Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Spiritual Ecology: The Cry of the Earth
    Spiritual Ecology: The Cry of the Earth
    Spiritual Ecology: The Cry of the Earth
    Ebook358 pages5 hours

    Spiritual Ecology: The Cry of the Earth

    By Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee, Sandra Ingerman, Joanna Macy and

    5/5

    ()

    Read preview

    About this ebook

    The first edition of this book fostered the emergence of the "Spiritual Ecology Movement," which recognizes the need for a spiritual response to our present ecological crisis. It drew an overwhelmingly positive response from readers, many of whom are asking the simple question, "What can I do?" This second expanded edition offers new chapters, including two from younger authors who are putting the principles of spiritual ecology into action, working with their hands as well as their hearts. It also includes a new preface and revised chapter by Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee, that reference two major recent events: the publication of Pope Francis's encyclical, "On Care for Our Common Home," which brought into the mainstream the idea that "the ecological crisis is essentially a spiritual problem"; and the 2015 Paris Climate Change Conference, which saw representatives from nearly 200 countries come together to address global warming, including faith leaders from many traditions. Bringing together voices from Buddhism, Sufism, Christianity, and Native American traditions, as well as from physics, deep psychology, and other environmental disciplines, this book calls on us to reassess our underlying attitudes and beliefs about the Earth and wake up to our spiritual as well as physical responsibilities toward the planet.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherIndependent Publishers Group
    Release dateSep 1, 2016
    ISBN9781941394168
    Spiritual Ecology: The Cry of the Earth

    Read more from Llewellyn Vaughan Lee

    Related to Spiritual Ecology

    Related ebooks

    New Age & Spirituality For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      Deep Ecology

      Aug 20, 2014

      Deep Ecology
      3 min read

    • Article

      Heart To Heart

      Jan 24, 2023

      Heart To Heart
      4 min read

    • Article

      Wardruna

      Dec 31, 2020

      Spirit-walking and deep mythology with Norwegian animists. At first glance, you’d be mistaken for thinking that Norway only represented black metal, burning churches, restaurant prices that will make you drop your dessert spoon, and, naturally, Vikin

      2 min read

    • Article

      Joanna Macy

      Nov 23, 2021

      Joanna Macy
      2 min read

    • Article

      Biophilia

      May 6, 2020

      Biophilia
      4 min read

    • Article

      Joanna Macy Reconnects

      Nov 20, 2019

      Joanna Macy Reconnects
      10 min read

    • Article

      Guided by Plant Voices

      Apr 29, 2020

      Plants are intelligent beings with profound wisdom to impart—if only we know how to listen. And Monica Gagliano knows how to listen. The evolutionary ecologist has done groundbreaking experiments suggesting plants have the capacity to learn, remember

      12 min read

    • Article

      Art In The Anthropocene

      Mar 12, 2019

      Art In The Anthropocene
      7 min read

    • Article

      Becoming Animal

      May 6, 2020

      Becoming Animal
      11 min read

    • Article

      Deep-Rooted Communities

      Jun 1, 2021

      Deep-Rooted Communities
      4 min read

    • Article

      The Listening World: Neurodivergent Voices for a More-Than-Human World

      Apr 8, 2020

      This week I was video chatting with Meghana Junnuru, one of my non-speaking autistic students, and she typed: “We will not get back to normal. We will only get back to natural.” Living in Minneapolis, I am graced with a slew of regional parks and nat

      16 min read

    • Article

      Life, Loss, And Connection

      Jul 20, 2021

      Life, Loss, And Connection
      4 min read

    • Article

      BOOKMARK THIS read…listen…stream

      Oct 18, 2022

      What Deep Listening Taught Early Christian Monks—and What it Can Teach Us Kim Haines-Eitzen • Princeton University Press Most of us likely think of deserts as barren with no redeeming value. Not so for Kim Haines-Eitzen, who finds a rich soundscape t

      5 min read

    • Article

      Faith For Troubled Times

      May 18, 2021

      Faith For Troubled Times
      4 min read

    • Article

      Acorns and Octavia

      Nov 25, 2022

      Acorns and Octavia
      10 min read

    • Article

      Joyful Wandering

      Jan 18, 2022

      Joyful Wandering
      4 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for Spiritual Ecology

    5/5

    4 ratings0 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

      Book preview

      Spiritual Ecology - Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee

      Acknowledgments

      PREFACE TO THE 2021 REPRINT

      THIS YEAR’S REPRINT has given me the opportunity to revisit my final chapter. In the eight years since Spiritual Ecology was first published, the climate crisis has continued to accelerate, temperatures rising, floods and fires increasing, seas acidifying and polluted with plastic, biodiversity threatened. This global crisis has now come to the forefront of our collective awareness, with young people crying out for a future being stolen, for climate justice and the living Earth, even as carbon emissions continue to rise. But within this global crisis lies a still unacknowledged spiritual crisis—our forgetfulness of the sacred nature of creation. Despite Pope Francis’ 2015 encyclical, Laudato Si’: On Care for Our Common Home , the depths and centrality of this spiritual crisis remain largely unacknowledged. Our focus remains on scientific data and carbon emissions, clean energy and the possibility of a technological fix, rather than the quality of consciousness that created this tragedy. Therefore in rewriting this chapter I have decided to focus on this element: how to regain the foundational awareness that belonged to our ancestors and is still held by certain Indigenous Peoples. I hope that by understanding the nature of the sacred, and reconnecting to a traditional way of knowing, we can help to bring our world back into balance, and restore a spiritual connection between humanity and the Earth.

      —LLEWELLYN VAUGHAN-LEE

      Inverness, California

      March 2021

      HEARING THE CRY OF THE EARTH

      Preface to the Second Edition

      WHEN WE FIRST published Spiritual Ecology: The Cry of the Earth in the autumn of 2013, the understanding that there was a spiritual dimension to our ecological crisis was still a fringe idea. The mainstream of environmental discussion and activity was focused on science and technology, politics and economics. But then in the spring of 2015 a remarkable document was published that compellingly reframed the issue for millions of people across the world. Pope Francis’ encyclical, Laudato Si’: On Care for Our Common Home, calls for us all to see that the unprecedented destruction of ecosystems we are visiting upon the Earth is rooted in urgent spiritual and moral questions, and requires from us a spiritual and moral response.

      Pope Francis chose to be named after a saint who loved and protected creation—whose life was grounded in love for all of God’s creation, and who saw all creatures as his brothers and sisters. In this powerful and evocative encyclical, Pope Francis speaks of the Earth as our Sister, Mother Earth, who now cries out to us because of the harm we have inflicted on her. For Pope Francis, as for his namesake in whose voice he speaks, the idea of the Earth as a living being whose cry we can and now must hear is not a fringe or new age idea; it is a reality we must respond to. The suffering of the Earth is as real as the suffering of the poor on whom the burden of this crisis falls most heavily; we must, he tells us, "hear both the cry of the earth and the cry of the poor. The earth herself, burdened and laid waste, is among the most abandoned and maltreated of our poor."

      The encyclical bears witness to this unprecedented destruction of ecosystems. For Pope Francis, the abuse and the violence of the way we live—which create symptoms of sickness evident in the soil, in the water, in the air and in all forms of life—are moral and spiritual issues, urgently requiring that we recognize the consequences of, and changes required in, our way of life. Science and technology are vital to understanding and finding ways to relieve these physical symptoms of our unsustainable civilization and the deep global imbalance it rests on. Economic models can illuminate how painfully they will affect the poorest among us, and help devise strategies to counter those effects. But technology is often presented as the only solution, and this the encyclical contests. Technology proves incapable of seeing the mysterious network of relations between things and so sometimes solves one problem only to create others.

      The encyclical points us instead to the deeper moral and spiritual ground in which the crisis is rooted, the ground of the soul. The well-being of the Earth is not separate from the well-being of our souls, the encyclical makes clear; to care for the Earth is to care for the soul. This is the deeper perspective Pope Francis offers, and it suggests an even bigger shift in approach, a more radical reframing. Rather than a problem to be solved, Francis says, the world is a joyful mystery to be contemplated with gladness and praise.

      How can we reclaim the inherent mystery that belongs to all of creation while living in a throwaway culture that has covered this wonder with waste? How can we return to a magical world we have made toxic with our greed and desires and our addiction to consumerism? How can we reclaim our sense of relatedness with the Earth and the vital work of care for our common home?

      The signs of wonder are all around us, from the simple mystery of a sunrise to the laugh of a child. So too are the signs of desolation we have created—the rubbish we scatter on our streets, the toxins in our water, the species we have depleted. And amidst both the beauty and the desolation is the cry of the Earth, the suffering of this most generous being who gives us life and sustains us. If we can hear Her cry despite the clamor of distractions that bombard us, we can begin the work of returning to what is sacred and whole, to that connection that unites us all. Echoing the teaching of St. Francis, the Pope writes, Everything is related, and we human beings are united as brothers and sisters on a wonderful pilgrimage, woven together by the love God has for each of his creatures and which also unites us in fond affection with brother sun, sister moon, brother river and mother earth.

      Love is the most powerful force in creation, and it is our love for the Earth that will heal what we have desecrated, that will guide us through this wasteland and help us to bring light back into our darkening world. Love links us all together in the most mysterious ways, and love can guide our hearts and hands. And the central note of love is oneness. Love speaks the language of oneness, of unity rather than separation.

      And if we truly hear the cry of the Earth, feel Her suffering and pain, our hearts will open. When I read Pope Francis using this same phrase—the cry of the Earth—tears came to my eyes; I was overjoyed that something so basic and yet so essential was now being recognized. Her suffering does not belong to another, but to the very core of our own being, where we are one with the Earth. This cry touches deeply within us: the soul of the world meeting our own soul, restoring the sacred ground of being, the interbeing we have with the Earth and all life.

      And central to this connection is love, for, in the words of Pope Francis, Nature is filled with words of love. Towards the end of his life, another prophet of our need to reconnect with a sacred Earth, Thomas Berry, spoke of love as foundational to this work, and of how we must all participate now in the repair of our planet.

      This book is a small offering of love to help us reclaim the tools known to our ancestors that can help in the work of repair, of reconnection, that will bring our planet back into balance. It speaks with the voices of many different traditions, but with the single note of love for the Earth and the knowing that Her cry has begun to be heard.

      —LLEWELLYN VAUGHAN-LEE

      Inverness, California

      December 2015

      Introduction

      THE EARTH is in distress and is calling to us, sending us signs of the extremity of its imbalance through earthquakes and tsunamis, floods and storms, drought, unprecedented heat. There are now indications that its ecosystem as a whole may even be approaching a tipping point or state shift of irreversible change with unforeseeable consequences.

      And some of us are responding to these signs, hearing this calling, individually and as groups, with ideas and actions—trying to bring our collective attention to our unsustainable materialistic lifestyle and the ways it is contributing to ecological devastation, accelerating pollution, species depletion. And yet, sadly, much of this response still belongs to the mindset that has caused the imbalance: the belief that we are separate from the world, that it is something out there, a problem we need to solve.

      The world is not a problem to be solved; it is a living being to which we belong. The world is part of our own self and we are a part of its suffering wholeness. Until we go to the root of our image of separateness, there can be no healing. And the deepest part of our separateness from creation lies in our forgetfulness of its sacred nature, which is also our own sacred nature. When our Western monotheistic culture suppressed the many gods and goddesses of creation, cut down the sacred groves and banished God to heaven, we began a cycle that has left us with a world destitute of the sacred, in a way unthinkable to any indigenous people. The natural world and the people who carry its wisdom know that the created world and all of its many inhabitants are sacred and belong together. Our separation from the natural world may have given us the fruits of technology and science, but it has left us bereft of any instinctual connection to the spiritual dimension of life—the connection between our soul and the soul of the world, the knowing that we are all part of one living, spiritual being.

      It is this wholeness that is calling to us now, that needs our response. It needs us to return to our own root and rootedness: our relationship to the sacred within creation. Only from the place of sacred wholeness and reverence can we begin the work of healing, of bringing the world back into balance.

      This book is a collection of responses to the call of the Earth. It is not offered as a solution to a problem, because the world is not a problem; it is a living being in distress. The signs of global imbalance—the tsunamis, the destruction of the coral reefs—are not just physical symptoms. As Thich Nhat Hanh writes, these are bells of mindfulness, calling us to be attentive, to wake up and listen. The Earth needs our attention. It needs us to help heal its body, damaged by our exploitation, and also its soul, wounded by our desecration, our forgetfulness of its sacred nature. Only when we remember what is sacred can we bring any real awareness to our present predicament.

      The voices collected in this book sound different notes in response to that call, offer different ways of being attentive, of remembering what is sacred.¹ Each in our own way, we need to return to our ancient heritage as guardians of the Earth, so that we may once again be present here, holding the Earth with our hearts and souls as well as in our minds and hands.

      Each of these chapters can be seen as a different way of describing a journey, one we must make now, from our soulless, materialistic wasteland to a land rich in meaning and sacred purpose, which knows the name and place of all of its myriad inhabitants. On this side, where our world stands now, we each live our separate lives, isolated within our individual, anxious self. On the other side, we feel the patterns of interrelationship that support and nourish us, and can commune together as a single living community; we feel the mystery and magic of a world full of sacred meaning and purpose. It is only when we stand on this other shore that we can hope to heal our world, to help it to become free of this nightmare of materialism that is destroying its fragile and magical beauty.

      The chapters of this book offer a range of different perspectives on the awakening needed to make this journey. We hear from Chief Oren Lyons, the Faithkeeper of the Turtle Clan of the Onondaga Nation, whose words carry the authority and knowing of one of the present wisdom keepers of the land, turning our attention back to the primacy of natural law; from Father Thomas Berry, the original voice of much of our present understanding of spiritual ecology, expressing sadness at the failure of the European settlers of North America to recognize the magnificence of the land and the spirituality of its peoples, and our desperate need to regain our sense of wonder and reverence; from Zen Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh, urging us to wake up and look at the signs the Earth is sending us of its distress, and to cultivate a new way based on kindness and compassion. We hear a variety of perspectives from the Buddhist, Celtic, Christian, Native American, Persian, and Indian traditions; we look through the lens of systems theory, Native American sacred lands, the use of the imagination, the sacredness of food, the world of the archetypes, and a new story of a living intelligent universe. We hear the voices and visions of an African chief, a farmer and beloved poet, a Franciscan monk, a Catholic nun, an American shaman, an Indian physicist and activist, a wilderness guide, and others as well.

      Finally, in this new edition I include the voices of a younger generation, those who have heard the cry of the Earth and are called to put into action the principles of spiritual ecology. After the publication of the first edition of this book, many people responded with the simple question, What can I do? A woman growing up in the middle of New York City, whose upbringing was shaped by the devotional bhakti traditions of India, and a Diné (Navajo) woman who turned down a graduate degree at Harvard to return to her land and, in her own words, learn to plant corn, have each answered this call with their heart and hands. Their words carry the passion and intention of those who are drawn to work for the future, who have recognized the dangers of our present culture and felt between their fingers the soil that needs to be remembered as sacred.

      As the editor, I am deeply grateful to all those who have given their voices to this collection of responses to what is a spiritual as well as a physical global crisis. In different ways they all articulate the same message: a need to regain our natural spirituality, the spirit that belongs to nature. Only when our feet learn once again how to walk in a sacred manner, and our hearts hear the real music of creation, can we bring the world back into balance.

      And at the same time, between these pages there is also a warning—sometimes articulated, sometimes more hidden. If we remain forgetful of the sacred in all of life and do not redeem our split between spirit and matter, our planet will become more and more out of balance. As its soul is starved of our spiritual connection, life as we know it will begin to fall to pieces and die. This is already beginning to happen in a small way, but we do not know how fast it will accelerate, when we will reach the tipping point. We urgently need to reclaim our guardianship of the physical and sacred world. We need to remember why we are here. To quote Wendell Berry:

      The care of the Earth is our most ancient and most worthy, and after all, our most pleasing responsibility. To cherish what remains of it, and to foster its renewal, is our only legitimate hope.

      —LLEWELLYN VAUGHAN-LEE, EDITOR

      Behold, my brothers, the spring has come; the earth has received the embraces of the sun and we shall soon see the results of that love!

      Every seed has awakened and so has all animal life. It is through this mysterious power that we too have our being and we therefore yield to our neighbors, even our animal neighbors, the same right as ourselves, to inhabit this land.

      TATANKA IYOTAKE, SITTING BULL

      Faithkeeper of the Turtle Clan of the Onondaga Nation, CHIEF OREN LYONS is responsible for maintaining the customs and traditions of his people, while representing their message to the world community. Here he speaks about the spiritual laws of nature and the absolute nature of those laws. We have to change our ways and stop making war against Mother Earth. We need to learn once again how to respect nature, to be thankful and enjoy life.

      Listening to Natural Law

      CHIEF OREN LYONS

      NEYAWENHA SKANNOH. It means Thank you for being well. The greeting in itself is something of an idea of how Indian people think and how their communities operate.

      What happens to you and what happens to the earth happens to us as well, so we have common interests. We have to somehow try to convince people who are in power to change the direction that they’ve been taking. We need to take a more responsible direction and to begin dealing with the realities of the future to insure that there is a future for the children, for the nation. That’s what we’re about. It is to our advantage as well as yours to be doing that.

      In the concern and in the fights that we face as a common people, as human beings, as a species, we have to get together and we have to do things like we’re doing now—meeting, sharing, learning. It all comes down to the will, what is in your heart. Indian people have survived up to this time because we have a strong will. We do not agree that we should be assimilated. We do not agree that we should give up our way of life. And that same will should be in your heart—the will that you do not agree that there be no future.

      I don’t believe, personally, that we have reached a point of no return in this situation that we’re in, but we are approaching it. The farther you’re away from a point of no return, the more options you have. As we move each day closer to a point of no return, we lose that day’s option. And there will come a point where we won’t have an option. There will be no more options. At that point, people will cry and people will carry on and so forth. But as Chief Shenandoah said to me, I don’t know what the big problem is. It’s too late anyway. I said, Uncle, what do you mean by that? Well, he says, they’ve done a lot of damage. They’re going to suffer. Kind of a simple observation, but true enough. There is a lot of damage done and people are going to suffer, but he didn’t carry out the thought that we were told a long time ago in the prophecies, that there was going to be a degradation of the earth. We were told that you could tell the extent of the degradation of the earth because there would be two very important systems to warn you.

      One would be the acceleration of the winds. We were told that the winds would accelerate and continue to accelerate. When you see that the accelerations of the winds are growing, then you are in dangerous times. They said the other way to tell that the earth was in degradation was how people treated their children. They said it will be very important to note how people treat their children, and that will tell you how the earth is degrading. So when you open up the newspapers today, they talk about exploitive sex and children, they talk about homeless children, and you can count homeless children by the millions. To us, it’s a severe indication of the degradation. Society doesn’t care.

      So we have to take those signposts seriously and begin to organize ourselves and do the best we can. We must gather ourselves together, give ourselves some moral support, enough to go home and start over and do it again, because everything starts at home. It starts right there with you. It starts with you and then your family. Then from your family it goes out, and that’s how you do it, that’s how you have to do it. It’s grassroots. You go back and you begin to inform and you get a little more excited and you get a little more severe in your positions and you begin to insist that people hear and listen. Education is important and how you educate people as to what we need is fundamentally important.

      The spiritual side of the natural world is absolute. The laws are absolute. Our instructions—and I’m talking about for all human beings—our instructions are to get along. Understand what these laws are. Get along with laws, and support them and work with them. We were told a long time ago that if you do that, life is endless. It just continues on and on in great cycles of regeneration, great powerful cycles of life regenerating and regenerating and regenerating.

      If you want to tinker with that regeneration, if you want to interrupt it, that’s your choice, but the results that come back can be very severe, because again, the laws are absolute. There’s no habeas corpus in natural law. You either do or you don’t. If you don’t, you pay. It’s quite simple. So what we have to do is get our leaders to change, and if our leaders don’t do it, we’ve got to raise better leaders, newer leaders. Raise your own leaders. Get them up there. It’s your responsibility to raise good leaders. Get them up there where they can be effective and change the direction of the way things are headed.

      I come from Onondaga, and from our country I remember when everybody planted. I stood behind one of those plows that you hooked behind a horse. And at my age, if you hit a rock, you flew right over the plow handle. It was hard to hold that plow. I remember that. It was hard work. Planting and agriculture are hard work. You have to get up early. You’ve got to do stuff, but it’s great training for character. It’s great training for becoming adult and becoming responsible, the best training really. But getting back to agriculture is hard to do these days. There will come a time, however, when only those that know how to plant will be eating.

      That’s not far off. So all of those Indian Nations that built whole civilizations around food and around thanksgiving and around spiritual law, those Indian Nations have to resurge and have to remind one another how important that is. All communities talk about prayer. We just don’t call it prayer, but we do it all the time. We sing songs, dawn songs, morning ceremonies, thanksgiving-coming-up-soon-songs. Thanksgiving all summer, all spring. All of our ceremonies are thanksgiving. We have thanksgiving twelve months a year.

      In the spring when the sap runs through the trees, we have ceremonies, thanksgiving. For the maple, chief of the trees, leader of all the trees, thanksgiving. Thanksgiving for all the trees. Planting thanksgiving. Thanksgiving for the strawberries, first fruit. Thanksgiving for the bees, the corn, green corn, thanksgiving. Harvest thanksgiving. Community, process, chiefs, clan mothers, everybody is there. Families are there. How

      Enjoying the preview?
      Page 1 of 1