Burning the hills, and deer democracy

Is there any point in contacting a radio show unless your view echoes that of a substantial sector of the population? What if you have a minority view that is, nevertheless, grounded in good empirical science? This is when things get interesting: you get trolled and berated, lampooned and virtually spat upon. What to do? Mostly, you shut up, because you get fed up, and depressed, and concerned about the safety and well-being of your immediate family. But sometimes the issues are so central to your own understanding of what is creating an increasing crisis in societies, here, and globally, that you decide to see if you can articulate it, without rancour or blame. Occasionally, you find your view is at the crest of an often tyrannously overwhelming wave of public feeling. Then you’re lauded for your bravery and honesty. Much more often, you prepare yourself for the inevitable, and sometimes damaging, flak.

 

Take the issue of ‘wild deer’ increasingly being blamed for entering and overgrazing agricultural land, for instance. They got a drubbing on the Joe Duffy show this week. There was little discussion of the rather interesting, and somewhat poignant, history of deer in Ireland (actually, there may have been discussion, but I became overwhelmed by depression at some point and turned the radio off). I did not hear any talk of species except a mention of Muntjac in reference to the the proposal to introduce the European Lynx: Muntjac are non-native; lynx are non-native (so said the caller), therefore introducing lynx was a bad idea. Hang on: lynx are historically native to Ireland, at least prehistorically. By contrast, there was much discussion of the damage they did to ‘our’ or, more often, ‘my’ land, and the monetary cost of the damage was mentioned frequently. So was the issue of responsibility. The farmer is responsible for his animals, so the argument went: why wasn’t the NPWS or Coilte responsible (for which I imagine one can read, financially liable) for the deer which must be, in some sense ‘theirs’ since they reside primarily on parks or forestry lands?

 

The answer is, of course, that wild animals do not belong to anyone, in the sense that farm animals do. If humans ‘own’ everything in a country (and the general consensus appears to be that this is the case: everything is either property, or a ‘resource’, including water, the surrounding seas, and even, one must imagine, for the purposes of allocating ‘responsibility’, the air) then humans must have laws that reflect how any ‘damaging’ aspect of their property’s activity is to be reined in, or compensated for.

 

Between listening to the radio, preparing the house for visitors, organising classes and doing all the other things one does to survive, I also came across references to the  burning of uplands in Ireland, a practice I recall was common enough on the heather moorlands of Scotland when I was a child, but something that, I’d thought, was generally seen as unproductive and, given how frequently dangerous fires get out of control, is now discouraged as ‘second best land management’ (Rackham). I was particularly provoked into thinking about humanity’s inconsistent thinking on the issue of responsibility when a news reporter described the second reason, after land management, for burning uplands as being fueled by the ‘primitive urge to light fires’, as though this was somehow excusable.

Let me make something quite clear: I have nothing against primitive drives, in principle. Sex is one. So, if we dig deep enough, is reciprocity. Both are deeply satisfying and potentially enriching. But primitive urges cannot always be acted on: sometimes, and especially if the urge is not reciprocated, we need to learn restraint.

Restraint is something of a paradox for people: on the one hand, we’ve managed to restrain ourselves enough to live in artificially dense communities, suppressing any primitive urge to make more space for ourselves at the expense of other members of our own species. On the other, as far as other species and ecosystems are concerned, we’ve shown little, if any restraint. This is largely because we see ourselves as being the ones who run the show (something I think is directly contraindicated by the longevity of the microorganisms that long preceded, and will long outlive us, and even by the species we like to  call ‘vermin’ or ‘invasive’ that manage to slot themselves into the niches we’ve vacated with sustained use of clubs, greed, roads, fences, noise pollution and fire. Many of our fellow species are considerably more flexible, more prolific, more tolerant and more enduring than we are).

However, if the story we tell ourselves about our mastery, our ‘god-given’ right to own and exploit all else as resource or property, were true, we would, surely, have an obligation to organise things to ensure their continuity, so we could continue to flourish and prosper. After all, we don’t just rely on the wild for the healthiest meat, the purest water, the clearest air, the finest biodiversity and the best experiences we can attain (although increasingly, a lack of access to these attainments must be replaced, and alcohol, drugs, and other acts of ‘consumerism’ do indeed numb discretion and provide temporary relief from the acknowledgement of their absence). We also depend on the resilience of systems and the graduation of the ‘solar flow’ that complex systems provide to allow all our technology and artifice to operate effectively. Sharp graduations, from tornadoes to sudden temperature drops to drought cause our human invented structures to buckle and collapse. This is not news. It’s well known, scientifically authenticated, empirical fact. But we choose to ignore it because it does not fit the story of mastery.

The most depressing thing about listening to the Joe Duffy show was not the call for culling, or the demand for responsibility. It was easy to appreciate the frustrations of the farmers who made the case that their livelihoods were threatened by the invasion. It was difficult to deny that a deer causes extensive damage to a vehicle if it is hit (hard to avoid the conclusion that the deer doesn’t benefit from the encounter either, but let’s leave that aside for now). What was really depressing was the lack of empathy or any attempt to look at things from a more objective perspective. We got no facts and figures on actual numbers, no details of the species involved, no review of the change, if any, in land use.

Cull, then, if you absolutely must (but use people who know how to kill humanely), and keep it to a minimum, until and unless you can do better research. Invest in research. Give the remaining deer somewhere to go, a let out clause. Somewhere undisturbed, and with clearances so they do not automatically seek to graze in neighbouring fields. Let them have some space, somewhere they can live and breed without causing a nuisance or being interfered with. Then do the research: learn about numbers, the history and movement patterns of each of the three species living here. The impact and extent of hybridisation. And disseminate the information, have workshops and discussions.

Oh, and when culling, how about considering distributing the meat to those who are most lacking in good nutrition – and who will not waste it. For minimal cost, and as an exercise in education and appreciation, why not consider having feasts in villages. Or special meals in prisons, or in homeless shelters.

Finally, consider reorganising how agriculture takes place, integrating routes or corridors into fields that deer and other migrating wild species can use. Culverts under roads need not be especially expensive, if the research into where to locate them has been properly conducted.

I talked about primitive urges earlier, and one final thing from Joe’s discussion stuck with me. Someone who had damaged their car by running into a deer said that deer ‘leap at the lights’. This seems unlikely. I used to go stalking with my father in Scotland and we had trouble even getting close enough for him to take a shot, let alone having them leap towards us for any reason. ‘Lamping’ is done, as far as I know, by driving around more or less in the dark and then visually ‘stunning’ the deer by shining a vast battery of headlamps directly at the animal. Blinded, they likely freeze long enough for someone to take a pot shot. The leap towards the lights is more likely to be a random attempt to escape than a counter attack, or evidence of attraction to light.

Somewhere along the way, we’ve lost touch with empathy for anything but ourselves (and even that is patchy) or for the animals we’ve ‘tamed’. Even they are liable to a kitch version of anthropomorphism – dressed up in human-looking clothes, accessorised, attributed human emotions.

The best farmers I know – the ones with the healthiest, most productive animals, the juciest fruit, the most succulent vegetables – are rarely rich. What they are is humane, and knowledgeable. There is knowledge in every rural community of Ireland, deep knowledge of the land, and the animals, domestic and wild, but it’s as counter-cultural, and as difficult to spot, as a thin eel wriggling upstream.

It’s unlikely that those with that kind of knowledge would venture to voice their concerns on Joe Duffy’s show. But those people are, in their own ways, more articulate, more in tune, and most importantly, more grounded in empirical knowledge, than any of the callers who demand yet more subsumation of the wild, that ‘it’ respect ‘our’ rules, without realising that, ultimately, we are utterly enmeshed in ‘it’.

A link to an article on WAW

http://www.irishtimes.com/opinion/wild-atlantic-way-it-is-big-and-bold-but-it-also-needs-to-be-sensitive-and-fair-1.2177054

See what you think.

NUI Galway to suspend Dr. Sheehy Skeffington’s email as outspoken whistle-blower refuses to be silenced

NUI Galway to suspend Dr. Sheehy Skeffington's email as outspoken whistle-blower refuses to be silenced.

Some thoughts on organising a Mensa event for the first time

One thing that has precluded me from taking part in Mensa events, which have mostly been ‘Meet and Eat’s, in the past, is the inherent assumption (which, I would contend, is exclusive) that we can all afford to participate in such an enterprise. Poverty precludes such participation and the vast majority of those of us with high IQ, just like the vast majority of the rest of the population, struggle to get enough money together to meet our basic needs and obligations, which makes booking a seat at a table in a restaurant an activity we undertake to mark only very rare events, if, indeed, at all.

Of course, I don’t resent those who can participate in such events: bon appetit! I say. But let’s stop the pretence that this is an inclusive invitation: it is not. Some recent events (particularly those organised by Ger Heaney), however, got me thinking about how it is possible to increase inclusivity, to make Mensa meetings much more democratic (including ones that look at Democracy in Action!). If we want to allow a much broader cohort of Mensans to meet, and, perhaps, even broaden the conversation to include thinking about what being a Mensan might mean, how we might contribute to supporting one another in the struggles and challenges we face, perhaps as a result of having high IQ, then we have to use our intelligence more creatively. This, by definition (I would argue), we are eminently qualified to do.

Being part of a society whose elitism is based on intelligence (if, indeed, intelligence is an elite trait: I’m not sure that it is, but it’s certainly undervalued, in my experience, in the broader society) should not extend automatically to an elitism based on wealth. Wealth and intelligence most certainly do not go hand in hand. High IQ and creativity, inventiveness, resourcefulness, fun, wit, curiosity, a thirst for knowledge and, I would argue, at least a potential propensity towards wisdom, on the other hand, almost always do.

This is my situation: I am underemployed, and, as a consequence, I am (relatively speaking) poor. I have been wealthy in the past, but various conditions, including, very possibly, my own IQ, caused me to ask so many questions, and uncover so much that was nonsensical, absurd, corrupt and unjust about the way that society and culture encourage a deliberate ignorance about how to live, that I could not but rock the proverbial boat, tipping myself out of the right to privilege, into a sea of indifference.

Attempting to change any system from within is nigh on impossible, according both to my brilliant supervisor, Barbara Harrell-Bond, and to the wonderful Leonard Cohen, who knows about these things. Shifting perspective, however, subtly alters the relationships between all other interconnections. No higher power will extricate us from the mesh we’re in, but we can use our wit and wisdom to change how we look at it, and alter our attitude, and that has powerful ramifications. By working out ways to meet that allow for more inclusion, more participation, we are using the very tools that have drawn us together in the first place: our intelligence, our capacity to problem-solve.

Four Mensans and various members of their families met to circumnavigate Erris Head over the weekend. None of us ordinary, all facing various manifestations of the same mundane and draining difficulties that come from living on the edge, in more ways than one. It was fun to have one of them to stay, and to spend a bit more time exchanging ideas, and seeing what light one person’s experience sheds on another’s.

Relationships are reciprocal. None of us benefits from precluding the participation or contributions of those who have something to share, particularly in a society set up in the name of all of its members. But it takes an effort to use our intelligence so that we find ways to ensure that there are opportunities even for those of us who are chronically strapped for cash, to bring what we have to offer to the table. We don’t want crumbs. We most certainly don’t want a scrap: we’ve enough and more to struggle with already. But we do want a place at the table, as fellow Mensans, having established our right to be here.

Isle of Saints, Scholars and Scoundrels: wisdom, intelligence and wickedness in Ireland, past and present

Ireland, the isle of saints and scholars, has a long history of thoughtfulness (despite the stereotyping by her powerful neighbour of her people as ‘thick’, uneducated, unwilling to be educated, doltish or otherwise unintelligent). Dr Tom Duddy explores this in his book, A History of Irish Thought. What’s interesting, though, is that scholarship is associated with intelligence, a kind of analytic, morally neutral quality of intellectual investigation, whereas sainthood is associated with a focus on ‘the good’: what acts will benefit us, as people, to further the common good?

But, as Nick Maxwell points out in his extensive study of wisdom and the campaign to encourage institutions devoted to learning to extend their remit, and focus on helping humanity learn to live more wisely, wisdom and intelligence are not entirely separable. In fact, it is our unhealthy obsession with research as a tool for profit in business, without any questioning of the basis for such a social and economic model, that has led us into our present predicament.

The tradition of linking wisdom with intelligence, or scholarship with a modern-day interpretation of saintliness (defined simply as the desire to benefit humanity, and the wider world, altruistically, or in recognition of our interconnectedness), has deep roots here in Ireland. Jonathan Swift in his ‘Modest Proposal’ was clearly pointing out the brutality of thinking without an accompanying sense of empathy. Beckett explores the agony, but also the necessity for honest acknowledgement, of living without traditional reference points, and how we still seek to reach for some connection, to make a noise within the absurdity and nonsense, that might mean something to someone else.

However, there are also many Irish examples of the collective, or individual, use of intelligence to undercut, or harm, communities or individuals. Eamon de Valera has a mixed reputation, as does Bono, with his (perhaps understandable) unwillingness to contribute to the tax coffers of the country (coffers that have been ransacked to benefit a tiny proportion of bondholders while the majority of contributors still bear the brunt of the national debt – something of an example of collective scoundrel-ism). Michael O’Leary has not necessarily created social cohesion or benefitted the environment, or even created job security for many of his employees, although his business model has certainly helped make flying more affordable. More seriously, there are no doubt many good reasons why those who joined religious orders became abusers, but the harm they perpetrated is an enduring legacy of horror and shame. No doubt you can think of other saints who were scholars, or scholars – or at least relatively intelligent individuals – who were scoundrels.

What of the future? What of current attempts to create a coherent strategy that will benefit all? Mostly, now, we think of this happening at the political sphere. But scholarship has an important role to play in creating  a thinking space for how to live. Scholarship is never neutral. There are always underlying frameworks, how the scholar imagines, consciously or unconsciously, the world to be, or the world as they would like it to be. An enquiry into how we can live not just intelligently, but wisely, is worth pursuing, even if the questions such an endeavour raises are difficult and controversial.

To see more of Maxwell’s work, go to http://www.ucl.ac.uk/from-knowledge-to-wisdom

Ordinary consumers are better job creators than high earners

The rich do not create jobs in the same way that ordinary consumers do. More equal societies create more jobs, because more people have relatively more money. More unequal societies create fewer jobs because most people can’t afford to buy more than the basics. Jobs are a consequence of a feedback loop between consumers and suppliers. Higher taxes need to be collectible through internationally applicable legislation that does not allow the super-rich to salt money away in tax havens.

A more equal society is a fairer society, but only if the super rich are not able to escape a globally applicable tax system.

Comments? Questions?

Gamanrad

The Gamanrad was a tribe that came to (invaded??) Erris from the Continent, probably in two waves, 1000 BC, and around 600 BC or perhaps a little earlier. They were a section of the people known as Fir Domnann. A few years ago, I began to see if I could network with a loose collective of people in Erris who were interested in ecologically mindful action – not just beachcleans, but deeper thinking about how we connect with this place, and what we can do to ‘tread lightly’, as Yeats said, on our own dreams and visions of the future. After some meetings, and with the agreement of the 20 or so people who came along (I advertised these meetings as widely as I could) we decided we would maintain a loose network, rather than form a formal group. I called the group Gamanrad, after this early tribe, because they developed a highly sophisticated culture, but left little trace, except stories and myths. If you want to be a part of this loose collective, if you consider yourself already to be a part, then please get in touch. The kind of things we think about are the status of a large portion of Erris as an SAC, and what that might mean; conflicts in the use of loughs, land and marine areas, and what might be done to respond to these; littering, burning, and other damaging activity, and how to address it; walking access and old rights of way; protection of species; native species restoration; and any other thoughts people have that they want to share. There is no hierarchy to this group. Anyone can be a member. All I would ask is that no one creates a hierarchy or tries to lead it. It has no ideology. It has no end. It is entirely means-oriented, which means it is the way that we interact that counts, each and every single time.

I completed a PhD at University College Cork, here in Ireland, and successfully defended the thesis last October. The thesis was in the field of Environmental Philosophy, entitled, ‘From respect for nature to realisation as agency in response to the ecological emergency’. The focus of the thesis is on the narratives and conceptual frameworks we use to understand our relationship and responsibilities to the ecological context, and on what prospects we have to shift these frameworks so that we respond more effectively, and mitigate some of the impacts that have allowed the ecological catastrophes we are living in to develop.

This site is a record of the thesis, and I am gradually updating it. This is because the chapters on this site don’t correspond precisely with the chapters in my thesis – they’re sometimes earlier versions, and gradually, I hope, will evolve into more precise versions of what I was trying to say in the thesis. I’d like to publish, eventually, but until then, I’ll work on this site. I’m also adding details of postdoctoral work and proposals. My personal situation has meant that I have spent the last 16 years living in an isolated and marginal area in the north-west of Ireland, having come here, originally from Scotland, via Oxford and Kenya, among other places. I was one of the last people who was allowed the privilege of conducting my doctoral research in Cork almost entirely independently, without having to attend formal workshops, or to complete modules. This means that I have a poor publication record, so I want to use this site as an opportunity (along with https://ucc-ie.academia.edu/lucyweirbinghammcandrew) to address that paucity, by publishing informally here and hopefully developing some interaction with people through comments so that I can hone my writing skills, and get more of a discussion going on the issues I’ve been working to understand.

Taking the next steps

Today is my conferral day. In Cork. But I am in Mayo. The simple explanation for this is that I cannot afford to go to Cork, to receive the parchment that says I have attained a doctorate. I was upset when I realised I would be unable to attend the conferral ceremony. I’d tried to save money, but I have two teenage kids, and very little in the way of an income, and a couple of weeks ago, I realised that my attempts to keep any funds aside were futile. So I resigned myself to the inevitable sense of defeat and depression that lurks at the edges of my awareness now, and I buoy myself up with the encouraging thought that I did it. I may not receive the applause. I may not get my photo in the paper. No one in the community I live in knows or cares that I went through the process of doctoral research, thesis-writing, submission to deadline, and viva examination. It means nothing to anyone. But in the end, that’s all any achievement is: a phantom. The real impact is in how I live my life, and interact with others, how I find ways to disseminate the results of my research to the many others out there who also care very deeply about how we are living, and the kind of impact we are having.

One thing I’ll be working on, along with looking for work, is organising this blog, and its sister blog, http://www.yogazazen.wordpress.com. I’ll see if I can make it easier to navigate, and I’ll trim some of the longer posts. I will post once a week, but I’ll make sure I archive material that’s older, so there’s room to manoevre, as it were. Please bear with me. I’m working on this without help. I live an isolated, marginalised life, partly because what I deem important isn’t necessarily what the vast majority deem important. But I will keep sending out this tone, this sounding, this cry from the far flung shores of Erris, so that, for those for whom these things matter, the signal will serve as a sign that even here, even alone, even unable to participate, the message is, keep going, the attitude of mindful self-awareness is the key to an enriched and enriching understanding of interrelationship.

So, I rededicate this website to those of you who, like salmon, wriggling against the current, and feeling your way back to your origins, your source. The site will cover the topics of ecological mindfulness, ecologically mindful activity, and realisation as agency. It will include proposals for postdoctoral research, as well as papers and reviews I have submitted for consideration by journals and conferences (and I will note when papers have been accepted for presentation, but I have not been able to attend the conference for lack of funding. I will also note when I have been published, and when I have been able to attend and present).

Publication is not my main ambition, although it would be easier to gain recognition and to take part in philosophical and perhaps political discussion if my thesis, or some version of it, were published. I don’t believe that making objects of our work should be the main focus for thinkers of any stripe. I’m much more interested in disseminating the work and engendering discussion, and, dare I say it, creating a shift in how we view our interrelatedness as individuals, communities, societies, and as a species.

I welcome feedback, although I would deeply appreciate it if you would couch your comments in terms that are mindful, considerate, balanced and show an awareness of the threads of experience and context that have led you to your perspective. I will aim to add a post once a week, on a Friday, so if you’re following this regularly, look out for a post then.

If your interest relates to the practice of yoga as a mindfulness practice, to meditation or to related practices, then please feel free to visit my other site, http://www.yogazazen.wordpress.com

With deep bows, as a sadder but (I hope) a wiser woman, I remain,

your lw

Thinking the (im)possible

What if the thing we think of as agency, the deliberative system of assessment and decision making, resulting in action, is entirely wrongly conceived? What if, in fact, this mistaken idea we have about what we decide to do is creating, and maintaining, a relationship with the ecological context that is increasingly, and now critically, destructive to the systems we depend upon?

I want to consider agency from a different perspective: agency as realization. Realization itself is not communicated through reasoning or even through language but through pointing towards an experience which must then itself be experienced. This is like experiencing (rather than thinking) impossible possibilities, including the possibility that by experiencing ourselves as explicitly realizing systems, at the time while the realization is happening, enmeshed within implicitly reactive exchanges, our response becomes a part of that dynamic. We become aware of what we are and this shifts everything.

Can we ever again ‘speak the language of nature’ (if we ever did, or if we do not still)? Of course, it depends, both on what we think of as the framework of our experience, within which all else is interpreted. Could this really be possible or would this just imply staring into two mirrors that reflect one another infinitely but never allow us to see outside what they are reflecting? If this is all that happens when we study ourselves, then we are not just enmeshed: we are entrapped. . If we are physiological organisms, then we are also genetically driven to desire more goods, to push back limits, to maximise our capacity to exploit ‘resources’, and so on, and no matter what degree of attention we pay to our activity, the railtracks of our DNA will dictate our direction. If this assessment is right, then being able to recognise our enmeshment is no more than an accidental evolutionary hiccup, and a tragic one at that, since it allows us to watch the uncontrollable acceleration of our demise while strapped to the engine that is driving it.

This is the nihilism that underlies a sense of hopelessness, a sense that there is no point in attempting to reverse or mitigate the effects of our catastrophic impact on the ecological context that supports and nurtures us. We can only gaze, terrified, into the very heart of our own darkness. There is no one to blame, and no Other to rescue us. We face the ultimate absurdity of our own condition, that of a creature doomed by its own nature. There is nothing, even, to fear, since fear would imply that we could do something to react against ourselves, but it is ourselves that are creating the conditions for our own destruction.

Going on a silent retreat, or isolating oneself, taking certain drugs or enduring a situation of extreme trauma, can all allow the fundamental horror of our condition to confront us. There is no escape. At this point, a kind of psychosis can take hold. We cling to anything, even if we know, in our hearts, that it is a lie. We repeat it like a mantra, willing it to be true: God Is! Or we turn the other way and embrace our destructiveness, wreck relationships, exploit to the maximum degree possible our context, rout it because at least, by increasing the pace of the destruction, we may, just for a moment, feel something, while also, of course, increasing the chances of it all being over, sooner.

Are these our choices? Denial, retreat into self delusion that never quite convinces us, but we sound the gong louder, sing the hymn with total force and focus, count the beads, whisper the prayers over and over? Or doomster-laden drives down the fastest lane to destruction, kicking against the petty attempts at civilisation, culture, community or any other endeavour that attempts to build while the ground is crumbling beneath our feet? What else is there? Humour, laughing into the dark, because the situation is wholly absurd and meaningless? The vaccuum that these possibilities create sucks us in and in any attempt to go beyond this level of understanding, we risk, insanity, anger, triviality or the great companion to exhaustive effort: apathy.

What happens if we manage to turn our understanding another way, if we see ourselves as within, and intimately elemental to, the situation we observe? What if we begin to understand that our capacity to understand, to observe, to realize where and what we are, is more than enough to shift our interactions? What if ‘just sitting’ is the strongest response we have? If we go on, through the vaccuum-black horror of nihilism, we find that we are delicately attuned natural systems, just as all natural systems are. We have developed with a capacity to live within those systems. We express autopoeisis, playfulness, creativity, vulnerability, from the moment we are born. We are curious, inventive, imaginative. We elude analysis. This is true not just of humans, of course, but this impermanent, dynamic, shifting animism exists throughout the universe. We are insubstantial, reliant on air, complete in our skins yet utterly interdependent, and with this extraordinary capacity for consciousness, for self-awareness, for realization. Most of our acts are unpremeditated, and even, to use Schelling’s word, unprethinkable. We surprise ourselves, if we take the time to look, with how unpredictable we are. Because consciousness is a quality that has emerged, like a gift, to mirror the universe back onto itself. The greed and yearning we experience to own, to fill the horror-vaccuum with whatever material or energy we can suction up, is the manifestation of our fear of what we are. However, just sitting and going through the realization of this fear reveals it to be a fear of death. We cannot kill death, however hard we try. We must find some way, without lies, without denial, without rage, to embrace, to radically accept death as the shadow that creates form and firmness. To realize is to sit with this acceptance, to embrace and honour ourselves, to recognise but not to exacerbate the flow of energy that both creates and, in the end, disippates us. We are no more destructive or creative than any other force in the universe. We are no more of an anomaly. We are mirrors of the universe and it is the mirror through which we understand ourselves.

This is the illuminating proposition that lies at the heart of realization as action. We do not need guiding sets of principles to know what to do. We need to know what we are doing, what is happening right now. We need to practice bringing our attention back, again and again, to the staying point of focus on the dynamic, moving moment. This is the practical necessity of our condition, and practical necessity precedes ethics, but ethics is an unnecessary complication, pushing the moment away, into an impossible, unachievable, utopian ‘then’. ‘Then’ all will be well. We never get to then but it creates the separation between heaven and earth.

Four hundred years of a narrative that analyses Nature into atomistic parts, classifying separate elements individually, has allowed us to distiguish, and construct, to include, and also to exclude, to the extraordinary technological and numerical advantage of our species. However, this is the same narrative that demands we see ourselves as exclusively possessed of souls, as having advanced to the head of the evolutionary ladder, and therefore as entitled to dominate and subjugate, steward or destroy, any of those we have named and numbered.

It is, therefore, time to review the context, to recognise that we are inside the results of interactions (climate change, biodiversity loss, habitat destruction, for instance) and they (pollution, radiation, modified food) are inside us. Instead of pushing the ideal forward, claiming that we are creating something that is to the benefit of all, we need to acknowledge that our so-called ‘progress’ has resulted in fewer and fewer succeeding in sucking more and more energy from the systems we all depend upon, to the extreme detriment of all the rest. We need to sit with, to walk with, this knowledge. To get moving again, we need first to be still. This is not a call for some Romantic return to Paradise. There was no such place, only the richly biodiverse roots of our ancestry did offer us more options, and the impoverished systems we now depend upon require our nurturing.

Just sitting is premoral. Just walking requires no thought about a right way or a wrong way, as long as it is done with the effort of full attention. We can cook, we can garden, we can even drive, speak, do business, and dream with realization. Isn’t it strange that we have had this capacity all along, that we already know how to live, just by watching ourselves, but that we have worked so hard to ignore our knowledge of what is going on? What is this blindness for? Why do we resist the understanding that is being whispered to us with every outbreath, that we belong, that we have the capacity to belong with skill, that it is a matter of practical necessity that we recognise our belonging as a gift, or a curse? The world is screaming at us to wake up. Our own bodies are groaning under the weight of this denial. Nothing that we do now matters, if we refuse to acknowledge the common ground of our experience.

How does realization in action manifest itself? It is a practice, in the sense that it is a way of living. It is also a practice, in the sense of a way of perfecting a skill. We practice watching what we already do, without judgement, without evaluation, or suggesting to ourselves that such and such was right, or wrong, good, or bad. We practice bringing our attention to our actions as we are undertaking them, to our thoughts as they develop and intensify, or dissolve and disappear. We watch our words with curiosity: you think you know what you are going to say, until you begin to listen to yourself speaking, as you speak, and then you begin to realize that what you are saying is a result of myriad threads of immediate and distant circumstances. The sounds coming out of you are echoes of others, reactions to subtle messages, physical and verbal, from your interlocutor, coloured by your sense of well-being (or disease), by your immediate environment, familiar or strange, by whether the sun is shining, or it is raining. All that is happening right now, all that has happened up to now, creates the words you use, the phraseology, the tone, the mannerisms that accompany the words. This, in turn, creates conditions for your respondent. In this infinitely complex set of interactions, it may seem impossible that realizing, in the sense of watching, and observing, understanding by gaining insight through watching, and also, therefore, creating space, the psychological distance of observation, can allow new possibilities to arise, a slight shift in your reactions, a microbeat of reflection before you find the words or activities rearranging themselves, playfully, into different patterns.

It is a matter of scale. We are taught that, in order to alter the ecological catastrophe, in order to respond, we need huge interventions, we need to fire rockets filled with chemicals into the atmosphere to generate clouds that will hammer down rain on drought-ridden regions. We need to understand ourselves from space, or by searching for life on other planets. Perhaps we need these interventions. Perhaps they will emerge as possibilities, even after engaging the effort of realization. But realization itself works on the tiny shifts in the patterns developing in individual human brains. Meditative practices alter the systems within the brain. We are not looking for stasis, or harmony, either internally, within the organisms that we are, nor in Nature, which we can neither ‘restore’ nor live ‘in balance’ with. Instead, we are recognizing dynamism, impermanence, interdependence, and that there is a flow, a way in which energy disippates and matter cycles, that benefits the systems upon which we depend, from the level of interpersonal relationships, to the level of the Earth’s systems (and, perhaps, beyond).

We can synchronise ourselves to the unfolding of these graduated flows of energy, to the pulses of increase, and growth, and decline, including our own demise. This recognition is useful when we are watching for practical, pragmatic responses that enhance the relationship between human and natural systems. Realization allows us to slow down the impact of the exploitative urge by slowing down our interventions, making exploitative activity less profitable. We can create benefits to leaving land undisturbed, to allowing systems to self-regenerate. We can create policies that allow governing bodies to buy up small tracts of land so that would-be exploitative individuals or companies know that they are going to have to deal with legislation, instead of just appropriating vast areas for exploitative operations.

We are not the deliberative creators of change that we have been taught to believe we are. Our agency, our capacity to respond, lies entirely in our capacity to realize, to sit with, to observe, what is going on in and around us, and over which we have no control until and unless we realize our situation. When we consider our relationship with the ecological context, a context that is in critical condition, we do not change the context through confrontation or aggressive tactics that only engender more fear and hatred. Instead, we need to use the effort of paying attention to what and how we act, and this, in turn, allows us to shift. Three attitudes are elicited through realization. A kind of solidarity is created when we become increasingly sensitive to the particular details of our own circumstances, to the pain and suffering we have already endured, and to the pain and suffering that, with a bit of imagination, we recognise as having been endured by all others. We can extend this compassion beyond sentient creatures by understanding that interdependence implies that there is no clear boundary between what is responding and reacting and aware of itself, and what is responding and reacting, and is not aware of itself. We have endured pain and humiliation, simply in our attempts to survive. Given the information we had, we did the best we could. Acknowledging this is liberating: we need not blame ourselves for the impacts we have had, on others, or on the wider ecological context. We may feel deeply saddened by the catastrophic impact these survival attempts have had. However, with the benefit of a hair’s breadth space, the space at the end of the breath, we can see how it might be possible, both because, and in spite of, our situation so far, to feel compassion for the state we are in. Like watching the struggling attempts of ants to regroup after an invasive attack, all our efforts have been to come into accord with the flow of energy and the cycling of matter. When we see this, we may not find we can suddenly free ourselves from addictive patterns, or resolve all the broken features of our relationships. However, we are suddenly and immediately in the only position from which active change can take place and that is a powerful step.

The view of ourselves I have illustrated here depends on a post-Darwinian view of nature. This means that events are interconnected, rather than unique or discrete, and that rather than laws being absolute and universal, natural laws are probabalistic, and hence, always to some degree open to unpredictability, themselves impermanent, and dynamic. We humans, within this paradigm, offer a responsiveness that straddles the interactions going on in and around us, and our capacity to observe them. ‘Now’ is not a moment but a wavering boundary, just as realization is not agency in the traditional sense of a determination and ability to act. Realization is grasping the entire trajectory, all at once, and in doing so, loosening its inevitable progression, causing it to waver and open into a shifting set of alternatives, as wide as the realization itself. Our agency depends, therefore, on the effort we are prepared to make to pay attention, to observe, and to open, through shifts in language and in focus, to shifts in how we interact.

What we attend to is – and has to be – based on what we already do. We begin to see the grounds, and the framework, that shape what we include in consideration now. We cannot help but tell a story to ourselves about what and why certain elements of our context are worthy of inclusion in our consideration, while others are not. We interpret evidence, weigh up interests, establish policies and rules, based on what is worth considering. This is how we develop an ethic, a code by which to live. However, developing this ethic is both futile and unnecessary. Rules, and legislation, can be ethically neutral, can be purely pragmatic. We can have practical rules for what to include based not on what we value in a moral sense, but on what we take into consideration by constantly reflecting and adjusting our conceptual model with our experiential or empirical knowledge. There is a kind of ‘reflective equilibrium’ to this process, but with an awareness that this blaancing of concept and experience is ever shifting on a fulcrum that is in motion, so we cannot rest with ‘this is always right, here’, and need to learn to make case by case assessments, just as they arise, through realization of all that is involved. Only through realization can we develop the kind of flexibility needed in our response.

What we pay attention to is both what we are interested in, in the positive sense, and what we are obliged to consider because it forces itself on our attention. But when we realize our situation, everything becomes interesting, including the soil, rocks, trees, buildings, microbes and everything else. The field of ethology only developed after the Second World War which means that we only recently began considering other animals worthy of study as complex organisms with behavioural patterns that were not just mechanistic responses but highly developed evolutionarily appropriate, non-linear patterns. We were wrong to treat women and slaves as non-humans. The lesson from this is that we need to widen our consideration of what is interesting. There is not ‘final criterion’ for including a category within our interests. Self interest is universal interest. Consideration, attention and realization can (and must) be paid at least in recognition of the interdependence of systems, but this can happen in an ethically neutral fashion. We do not need to seek to justify our attention with reference to the value of ecosystems, and so on. This will always depend on the context of our own value scheme. We are necessarily constrained in what we value by our status as humans. However, this does not preclude us from considering systems and it is this broadening of our consideration that seems to me so vital as an exercise in extending our capacity to respond to the current predicament, particularly given the idea that it is only through attention, awareness or realization that we are agents.

So far, I have mostly talked about the first sense of realization: realization as insight, or understanding. But realization also means ‘to make real’, to actualise (in Zen terms). It has a dual function and the second function is the full manifestation of human agency. What is made real through bringing to attention is the set of relationships that are then brought to awareness but since the act of bringing them to awareness acts as a metasystem, then the act of realization is also the capacity to shift this set of relationships by overviewing them. realization is not passive just as consideration is not passive. It requires the holding of a situation or condition in awareness. If we ask ourselves what kind of creatures we are now, with this insight in mind, we must take responsibility for shifting the system of our enmeshment, and so, for co-creating our reality. Many myths, many stories attest to a recognition of this co-creation. Perhaps it is time for us to unearth these stories, and to somehow find a way of reconciling science and art, human and Nature, through narratives that thread between them.