Tuesday 17 November 2015

A Wounded Planet in Need of Love

Almost eighteen years ago, Julia Butterfly Hill embarked on a non-violent tree sit for 738 days, from December 10, 1997, until December 23, 1999. Luna, the tree she ascended unto, a thousand-year-old red wood tree, 180 feet high, in the Headwaters Forest in Northern California was under threat of being logged together with other trees in the area. Julia’s enduring example and extraordinary activism was deeply rooted in her ‘acute vision of a wounded world in need of a nonviolent healing’.

She had a vision above the scope of fine narratives, beyond the teas and committees of business as usual. Hers was indeed to also symbolize a respect for the sacred, atop Luna, separated from the rest of a world driven by greed and exploitation, from a generation lacking profound disposability consciousness. “By not allowing my feet to touch the ground once during all this time, I’ve separated myself from the world down there.”

In December 2008, inspiring activist Tim DeChristopher disrupted an illegitimate Bureau of Land Management oil and gas auction by outbidding oil companies for parcels around Arches and Canyonlands National Parks in Utah. An unprecedented trial ended in his 21 months in jail. His experiences of the systemic evil in prison and subsequent enrollment in Harvard Divinity School after his release on April 21, 2013 transformed his activism in diverse ways. The core of his message deeply rooted in the embodiment and reflection of love to heal a wounded planet.
With Tim DeChristopher in Montpelier
Whether it’s Butterfly Hill whose deep connection with the sacred espoused healing for a wounded world or DeChristopher who preaches joining our collective divinities to confront the climate crisis, this proposition is true: that any question about solving the problem begs for an answer with an intrinsic value found within a person. So how did we even get into this mess in the first place?

Al Gore in his book ‘The Future:Six Drivers of Global Change’ brilliantly describes how our dilemma began from a philosophical text book centuries ago after the launch of the Scientific Revolution by the thinkers of the times:

“Francis Bacon, who more than any other emphasized the word “progress” in describing humanity’s journey into the future, was also among the first to write about human progress with a special emphasis on subduing, dominating, and controlling nature-- as if we were as separate from nature as Descartes believed the mind was separate from the body........ By tacitly assuming our own separateness from the ecological system of the planet, we are frequently surprised by phenomena that emerge from our inextricable connections to it".

Centuries later, this philosophical error has driven insatiable greed, deceit and exploitation of the planet in search of profit and progress. They have been in shapes and forms that confound our thinking and begin to question how indeed civilized we are as a civilization.

For example, reporters at the Los Angeles Times, the Columbia Journalism School, and the Pulitzer-Prize winning Inside Climate News, revealed that ExxonMobil knew all about climate change in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s. But they not only lied about it but also funded individuals and institutions to deny climate change and fight against climate action. And when I provided direct support for  Bill McKibben, the founder of 350.org at an ExxonMobil gas station in Burlington, Vermont a month ago to stage a one-man #ExxonKnew action there, it finally dawned on me that the answer lies within the transformation of the human heart by a transcendent love for our planet.

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Providing direct support for Bill McKibben in Burlington
Our cumulative wisdom, intellectuality and technology do not match the daunting challenges of our time. Our planet doesn’t demand our saving it, it needs we loving it, for indeed we are only loving ourselves in the process. We believe in Nonviolent Direct Action dismantling strongholds such as capitalism but ultimately it is love that changes the human heart; even legal binding agreements and laws do not. Love is the greatest ethic, the peak of all intellectual and religious debate, it is where our common humanity converges.

Feelings and experiences cannot be tested for truth, only words and propositions are. And we would agree to the fact that given a planet in need of a nonviolent healing it begins with the reflection of the love that inextricably binds us to our ecological system as one. The proposition is true and the practice would ultimately heal.