Black swans, white geese

Being the odd one out, the unexpected one, is always hard. It was hard for my father, who reviled tourism as an industry that would help the economy in the Highlands of Scotland. He tried hard to work with landlords on understanding how better to allow natural systems to regenerate. In doing this, he was attempting to work with what there was, not, Chris Packham style, with what there ‘should be’. He didn’t agree with the social and class system in the Highlands of Scotland. He couldn’t take the snobbery and hierarchies seriously. That made him very different from his family. It also made him a challenge to work with, because he didn’t want to stand under anyone else’s umbrella, to use a Larkin phrase. He stood aside, and often criticised how policies were put into place.

In a more tolerant society, he would have been treasured for what he had to offer. He might even have been helped, very gently, with the ignominy of addiction, which dogged him all his adult life. Imagine a world in which someone who is very bright, is honoured for coming up with unusual but brilliant solutions. Who persuades a friend, a landowner, to put aside a huge swathe of land to start a Wildlife Park, where all the animals that have ever lived in Scotland are housed in huge open spaces with a view to educating the public, and the possibility of rewilding being discussed. The compromise was the bear enclosure, which he hated. It was supposed to mimic a cave on the side of a mountain, but it was cruelly small, and one looked into the pit – it was really a bear pit – at a foreshortened view of once magnificent animals reduced to crick-necked neurotics.

I wonder if this pattern has shaped me, too. An outsider, seeing more clearly what colour the water is in the bowl in which we swim. I’ve said ad nauseum that I don’t think we’re free to become who we become, except in one very profound sense: we have the capacity to reflect. This, to use a word I loathe but am forced to use, is mindfulness. I prefer to call it awareness. It is the capacity to see what we are doing, as though we are watching ourselves from without. But how we watch ourselves is vital. If we see ourselves with the eyes of despair, or desperation, shame or resentment, we will chain ourselves even more tightly to the inevitable patterns of destruction that already threaten our survival. Instead, somehow, we have to find a way to see what we are with compassion, and even with love. This is not sentimental twaddle. This is what our survivability depends upon.

This week, I spent time with the family of someone I love. Again, I realised that none of us has a family in which all relationships are fair, or kind. We all struggle with the woes of blame and resentment, guilt, fear to the point of paranoia, and anger. The difference between those who survive and thrive and those whose lives become more and more embroiled in point scoring and who has what is searing but salutary. We need to learn the old truths and we need to keep tolerance alive. Going to England after a long absence, it struck me how tenuous the silver threads of tolerance are, how much we rely on the kindness of strangers, which is really just an extension of our attitude to ourselves. This is what I will continue to write about, and discuss, as the ecological emergency manifests itself in all the various aspects of all our lives.

I have been incredibly lucky to have had the opportunities I’ve had, the access to education, and to the beautiful places and people I’ve known as home and family. Success has very little to do with recognition by others: it comes from recognising what one has, and using ones own skill as creatively and generously as possible. I need to remind myself of this. Often. Especially as the days shorten and I am forced to reassess my own situation once again.

An extract from my latest book: Econnecting the yamas and niyamas in the ecological emergency

I haven’t written specifically about yoga for a while but today, all that will change! Last year I started to focus on how I could integrate yoga philosophy and practices with what I had been working on as a philosopher interested in responding to the ecological emergency. This year, I’ve decided to create a book out of the course I wrote (and rewrote, and rewrote). This has involved further rewriting (and looking up more information, and more rewriting). I thought I’d post an extract from each chapter as I go along. I did this, a long time ago, with my thesis (see my other blog at http://www.gamanrad.wordpress.com for more on this, though I’ve been gradually culling and cribbing from there so it’s a bit of a graveyard). Here we go:

The job of this book is to unspool the threads of the sutras so that we can understand the instructions they might give us for how to act in the ecological emergency. This emergency is causing huge destruction and we must find ways to reduce the harm and suffering it is causing. We cannot do this by forming angry groups and blaming others for the predicament we are in. Of course for most of us, the suffering is largely created by the culture of consumerism, and the greed and exploitation on which that is based. So in a sense, we are all experiencing the results of those actions. But in another sense, none of us are separate from those actions. This is not because we want to be a part of the greed, the focus on wealth and money, and all the cruelty and violence that is behind consumerist societies. It is because we were born into this and are part of it whether we like it or not. 

I wrote this book because I have spent a lifetime angry and frustrated at my own inability to escape consumerism and all its ills. I don’t blame capitalism, necessarily, although we will talk about the problems with greed and possession and what we can do about it. The problem with wanting to change others is one I will come back to again and again. Capitalism is the idea of acquiring wealth, and the original idea of wealth was that which makes you well, which is not a bad thing. But we will explore how yoga sees wealth, and what is really the chief thing we need to focus on. This is interesting and not what you might expect. 

Eventually, I realised that I could never run away from consumer society, or escape from any of the greed and violence that haunts our species. This is because what is really happening is not what is happening on the outside. This is where yoga can prove really useful. If you begin to deal with the world as though it is the thing you are looking with, not the thing you are looking at, then something rather strange begins to happen. 

Since we are in an ecological emergency, it seemed very important to me that I write this book now. After many years of attempting to get this message across, I have also realised that I teach what I need to learn. In a way, this is another aspect of the idea that what is going on inside me is what I experience outside me. Perhaps, then, the person I am really writing this book for is myself.

I have practiced yoga for over forty years now. I don’t have a perfect body or a perfect life, and nor am I enlightened, except in the sense I want to share here. What I know is that if we can understand ourselves and the world as interconnected, we can change the way we act. Not only will this change the ecological emergency into an opportunity for our species to give back, it will make our lives much richer and more meaningful. Yoga is not a practice that takes place on the mat, though we can practice there too. It is the way we act and feel during the other 23 hours of the day, the way of being in the world. 

You may think I am using the word yoga differently from how it is normally used. I do practice asanas, which are physical exercises, but I also practice yoga in how I live. That is what I want to get across. Yoga is a way of living. In the ecological emergency, it is a way of living that has the potential to change how we deal with one another and other species and systems. 

Before I launch into the exploration of the sutras, and the yamas and niyamas in particular, I want to say one more thing about myself. It is really an extension of what I said earlier about the inside and the outside. Lots of my research has been in the area of systems theory, which is the idea that we are entirely interconnected, from a quantum level to the level of quarks or stars or galaxies. When we affect one system, be it a virus or a bat, a brother in the bedroom or a boardroom CEO, or even our own sense of self criticism and despair, we affect them all. This is why I use the phrase ‘the ecological emergency’ instead of climate change, biodiversity loss, pollution, and so on. The ecological emergency is in us. It is us. We need to deal with it from the inside out, rather than from the outside in. And therefore it is an amazing and terrifying instance of a yoga lesson, where all the work takes place on the inside, and the outside transforms itself in tandem. This is why I think we need to understand the real power of yoga, and the sutras, particularly the yamas and niyamas, are a great place to start. 

Climate change is part of the ecological emergency: here’s what you can do

A GUIDE TO THE BODHISATTVA’S WAY

OF LIFE

by

ACHARYA SHANTIDEVA

Translated into English by Stephen Batchelor

LIBRARY OF TIBETAN WORKS & ARCHIVES

DHARAMSALA

1979

The Benefit of the Awakening Mind

There is nothing here that has not been explained before

And I have no skill in the art of rhetoric;

Therefore, lacking any intention to benefit others,

I write this in order to acquaint it to my mind.

The climate crisis, nature on the run, wild fires, mass extinctions, bees and other pollinators dying, pollution, clear felling, rainforest destruction, mass migration, land becoming desert, drought, famine, war, political extremism, and your own grief, rage, depression, sense of isolation and loneliness. All these are interconnected. 

Blame someone else: oil companies, other people, stupidity, ignorance, them over there, immigrants, poverty, disease, the Virus. This is not the answer. 

What can we do?

We can focus on our own lives. We can see three spheres of relationship. This may feel inadequate but that’s the rub, the trick is to recognise the trick. Them, over there, is an illusion. It is all happening NowHere. 

Look at what we are. We emerge into consciousness from the mesh of our existence as children unable to choose where we were born, who brought us up and how, where and whether we were schooled, what happened to us that shaped the next thing, and chance happenings that threw all plans into the air. 

The Bhagavad Gita says that we are like puppets, the strings pulled by our emotions (e – out of, from, motio – movement, to move from, or to be moved by), which are in turn shaped and stimulated by memories, fears, desires, we develop according to our personal pasts. 

The most powerful thing we can do is realise that this is happening. That very realisation does two things: it makes the gap between our reactions and our noting of our reactions broaden into a space of awareness. It makes space for awareness real. Secondly, realisation is awareness. What is awareness? If we are all a part of the universe (or multiverses, as seems more likely), and I don’t see any reason to believe we are not, then we are the universe, the multiverse, the system, aware of itself. We are existence that is aware of existing. 

Why is this important? Because now we are in space, aware of the reflective nature of awareness. It is like holding a mirror up to a mirror, but we can now choose at least one thing: we can choose how we look. We can choose the manner in which we become aware. This is vitally important because if we choose to notice with kindness, then we shift how we interact. Instead of allowing ourselves to become embroiled in hatred and blame and inflaming the situation, we can respond, lovingly. As we heat the planet, so the situation becomes more inflamed. Responding is not the same as reacting. It is considerate, and allows for more effective solutions to arise. Effective solutions exist. In Thompson and Norris’s brilliant book, Sustainability, there is a recognition of the importance of balancing one’s own books first. This is very like the biblical proverb about the plank and the splinter: first, sort out your own life. We have no idea how powerful this idea is. If we can, individually and through mutual support, sort out our own lives, then we can connect with others and create a movement that will change the trajectory of the human species. This is what we can do. The problem is, will we? Will I?

I will. I am doing exactly this. I need your support. You have mine.

The Glore river’s silent scream

The Glore river in County Mayo is a place very close to my heart. I have spent time at the Glore Mill and walked the labyrinths. I have stood and looked for fish in the river and seen the flickering shadow of a tail, the dappled shape still as a stone and then gone, the sudden joyful flash and splash of a fish rising for flies in the evening.

On Friday, there was a major incident at the local waste water treatment plant. The river turned white. The next day, they say over 500 fish were found floating belly up in the river. I would guess (as would Ray Cooper, the man who owns the mill, and who is currently away but has seen this happen once before) the number is closer to the thousands. On top of which, of course, invertebrates, small fish, birds and mammals alongside the river at the time – voles, rabbits badgers, otters – will also have crawled off to die. Herons and wagtails. Nesting sand martins. We will not count the water boatmen or the eels. We don’t see them. We know so little about the systems that interweave with the water. We sluice our waste into the river. It was an accident. We, the public, don’t know what was released into the water. Will we ever? Will there be an investigation? And if there is, will we be privy to the results, in language a layman can understand?

Human error. Or a glitch in the system. A fault in the programming. And the white substance? Bleach is not white but anything that is a strong disinfectant or cleaning agent tends to have a bleaching element. I’m guessing because I don’t expect to hear the truth. I hope I’m wrong. Here’s what I hope happens:

I hope there is a spokesman from the plant who tells us exactly what happened, when, and by whom, in language we can understand, without obfuscation or passing the buck. I hope that this person then announces that the CEO and the entire board of Irish Water, ultimately responsible for the effective running of the (largely state owned) company, is fired, and imprisoned. And fined. I hope the person responsible for this makes a full statement on what they did and why and that they and any personnel in the plant itself are investigated and if they have gaps in their awareness of what the implications are of what they have done, they be rapidly demoted and that the next people who fill these posts have some serious training in the systems they affect when they screw up.

I hope that the minister for the environment in Ireland, Eamon Ryan, makes a public announcement that the river will be restored with money from Irish Water’s fine. I hope that money is made available to Ray Cooper who has been a custodian of the river for 25 years. A lot of money. And that the waste water treatment plant at Kiltimagh is replaced with a system that Ray himself approves.

I do not have much hope that any of this will come to pass, and I am breaking my own commitment to myself that I will respond to events and not react. This is my grief speaking. But sometimes one has to let grief speak.

The Glore river. Glore means voice in Irish.

Update on AntiVaxxers, Conspiracy Theorists, and Yoga

I’m getting more interested in how Yoga is presented. But I’ve also discovered that there’s a lot of misinformation out there around Yoga and its sister ‘science’, Ayurveda. Now, I’m not a big fan of Ayurveda (I’m doing a course right now, as it happens). In researching the post I put up about antivaxxers (scroll down) I thought a bit more about what is wrong with teaching yoga as anti-science. I came across this. https://www.science.org/news/2020/10/fraud-nation-critics-blast-indian-government-s-promotion-traditional-medicine-covid-19. I need to do my asana practice now but I’ll come back tomorrow. If you can’t read the article, recall only this:

In a press release, IMA demanded Vardhan produce evidence of the treatments’ efficacy; if he’s unable to do so, the association wrote, Vardhan is “inflicting a fraud on the nation and gullible patients by calling placebos as drugs”.

Yoga does NOT imply 5G conspiracy theories or anti-vax

An interesting article in today’s Sunday Times https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/from-asana-to-antivax-how-yoga-is-helping-to-spread-conspiracy-theories-9k27n5kh2 has prompted me to respond. I’ve heard a lot of yoga teachers jittering with fear around Covid, 5G and conspiracy theories. First, I was patient with them: fears need ears and love to reassure them. I don’t judge. It’s easy to dismiss someone who says they think we’re being jabbed with poison. I don’t like taking medicines or injecting things into me and the normal timeline to create a vaccine is three to five years. This has been a rush. It’s also true that Big Pharma (a traditional target of yogis seeking to recommend the benefits of food as medicine) is making trillions out of the push to vaccinate the human population. The untold story of animal testing worries me too. Taking macaques from the wild just so humans, who have done so much damage to the planet, can survive, makes me want to weep.

But I want to be clear on this: I’m vaccinated because I don’t believe I have a choice if I want to work and travel, as I have to do if I’m to support my partner and family. I also don’t believe that I’ve been jabbed with poison, or a tracking device. A nurse injected me with mRNA tozinameran in Mallow in May and again in June. The vaccine is a nucleoside-modified mRNA encoding a mutated form of the full-length spike protien of SARS-CoV-2, encapsulated in lipid nanoparticles. In very simple terms, my body has been tricked into believing I have Covid, and it has produced antibodies which increase my chance of fighting infection if I get exposed to actual Covid. That’s it. It’s got some risks. I don’t like messing about with my body’s immune system because it’s been good at doing its job on its own so far. But I did a cost benefit analysis and on the whole, I don’t think there’s an argument. I would be foolish and selfish not to have had the jab. If I lived alone in a bee loud glade, maybe. In Ireland, travelling for work and family, no choice. I’m grateful that I am somewhat protected from a virus that has come about through our putting other species under too much pressure. Where did it come from? I don’t know. But I don’t believe that it was released by an evil genius to kill us. Human incompetence is more likely. We like to hide it, but the greatest feature of our species is our ignorance. I include myself in that. 

Yoga and conspiracies

OK, my good friend told me that I should shorten this, and now I’ve lost the earlier (rather brilliant) bit on Yoga and conflict, how we face conflict, how yogis have faced conflict in the past (think Arjuna, and dealing with one’s dharma). But I can’t find the draft and I don’t think it’s so important that I’m going to spend a lot of time worrying about it. You’re all grown up (probably, and if you’re not, well done for getting this far!). And you can make up your own minds.

Listening for a change

This was obviously a title for an earlier version that I managed to lose, but it’s also the title of a great book I read when I was collecting oral testimonies of refugees. Refugees have been through a huge amount of trauma because people stick to their ideals above all else. Give me practical philosophy every time. Give me inconsistency and a recognition that we are all full of contradictions. Give me self compassion and patience and a willingness to integrate, and to look for common ground even as I recognise my own unique stance. Good luck. Be kind. Never give up.

I teach corporate clients too

I can target corporate clients by shifting how I offer my work so that there’s a growing awareness through the meditations I offer of possibilities to do good through corporate work. You are not the enemy. There is no them and us. There is only enmeshment and the potential for all of us to live enlightened lives, which almost no one does all the time, but we can all do a little bit more. That means more compassionate attunement, learning to let love do what needs to be done, self compassion and small steps in relationship building, as well as small steps in shifting how we treat the more-than-human world. I would love to record meditations or talks or asana practices based on this and I’m sure there is a market out there … let me know if this is something you’re interested in!

The IPCC, the ecological emergency, and the local scene in North Cork: wising up is what we need to do now

Here are the choices. We can not believe that the climate will have any impact on north Cork, that the weather’s pretty unpredictable in any case, and that therefore there’s no point in doing anything. People who refuse to believe that climate change is happening fall into this camp. It’s easy to denigrate this approach but it’s also remarkably common, and in a sense, fully understandable. After all, if you look out of the window right now you’re probably seeing weather that is at least related to weather you’re familiar with. The climate hasn’t suddenly gone from temperate to desert.

We can get depressed and angry that we can’t do anything meaningful, that reusing plastic bags and attempting to cut down on travel are tiny acts that are almost irrelevant when you look at the huge military operation in Afghanistan. We can think that “we might as well be phoning” as N’s father used to say – meaning that nothing we do makes any difference at all. We can blame other people for the way things are and withdraw into our own safety zones, taking comfort in food or alcohol, sex or even violence. Not caring.

Or we can realise that what’s going on is inseparable from us. We’re in it. We can stop thinking about things as separate systems, and that means we can stop talking about climate as though it’s separate from biodiversity. Atmosphere is affected by terrestrial and marine systems. Both are affected by human attitudes. We have changed the world by what we think about the world, and by how that’s caused and causing us to act in the world.

Now we’ve understood how we’re involved, and what makes a difference – our worldview, our way of seeing our involvement as part of the problem and part of the way of dealing with the problem – let’s go back to a more detailed look at the problem. What will happen in north Cork, according to the IPCC report? We don’t really know, is the first answer. Professor John Sweeney of Maynooth University says that the climate in the west of Ireland, and probably in the north, will likely become wetter, stormier (‘warmer, wetter, windier’). Climate in the south and east and perhaps the midlands will likely become drier, or at least with more extremes of drought and flooding. The coastal counties will experience more erosion and more coastal flooding.

None of these happen without affecting terrestrial (including waterways) systems. So we need to put these pieces of information together. Firstly, we need to recognise our interdependence and the interdependence of these systems. This is because along with the fragmentation and collapse of natural systems (think insect populations, desertification, deforestation, urbanisation) including climate systems (think the North Atlantic Drift which impacts climate in Ireland and is losing energy, carbon parts per million in the atmosphere leading to trapping of heat in the atmosphere), we’re also seeing the fragmentation, through attitude polarisation, of human systems. Attitude polarisation is the tendency for extreme positions to be held by people who then refuse to tolerate people with other points of view. We can see that happening in response to the IPCC report, as farmers, foresters and businesses on the one hand face citizens, activists and politicians on the other (these groups are not mutually exclusive and there are many fragmentations within them). What can we do? The same thing we do when we see natural systems collapse: realise they’re not separate from us. What’s happening over there isn’t separate. So we need to take the same approach: synthesise. Find ways to build connections between different groups. Recognise that some farmers are activists, that business people can come up with solutions that activists might not have thought of. We have to build community resilience by building tolerance from a multi-faceted approach.

So what might happen in north Cork as a result of this report? We could see more flash flooding of rivers and unless we deal with slurry and sewerage systems differently, we will see more pollution, reduction in biodiversity loss, and a deepening crisis. Flooding of rivers affects soil health and human habitation, roads and transport, energy consumption (blackouts when power lines get shorted). Erosion through drought then flooding means upland soils become more depleted. We can replace waste treatment systems with composting systems and begin a radical change in how we see and deal with waste.

Here in north Cork, farming needs to change but farmers need to be listened to and supported, and those who have understood and embraced a mixed model need to be supported more, and to become ambassadors for change. We need more hedgerows and more mixed farms. We could reintroduce sugarbeet as a crop, get farmers to mix tillage with livestock, reduce the herd. Reduce the herd, but also mix species, bring in more biodiversity, since we don’t know which kinds of animals will better adapt, rely less on housing animals in the winter, create more windbreaks, more natural shelter. Farmers have been told since the 80s to pull up hedgerows and cut down trees, to create prairies of their lands. Now we’re asking them to increase biodiversity fast. It’s in their interest but they’re often heavily invested in equipment that’s unsuitable for the mixed model of farming that’s coming to the fore. So they need help. Financial help. Plant a diverse variety of mostly native trees, and think about having tree crops as well as vegetable crops. Why are we buying onions from New Zealand?

The councils need to change. Politicians need to change. We need to see understanding of interconnection, and action on all fronts, from energy to transport to education to waste management. Everything needs to be examined for how it fits into the whole pattern of how we live, not just in some niche place where we have a nice closed community, like on a huge estate, or in a religious order’s demesne. These can be examples, though. Bridges not walls is what we need.

We need to change energy use and biogas might be a source, windmills everywhere is not necessarily the best long term solution, solar panels on all rooves is much better. Data centres (not yet an issue here in north Cork but a threat nevertheless) need a major rethink: who benefits? What are they really for? Likewise offshore energy from windfarms outsourced to private companies that don’t and won’t create any benefit for the Irish population – not a local issue, perhaps, but one that needs thinking about.

Forestry needs to change. Growing native trees on uplands protects soil health and allows for the regeneration of long over-exploited systems. Fewer sheep. Fewer deer. More space for wildlife (deer have no natural predators in Ireland – we could reintroduce them but that requires further thought…).

There’s no ideal answer to the report. Fear doesn’t help. Denial doesn’t help. Talking to one another and pooling resources, realising that we all have a bit of information and knowledge that might help, that creating community is creating resilience. This matters. We have to respect citizen science, we have to respect the rights of groups to protest, but ultimately things will get worse until and unless we recognise that we need to work together, with all groups. Fragmentation is the cause. Knowledge is only part of the answer. Knowledge is science, technical responses which are great for short term fixes. We need more than that. We need a shift in attitude, in worldview, and ultimately we need to become wise, which means agreeing to common ground on what we value. If this is community, patience, courage, love and freedom, values that are key to our survival, then we can’t limit them to the species. We have to see and respect the intelligence that’s inherent in systems. We still have time. Not much, though. Wise up!