, in the long run, it will be ultimately not be possible to rescue attention and focus in a world that is dominated by the belief that we need to keep growing and speeding up every year. ...we will, sooner or later, have to take on this very deep issue: the growth machine itself. But we will have to do this in any event - for another reason. The growth machine has pushed humans beyond the limits of our minds - but is also pushing the planet beyond its ecological limits. And these two crises, I was coming to believe are intertwined.

Our main problem over the past few days and weeks,’ he said, ‘has lain in trying to connect the various phenomena. In fact, there wasn’t any obvious connection until a jelly-like substance started to crop up. Sometimes it appeared in small quantities, sometimes in larger amounts, but always with the distinguishing characteristic that it disintegrated rapidly on contact with air. Unfortunately the discovery of the jelly only added to the mystery, given its presence in crustaceans, mussels and whales - three types of organism that could hardly be more different. Of course, it might have been some kind of fungus, a jellified version of rabies, an infectious disease like BSE or swine fever. But, if so, why would ships be disappearing or crabs transporting killer algae? There was no sign of the jelly on the worms that infested the slope. They were carrying a different kind of cargo - bacteria that break down hydrates and cause methane gas to rise. Hence the landslide and the tsunami. And what about the mutated species that have been emerging all over the world? Even fish have been behaving oddly. None of it adds up. In that respect, Jack Vanderbilt was right to discern an intelligent mind behind the chaos. But he overestimated our ability - no scientist knows anything like enough about marine ecology to be capable of manipulating it to that extent. People are fond of saying that we know more about space than we do about the oceans. It’s perfectly true, but there’s a simple reason why: we can’t see or move as well in the water as we can in outer space. The Hubble telescope peers effortlessly into different galaxies, but the world’s strongest floodlight only illuminates a dozen square metres of seabed. An astronaut in a spacesuit can move with almost total freedom, but even the most sophisticated divesuit won’t stop you being crushed to death beyond a certain depth. AUVs and ROVs are only operational if the conditions are right. We don’t have the physical constitution or the technology to deposit billions of worms on underwater hydrates, let alone the requisite knowledge to engineer them for a habitat that we barely understand. Besides, there are all the other phenomena: deep-sea cables being destroyed at the bottom of the ocean by forces other than the underwater slide; plagues of jellyfish and mussels rising from the abyssal plains. The simplest explanation would be to see these developments as part of a plan, but such a plan could only be the work of a species that knows the ocean as intimately as we do the land - a species that lives in the depths and plays the dominant role in that particular universe.

Deep Simplicity: Bringing Order to Chaos and Complexity John Gribbin, Random House (2005) F.F.I.A.S.C.O.: The Inside Story of a Wall Street Trader Frank Partnoy, Penguin Books (1999) Ice Age John & Mary Gribbin, Barnes & Noble (2002) How the Scots Invented the Modern World: The True Story of How Western Europe's Poorest Nation Created Our World & Everything in It Arthur Herman, Three Rivers Press (2002) Models of My Life Herbert A. Simon The MIT Press (1996) A Matter of Degrees: What Temperature Reveals About the Past and Future of Our Species, Planet, and Universe Gino Segre, Viking Books (2002) Andrew Carnegie Joseph Frazier Wall, Oxford University Press (1970) Guns Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies Jared M. Diamond, W. W. Norton & Company The Third Chimpanzee: The Evolution and Future of the Human Animal Jared Nt[. Diamond, Perennial (1992) Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion Robert B. Cialdini, Perennial Currents (1998) The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin Benjamin franklin, Yale Nota Bene (2003) Living Within Limits: Ecology, Economics, and Population Taboos Garrett Hardin, Oxford University Press (1995) The Selfish Gene Richard Dawkins, Oxford University Press (1990) Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller Sr. Ron Chernow, Vintage (2004) The Wealth and Poverty of Nations: Why Some Are So Rich and Some So Poor David Sandes, W. W Norton & Company (1998) The Warren Buffett Portfolio: Mastering the Power of the Focus Investment Strategist Robert G. Hagstrom, Wiley (2000) Genome: The Autobiography of a Species in 23 Chapters Matt Ridley, Harper Collins Publishers (2000) Getting to Yes: Negotiating Agreement Without Giz.ting In Roger Fisher, William, and Bruce Patton, Penguin Books Three Scientists and Their Gods: Looking for Meaning in an Age of Information Robert Wright, Harper Collins Publishers (1989) Only the Paranoid Survive Andy Grove, Currency (1996 And a few from your editor... Les Schwab: Pride in Performance Les Schwab, Pacific Northwest Books (1986) Men and Rubber: The Story of Business Harvey S. Firestone, Kessinger Publishing (2003) Men to Match My Mountains: The Opening of the Far West, 1840-1900 Irving Stone, Book Sales (2001)

question it is to question a fact as established as the tide. How easily and quickly we slide into our race-pattern unless we keep intact the stiff-necked and blinded pattern of the recent intellectual training. We threw it over, and there wasn’t much to throw over, and we felt good about it. This Lady, of plaster and wood and paint, is one of the strong ecological factors of the town of Loreto, and not to know her and her strength is to fail to know Loreto. One could not ignore a granite monolith in the path of the waves. Such a rock, breaking the rushing waters, would have an effect on animal distribution radiating in circles like a dropped stone in a pool. So has this plaster Lady a powerful effect on the deep black water of the human spirit. She may disappear and her name be lost, as the Magna Mater, as Isis, have disappeared. But something very like her will take her place, and the longings which created her will find somewhere in the world a similar altar on which to pour their force. No matter what her name is, Artemis, or Venus, or a girl behind a Woolworth counter vaguely remembered, she is as eternal as our species, and we will continue to manufacture her as long as we survive.

The results are all around us in the Western church and in the worldviews that Western Christianity has generated. Secularists often criticize Christians for contributing to ecological disaster, and there’s more than a grain of truth in the charge. I have heard it seriously argued in North America that since God intends to destroy the present space-time universe, and moreover since he intends to do so quite soon now, it really doesn’t matter whether we emit twice as many greenhouse gases as we do now, whether we destroy the rain forests and the arctic tundra, whether we fill our skies with acid rain. That is a peculiarly modern form of would-be Christian negativity about the world, and of course its skin-deep “spiritual” viewpoint is entirely in thrall to the heart-deep materialism of the business interests that will be served, in however short a term, by such hazardous practices.

rumination on the idea that our ecological commitments, if they are to reach mature and sustainable expression, need to be grounded in a sense of deep reciprocity with the living world.

The extraction of deep wisdom can be done at any age, and if we are to love the time of our life, it must be. Imbedded within us is the deeper story we came to live, and the core issue at every age for any awakened human being is the extent to which we are living that story in the present moment.

Our interaction with nature is clearly constrained and directed by such foundational ethical precepts as mercy, moderation, and gratitude, which, when systematically understood and applied, result in ecological health. But ethical precepts refer ultimately to human nature, and therefore ecological health is rooted in psychological health. From this deep level perspective, environmental degradation is less a resource problem than an attitude problem. This psycho-ecological approach toward preserving and enhancing environmental health is explored by considering some pertinent aspects of Islamic socio-intellectual history and their relevance for re-articulating and re-applying authentic Islamic environmental ethical values in today’s world.

Merkur's statement "indwellers are specific in location to the phenomenon whose forms they impart" reveals something immediately- that two specific Indwellers- the masculine-depicted being who Indwells the Wind (and the sky and weather), and the feminine-depicted being who Indwells the Earth itself, are universal Indwellers, to be found at every moment, anywhere you could be on earth beyond being on a boat in the middle of an ocean, on which you would still encounter the Wind Indweller- and, if you went down deep enough, the Earth Indweller's "body", the Earth itself, is still present.

This is our home, at the deepest level, and we can't be lost from it, can't "go missing", can't vanish into a fictional nothingness which is only a fearful abstraction. We are involved in this earth and sky, the deep abyss below, the boundless field of stars, forever. It's not an optional participation.

Be not afraid of the universe. Nothing that has happened is unnatural, fallen, evil, or otherwise a "problem". This is organic naturalism- nothing is "above" nature, and therefore, nothing is "supernatural". It just happens that Nature is so deep, so full of depths and heights, that our range of everyday mind fails to capture much that exists- "for all that is seen, nine things are unseen." Nothing that you will encounter in this world or the next is unnatural, nor is it ultimately alien. Be not afraid.

The positivity cult adheres to a belief that all those on the path of self-actualization self-realisation cannot possibly be therefore melancholic; that one negates the other is the claim. While melancholy - in an age of growing crisis so deep and all but irrecoverable is in truth a most natural authentic feeling and attitude, and particularly within this, where one does not lose sight of all the beauty remaining which continues to exist, thus it being a most commendable thing, indeed an ideal.

when it comes to creating deep and lasting social and ecological behaviour change, the most effective approach is precisely to connect with people’s values and identity, not with their pocket and budget.

The Free Soul, also called the Wandering Soul, the Water Soul, or the Dreaming Soul, is the soul that pre-existed the body and the obtaining of the breath soul. It is often depicted as emerging from the "depths" of the world, from the Underworld or a Netherworld. That the Earth Indweller (the Earth and Underworld Mother) is believed to be the source of free souls automatically positions the free soul as taking some kind of "birth" inside the earth, and emerging from its depths. The "waters below" or the watery abyss that has been conceptualized mythically as the Underworld (and psychologically viewed as the deep, dark interior world of the subconscious and dreams) gives the free soul the name "water soul", making its character distinctive to the windy breath soul. Merkur writes: "The free soul, which can leave and return to the body in sleep, trances, and illnesses without causing loss of life, is a genuinely distinct type of soul. Either it is (conceived of) as miniature and located in the body, or it follows the body as though it were a shadow. It has and imparts the shape and personality of the person or creature, according to the respective species and, at least in humans, individuality. It is the seat of all illness, for its loss (or injury) causes illness (to manifest in the body.) It is also the site of spirit-intrusion. Through illness, the free soul can be an indirect cause of death. However, shamans may journey safely out of their bodies as free souls during their so-called spirit flights.

Progress is happening all around us, and an urban mountain lion is the ultimate sign of the region’s ecological health. The plight of P-22 has captured the imagination of Angelinos—and people across the globe—bringing them a glimpse into a wilder world, one that refuses to be contained by the boundaries of endless paved freeways. Even some who fear P-22 and his brethren still cheer him on, sharing the sentiment expressed by Gregory Rodriguez in the LA Times: “I have no illusions that the Glendale bear or P-22 wouldn’t hesitate to dine on me given the right circumstances. But I’m still rooting for them. Deep down I’m hoping that if they can survive at the margins of human civilization without forsaking their wildness, so can I.” Truly, it’s something to celebrate that the city that gave us Carmageddon also has allowed a mountain lion to thrive. Los Angeles now needs to prove to P-22 his journey wasn’t for naught. Let’s give him—and all his Santa Monica Mountain kin—a Hollywood ending by building the largest wildlife crossing in the world in one of the largest urban areas in the country. He deserves as much.

Social ecologist Gregory Bateson foresaw how the separating of mind from matter – spirit from nature – creates all sorts of problems. For Bateson, this separation is an error of the most fundamental degree. This error, Bateson saw woven into Western habits of thought at deep and partly unconscious levels, undermining our capacity to flourish sustainably on Earth. He felt that it is what pits humanity against nature and provides for our prevalent worldview of survival through competition, in what he viewed as “an ecology of bad ideas” breeding parasitic humans, purely self-centered and destructive of their host environment. He noted that if you, “see the world around you as mindless and therefore not entitled to moral or ethical consideration, the environment will be yours to exploit…If this is your estimate of your relation to nature and you have an advanced technology, your likelihood of survival will be that of a snowball in hell. You will die either of the toxic by-products of your own hate, or, simply, of over-population and over-grazing” (Bateson, 2000).

The Phobos facility is built like a gigantic, underground cone extending many hundreds of meters into the rock. There are a bunch of levels, I’m not even sure how many. Eight? Nine? The whole thing is built in the center of the solar system’s largest strip mine, which would be terrible for the Phobos ecology—except that Phobos doesn’t have an ecology, of course; it’s an airless moon of ice and rock.

Those people are all city oriented...They look around and the landscapes are just scenery. They don't see it as an integral whole. They're believers in technology, so they believe in industrial forestry, industrial agriculture, industrial fishing, and all this stuff, because they are technology optimists. They really think this stuff is all okay; we've just got to reform this a little bit, or this other. But they don't have a deep, systemic analysis of the crisis that we're all ensnared in.. So, they put their efforts, as I see it, in the wrong places. You could call it shallow ecology. They're reformists. Human welfare environmentalism.: which sees nature as a vast storehouse of resources for human use. They don't have a deep respect for other creatures. They don't really see that sharing the planet with other species is fundamental.

The history of cruelty inflicted in the name of morals has convinced me that the increase of identification might achieve what moralizing cannot: beautiful actions.

I have always thought of all creatures-all organisms, really-as relations. Whether wandering alone in deep wilderness or just leaning against a tree growing beside an urban sidewalk, I have had no difficulty feeling, as if in dreamtime, the roots of our relatedness-ecologically, yes, but also with an overlay of the sacred, the holy.

The evidence piles up. And in the face of this evidence, proponents of green growth eventually begin to turn to fairy tales. Sure, they say, maybe green growth isn’t empirically actual, but there’s no reason that it can’t happen in theory. We are limited only by our imagination! There’s no reason we can’t have our incomes rising for ever while we nonetheless consume less material stuff each year. And here they are right. There’s no a priori reason why such a thing can’t happen in theory, in a magical alternative world. But there’s a certain moral hazard at stake when we start trafficking in fairy tales – telling people not to worry because eventually, somehow, GDP will de-link from resource use and we’ll be in the clear. In an era of climate emergency and mass extinction, we don’t have time to speculate about imaginary possibilities. We don’t have time to wait for this juggernaut of ecological destruction to suddenly stop being destructive, when all the evidence says it won’t happen. It is unscientific, and a profoundly irresponsible gamble with human lives – with all of life. There is an easy way to solve this problem. For decades, ecological economists have proposed that we can put an end to the debate once and for all with a simple and elegant intervention: impose a cap on annual resource use and waste, and tighten that cap year-on-year until we are back within planetary boundaries.36 If green growthers really believe GDP will keep growing, for ever, despite rapid reductions in material use, then this shouldn’t worry them one bit. In fact, they should welcome such a move. It will give them a chance to prove to the world once and for all that they are right. Indeed, putting hard limits on resource use and waste will help incentivise the transition, spurring the shift toward dematerialised GDP growth. But every time we propose this policy to green growthers, they wriggle away. Indeed, to my knowledge, not a single proponent of green growth has ever agreed to take it up. Why not? I suspect that on some deep level – despite the fairy tales – they realise that this is not how capitalism actually works. For 500 years, capitalism has depended on extraction from nature. It has always needed an ‘outside’, external to itself, from which to plunder value, for free, without an equivalent return. That’s what fuels growth. To put a limit on material extraction and waste is to effectively kill the goose that lays the golden eggs.

In the language of forestry and forest ecology, the ‘understorey’ is the name given to the life that exists between the forest floor and the tree canopy: the fungi, mosses, lichens, bushes and saplings that thrive and compete in this mid-zone. Metaphorically, though, the ‘understorey’ is also the sum of the entangled, ever-growing narratives, histories, ideas and words that interweave to give a wood or forest its diverse life in culture.

The fifth principle [of Arne Naess's principles of deep ecology] states that the flourishing of both human and non-human life requires a substantial decrease of human population. As I said, we are a plague, and our population is out of control. And we don't want to die.

Development, even in its modest sustainable form, had become a Western curse on the rest of the world. An environmentally sound society in Ehrlich’s terms meant explicitly rejecting what he saw as all the key values of Western society: growth, affluence, and private enterprise, along with “racism, sexism, religious prejudice, and xenophobia.” “Unless these divisive traits can be managed,” Ehrlich warned, “they could cripple attempts to develop the global cooperation needed to create a new civilization.”25 “A new civilization”: Ehrlich’s vision of the future now reflected modern ecology’s call for a new cultural order to replace its old, moribund predecessor. The passing of the West, ecology’s more radical proponents in the seventies and eighties announced, would open the doors to a vital, holistic human community rooted in a “new” organic vision of nature. That radical revision culminated in the influential Deep Ecology movement, which described itself as “going beyond the so-called factual scientific level to the level of Self and Earth wisdom.

The urban-rural, human-natural dichotomy blinds us to the deeper unity beneath our own divided perceptions. If we concentrate our attention solely upon the city, seeing in it the ultimate symbol of “man’s” conquest of “nature”, we miss the extent to which the city’s inhabitants continue to rely as much on the nonhuman world as they do on each other … we also wall ourselves off from the broader ecosystems which contain our urban homes. Deep ecology to the contrary, we cannot solve this dilemma by seeking permanent escape from the city in a “wild” nature untouched by human hands, for such an escape requires us to build the same artificial mental wall between nature and un-nature. We fail to see that our own flight from “the city” creates “the wild” as its symbolic opposite and pulls that seemingly most nature of places into our own cultural orbit. We alter it with our presence, and even with the ways we think about it. Just as our own lives continue to be embedded in a web of ‘natural’ relationships, nothing in nature remains untouched by the web of ‘human’ relationships that constitute our common history.

Man, then, is the ultimate stranger, “traditionless, utterly matter-of-fact, religionless, clever, unfruitful”—this is Spengler describing the degenerate world-city man in The Decline of the West. Deep ecology’s Homo sapiens corresponds to Werner Sombart’s trader or J.A. Hobson’s capitalist Jew: a parasite, “a locust-like blight on the planet,” according to deep ecologist Gary Snyder, to whom human history is one of “ravaging this precious, beautiful planet.” And Gaia’s final solution to this threat? “Nature will be able to reconstitute itself once the top of the food chain is lopped off—meaning us.”79 Activist Judi Bari has concluded, “I believe the Earth is going to rise up and throw us off … The Earth’s failure to be able to sustain this kind of life will cause it to collapse. I’m sure life will survive that,” she adds, “but I don’t know that humans will. I don’t know if we deserve to.

la Deep Ecology, hasta llegar a contemplar al hombre como un virus peligroso para la “Madre Tierra”.

From Melissa Nelson: Where was my Native American family in the deep ecology philosophy? Haven’t these ideas been part of traditional cultures for thousands of years? Yes and no. Within the deep ecology movement people often make a distinction between an anthropocentric worldview and a “biocentric” one. This distinction can support a people versus nature type of thinking that has very little meaning for indigenous peoples. Native restoration ecologist Dennis Martinez, has said, ”we need to move beyond the anthropocentric-biocentric dichotomy and see that we are really kin-centric”; meaning we must recognize the reality of our extended family- the rock people, the plant people, the bird people, the water people- and human beings’ humble place in this web of kin.

Make no mistake, they are connected, these disease outbreaks coming one after another. And they are not simply happening to us; they represent the unintended results of things we are doing. They reflect the convergence of two forms of crisis on our planet. The first crisis is ecological, the second is medical. As the two intersect, their joint consequences appear as a pattern of weird and terrible new diseases, emerging from unexpected sources and raising deep concern, deep foreboding, among the scientists who study them. How do such diseases leap from nonhuman animals into people, and why do they seem to be leaping more frequently in recent years?

It just wasn’t the right learning environment for Lucas. The teachers really tried and we believe in public education, but a lot of the other kids were just out of control.” The man working on bagging chamomile tea immediately beside her felt obliged to say, “Right.” “Obviously it’s not the kids’ fault. A lot of them are coming from homes—” The woman who was helping me bag mangoes, Noor, with whom I was friendly, tensed up a little in expectation of an offensive predicate. “—well, they’re drinking soda and eating junk food all the time. Of course they can’t concentrate.” “Right,” the man said, maybe relieved her sentence hadn’t taken a turn for the worse. “They’re on some kind of chemical high. Their food is full of who knows what hormones. They can’t be expected to learn or respect other kids who are trying to learn.” “Sure.” It was the kind of exchange, although exchange isn’t really the word, with which I’d grown familiar, a new biopolitical vocabulary for expressing racial and class anxiety: instead of claiming brown and black people were biologically inferior, you claimed they were—for reasons you sympathized with, reasons that weren’t really their fault—compromised by the food and drink they ingested; all those artificial dyes had darkened them on the inside. Your child, who had never so much as sipped a high-fructose carbonated beverage containing phosphoric acid and E150d, was a more sensitive instrument: purer, smarter, free of violence. This way of thinking allowed one to deploy the vocabularies of sixties radicalism—ecological awareness, anticorporate agitation, etc.—in order to justify the reproduction of social inequality. It allowed you to redescribe caring for your own genetic material—feeding Lucas the latest in coagulated soy juice—as altruism: it’s not just good for Lucas, it’s good for the planet. But from those who out of ignorance or desperation have allowed their children’s digestive tracts to know deep-fried, mechanically processed chicken, those who happen to be, in Brooklyn, disproportionately black and Latino, Lucas must be protected at whatever cost.

When mathematicians are debating whether there are seven, eleven, or thirteen dimensions to our universe, when astrophysicists are considering whether black holes might be portals to other dimensions and quantum physicists are mapping particles that pop in and out of physical existence, coming from and returning to we know not where, is it really as absurd as Edwards thinks to consider the possibility that our minds may not be restricted to the simple four-dimensional spacetime world we can touch with our fingers and toes?

Our economic system is structurally dependent on growth, it serves the interests of the most powerful factions of our society, and it is rooted in a deep-seated world view of dominion and dualism that goes back some 500 years. This edifice will not yield easily. Not even to science.

The work of the radical biologist Lynn Margulis and others has shown humans to be not solitary beings, but what Margulis memorably calls ‘holobionts’ – collaborative compound organisms, ecological units ‘consisting of trillions of bacteria, viruses and fungi that coordinate the task of living together and sharing a common life’, in the philosopher Glenn Albrecht’s phrase.