Shaping a Living World: Part 10

“Racism, xenophobia, anti-Semitism & Islamophobia are poisoning our societies. We must stand up against them. Every time. Everywhere.”
— United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres.

Hello again folks! You will notice that I skipped a few parts to this piece. This is because I think it is pertinent to talk about these issues now, as opposed to waiting until later.

Why talk about this now? The answer is short and simple; Charlottesville. If you are not familiar with what happened there (you live under a rock?) I suggest using the fine power that is Google. I will not be going into a detailed analysis of the events that took place. The specifics of this particular case are beyond the scopes of this piece, but it does give me a good opportunity to talk about the issues raised by the event.

In case I have been in any way vague or unclear on this blog; I condemn bigotry in all its forms. My animism says that the world is full of people, and that those people deserve dignity and respect. All people.

As the quote I used above; I condemn racism, xenophobia, anti-Semitism, and Islamaphobia. I also condemn discrimination in all its forms, whether directed towards People of Color, Native American Peoples, or the LGBT+ community. I stand with these peoples in their struggles for equality and against oppression.

In the event that is unclear in any way, let me put it this way. Fuck Nazis and all they stand for. This world has no place for white nationalists, white supremacists, or any other form of bigotry. I happen to think that these ideologies are toxic, a poison to our minds and spirits. We need to fight them anywhere and everywhere we can; we need to inoculate ourselves, and do everything in our power to prevent these social toxins from spreading.

“We hold it as an inviolable principle that racism must be opposed by all the means that humanity has at its disposal. Wherever it occurs it has the potential to result in a systematic and comprehensive denial of human rights to those who are discriminated against.” – Nelson Mandela, in an address to the UN.

Charlottesville throws that in stark relief, and we must do everything we can to stand against these ideas. Such ideas are responsible for the countless injuries, and the death of Heather Heyer when a car plowed into a group of counter-protesters. In recent memory, too many lives have already been claimed by toxic ideologies. We literally buried millions in the last World War to tell Nazi fucks to go to hell.

Yet, it must be admitted that this is a really complicated set of issues. There is no single, simple answer to any of this, and it must be considered at best a work in progress. There is no way I have the space or the time to detail all of that nuance here.

With that in mind, let’s talk about the Sustainable Development Goals.

Sustainable Development Goals;

It should be noted that Goal 10: Reduced Inequalities, is broadly focused on everything from income inequalities to social inequalities. As I feel I have covered my thoughts on income inequalities in other posts, and with Charlottesville as our focus, we are going to be putting those aside. For purposes of this blog, I will focus more on the social aspects of this goal. Here are three specifics goals that address these issues;

“By 2030, empower and promote the social, economic and political inclusion of all, irrespective of age, sex, disability, race, ethnicity, origin, religion or economic or other status

Ensure equal opportunity and reduce inequalities of outcome, including by eliminating discriminatory laws, policies and practices and promoting appropriate legislation, policies and action in this regard

Adopt policies, especially fiscal, wage and social protection policies, and progressively achieve greater equality.”- UN Sustainable Development Goals

The first goal in my mind is nothing short of the liberation and empowerment of minority populations, and anyone that is subject to discrimination. People of Color, Women, Native Americans, Immigrants, LGBT+ folks, Muslims, all of them. Inclusion is a big deal, because these populations have historical and in many way intentionally been left “out”, of politics, of the economy, and in our society.

I really like how the second goal above addresses both opportunity as well as outcome, because this is a significant distinction to be made. It is not enough that minority and marginalized populations have equal opportunities, as in that the have “access” to things such as good schools and good healthcare. Equality in outcome literally means if they have the opportunity for something, then they have the ability to make it happen.

In addition, the second goal also speaks to the need to eliminate discriminatory laws and policies. I don’t want to mince words here; the US is absolutely steeped and was even founded on such ideas as white supremacy. Women were at one time not given the right to vote, nor African-Americans. We can still see these policies at work in our city planning, in our politics, and even in our rhetoric. We need to destroy those old policies, and put in place better ones. That is a long discussion that needs to happen.

With all that in mind, I think it can be stated that in many ways events such as what happened in Charlottesville are uniquely US problems. Many other countries tackle these issues differently than we do, and some in ways that make it nearly impossible for something like Charlottesville to happen. In other parts of the world, the “Unite the Right” protestors would have been arrested long before they had the chance to rally.

As exploring the Nordic countries, and wider Europe in general, is a part of this series; let’s now turn to explore some of those policies.

Social Democracy

The first thing we need to do is talk about hate speech, because many countries in the world make a distinction between free speech, and hate speech;

Hate speech is speech which attacks a person or group on the basis of attributes such as race, religion, ethnic origin, sexual orientation, disability, or gender… “ – Wikipedia “Hate Speech”

So let’s look a little closer at how the Nordic countries treat this issue, with Denmark up first;

“Denmark prohibits hate speech, and defines it as publicly making statements by which a group is threatened (trues), insulted (forhånes) or degraded (nedværdiges) due to race, skin colour, national or ethnic origin, faith or sexual orientation.” – Wikipedia “Hate Speech”

Or more specifically in Denmark;

“Whoever publicly, or with intention to disseminating in a larger circle makes statements or other pronouncement, by which a group of persons is threatened, derided or degraded because of their race, colour of skin, national or ethnic background, faith or sexual orientation, will be punished by fine or imprisonment for up to 2 years. Sec. 2. When meting out the punishment it shall be considered an especially aggravating circumstance, if the count has the character of propaganda.”

— § 266b of the Danish penal code

That’s right, you either get fined or go to prison in Denmark for the kind of thing we saw in Charlottesville. What about Norway?

“Norway prohibits hate speech, and defines it as publicly making statements that threaten or ridicule someone or that incite hatred, persecution or contempt for someone due to their skin colour, ethnic origin, homosexual orientation, religion or philosophy of life. At the same time, the Norwegian Constitution guarantees the right to free speech, and there has been an ongoing public and judicial debate over where the right balance between the ban against hate speech and the right to free speech lies.” Wikipedia “Hate Speech”

Norway’s response is a little more nuanced than that of Denmark, but has very strong protections and a straightforward definition of what distinguishes hate speech from free speech. However, because Norway seeks to strike a balance, whether or not something qualifies is usually left up to the courts.

However, the alt-right pukes in Charlottesville would definitely fall under hate speech in Norway. On to Sweden;

“Sweden prohibits hate speech, and defines it as publicly making statements that threaten or express disrespect for an ethnic group or similar group regarding their race, skin colour, national or ethnic origin, faith, or sexual orientation. The crime does not prohibit a pertinent and responsible debate (en saklig och vederhäftig diskussion), nor statements made in a completely private sphere. There are constitutional restrictions pertaining to which acts are criminalized, as well limits set by the European Convention on Human Rights. The crime is called “Hets mot folkgrupp” in Swedish which directly translated can be translated to Incitement (of hatred/violence) towards population groups.” Wikipedia “Hate Speech”

Sweden’s law is pretty nuanced as well, and is also governed by the ECHR and the Swedish constitution. As such, this is the kind of thing that, like Norway, is often decided in the courts. However, because the Swedes make a particular distinction for “incitement” I think that showing up with helmets, shields, and in the presence of heavily armed militia constitutes incitement in the case of Charlottesville.

Generally, this series has been limited to the Nordic countries. But since we are talking about literal fucking Nazis (no hyperbole), perhaps it’s fair to bring Germany into the conversation as well.

“In Germany, Volksverhetzung (“incitement of popular hatred”) is a punishable offense under Section 130 of the Strafgesetzbuch(Germany’s criminal code) and can lead to up to five years imprisonment. Section 130 makes it a crime to publicly incite hatred against parts of the population or to call for violent or arbitrary measures against them or to insult, maliciously slur or defame them in a manner violating their (constitutionally protected) human dignity.”

As with the examples above; incitement counts, violence counts, as well as insults against human dignity. Germany isn’t even playing around here folks, with up to five years in prison for the kind of shit we saw in Charlottesville.

Plus it might get you punched and then arrested. 

But America is different folks, and in this case I am not sure “different” is such a great thing. It is written into our very constitution;

“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof, or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press, or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.” First Amendment of US Constitution.

Now, I’m generally a big support of free speech and the first amendment. I think we should be free to write and talk about most ideas and topics. But like Norway, I also think there is a balance to this. I think there is a limit to the kinds of speech we tolerate. You are familiar with the paradox of tolerance correct?

“Less well known is the paradox of tolerance: Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them. “ – Karl Popper

This is the kind of crisis we face. Do we tolerate open threats of genocide in our streets? Do we tolerate literal fucking Nazis, and let them get away with it?

Speaking legally, the answer is yes. Because of the First Amendment, we cannot enact any laws at any level to tease out the nuance on this kind of thing. The USA does not make the distinction between hate speech and free speech; the direct result is events like Charlottesville. This is one of the few countries in the world this kind of toxin can fester.

There is no legal recourse, unless another law is broken in the process. Such as assault, or murder… Oh wait… (And in the case of many assaults, the police failed to act.)

In short;

“Effectively, the Supreme Court unanimously reaffirms that there is no ‘hate speech’ exception to the First Amendment.” – Washington Post

So where does that leave us? If you ask my opinion, it is time we have a real serious talk about what hate speech means in this country. However, as our hands are tied on the legislative side of things; we are left with cultural, social and spiritual avenues of fighting this social disease. In the words of the UN Secretary-General…

We fight it everytime. Everywhere.

Thanks for reading!

P.S. As this goal and topic is primarily focused on social issues (as opposed to environmental ones); there was really nothing from Drawdown to be included here.

Sources/References;

http://www.un.org/en/letsfightracism/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hate_speech

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/2017/06/19/supreme-court-unanimously-reaffirms-there-is-no-hate-speech-exception-to-the-first-amendment/?utm_term=.34b6d2ab2ef1

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2017/08/13/an-american-tourist-gave-the-nazi-salute-in-germany-so-a-stranger-beat-him-up-police-say/?utm_term=.f9f8aa9a10c1

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_speech_and_freedom_of_the_press_in_Denmark

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance

Shaping a Living World: Part 2

“We must be clear about our agenda, which includes promoting sustainable, local economies, reforming our food systems, distributing resources in a more just and humane fashion, and ensuring that our human populations are below the carrying capacity of our planet through access to voluntary birth control, and equal access to education and work for women. “ Pagan Statement on the Environment (http://ecopagan.com/) (Emphasis mine)

Today I want to talk about the second Sustainable Development Goal, as put forward by the UN: Zero Hunger. There is quite a bit to discuss here, and inevitably I am not going to be able to cover every aspect that goes into this. There is so much data and information, and so much to say on this topic. Many others have said it way better than I can. There are some great resources out there in internet land, and I encourage you to seek those out. This is a collective effort after all.

Before I get into the real meat of this post, there are a few notes I want to put out there before we go deeper. As is pointed out in the quote at the beginning of this post, these issues are all intertwined. Sometimes it is hard to separate all these different topics and discuss them discretely. These are holistic topics, and one often informs all the others. I think that is a good thing in the long run. It just means we have a lot of work to do.

Just as an example, you will notice that both population and food systems are mentioned in the opening quote, as well as women’s rights. Population and agriculture especially are very much intertwined, especially since the industrial revolution. Agriculture alone gave us the option to reliably sustain a stable population. But even so, the total population of the world has exploded since the industrial revolution.

One of the biggest things we can do is to help is stabilize our population growth, in addition to ensuring everyone has enough to eat. While these issues will be discussed more in future posts, one example covered above is providing access to universal voluntary birth control.

This alone has all kinds of issues with it, because more people means more mouths to feed and more resource use. But, population  alone doesn’t tell the whole story. As the article linked points outs;

“Citizens of more affluent nations leave a much greater footprint on our planet than people living in poorer countries – although there are exceptions. Copenhagen is the capital of a high-income nation – Denmark “ – BBC

That means those of us in the US. We have a huge footprint compared to many other people across the globe. That will have to change, but that is a topic for another time. As the UN has pointed out, we could be pushing 10 billion people on the planet by mid century, and that means we are going to have to face the challenges created by that.

There are a lot of facets to this, which I will cover in later parts of this series. For the purpose of this post, we have to figure out how to feed our current population with sustainable food system, as well as plan for the future as well. With guidance from the Sustainable Development Goals, social democracy, and Drawdown, we can start to see how we might handle these challenges.

Sustainable Development Goals;

I encourage you to visit the UN site about these goals linked below. There is much more there than I have the space to cover here. But as a brief selection, the SDG’s provide this general outline on how to shape a world that does not have to worry about hunger.

“ – By 2030, end hunger and ensure access by all people, in particular the poor and people in vulnerable situations, including infants, to safe, nutritious and sufficient food all year round

– By 2030, end all forms of malnutrition, including achieving, by 2025, the internationally agreed targets on stunting and wasting in children under 5 years of age, and address the nutritional needs of adolescent girls, pregnant and lactating women and older persons

– By 2030, double the agricultural productivity and incomes of small-scale food producers, in particular women, indigenous peoples, family farmers, pastoralists and fishers, including through secure and equal access to land, other productive resources and inputs, knowledge, financial services, markets and opportunities for value addition and non-farm employment

– By 2030, ensure sustainable food production systems and implement resilient agricultural practices that increase productivity and production, that help maintain ecosystems, that strengthen capacity for adaptation to climate change, extreme weather, drought, flooding and other disasters and that progressively improve land and soil quality”

The SDG’s are often considered to be very ambitious, and it certainly is a possibility that we may not be able to reach these goals. But having a goal to shoot towards I think is just as important as whether or not we succeed or fail. It means we are trying, and that counts in my book.

Most of these goals speak for themselves, and will require a great variety of local, regional and global policy to meet. They will require a hard look at ourselves, and a lot of global cooperation. The first two goals are pretty straight forward, make sure all people are fed; especially marginalized or impoverished people as well as children. Malnutrition is a huge problem, because it stunts growth, and also is a big problem for pregnant women as well.

The third and fourth goals are more relevant to our purpose here, and more directly applicable through the solutions proposed by Drawdown. Under current projections our population is expected to grow, and we will need to be able to feed that population across the globe. While I think it is just as important that we stabilize our population growth, we also have provide for the needs of the people. The third goal really centers the importance of small-scale producers, which are often women and indigenous people. Their skills and knowledge in sustainable agriculture are necessary and important for a sustainable food system.

The fourth goal above is an important one, and can be addressed with some of the solutions from both social democracy as well as Drawdown. Let’s explore those ideas in a little more depth shall we.

Social Democracy;

“Combined, the Nordic countries were the 6th largest donor to WFP in 2014 and among WFP’s top multilateral donors. “ – UN World Food Program 

The Nordic countries are doing their part to alleviate world hunger, but this is not the whole story to be sure. Just as an example , the USA is the single largest donor. This kind of funding goes into feeding people across the world, especially in low-income countries in the global South. It is also noteworthy that the World Food Program has a office in Copenhagen, which has been ranked as one of the greenest  cities in the world. That is surely a model worth exploring.

Such efforts are important and should be encouraged, but there is a lot more work to be done. Just as an example, overall the USA lags well behind the Nordic countries and Europe.

“Based on the data available, though, the report finds that Scandinavian countries — Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Finland — win the honors. Sweden was already “84.5 percent of the way to the best possible outcome across the 17 [Sustainable Development Goals],” the report found, ranking number one in the world – and receiving a corresponding score of 84.5. The other three Scandinavian nations then filled out the top four slots, followed by many European nations. “ (Washington Post )

The Nordic countries in particular, and Europe more generally are well ahead of the curve on building a less hungry and more sustainable world. How did the US fair?

“The United States, in contrast, ranked 25th, with a score of 72.7. It fared considerably worse than a comparable neighbor, Canada, which ranked 13th, with a score of 76.8. “ (Washington Post )

The logical follow up question is why?

“These poor rankings were doled out because (among other things) the U.S. has too many people below the poverty line, too much adult obesity, too little renewable energy, too many homicides and people in prison, and so on and so on

the poor score of the United States underscores that while we’ve done exceedingly well economically, we’ve neglected the social and the environmental dimensions of progress — issues ranging from equality to ecosystem preservation.” (Washington Post )

Right there gets at the real heart of the matter. While the USA is a powerhouse of an economy, and the largest military in the world, we are behind the ball in many important measures. We are not doing nearly enough as a country to take care of our poor, our hungry, and to provide access to nutritional food either. We have not had a great record so far on social or environmental issues, and there is certainly a lot of room for improvement.

Let’s look at some specific solutions that not only help to alleviate hunger, but also go a long way to fighting climate change and create sustainable food systems.

Drawdown;

The applications for Drawdown here are immense, because we need a radical change in our food systems, not only to combat hunger, but also to live sustainably. Pretty much the entire “Food” sector could apply here. As such, I am limiting myself to the some of the most impactful solutions.

Food ;

Reduced Food Waste

#3 Solution 70.53 gigatons CO2 reduction by 2050

A third of the food raised or prepared does not make it from farm or factory to fork. Producing uneaten food squanders a whole host of resources—seeds, water, energy, land, fertilizer, hours of labor, financial capital—and generates greenhouse gases at every stage—including methane when organic matter lands in the global rubbish bin. The food we waste is responsible for roughly 8 percent of global emissions… Beyond addressing emissions, these efforts can also help to meet future food demand.”

Especially in the US, we throw out a ridiculous amount of food. As the above quote points out, this is a waste in a whole lot of ways, of time as well as energy. Plus, in many cases, perfectly good food is thrown out, food that could just benefit some of our most vulnerable. In addition to contributing to climate change, reduction of food waste could go a long way into combating hunger as well. As the page on Drawdown points out, there is a lot of nuance in why food goes to waste. We need to take a hard look at these aspects and see where we can do better.

Plant Rich Diets 

#4 Solution 66.11 gigatons C02 reduction by 2050

“Shifting to a diet rich in plants is a demand-side solution to global warming that runs counter to the meat-centric Western diet on the rise globally. That diet comes with a steep climate price tag: one-fifth of global emissions. If cattle were their own nation, they would be the world’s third-largest emitter of greenhouse gases.”

There is no real getting around this one. How we raise and tend our livestock in industrial factory farms is absurd, from just about every level you can think of. CAFOs are often inhumane, and contribute huge amounts of emissions and pollution. I can’t go into all that here, but suffice to say there is a quite a bit of work to be done.

I’m not advocating veganism or vegetarianism here, though these are noble goals to be sure. I’ll confess straight out that I’m a happy little omnivore. That being said, my family is doing all we can to eat less meat, and that is a start.

Regenerative Agriculture

#11 Solution 23.15 gigatons C02 Reduction by 2050

“Conventional wisdom has long held that the world cannot be fed without chemicals and synthetic fertilizers. Evidence points to a new wisdom: The world cannot be fed unless the soil is fed. Regenerative agriculture enhances and sustains the health of the soil by restoring its carbon content, which in turn improves productivity—just the opposite of conventional agriculture. “

There is so much that could be said here, and alas I don’t have the space to detail all of it here. There are so many ideas and options out there that we seriously need to explore, of which Regenerative Agriculture is just one. It is vitally important to our environment and our water ways that we reduce synthetic chemical and fertilizer use. Such chemicals often leads to toxic algae blooms, and the declining health of our water systems.

Conservation Agriculture

#16 Solution 17.35 Gigatons of C02 reduction by 2050

“Plows are absent on farms practicing conservation agriculture, and for good reason. When farmers till their fields to destroy weeds and fold in fertilizer, water in the freshly turned soil evaporates. Soil itself can be blown or washed away and carbon held within it released into the atmosphere. Tilling can make a field nutrient poor and less life-giving.”

Large mechanized industrial farm systems have really done their fair share of damage, and it is well past time we start rethinking those methods. So much harm to our environment can be prevented if we change how we do so many things, agriculture is just one. Conservation Agriculture spares the plow, and in that way protects the health of both the soil as well as increasing resiliency.

Tree Intercropping

#17 Solution 17.2 gigatons of C02 reduction by 2050

“Plowed under during the twentieth century to make room for industrialized methods of farming, tree intercropping is one of dozens of techniques that can create an agricultural renaissance—a transformation of food-growing practices that bring people, regeneration, and abundance back to the land. “

It should go without saying that planting and growing more trees will help in the work ahead. Trees are often removed on farmland, and agriculture since it’s invention is responsible for mass deforestation. Bringing back some of those trees can help by creating carbon sinks, wind breaks, and overall benefits to the health of the soil.

There is so much more I could talk about; composting, permaculture, urban forests, urban gardens, the whole works. Sadly, this piece is already longer than I had expected. As such I will wrap this up and I hope you join me next time when we explore the third goal; Good Health & Well-Being.

As always, thanks for reading!

Sources/References;

http://ecopagan.com/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_democracy

http://www.drawdown.org/

http://www.un.org/sustainabledevelopment/sustainable-development-goals/

http://un.dk/un-in-denmark/wfp

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/2016/07/21/a-new-report-rated-countries-on-sustainable-development-and-the-u-s-did-horribly/?utm_term=.d33e3e80a675

http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20160311-how-many-people-can-our-planet-really-support

http://www.worldometers.info/world-population/

https://www.ecowatch.com/top-10-greenest-cities-in-the-world-1881963132.html

https://www.wfp.org/funding/year/2016

Shaping a Living World: Part 1

“In addition, there is a deeper and more profound change that is needed. Fundamentally, we believe that a change in spirit is required, one that fosters a new relationship between humanity and other species and Earth as a whole. As Pagans, we believe we are well situated to help imagine and create a future in which humanity lives in greater harmony with the rest of our planet.“ – Pagan Statement on the Environment

We face a lot of challenges with the future ahead, climate change just being one among them. As an animist, I am asked to engage; with the planet and with my community. My animism is both nature-centric, as well as human-centric.

It is people-centric (human and not), and because it is relational ignoring the greater problems in our communities and world is not an option for me. Being an animist means I need to think about where we have come from, and where we are going.

It asks me to imagine a better future tomorrow, for everyone. So now I have to ask myself, what would my future look like?

This is a pretty complex question to ask, and it is at the heart of this series. The answer to this question is informed by both my spirituality as well as my values, and the two are deeply integrated and intertwined. Both will be discussed over the course of this series, so that I can explore these things more deeply.

That being said, I have thus far been impressed with the ideas of social democracy, especially the Nordic model. Much of the data and information we have suggests that it is one of the better social models in the world, and the Nordics are consistently ranked as some of the most prosperous and happiest people in the world. As such, the values of social democracy will be central to this series.

In addition, I think that global problems require a global response, and many of the issues we face such as climate change are certainly global issues. As such, I found the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals a good mesh with many of my values. 193 nations representing a majority of the population of the planet have worked on the SDG’s, and therefore it provides us a road map that is agreed upon by consensus, because there is “no planet B.” Those too will form a way in which to frame this series.

Also, I believe firmly that our future as a species must be a sustainable one. For that reason another big part of project will be Drawdown, which is one of the most comprehensive plans to date on how to combat climate change. It will form a big part of this project as well.

All that said; I am a dreamer as well as a realist. I am going to be tempering myself with a healthy dose of skepticism and pragmatism. I will try my best to focus on what we can do today, or at least in the near future. We need solutions now, and so we cannot place our hope in some far off ideal.

As such, it must be kept in mind that there is no such thing as a perfect solution. The perfect is the enemy of the good. I am not dreaming up a Utopia here, as such a world is not possible at the current time. At very least, I simply want to emphasize the fact that we can, and must do better. The future is bleak indeed if we don’t try.

Without further ado, let’s talk about the first of the Sustainable Development Goal; No Poverty

One of the core philosophies of my animism is that the needs of the many outweighs the needs of the few. We can and should make a concentrated effort on making sure no single persons goes without. It implies not only do we have to do better for our most vulnerable, it in some way implies we must.

Sustainable Development Goals

Some of the highlights from the SDG’s include;

“By 2030, eradicate extreme poverty for all people everywhere, currently measured as people living on less than $1.25 a day

By 2030, reduce at least by half the proportion of men, women and children of all ages living in poverty in all its dimensions according to national definitions

Implement nationally appropriate social protection systems and measures for all, including floors, and by 2030 achieve substantial coverage of the poor and the vulnerable.”

This is a huge global effort, and it will take a lot of policy decisions that I have not the space to write about here. Some of these decisions will happen on the local level, some regional, some national, and some on the international level. I like the EU’s principle of subsidiarity, in which decisions should happen at the level they are most effective.

On this ground, I think the Nordic model of Social Democracy has some insights to offer, and ideas we should look at more closely.

Social Democracy

That being said, I think the model of social democracy is on to some very important aspects that help to eliminate extreme poverty in our society. The USA in particular is behind the ball on a lot of these points, and have a deplorable track record of treating our vulnerable poorly.

“According to the OECD, the 2012 poverty rates for Sweden, Denmark, Norway and Finland stood at 9 percent, 5.4 percent, 8.1 percent and 6.5 percent respectively….

The “Nordic Model” presents a starting point for other countries to develop methods to attack poverty as they work towards sustainable development.” – Borgen Project

Universal Healthcare – This is one of the most important things we can do for our most vulnerable. We need to frame health care as a right, not a privilege that only those with the means can afford. Every single person should not have to make the choice between health and bankruptcy. Considering one of the SDG’s involves healthcare, I will say no more on this for now.

Universal Education – This one is another big part of the puzzle that comes into play when trying to eliminate poverty. People end up in poverty for a lot of reasons, unemployment and displacement being among them. Universal Education (including Higher Ed and Trade/Vocational Skills) gives people the option of retraining, or any other type of personal advancement. Education is also among the SDG’s (which are all deeply intertwined), so let’s move on.

Universal Basic Income – The idea of UBI is still being explored, but the concept is simple; give everyone in a society a basic income just for existing. The idea being that a person has the right to have their basic needs met, primarily food and shelter. A person would receive a basic stipend to use however they wanted, no strings attached. It is being tested in Finland and several other areas, and some of the results are already starting to show;

“Not only could UBI replace the income lost as automated systems continue to replace human workers, experts also believe that having such a safety net would spur more innovation as the fear of failure would be reduced. People equipped with the knowledge that they will be able to provide for themselves should they fail will be more willing to take bigger risks, which could result in a spike in innovation that would help us all. “

UBI could help eliminate the “scarcity mentality”, and help people out of poverty and increased equality all around. I will be watching the idea as it unfolds with interest.

Drawdown

Getting rid of poverty in our societies with require social, cultural, and well as political changes. A change in spirit. It will also require technological solutions, and here we visit a few of the solutions from Drawdown that can really make a difference in the life of impoverish communities and people. They also help the planet at the same time. Please note that many of these solutions will appear under other Sustainable Development Goals, as I get to them.

Energy;

Rooftop Solar 

“In rural parts of low-income countries, they can leapfrog the need for large-scale, centralized power grids, and accelerate access to affordable, clean electricity—becoming a powerful tool for eliminating poverty. “

Impoverished people all over the world, especially in the Global South, often don’t have reliable access to electricity. While this is a complex issue with a lot of nuance that I will not be able to cover here, one of the solutions proposed by Drawdown with a lot of promise for fighting poverty is Rooftop Solar. It is ranked in the top ten of most effective solutions, with a reduction of 20.6 gigatons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere by 2050. As many people in poverty globally are often found in Africa and South Asia, rooftop solar provides a reliable option that fights poverty and climate change at the same time.

Micro-wind 

“In lower-income countries, micro wind turbines can help expand access to electricity, giving people a way to light their homes or cook their evening meals, which can avoid emissions from dirty diesel generators or kerosene lamps.”

In addition to rooftop solar, micro-wind can act as a supplement in order to bring electricity to rural and impoverished areas. While the impact is not nearly as large as rooftop solar, it is should not be discounted. It is ranked #76 out of a 100 total solutions by Drawdown, with 0.2 gigatons of CO2 reduction. It could be a vital supplemental energy source for places without grid access, and just like solar the costs are currently plummeting, thus reducing implementation costs and net benefits in the long term.

Micro-grids

“Microgrids also aid human and economic development. Globally, 1.1 billion people do not have access to a grid or electricity, most of them in sub-Saharan Africa and Asia. In rural parts of low-income countries, populations are best supplied with electricity from microgrids. “

Many rural communities are far away from city centers and centralized grid systems. These communities are often rural, and have low incomes. In combination with rooftop solar and micro-wind (along with other sources), micro-grids have the capacity to bring electrical power to entire communities, and help share the load variability among renewable sources. Overall it is ranked #78 out of a 100.

Food;

Clean Cookstoves

“Around the world, 3 billion people cook over open fires or on rudimentary stoves. The cooking fuels used by 40 percent of humanity are wood, charcoal, animal dung, crop residues, and coal. As these burn, often inside homes or in areas with limited ventilation, they release plumes of smoke and soot liable for 4.3 million premature deaths each year. “

As much about food will be covered under SDG Goal 2 (Zero Hunger), I have included clean cookstoves here. As I have pointed out above, many rural and poor areas do not have reliable access to electricity or utilities, so often they have to use more traditional cookstoves. By helping to clean up that process, we can aid people in poverty as well as reduce the numbers of premature death annually, as well as improve the health of people.

This solution is ranked #21 by Drawdown, with an overall reduction of 15.81 gigatons of carbon dioxide.

Women & Girls

Women Smallholders

“On average, women make up 43 percent of the agricultural labor force and produce 60 to 80 percent of food crops in poorer parts of the world. Often unpaid or low-paid laborers, they cultivate field and tree crops, tend livestock, and grow home gardens. Most of them are part of the 475 million smallholder families who operate on less than 5 acres of land.”

As Gender Equality is one of the SDG’s, I have decided to put this solution here. It is ranked number #62 overall, with a 2.06 gigaton reduction in CO2 by 2050. By giving women an equal share in both income and productive resources on their farms, farm yield would be expected to rise, and this would lead to increased efficiency of land resources, including a lower need for deforestation.

In the next part of this series, we will be looking at the second Sustainable Development Goal, which is Zero Hunger.

Thanks for reading!

Sources;/References;

http://ecopagan.com/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_democracy

http://www.drawdown.org/

http://www.un.org/sustainabledevelopment/sustainable-development-goals/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sustainable_Development_Goals

https://futurism.com/finlands-universal-basic-income-program-is-already-reducing-stress-for-recipients/

https://borgenproject.org/why-sweden-has-lower-poverty-rates/

Why We are Here…

Hello there folks,

I’ll start with a few updates. I’ve been real busy lately; writing, editing, and getting ready for my first vending event this fall! As such, I haven’t had a lot of time to keep this blog going. I am also starting another book manuscript soon, so this blog my go into “low power” mode so I can focus on other things. I have a whole series of topics I still want to write about, so I’ll try to get something up here monthly at least. But that is besides the point for today.

For those of you that don’t follow me on Facebook, I often use it as a testing ground to develop my own ideas. Yesterday I turned out some thoughts that have gotten a fair bit of attention, so I wanted to share those with you here. The edited post appears below;

We live in interesting times, times in which existential crises lie seemingly around every corner. These are challenges that will test the very nature of the human spirit. Challenges that not only question who we are, but who we will be. If we survive at all.

The climate is changing. That is a fact. Centuries of cutting down forests and polluting our water and air is coming home to roost. Centuries of exploitation and oppression have come back to haunt us.

I think some very old beings once dwelled in those ancient forests. We cut them down, and we killed them. Those we didn’t, we broke all ties with and exiled. We built an ideological wall between “nature” and “society” so tall and thick that we have all but divorced ourselves from all those old relationships.

Worse still, in this country (USA), we have treated the people (Native Americans, and others) the ones that knew these beings best, the exact same way. We took their lands, killed them, and have perpetuated those cycles ever since.

We destroyed other peoples, and we destroyed ourselves. We became “white”, devoid of any spirit of our own. We died in the process.

I am not the first to say these things, and surely the credit does not belong to me alone.

The amount of work ahead is greater than any one individual, greater than even a single generation. We have to deal with our shit now.

And we are poorly prepared for this. We need allies and the strength of community to face what lies ahead. We have done a fine job of isolating ourselves in the name of “individualism”. We have killed the old gods that were once our allies. Those that are left have no reason to love us. They know what we did, they remember. Why should they help us?

In this country, we cannot assume they are on our side. That is not the case. The land is not on our side.

But, I don’t want you to give up hope. Another world is possible, and it lies on the other side of the horizon. We need all the help we can get, and the amount of work we have to do is tremendous. We will not live to see the end of that work, but it must be done all the same.

I find it no coincidence that there has been a rise in spiritual specialists recently. We were made for this work. We are here to tear down the walls we have built, and to rebuild relationships we have severed. To save what can be saved, and to change what must be changed.

We are here at this time, because our skills are required. Everything we know hangs in the balance.

Books, Books, Books!

Hello folks,

I wanted to stop in and remind you about my books! I have five of them published now, and you can find them all on Amazon as well as on my Etsy shop!

Kindle and Print editions, $2.99 – $11.99

Or from my shop signed for $10! ($5 for the book, and $5 for shipping.)

Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&field-keywords=Nicholas+Haney

Etsy Shop: https://www.etsy.com/shop/TheWhiteWolfShop

Tracking as a Way of Knowing: A Commentary

Tracking as a way of Knowing: A Commentary

There has been quite the flood of great material coming out lately, and to be frank I am having a hard time keeping up. Maybe I shouldn’t put the expectation upon myself that I will ever keep up, but at the same time it doesn’t really stress me out all that much. It is more exciting for me than stressful, knowing other people are exploring things along similar lines that I am.

Or at least, I am becoming more aware of that fact.

In addition, it doesn’t help when I feel like I have been dog piled with my own writing projects. As an advanced warning, this blog may go on (semi) hiatus in the near future. There is a longer project starting to poke on prod at me. I may decide to give that project my full attention, but that is up in the air at the moment.

Things have been pretty chaotic in my own life, and I don’t feel like I have had much time to breathe. In addition, the world on the whole has seemed pretty chaotic too. It has all left me feeling overwhelmed and anxious. I’m dealing with that the best I can, and life goes on.

As such, I bring my commentary on a piece I came across lately, called “Tracking as a Way of Knowing” by Sophia Sinopoulous-Lloyd. This particular piece really spoke to both my spirituality, and my practical on the ground skills as a hunter. This is kind of a long commentary, which isn’t usually my habit. Some people just won’t read longer pieces, or don’t have the time to do so. For that, I apologize, but I didn’t want to break this up either.

As such, we start here with this quote from the author;

“One of the central themes in permaculture (as in ecology) is that living beings—both plant and animal—build alliances with each other and form natural communities characterized by certain highly efficient cycles of energy. Part of this efficiency owes to the fact that the structure of ecosystems is the opposite of mechanistic. Everything has multiple functions, and there is no such thing as waste. Naturalist knowledge not predicated on a neoclassical production-oriented view of the environment is critical to the skillful practice of permaculture farming. To this end, tracking seemed to promise a way of beginning to build relationships that lead beyond the boundaries of the homestead and private property, into the wild…”

There are several aspects of this quote that also apply to an animistic worldview. The most obvious of which is that living beings build alliances with each other and form natural communities. This is a foundational part of my own animism; being primarily concerned with people living in relationship with each other. In addition, I love the parallels between my spiritual practice and the patterns of natural ecosystems.

That is part of the reason I am animist to begin with. It runs parallel in many ways to many scientific disciplines, not least among them ecology. To me at least, the natural environment is a social environment, in which many non-human agents are in constant connection with each other, and forming self-organized networks and systems. These systems, whether they are deciduous forests, or wetlands, or watersheds, they tend to be self-organizing, self-regulating, and self-governing. I think there is a great deal to learn about society by studying natural systems.

More than that, as opposed to many mechanical production methods, as the author points out, almost nothing is wasted in an integrated natural ecosystem. Unlike many of our human productions methods, that run linearly from extraction —> production —> consumption —-> waste, natural systems tend to have a higher degree of multilinear networks that continuously cycle material as well as energy.

Lastly in the above quote, the author introduces the practice of tracking as a way to build relationships with the natural world. I cannot agree more, and my own experience tracking has highlighted a lot of the points the author makes. There will be more on that in a moment, but first we have to ask what is tracking? Here the author picks up the thread;

“Tracking is an umbrella term for discerning an animal’s endeavors from the marks it has left on the landscape. Its subdivisions include things like clear print identification, gait and track pattern analysis, trailing (where you follow a particular animal’s tracks to find out other things about it), and identifying other signs of behavior, like feeding or territorial marking. Tracking is not limited to uncovering the past of animals though. We can use the rings on an old tree stump to diagnose an ancient forest fire or a particularly hard winter, and we can examine the topography of the forest floor to discern the effects of a century-old ice storm. Such things leave their own sorts of tracks. Our ancestors didn’t only track things on the earth—they tracked the skies too, charting movement of constellations, the paths of planets, and the phases of the moon, giving us the basis for our understanding of time. “

There is so much more to tracking that simply following animals. There is a lot of knowledge and practical experience that goes into being able to do it well. It is so much bigger than the individual tracks themselves.

I was learning forestry from a very young age, rather or not I realized it at the time. My childhood home was heated with firewood in the winter. This means that I spent a lot of time learning from my dad not only how to cut and move wood, but also basic understandings of forests. How to identify trees, as yes how to read their rings. I have seen first hand evidence of burns, rot, disease, seasons that were wet, seasons that were dry and so on. You began to realize on a holistic scale, that you are part of an unfolding story. The trees, the animals, the plants, all it is part of a story that you are smack in the middle of.

You also realize, as the author points out, that your ancestors understood this too. When I hunt, when I track, when I spend time in the woods it brings me a little closer to their stories. I become entangled in the webs around me, in the unfolding story of the land, sea and sky.

As the author points out, this also included the stars and planets, the Cosmos on a much wider level. Tracking in this way becomes a means of connecting with the past, being in the present, and looking to the future.

That is what my animism is all about, building those connections across time and space. It is learning the stories that bind us to the past, telling the stories in the present, and wondering about the stories of the future. The telling of these stories shapes reality around us, and shapes our position in those stories. Tracking is just another way of learning a story, of what has gone before.

“Hunting especially in a survival situation requires a basic familiarity with tracking. Since then though I’ve put in dirt-time in service of a less particular goal: a glimpse of the unique and specific creatures that live around me. Getting familiar with my non-human neighbors is driven by an open-ended desire for relationship. My wish to track now doesn’t feel so different from my impulse to connect with the spirit-world. After all, the all-but-forgotten root of religion is in part the multifaceted need to relate to something both deeply “Other” and also deeply, invisibly, woven into our lives. The necessity of securing food and resources and the communion with the invisible and holy are not by definition distinct endeavors. In much of human history they have been complementary— they’ve even required each other. The first spirituality had to have been practical.”

As I have mentioned before on this blog, hunting is not something I just do as a practical endeavor. It is deeply interwoven with my spiritual practice, and I love that the author brings up this point; that the first spirituality had to have been practical. It had to work, and there was not a clear seperation between the mundane and the sacred.

Hunting is so much more than wanting to fill the freezer. It is how I connect with the spirits of nature around me, it is how I connect with my ancestors and the Huntress I work with. Hunting and tracking is kind of like following in the footsteps of the sacred, that also has the very practical aspect of putting food on the table (on occasion). It is a deeply connective and affirming practice that weaves me into the Greater around me.

It is, as the author states, a communion between past, present, and future.

It is more than that as well, because it also connects you with the greater cycles of life and death, of nature itself around you. I have followed the game trails, tracked my prey through the great mixed-Oak forests of my homeland, and I learned their habits, learned their stories, and in some cases even gave them names. After all this, after taking part as two dancers in the story of life, that is when I had to decide whether or not to take a life I had come to love.

This is something deeply spiritual, and hard for me to put into words. It is one of those deeper Mysteries of my practice that has to be experienced to really understand. In addition, the moment you decide to release that arrow (I’m a bowhunter), that is when the real work begins.

Suddenly, you are connected to the realms of the Dead. With your ancestors, who stand behind you, and with the ancestors of the prey, who stand before you. All will hold you accountable for what you have done, and that in my experience is where the real work begins. I am accountable for what I have done, and obliged to do everything I can to smooth the transition of Dead to the keeping of their ancestors, which return them into the cycle of life and death. I have to calm the confused spirits, and treat the remains with respect. I have to answer to Ancestors of the slain, and return their fallen kin to their keeping.

These webs go deep, and suffice to say that I am still trying to navigate my way through those entanglements.

To take a brief tangent, it is a common perception among non-hunters that hunters are just barbaric ruthless killers. I’m sympathetic enough to agree with that perception in some cases. By my own standards, and the deep animistic way I approach hunting, some hunters do qualify as barbaric under my view. When you frame hunting as a sport, as a game, as a means to rack up points in the “top predator game”, in my opinion you have missed the point.

Life and death is not a sport. Treating it that way has a noted lack of respect, and denies the deep spiritual practice that our ancestors knew some well. In some way, I think all hunters experience a little bit of that, but the degrees of difference between spirituality and sport are wide enough to float an armada through.

That break, that sundering is an important point in and of itself.

Which brings us back to the article;

“For some, following the tracks left behind by a game animal and courting the divine by following a trail of psycho-spiritual signs exist along the same spectrum of activity, both characterized by a sort of sympathetic allurement. Keeney comments later on how this practical spirituality has been largely lost on the modern world: “As we broke the bonds of relationship and interdependency with one another and disrupted our ecological matrix, our link to the divine mysteries became all but lost.” “

From the first time the “animism” as a concept entered our lexicon, it has been littered with this kind of ideology. Animism as a form of indigenous spirituality was immediately categorized as something “primitive” people did, and not something that had any place in “civilized” society. The entire concept is littered with the relics of imperialism, colonialism, and Eurocentrism.

But the ideology goes back even farther than that, at least as far back as biblical times if not further. The idea that mankind, and our “civilization” is somehow separate and dominant to all others. We have tried our best to sever our connection to nature, as “moderns”, and in the process we have sundered away connections that once defined us.

It is so important we rebuild those bridges, and see ourselves once again as part of nature, as part of a wider natural community. It is imperative think, if we are every going to heal those disrupted matrixes that were once so essential to our lives.

Returning again to the article;

“Tracks glow darkly in the snow like icons, triggering some ancient seeker in us, an invisible string pulling us forward. I often hear an astonished “I could do this for hours!” exclaimed by folks from a wide range of backgrounds who are just learning basic wildlife tracking techniques—confirming that it is far more than just the master trackers among us who are tugged by such strings. The metaphor of the invisible string is well known in some old tracking traditions. Keeney quotes a Bushman hunter explaining the metaphysics of spiritual ropes or strings in the context of tracking:

The ancestors and God can attach a rope to you. When that happens, they are able to pull you to where you need to go; that’s the secret behind our ability to track. A Bushman hunter feels something tapping on his arm when it is time to hunt. It is the ancestors pulling a rope that is attached to our arms. The other end is attached to the animal. We simply follow the pulling of the rope, and it takes us to a kudu, giraffe, eland, warthog, or gemsbok.”

There is an important metaphor here that made me want to jump out of my seat and go “yes!”. The metaphysics that I have talked about so many times here, the ideas of strings or “filaments” that connected everything in the Cosmos.

It is not unusual for me to call up my gods, ancestors and spirits when I hunt. It is really strange to think about how deep of a connection I am building in that moment, when I am tracking. I am creating bridges with the ancestors, the gods, and with the animal I am tracking. I am building relationships and connecting with the past in a deep and profound way, a spiritual way that is like going headfirst underwater. The world changes, and your perception shifts. It’s trance work, in a way, reading the trails and learning their stories…

As the article points out, tracking is way more than just following the physical prints;

“Tracking, it turns out, is nothing less than an epistemology: an ecological way of knowing, a green hermeneutics. It is not just a way of seeing “how things are connected,” it is a discipline that redefines and expands what connection and relationship even is. As such it seems to have something to add to nearly every realm of experience and knowledge—an interdisciplinary skill to the core. It blurs modern distinctions between art and science, because it is at once a contemplative practice and also an empirical and quantitative study. It blurs our distinctions between fact and myth because though it is a deterministic study in physical cause and effect, it inevitably lends itself to forming personal relationships with spectral creatures, telling stories about them, and dreaming dreams about them. Eventually, beings are “known” through their tracks, and archetypes emerge. These archetypes have great value to an ecosystem as ways of mapping the world so that a near infinite number of facts can be codified and passed on to future generations. Tracking is unequivocally poetry and it is also unequivocally ecology—at least as long as we humans are involved—and both dimensions are necessary, two halves of a whole. Tracking always leaves room for Mystery with a capital M—it’s impossible for it not to. Whereas in their most dogmatic guises religion protects Mystery sometimes too fiercely, and science perhaps does not defer to it enough, tracking stands innocuously in the middle as the symbiosis of mystery and knowledge.”

Tracking, as with hunting more generally, is a kind of Mystery that is hard to clearly articulate. It is a liminal practice, where art & science, the mythic & the mundane start to mix and swirl in a many unexpected ways. It is a space where stories are told, and where stories are heard. It is in that un-time, in that un-space that the forest and the world around you becomes alive. You are part of that story, apart of that liminal unfolding as you follow the paths that have been led for you.

Hunting in general has greatly influenced my spiritual practice for this very reason. Being in the woods has, being in that liminal place, that is where the real work can happen. We have tried too hard as “modern” people to seperate our “society” from the “natural”. We cut ourselves off from the sacred when we did that, and we lost a whole part of ourselves in the process. We failed to understand that we are part of that great natural community, and the moment we started to separate ourselves from that, it was like cutting away our senses and our limbs.

We are blind and floating in an empty world.

Returning to the article now;

“Ecologist Dennis Martinez points out that unlike the “biocentric” Euro-American model of conservation and land management, a model that can be drawn from Indigenous methods of land management is what he calls “kincentric”; it neither idolizes nor alienates humans, but cherishes and enshrines the alliances among and between humans, animals, plants, and the earth.”

This is both timely and curious that this idea would resurface here. I am working my way through a shamanic intensive, and I am currently in the classwork on Totemism. Now, as I have said before “totem” isn’t a concept I use much at all in my own practice, partly because it doesn’t feel relevant, and partly because I am wary of cultural appropriation. “Totem” is a corrupted version of an Ojibwa word, and I am frankly just not comfortable using it.

That said, in a grand sense the idea behind Totemism is of one’s “kinship group,” that is the close community of human and non-human nature with which we are surrounded. That is what we are talking about here, the realization that nature is part of ourselves, part of our community, and even part of our “kinship group.”

As I have said on this blog many times, we are related to every thing on this planet in some measure. As such building those relationships and alliances is vitally important not only to our spiritual lives, but also to the future of this planet. Reintegrating ourselves within and as part of nature is a vital change in spirit that is required to fully build a sustainable civilization.

If you want to think of it in a very wide sense, the Cosmos is our distant ancestor, the planet Earth is too. My home state of Michigan is an ancestor too in a very real sense. I was born here, the minerals and soil are in my bones. The plants and animals are part of my flesh, and the Great Waters that surround this state are part of my greater community, they are part of my spirit too.

We need to be giving back and being good members of that community.

I’m going to give the last words to the article;

“The words conservation and ecology, as we use them in the Western sense, don’t exactly fit what Indian people did or do with the land. It was their livelihood, which depended on reciprocity. Thus, the trees were not seen just as trees, they were also seen as relatives. The trees are relatives and other species are relatives and they watched you all the time.

In this view, feelings of solidarity, love, and belonging that traverse the boundaries of species and beyond are not luxuries or overly sentimentalized notions; they are functions of ecological interdependency and are integral to survival. Seeing as the majority of beings on our planet (as well as the rest of the universe) are non-human, we can expect a limited view of reality if we aren’t welcoming efforts to soulfully relate to them. Let us see beyond the jaded (and polarizing) caricature of the nature-hippie who escapes from civilization to the forest. If the intention is not to leave but to enter, not to hide but to belong, relationship with the non-human brings back deep value to human community and enriches culture. This is loud and clear in nature-based spiritualities, but it is also buried in our most dearly held stories…”

It is time to tell those stories once more.

Thanks for reading!

Sources/References;

http://writtenriver.com/tracking-as-a-way-of-knowing/

Interanimism: A Brief Commentary

Hello again folks,

As a brief note, WordPress is telling me that today is my sixth year anniversary here at The Thought Forge. Hurray! It has been a pleasure writing for you all these years, and I hope to continue to do so into the future. We have nearly 930 email followers on this blog, and I thank each and every one of you for this journey so far! Now, onto the meat!

There have been a lot of great articles out recently concerning animism and relationships. Today I would like to take a more in depth look at one of the them Interanimism By Mathieu Thiem. It has given me quite a lot to think about, and I want to dig a little deeper into the article itself.

Now, I will not be examining the whole of the article, as certain aspects I still want to sit with for a while. Naturally, if you want to read the whole of the article in context, links are provided. I invite you to take a read before reading my own exploration.

Let’s start with a quote from the article, to really set the stage for what I am going to be talking about here;

“By intra-action I mean that each act upon an object is effectively co-creating both the actor and the object because it introduces a new parameter of relationships. The relationship of interbeing between the two are co-constitutional, they act as feedback loops that mutually affect one another.”

To put this into my own words, intraction is the mutual relationship between two actors/agents. Take for example to people in a close, intimate partnership. Say two lovers for example. The relationship is the whole construct for both the individuals themselves, as well as the greater connections between them. It is not a neither/or kind of thing, but a “and” kind of relationship. The two lovers are co-creating their reality, through cooperation, and conflict as well. The constant push and pull, the constant integrated creation of of thing greater than just two individuals.

This extend well beyond our persons as well, to include all of our relations to other humans as well as our environment. I will be detailing this more in a future post, with graphics and everything; mostly because this kind of thing is better illustrated with visuals.

The primary topic of this blog has been animism for a long time; using Harvey’s definition that the world is full of persons and that life is lived in relationships with others. The principle of intraction is that those persons are involved in a delicate relational dance that co-creates their reality. As Clifford Geertz put it so perfectly;

“that man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun, I take culture to be those webs, and the analysis of it to be therefore not an experimental science in search of law but an interpretive one in search of meaning” (Clifford Geertz, from The Intrepretation of Cultures)

That is really what my animism is all about, a search for meaning. That meaning, following the spirit of the article, is something we co-create with others in relationship. Returning to the article;

“This brings us to Interanimism, the notion that existence is mutually inspiring and co-creating itself, animating its interbeing through intra-active relationships. Rather than seeing the world filled with particulated essences or souls, what would reality be like if we saw all matter as an emergent function of relationships and agency as the phenomenology of entanglement?

This really gets to the heart of animism as I understand it. I have said it dozens of times here, but I understand it in the way Graham Harvey articulates animsim; “that the world is filled with persons and that life is lived in relation with others.” Actors and agents (persons) are more than simply individuals in isolation, but a web of beings in a network. More than just defined by their individuality, they are defined by their connections to everything else. It also implies that by focusing on simply “atomist” perspectives, we miss a lot of the picture. As Thiem points out;

“Rather than committing reductionist fallacies, we must come to observe matter as it really is, an emergent phenomenon of relationships. An atom is a construct of its relational existence…”

Now, I wouldn’t necessarily call it a reductionist fallacies to look an individual entity is terms of itself, but it would definitely be missing the bigger picture of networked connections. As humans are relatively complex beings, it would be the equivalent of trying understand the whole of my being from just a single cell. While it is true in a large degree that you could extrapolate my DNA and get a decent view of my person, you would miss all the memories, all the experiences, the scars, and the resulting personality that has emerged from all those interactions; with others as well as with my environment.

You could get a decent portrait, but the image and person are not the same.

By just looking at a single cell of my being, you would miss the bigger picture; and that is an important point in and of itself. In addition, if you just look at me as an individual, you would also miss the fact that I am defined in relationship with others. You really see me as a whole when I am with my partner, my friends, or in any kind of network with other beings. You are seeing me in the totality as a whole, instead of an isolated partial. I wouldn’t be who I am today without all those intra/inter-actions.

Thiem continues with;

“Every time an intra-action occurs, there is a resulting degree of agency emerging. As more intra-action and entanglement occurs, the emergent agency becomes more attentive, more aware, more enlivened. This is applicable to all interbeing within our existence. Agency is not a special or rare occurrence, but it is rather the basic emergent function of ALL EXISTENCE. That is right, awareness seems to be the norm rather than the exception.

Agency is just as much a physical phenomenon as it is a mental one. The two are the same thing.”

While I myself tend to communicate more plainly, I have expressed this thought in a dozen different ways. “The world is filled with persons” can be simply restated matter itself is agential. The Cosmos as a whole, from the smallest scales to the largest, can be said to have some measure of agency. While I do think there are limits to nature and scope of that agency, it would still seem to be a basic characteristic of existence.

Consider for a moment the nature of the atom itself, as one of the many parts of the cosmic whole. Even taken alone, there is a basic agency to the atom. It seeks out a “balance”, combining itself in numerous forms in order to achieve that. That basic drive to balance out internal charges (positive protons and negative electrons) denotes a basic form of agency. No, it is not the kind of agency found in larger and more complex forms, but an arguable simple agency all the same.

Throughout the history of the known universe, we see this basic agency. Smaller forms coalesce into more complex and diverse forms, and from that eventually comes the basics of life as we know it. We as humans are the result of countless generations of constructive agencies.

This is not to say that this is a linear progression of simpler to more complex, but like biological evolution itself, it is a process of starts and stops. Entropy resists the larger and more complex forms, which then breakdown and rearrange before becoming something new.

As such, as Thiem points out, our reality is a process in motion. Not a linear track, but a complex of becoming…

Now, I want to move this discussion from the most broad to talk about a few specific points for a moment. I have said many times that I am an animist first, but also consider myself to be a polytheist by proxy. This means simply that there is plenty of room in my cosmology for those elusive beings we tend to refer to as gods.

I have struggled for a long time to clearly articulate how I view the gods. I have tried to describe them in the past as collective beings, as cumulative ancestors, and as the “spirit of a group”. Thiem has done a service by putting into words what I could not;

“Gods are not separate disembodied ideals, but are instead the emergent agencies from the vast networks of ancient entanglements within which we are embedded. Gods arise not as archetypes, but as the long lived intellects of ecosystems and bioregions. As a bioregion, or any massive networked system for that matter, begins to experience multi emergent synergistic qualities that are unique to its paradigm, the agency of that system becomes more capable of awareness and attention. It develops its own paradigmatic memory and it seeks its own teleodynamic harmony.”

Gods can be all the things I just mentioned, and have tried to articulate in the the past. As emergent agencies, they can be the collective agency of a tribe, or a city. They can be collective agency of an entire region or ecosystems, a co-creation of human as well as natural persons. We as humans can well be part of those emergences, as we tell our stories of the gods, and so add to the network that is the agency of the very same beings.

In the nature of synergy, the whole becomes greater than the sum of its parts. We may see the spirits in individual trees, but the god is in the forest.

Puts a whole new spin on the old cliché of “seeing the forest through the trees.”

(One of my photos.)

As I have already said, my animism sees the world as full of persons, of agents. But most common discussions of animism revolve around the idea of spirits, or not necessarily corporeal persons. As such, any animism must make space for these kind of beings, and Thiem here also articulates this idea well;

“Spirits are the liminal agencies of the rocks, the trees, the rivers and all the other functionaries of the more than human world. They are not themselves astral or ethereal, but are physically present in the waking dream of the land. They are nature’s diffractive agencies, emerging out of the entangled relationships of various enlivened constructs.”

There is really not a lot I can add to this. This means that every rock, every tree, and every rivers may well be agencies in their own right. Through the networked intra/interactions of all of the parts, a new whole emerges. This is especially true of natural ecosystems, which often work in cooperation, as well as sometimes in competition. In addition, Thiem’s article also touches on the ancestors as well;

“ The ancestors are the culminating influences of the past embedded onto the present, all their gravitational waves pushing us forward into the expanse of the universe. The ancestors are not ghosts that pop up like some spooky ethereal being, but are the past actions of our ancestors imprinted upon the informational matrix of our reality which produces an emergent agency capable of communicating with the living, forever affecting and inspiring our future.”

This gets at the heart of how I have tried to articulate how I understand the ancestors. They are no longer embodied, but they are still around, embedded as they are in the intangible. They are, as Thiem put it, “imprinted upon the informational matrix of our reality.” This is a good way to conceive of the disembodied generally. Thiem goes on to add;

“…Because of this, the ancestors were not an aspect of dead beings that somehow haunted us in the present, but rather to be an ancestor was to be alive as a different state of being. And this state of being was a kind of imprinting or embedding into the eco-sociological matrix of their places. So when you died you literally became the land, the flora and fauna etc. Your stories inhabited the land and were still very much a part of what made it what it was.”

In short, we are more than just our bodies. We are our stories, our relationships, our very real and formed relationships with the land, the water, and the sky. We are part of the air that we breath, and the water that we drink, so too they are part of us. The minerals from the earth compose our bones, and the fruits and flesh of plants and animals form our tissues. Even when we die, and those tangibles die away, our stories and our memories live on. This is how I understand the ancestors. But they are not just mere memories either, but agencies as well. People, in a different form.

As Thiem points out, the land too can sometimes also be counted as a ancestor. That my story is part of the land I call home. This makes me wonder a great deal. You see, I am a native of Michigan, and this is a curious land indeed. I was born here, and this land has been part of me since the very beginning.

I will have to look into this line of thought a little deeper, but I am sure the Native Americans of this region knew this well. On three sides of this state, we are bounded by the largest freshwater lakes in North America. Nearly one-fifth of the worlds freshwater resides at the edges of my state. This is something I will have to consider more, perhaps in a future post.

There is some much to Thiem’s article, and for the sake of brevity I am not going to explore anymore here. As such, I give the last words to Thiem himself.

“I call on these mythic beings because I am seeking to commune with the reality of our interbeing. I call on my ancestors because I must become aware of how deeply we are affected by them, even though they have changed form. In many ways their death hasn’t stopped their meddling in our world, to the point where one must wonder if they ever really died at all. Their wisdom and stories are embedded into the fabric of our reality and this has vast implications. I call upon the Gods because I know that my human agency isn’t enough to understand the desires of the land…”

Thanks for reading!

Sources/References;

Interanimism

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symbolic_anthropology