2/11

We have now returned to our ‘Slow Life’ in Ayr after spending 2 months travelling through Japan with the GNH tour (please see report ‘Slowing Down Japan’ for more details. It was wonderful to meet many new ‘Earth Lovers’ and reconnect with many old friends in Japan.
And it was also good to come to our garden and lovely old home. It had been raining (and was still raining) so everything was green and lush – nice for the chickens who pick happily away at the greenery. It is the hottest part of the year so I have decided not to turn on the hot water system (this uses about 30% of a household’s energy needs) – just boiling a couple of pots of water for the children’s bath. It is refreshing and not difficult at all to have cool showers - and a small step to living more lightly.
Pacha has started her first year of school and Yani has started kindergarten at the same school. He is very happy to be in his own space again, loves the routine of predictable days and his favourite toys, the big backyard with our chickens running around. Pacha loves seeing her friends again – but I think she is already a little bored with a ‘normal’ life!
When we returned to Australia we first visited my family on the Gold Coast. Everyone is involved in the campaign to stop a massive de-salination plant that was started with almost no community consultation of environmental impact assessment. The government says that because there is a ‘water crisis’ they just have to go ahead and build, despite many concerns. Many people love the idea of de-salination - turning sea-water into pure water – but the process uses a huge amount of energy and is extremely expensive. My sister, Inge, is leading the protest and promoting better alternatives like harvesting stormwater, rain water tanks and wasting less water. I see the connection between the massive French based corporation, Veolia, and the control of global water resources – its like a new oil rush – and can only lead to everyday people ending up paying enormous amounts for the luxury of clean water.
Back in Ayr I have started getting more involved in the climate change campaign along with working on my nomination as a senate candidate for the Greens (check out a new web log: www.anjalight.com). Two local groups have already started to plan a large meeting on climate change next month. I met with the local Mayor here to talk about ideas to engage everyday people in responding to climate change. It looks like the council will support a plan to prepare a presentation proposal focussing on empowering people to respond creatively to the climate crisis. John Seed and Ruth Rosenheck from the Rainforest Information Centre have been doing a ‘Climate Change – Despair and Empowerment’ Roadshow in other parts of Australia that has been received very enthusiastically. Many Climate Action Groups have been formed to continue active personal and political actions to make a change. I wonder what the response in Japan has been to the new movie by Al Gore – An Inconvenient Truth?
The most inspiring words I have read recently comes from Joanna Macy – I have to include it here and hope that it gives you the same sense of empowerment to continue as it has for me.

In INQUIRING MIND

Submitted June 27, 2005


THE END OF OIL, CLIMATE CHANGE, AND THE GREAT TURNING

Joanna Macy

In Buddhism, there are two mudras, or hand gestures, that I cherish. Statues and paintings of Buddhas and bodhisattvas often show them. One is the Fear Not or abhaya mudra--right hand raised at chest level, palm outward. It says, "I will not be afraid of the fear. I will not close down, I stay fully present." It's strikingly similar to the gesture of greeting associated with American Indians. "How!" they said, as I saw in the movies, and later I learned the meaning of that raised empty hand: "See, I carry no weapon, don't be afraid."

The second hand gesture I give you tonight is the Earth-touching one, the bhumisparsa mudra. Its other name is Calling the Earth to Witness, and it connects with the story of when Gautama, soon to become the Buddha, sat down under the bodhi tree. I picture him saying, in effect, "I am not going to get up until I have broken through to the secret of the suffering we cause ourselves and others. Until I wake up to that, I am not going to move." Well, this infuriated Mara, the embodiment of sin and death. Mara sent demons to frighten Gautama and dancing girls to distract him; but the Buddha-to-be didn't waver. Finally, Mara challenged him outright. "By what right and authority do you think you can solve the mystery of suffering? Just who do you think you are?"

And Gautama offered no personal credentials. No curriculum vitae. He didn't say, "I'm the son of a king. I graduated summa cum laude from the Yoga Institute or went to Harvard Business School." He said nothing at all about himself. He just touched the Earth. It was by the authority of Earth that he sought liberation from suffering.

So we can make that gesture too. We can touch the Earth. That act, even if only mental, reminds us of who we are and what we are about, as we confront the collapse of our oil-based economy and our oil-damaged climate. We are here for the sake of life. By the authority of our belonging to Earth from the beginning of space and time, we are here.


These Buddhist mudras are mirrored in the protocol which the Haudenosaunee or Iroquois Six Nations Confederacy used when opening their treaty meetings. You can make the following gestures mentally or physically.

We offer salutations and respect to all present at this meeting and to all who will be affected by it.

We brush off the chairs on which we sit--

to make a clear space for a meeting of minds.

We brush off from our clothing any debris picked up on the way--

to clear our minds of extraneous matters.

We wipe the blood from our hands--

to acknowledge and apologize for any hurt we have inflicted.

We wipe the tears from our eyes--

to acknowledge and forgive any hurt we have received.

We take the lump out of our throats--

to let go of any sadness or disappointment.

We take the tightness out of our chests--

to let go of any fear or resentment.

We acknowledge and pray for guidance

to the Great Creator Spirit of All Life.

Ho. So be it.

The Six Nations Confederacy, we are told, weighed every decision by its effects on the seventh generation. To adopt such a practice ourselves, we would need to let the future ones figure in our minds. To help me do that, I've been trying to imagine what storytellers of the seventh generation may recount about us. Maybe they'll say something like this:

"Once there was a mighty people. They possessed the greatest concentration of economic and military power the world had ever seen. And that vast power of theirs derived from ancient sunlight stored deep in the body of the living Earth. They felt entitled to that black gold--entitled to use it all, leaving none for us who came after. They felt entitled to it even when it lay under other peoples' lands. They felt it was theirs, because they had come to depend upon it in every aspect of their lives-- in food, clothing, shelter, in travel and transportation and communicating with each other. They had lost the ability to imagine any other way of life.

"A few voices warned that the black gold would run out and that its end was soon approaching. But those voices were hard to hear. More warnings came: that the burning of the black gold was disrupting the seasons and weather patterns, bringing vast climatic changes in the very metabolism of Earth. But that seemed too huge and too remote to take seriously, until...

"Until, faster than anyone had foreseen, it all began to happen. The black gold grew harder to find, costlier to pump. They called that point, when the decline began, Peak Oil. And at the same time, it was plain to see how melting arctic ice was altering the ocean currents which had steadied the climate for thousands of years. Droughts and flooding increased, giving a hint of the suffering in store from hunger and rioting and mass migrations."

This much, we know, the future storytellers can say. What will they go on to recount? What ensuing drama will they recall?

That is partly up to us, of course, because we are living it. We cannot make the realities of end of oil and climate change go away, but we can choose how we're going to respond.

It seems to me that there are two kinds of response to massive collective trauma. One is to contract--to close down in denial and fear, to tighten the heart and the fist. The other is to open up--open eyes, heart, hands, freeing the capacity to adapt and create. We know we're capable of that, because it is happening now all around our world.

A revolution is underway. You may not see it, if you don't know where to look, for in the words of Gil Scott Heron, "this revolution will not be televised." But once we become aware of this tidal change, the end of oil appears not as some hopeless, ghastly fate, but as an adventure requiring all our wisdom and passion for life.

This adventure is what many of us call the "Great Turning." It is the epochal shift from the industrial growth society to a life-sustaining society. This is the context in which to view the end of oil and climate change. Those two major disrupters of normalcy weave through all our other environmental battles, and they are at play, as well, in our militarism and social inequality and abuses of political power. More clearly than other crises and calamities, they sound the death knell of our industrial growth society.

So those future storytellers, looking back at our time, may go on to speak of the Great Turning. I can imagine them saying, "Our ancestors back then, bless them, they had no way of knowing if the Great Turning could succeed. No way of telling if a life-sustaining culture could emerge from the death throes of the industrial growth society. It probably looked hopeless at times. Their efforts must have often seemed isolated, paltry, and darkened by confusion. Yet they went ahead, they kept on doing what they could--and, because they persisted, the Great Turning happened."


For us alive today in the midst of it all, we can learn to see the Great Turning by bringing into focus its three dimensions. They co-arise and reinforce each other. The first dimension is holding actions in defense of life; they function to slow down the destruction caused by the industrial growth society, and buy time for more fundamental changes. The second includes all the life-affirming structures emerging now, fresh social and economic experiments ranging from land trusts, ecovillages, and local currencies to alternative forms of education and healing, many of them inspired by old, indigenous ways. And the third dimension consists of a profound shift in our perception of reality. As the ecological and systems worldview takes hold, our planet appears to us, not as supply house and sewer, but as a living web of relationships. And as ancient spiritual teachings resurface, we awaken to our essential identity with this web of life and accept our sacred responsibility to honor and serve it.

This multidimensional revolution holds such promise that I can't help thinking of it as comparable to the First Turning of the Wheel, when the Buddha Dharma broke forth upon the world. Once again the reality of our radical interconnectedness with each other, and all beings through space and time, becomes clear. And now our very survival depends on our waking up to that reality.

This Great Turning alters none of the facts about end of oil and climate change. It cannot save us from the immense and painful challenges they bring upon us; but it does enable us to engage them wholeheartedly, with wisdom and courage. For, like those two mudras--Fear Not and Touch the Earth--it grounds us in our mutual belonging.

In that mutual belonging is our solidarity--with past and future generations, and with each other. There is no end to that resource. It will never run out.