Climate Emergency & Covid-19 - a Crisis of the Spirit

My college, Trinity at the University of Toronto, is currently initiating a Centre for Sustainability, a multi-disciplinary teaching and research facility examining the inter-relationships that the many facets of sustainability involves.  The Alumni Society recently sponsored an online seminar to present some of the issues we face.

Taking the lead was Dr. Stephen Scharper, director of the institute’s sustainability initiative and well known across the campus for his teaching and involvement in several colleges and departments. He called us into a diagnostic moment in which we have agency – a spiritual space, he says.

 It is time to question our role as a human species.  What is our purpose and what is the response we are called to make? What on earth are we doing?  First, epidemiology and ecology are both systems that focus on the common good and we need to learn more about both and how they work together.

 Second, we are no longer nomads separated by distance and lack of knowledge of one another. We live in an earth community – which makes us responsible for social, cultural, political, economic and gender health with a responsibility to work against oppression and seek justice for all. The poor are affected most.

 Third, we lead lives wherever we live with joy, love and hope. The response of our spiritual practices must relate to the natural world as our partner and we need to build new relationships with the economy, the culture and the biosphere.  Thomas Berry is always a primary source in encouraging us to “Befriend the earth” as a subject to be embraced and valued rather than an object to be exploited.

 What is required is balance.  Oikos, the Greek word used for family, property and house – the household becomes a common prefix “eco” for both economics and ecology. There needs to be a balance between them. Scharper defines the economy as “a wholly owned subsidiary of the earth”.

 We are in a position comparable to that of some Old Testament prophets who protested their summons from God by saying, “We didn’t ask to be here”. We are the ones to be here now.

 Joy Fitzgibbon, Associate Director of the Margaret MacMillan Trinity One Program followed.  She echoed the recent reports on the pandemic and agreed that the record of Canada is not great.  Decisions have been made that are both helpful and unhelpful and we need to understand more of both.  Public health tries to deal with trauma and our current situation reminds us of the trauma of the earth itself in need of healing.  Fear, denial and attempts to control are common to both. Public health does not show as much evidence of global policy as environmental protection does – though the latter is more aspirational than effective.  Fragmentation is less effective than collaboration and poor patterns of working together have a history.

Nevertheless she has hope and sees many opportunities to respond in a crisis – to learn, to embrace needs, to alter person life practices, to not waste time, to refashion society and to re-order better relationships between the human and non-human in our environment - and to admit many of the wrong things about the way we live. It’s possible to look at political and social structures and to listen to suffering through the voices of the marginalized, especially the poorest of the poor. She cites Henri Nouwen who describes being led out of the desert by someone who has been there.

 There are good examples for learning.  Among them are the Sustainable Development Goals, Access to Care, the Global Drug Facility and The Johns Hopkins site where one can monitor the progress of countries world side and track their progress in dealing with Covid-19.  In our own country we can learn from places that have done well – the Maritime provinces – and the indigenous communities which in some places has done well with the pandemic by saying the have a “deep respect for the virus”.  They also have much to teach us in their deep respect for the earth.

 Sarah Levy, a graduate of the college and a past president of its Environment Society focuses on her post-doctoral research of animals. The pandemic has reminded us we are among them and subject to all the links in the chain with no vacuums among the levels.  Pandemics are zootic and jump from animals to humans.  We have not absorbed this reality. 

While we may not have shopped at live animal markets for food, we are now living with finger pointing and racial epithets about their counties of origin. But we don’t acknowledge our own culpability in supporting factory farming, industrialized meat production and the use of immigrant farm workers, who are often housed and have been made to work in places that encourage the spread of disease. Sick animals get excluded from the food system only when there are serious outbreaks reaching our attention – like Mad Cow disease – and Canadian mink farms have recently come under scrutiny as dangerous.

 These are not just symptoms but recognition of the spiritual dimension of “The Other”. What will our new normal look like, she asks.  An opportunity is to listen to the animals, who have no voice. We have to be theirs. We love them and indulge them as pets.  But there also needs to be recognition of how they serve us – less for physical labour now than they have done throughout history – but still for food. Their suffering during brief and incarcerated lives harms them – and by extension ourselves, as fellow creatures. We could return to smaller scale farms and develop more plant based diets – helping both the animals and the environment.

 Much food for thought.

Airborne - Revisiting the Black Death Now

As we settle into a marathon rather than a sprint of Covid-19, the word “plague” is on the rebound. Jill Lepore outlines several in her New Yorker article “Don’t’ Come Any Closer”. She notes that in 1666 people weren’t very different from us as they examined their bodies for possible changes. They prayed, raged and poured over “books that frighted them terribly”. While journalists wonder today whether they should cover the meandering utterances of the president, the British government then thought that banning books would help. People in Britain fled to Hampton Court rather than the Hamptons, and shortages of horses for travel parallel our empty shelves of toilet paper. Instead of Zooming, some people in Italy fled to quieter realms and told the stories of the Boccaccio’s Decameron while in hiding from the Black Death.

It reminded me to look at what Thomas Berry said about that same Black Death in his article, “A New Story”, written in 1978 — the first of many works that influenced a rethinking of theology in many quarters. Berry saw the Black Death as a turning point in human understanding.

The Christian world up to that point, he observed, had been predictable. Seasons arrived and passed in the mediaeval world and it was not without hardship and suffering, but there appeared to be balance and renewal. But in a Europe where a third to a half of the population was wiped out, things changed forever. To many, the Black Death was a punishment from God. That perception enhanced a need for redemption and emphasized personal salvation through repentance. This change in emphasis from reliance on the original creation story happened long before the Protestant Reformation, Berry notes, but the reaction to the plague set in motion the individualism that would later question the power of corporate Catholicism and a move to Protestantism.

The other change of direction was almost like being drawn to a fire in spite of fearing it — a fascination with the cause of the plague that led to exploration and ultimately to the development of modern science. It gave birth to geology, a science that explored the origins of the planet and initiated our ability to move beyond history, Its sister science. paleontology, with its new ways of extracting bones of our ancestors, enhanced our understanding of history even more. The telescope and the microscope gave us entry to new worlds not previously imagined, and we gained a growing understanding that humans as a species evolved from simpler life forms. Our growing consciousness gave us the additional sense of being a species with a right to dominate the earth. Medicine and biology could save us,

Those times resonate today. One the one hand we have thought with confidence that we are in control of the environments that surround us through our growing advances in biological research — but suddenly we’re not. On the other hand, we have individuals who resolutely say they are “washed in the blood of the Lamb” and can go to their megachurches no matter what. When asked whether these folk might put others in danger by getting infected, they simply don’t care - because they are saved. The more secular adherents of capitalism want everything to open up and if that means sacrificing the elderly, even including themselves, — well fine.

The impact of the modern virus is small compared to the loss of life in the Black Death, but today’s news travels with the speed of the virus itself. Viruses have always moved along trade routes. In another New Yorker article, Kate Brown notes that the modern crowding of humans and animals in some parts of the world has contributed to zoonotic disease transmittal not only from east to west, but quite possibly through American megafarms. Their monocultures sent diseases from chickens and livestock to other parts of the world. Viruses have little respect for border or walls.

The poor in crowded cities, Brown notes, are often dependent on foraging on urban borders to find wild animals to eat and survive. Their manufactured factory goods travel the world. More affluent modern traders include people who exchange their boring local lives for more exotic foreign shores on planes and cruise ships — hothouses for viruses to grow and penetrate. We congregate in conference centers, concert halls, restaurants, bars, and some of us even in churches. We’re totally focused on our self created worlds and pay no attention to corona viruses unless we are research scientists. And the news that reaches every point is processed selectively. We like the metaphor of butterfly wings flapping on one side of the world having a direct impact in organizational seminars as a neat idea without applying to us — until it does.

I also can’t help getting Clive Hamilton’s book, Defiant Earth, out of my head. Has Gaia looked around and pondered, “I sent them hurricanes, I sent them floods, I sent them tornadoes, I sent them fires — all with increasing intensity. While the environmentalists moan and the politicians deny or ignore, what do I have to do to get their attention? Are they not seeing what they are doing to despoil the earth? Maybe I should try something that they can’t see but has a universal effect to scare the bejusus out of them”.

One of the effects is that climate change and the Anthropocene have almost disappeared in favour of the viral scene front and centre. The omni-present press can talk of nothing but medical disaster and economic disaster in an endless news cycle and when there is no news, they turn to analysis to assign blame. The battle between economics and health can suck up all the oxygen. If that is isn’t enough, add in the drama of federal versus state. Paying attention to the news these days is a disaster leading to outrage or despair. It’s as though climate changes and its ongoing danger have disappeared. The only odd glimmer that “Hey the air is cleaner now that there are fewer cars on the road” disappears as we now decide that the contamination of the virus isn’t caused only by travel and congregating. It’s in the air.

A Summer of Batesons

It started with an email from University of Toronto’s McLuhan Centre. A conference had issued an open invitation to attend a movie entitled An Ecology of Mind by Nora Bateson. The filmmaker would be present.

An Ecology of Mind is a beautiful tribute by Nora to her father, Gregory Bateson, a noted anthropologist, philosopher, author, naturalist, systems theorist and film maker himself. Though I knew his name as a husband of Margaret Mead, I knew very little else about him. Gregory was born in 1904 and his youngest daughter was born in 1968, 12 years before his death in 1980. Nora Bateson has spent much of her own life getting to know the work and influence of her father through his own films, writings and lectures, and the people he has influenced. The resulting film, as well as being loving, is both informative and inspiring.

Many of those he has influenced and depicted in the film were familiar to me – among them, Fritjof Capra, Stewart Brand, Jerry Brown – as well as his other daughter, Mary Catherine Bateson. Intensely curious, he delved into many fields and became one of the leading proponents of systems thinking. In an age of experts, he remained a generalist and if anything was overly modest in expressing his originality. He understood and championed the move from seeing the world as a machine to that of a relational network. Many common expressions - the double bind, connecting the dots, the map is not the territory the difference that makes a difference – are ones we owe to Bateson.

The substance of the film is significant in terms of Bateson’s teaching – he wrote a book with that title - and I will deal with it at more length later. He was an early advocate that all living systems have minds whether conscious or not – using “mind” as the signifier of layers of relationships that surround us like concentric circles and make us less like individuals and more like participants in levels of culture and meaning. Cosmology and deep history came naturally to him.

As a memoir, the film is charming – rich with insights from Bateson himself in numerous film clips, both with his young daughter and as a lecturer using examples from Through the Looking Glass in a delightful way. The last scene shows Bateson instructing small Nora on the importance of climbing an extra mile to reach the heights and telling her he told her that first. She replied quite forcefully for a small girl, “But I thought it first”. “All right”, her father said, contentedly. The film is also an excellent summation of his work. Sections of it can be accessed online and it is still available for purchase.

Watching the film made me realize that I knew her older sister, Mary Catherine Bateson as a writer of a favorite book on my shelf for years, and it was a good time to re-read it. It is called Peripheral Visons, Learning along the Way. As the daughter of Bateson and Margaret Mead, it is no surprise that Mary Catherine Bateson also became an anthropologist and this book is based on her experiences of several different countries and their cultures.

She is an excellent storyteller. In an early chapter we meet her in Iran heading with her two and a half year old daughter to witness a ceremonial sacrifice of a sheep, a ritual with roots in several religious traditions. She calmly explains what is going on to her young daughter as the gardener lays out the sheep’s internal organs, with an awareness that children take their emotional lead from a parent, no matter how bizarre a different cultural ritual might seem – and notes that the local children take it in as a totally normal event. Later in the book she explores the different ways that babies behave depending on their cultures by contrasting visits to a classroom by mothers and babies from America and Iran. Still later we hear of experiences on a writing fellowship at the MacDowell Colony in New England as well as her time in the Philippines. As a writer, Mary Catherine Bateson is thoughtful and filled with humanity; any reader is bound to learn from her. I’ve enjoyed her other books too.

Back to Gregory. I am much indebted to Noel Charlton’s book, Understanding Gregory Bateson, Mind, Beauty and the Sacred Earth, a splendid biography and study of the Bateson’s life, teaching and works. Charlton notes at the beginning of the book that he will cover Bateson’s what – to recover the grace of realizing our interrelated membership of the community of living organisms on the planet, as well as his how – the personal relationship with the more than rational processes of both the natural world and human art – poetry, painting, dance, music, humor, metaphor, the best of religion and natural history”. At the end of his life Bateson was prepared to call both nature and the arts inspired by them ‘the sacred”. He saw the devastation of the planet and its effect long before his death and noted that the human capacity to be responsive also meant that we must be responsible.

Bateson claimed to belong to four generations of atheists, but he grew up in a home where the Bible was read daily at breakfast. His grandfather and father were both scientists and like his father, he was a life-long admirer of the poets, William Blake and Samuel Butler. The loss of his older brothers, one in World War I and the other by suicide, placed much expectation on the surviving son. He started in zoology but quickly switched to anthropology and traveled to Samoa where he met and later married anthropologist Margaret Mead. Their marriage produced another one, Mary Catherine Bateson, who collaborated with her father at the end of his life.

Early in his career Bateson realized the limitations of specialization – knowing more and more about less and less. He was a key figure in the founding and development of the Macy Conferences that facilitated informal interdisciplinary exchange. Leading scientists from many fields and their collaboration ultimately resulted in the new field of cybernetics, systems that included biological, social, political, financial, mental, communication and engineering ones. For Bateson, this led to a later shift of interest to psychology and clinical psychiatry. His “double bind” theory of schizophrenia was largely rejected at the time, but led later to family systems theory, and contributed to other fields of study such as addiction, play theory, international relations and environmental studies.

Steps to an Ecology of Mind was written in 1972 followed by Mind and Nature in 1979. Both remind us of the need to rethink accustomed patterns of belief that are part of our heritage. He particularly questioned the notion of individualism and the sense of autonomy in western culture. We think our individual perspectives are unique and that we are separate from the things that we observe. We also think that we are rational beings and that progress is linear; both views are reinforced by our capitalistic system and by technology. In contrast, Bateson sees individuals as part of systems whose boundaries are not limited by their body or skin. What counts instead are the relationships between and among things. Our use of language causes us to abstract ourselves from the systems of which we are part and we tend to define ourselves by bits of information – a social insurance number, a job title, a student grade, a salary. We ignore the reality that we are part of a larger system upon which we are also totally dependent – the air we breathe, including the chemicals in the atmosphere, the genetically-modified food we eat, the water or other liquids we imbibe.

Many of our patterns of thinking have roots in stories and myths of the past and these are carried forward in our use of language. We name the things omitting the spaces between them, which also makes us think that we can measure and separate anything. While this way of thinking has been beneficial to the development of science and technology, it is not the whole story. It is especially problematic in our relationship to nature. Words like map and territory are metaphors for larger systems. We take for granted that a growing economy is a good thing and fail to recognize that at the same time the growth is polluting the atmosphere; the difference makes a difference that we fail to observe. We are similarly unaware when a non-native tree planted in a ravine affects the insects, and bees and birds no longer have food to eat. The difference that makes a difference happens in both space and time. We need to assess our metaphors to limit our effect on the surrounding environment.

We take it for granted that we know how to interpret reality, but Bateson stresses how much we are influenced by the cultural narratives that precede us. These, he says, must be constantly rethought and re-evaluated and we need to examine the wider context of relationships, interaction and interdependence. He credits natural systems with intelligence since these often can self-correct. In contrast, we use ideas from the past – that wilderness is dangerous and must be tamed, that oceans are vast and we can throw our waste in them, that indigenous people are uneducated and must learn our ways. We can destroy nature but we can’t create it. In 1972, he wrote.

“The environment will seem to be yours to exploit. Your survival unit will be you and your folks or conspecifics against the environment of other social units, other races, and the brutes and vegetables. 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.”

Bateson’s response was the need to learn - and he divided learning into several classes. What he terms zero learning means that we show no response to an item of sensory input. At a first level of learning, we notice that the context has changed. “No one can enter the same river more than once”, his daughter Mary Catherine observes in her sister’s film. Bateson himself is even more witty observing, “No man can go to bed with the same girl for the first time twice”. We are aware of new information in a new way and the context changes completely. Charlton has a further example of how we understand context, by noting that when we witness a murder in a play on a stage, we don’t rush to the phone and call the police.

Stage two learning is described as focusing on the learning experience itself – learning to learn. Stage three is more difficult and means a rethinking of our sets of assumptions or world view. We shift our character and even rethink our cosmology where we undertake a profound reorganization of the way we think. Stage four is akin to evolution itself and is beyond human capability to do more than glimpse occasionally. All evolution for Bateson can be described as possessing a mental process, an intelligence within. Our response to this is identified by Bateson as the sacred and he sees it also in the aesthetic process. We are part of nested systems of energy and beauty. The literal and the metaphorical are not “either/or” but “both and”.

C. A. Bowers also has a good summary of Bateson’s key directives for learning:

• Awareness of how we are influenced by earlier patterns of thinking and the need to become conscious of them.

• Knowledge and awareness of cultural patterns and systems other than our own

• The need to see ourselves as part of natural systems, neither separate from them nor superior to them

Bateson’s ideas resonate in certain ways with those of Thomas Berry, Joanna Macy, James Lovelock, Matthew Fox and Vandana Shiva. He was more of a thinker than an activist. Noel Charlton notes that even two decades ago there were many organizations working for change in our attitudes toward environmental issues, but there is still a need to go further. He urges us to take action in spreading the ecological message and envisions groups of eight to ten friends meeting regularly for as long as a year, spending time on research and reflection to increase awareness and response. At the end of this period, the group needs to split up into pairs and start new study groups, while also staying anchored in the original one for personal support – a model akin to the early spread of Christianity. In so doing, we can follow the writings and ideas of Gregory Bateson and his daughters who point the way.

Resources:

Bateson, Gregory. Steps to an Ecology of Mind, Collected Essays in Anthropology, Psychiatry, Evolution and Epistemology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972.

Bateson, Mary Catherine. Composing a Life.. New York: Grove Press, 1989

Bateson, Mary Catherine. Peripheral Visions - Learning Along the Way. New York: Harper Collins, 1994..

Bateson, Nora. An Ecology of Mind, A Daughter’s Portrait of Gregory Bateson. http://www.anecologyofmind.com

Bowers, C. A. Perspectives and Ideas of Gregory Bateson, Ecological Intelligence and Educational Rreforms. Eugene: Eco-Justice Press, 2011.

Charlton, Noel. Understanding Gregory Bateson, Mind Beauty and the Sacred Earth. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2008.

A New Story

On a November morning, the sunrise can be spectacular, arousing a sense of awe.  It’s rare to take in the beauty of the natural world and the environment designed and built by humans from the same vantage point.  City dwellers may still enjoy seeing natural beauty during the day, but the bright lights have masked the visible stars of the night sky.  Those living in less populated areas may still have that advantage.

A recent exhibit, Anthropocene, on display at both the National Gallery of Canada and the Art Gallery of Ontario, highlights what we humans have done to plunder and devastate our natural environment. This show is not the first to focus on this tragedy. More than thirty years ago, a Roman Catholic priest and cultural historian, Thomas Berry, expressed a need for a new story expanding on the one we find in the first chapter of the Book of Genesis.  He reminds us that earlier theologians like Augustine and Thomas Aquinas placed equal importance on learning from the Book of Nature.  What scientists now know about cosmology – the origin and nature of the universe - is astounding.

 Berry inspired colleagues to present this story in an award-winning film called Journey of the Universe. Since its release in 2014, the film and accompanying book have caused responses from a variety of Christian communities supporting Berry’s argument of the need for reassessment. This challenge is both complicated and contentious.  When Copernicus discovered that we were not the centre of the universe, his news was not well received. Nor were Darwin’s findings. Science has discovered that our milky way is only one among billions of galaxies.  The writers of the early books of the Bible had a lesser sense of history and it was limited to a very small part of planet earth.

 Journey and the first Genesis story share common elements.  Both start in darkness.  Light emerges, then water, then earth, then plants, then birds and animals and finally human beings.  In the Genesis story, creation is complete and humans become the focus of history.   In Journey, creation evolves in stages through billions of years and continues to do so.

 At the recent consecration of our new bishop in the Diocese of Toronto, we acknowledged that we are settlers.  What we celebrate less is indigenous peoples’ reverence for the earth - they see themselves as subjects alongside animals, vegetation and stars.  In contrast, we live in a world where anything other than ourselves is viewed as an object for our use and exploitation. The last 65 billion years of the Cenozoic geological period were the earth’s most creative and flourishing.  But in the last four hundred years we’ve managed to reverse the process of creative evolution - eliminating forests and species, polluting rivers and oceans, and robbing the earth of its resources.  And even as we put humans at the centre, we are selective about which humans, preferring those nearest and dearest and most like ourselves.

 Putting humans at the centre has a history and takes us back through 19th and 20th century industrialism and the earlier writings of Newton and Descartes, who proclaimed that everything that was not human was merely matter.  But we can also go further back to the two biblical creation stories, noting that the redemption story, where the world is dangerous and tempting, has prevailed over the creation account.  Within this context, we have taken the directive to have dominion over the earth and turned it into domination.

 People of faith now have an opportunity to learn.  Thomas Berry proposed more than 15 years ago that Christian and other religious communities can join with modern science communities to become part of a new Ecozoic era, where we return to intimacy with the earth and our place in the universe. When the earth itself becomes sacred to us, we recover both a sense of our miniscule presence as individuals – and at the same time, our sacred responsibility for it, owing to our gift of human consciousness.  It means rethinking the frameworks of theology and its implications - for liturgies, formation, stewardship, laws, governance, and for the challenges of our time – climate change, technology and the threat of annihilation by nuclear war. Meanwhile we have obsessed about gender and sexuality – not expressing with gratitude the wonder of the cosmos and our proper place in it.

 The first step is awareness.  Go to see Anthropocene.  Watch Journey of the Universe on YouTube.  Visit the associated websites: www.journeyoftheuniverse.org and

  www.theanthropocene.org. .  You will experience the universe and our small planet in new ways. These are first steps that may lead to increased understanding and commitment.

Roots and Wings

I’ve come upon Margaret Silf’s book, Roots and Wings, a series of short meditations which explores life from the Big Bang to the present. She sees the possibilities of an evolution from a world of fear and survival to one where love and discerning choice is our guide. No pie in-the-sky idealist, she is not convinced that a better would will automatically evolve unless we individually play our part in making it happen.

She notes some positives that we should be grateful for:

• There is more awareness that we are a global family, and that decisions we make here and now have an impact on everyone else on the planet

• More people are protesting that military force is not the answer

• More people are seeking a spiritual dimension to their lives, including many who would not describe themselves as religious

• More people care about the environment

• More people seek balance in their lives

• More people are seeking peace and justice in specific contexts

But lest we be euphoric, she also reminds us:

• There is a breakdown in trust – in companies, in institutions, in professions that leaves people isolated, fearful and defensive

• Our lives are shaped by the consumer markets of multinational corporations who think they control what is good for us – and that often merely means profitable for them

• Despair drives too many to addictive behaviour and compulsions

• Fear makes us very willing to sacrifice our personal freedom and restrict that of others

• There are dark forces of anger and frustration that are unleashed in destructive and negative ways

I read this book long before I developed my current interest in writer Thomas Berry and they are unlikely to have ever met. But her Jesuit roots intersect well with his Passionist ones in love of and concern for the environment.