The Trumpeter - Journal of Ecosophy (Athabasca University)

Major, Alice

The Trumpeter ISSN 0832-6193 Volume 32, No. 1 (2016)  
Alice Major 17 
sun thread 
Alice Major 
 
solstice  sun stitched  
to the high point of the sky gold knot 
 
chain stitch    daisy change 
small neat foot prints  
 
lilac leads to lily step by step 
through iris philadelphus fat sweet peony 
 
soul stitched into earth by breath 
the constant pouring forth of odour 
 
feathered edges  grass’s blanket stitch  
lie down in its covering   
 
running-stitch days so long 
so fast  sun’s flashing needle 
 
leaves woven with satin lines  
and seed stitch scattered everywhere 
 
 


sun thread

Carfore, Kimberly Ann

The Trumpeter ISSN 0832-6193 Volume 32, No. 1 (2016) 
 
Kimberly Carfore  
 
90 
Book Review  Mickey, Sam. On the Verge of a Planetary Civilization: A Philosophy of Integral 
Ecology. Rowman & Littlefield International, 2014. 
In the mid-1990s, some scholars began calling for “integral” approaches to ecology, seeking 
collaboration between multiple ecological theories and practices in efforts to compose a 
planetary civilization, that is, a civilization characterized by peaceful, just, and sustainable 
relationships between humans and the Earth community. Sam Mickey joins the quest for 
integral ecology in his book, On the Verge of a Planetary Civilization: A Philosophy of Integral 
Ecology. This book is relevant to anyone working within environmental humanities. Primarily a 
work of environmental philosophy, this book also addresses issues in ecofeminism, eco-
theology, and the field of religion and ecology.  
Mickey’s main thesis is that philosophical concepts of the complexity of boundaries can support 
the development of integral approaches to ecology and thus facilitate the emergence of a 
planetary civilization. Mickey draws extensively on two postmodern French thinkers, Gilles 
Deleuze and Félix Guattari, whose work with “geophilosophy” and “ecosophy” aligns with the 
aims of integral ecology to cross boundaries between disciplines and to situate human 
existence in the boundaries of its planetary context. Guattari’s “three ecologies” provide an 
orienting model for integral ecology, ensuring the inclusion of environmental, sociocultural, and 
subjective/existential dimensions of ecological phenomena (13-16). Alongside Deleuze and 
Guattari, Mickey weaves together the concepts of many affiliated thinkers, addressing Jacques 
Derrida’s deconstruction, Alfred North Whitehead’s process philosophy, the cosmopolitics of 
Isabelle Stengers, Bruno Latour’s theory of actors, Donna Haraway’s companion species, 
Graham Harman’s object-oriented philosophy, Timothy Morton’s ecology without nature, and 
the counter-apocalyptic theology of Catherine Keller.  
Focusing on concepts that convey the complex dynamics of boundaries, Mickey shows 
numerous ways in which a boundary (or edge, limit, border, verge, etc.) marks differences and 
connections between things. A shoreline connects beach with ocean, and it also marks their 
difference or separation. Playing on the derivation of “integral” from the Latin tangere (“to 
touch”), he describes an integral approach as a way of touching that builds connections 
(contact) while also leaving things untouched (intact, in-tegral). An integral ecology, therefore, 
plays with the intricate and delicate boundaries of tactful touching—to touch while leaving the 
other intact (39). Building connections with human and Earth others while respecting their 
difference or otherness (alterity) is a crucial part of the task of integral approaches to ecology. 
Integral ecology accounts for the numerous ways that connections and differences are 
distributed between different domains: self and other, sciences and humanities, religion and 
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Kimberly Carfore  
 
91 
secularity, local and global, human and nonhuman, an oppressive regime and its liberating 
successor, etc. Recognizing the complexity of boundaries makes it possible to find transitions 
and build alliances across boundaries instead of using boundaries to maintain oppressive 
dualisms and violent oppositions.  
The book presents an exploration of the transitions between boundaries by focusing on three 
kinds of boundaries, beginnings, middles, and endings, which are addressed in that order in 
three chapters—Beginning, Middle, and Ending, preceded by an Introduction and followed by a 
Conclusion. That symmetry and linear order is part of the humorous and ironic performance 
that Mickey accomplishes in this book, as each chapter introduces concepts that indicate how 
boundaries are always entangled and complicated with differences, asymmetries, nonlinearity, 
and chaos. The humour of Mickey’s approach is balanced with the passion of philosophical 
speculation, which uses imagination to invent new possibilities for human-Earth relations.  
The Beginning chapter introduces concepts of the dynamic, relational character of beginnings, 
including environmental, social, and subjective beginnings (e.g., the beginning of land at the 
edge of the sea, the revolutionary beginning of a new political regime, and the beginning of a 
decision or a moment of ethical responsibility). Beginnings happen in the middle of things. They 
are relational and dynamic. Attempts to control beginnings erect rigid hierarchies that fail to do 
justice to the uncertainty, flexibility, and difference that are constitutive of environments, 
societies, and subjects. The Middle chapter critiques the “hegemonic centrism” (Val Plumwood) 
whereby a dominant center is opposed to a periphery (51). For instance, while anthropocentric, 
biocentric, and ecocentric ethics each presuppose an opposition between central value and the 
marginalized value of the periphery, Mickey proposes an “anthropocosmic” approach for which 
the human and the world are conceived as mutually constitutive. This is an “omnicentrism” or 
“multicentrism” for which all humans and nonhumans exhibit agency and value (135). The 
Ending chapter addresses the apocalyptic tones of environmentalism, criticizing apocalyptic 
fantasies of a final end of the world or of a moral purification of all evildoers (“sinners” in 
religious contexts, “polluters” for environmentalists). The end of the world can facilitate a new 
beginning, an end to the violence and exploitation associated with global capitalism and a 
beginning that facilitates caring, loving human-Earth relations (“planetary love”) with strategies 
for an ecological democracy or “cosmopolitics” (177, 183).  
While creating a planetary civilization is an ambitious goal indeed, Mickey introduces multiple 
new and engaging concepts to help move us through the complex boundaries of the ecological 
crisis and awaken us to our planetarity. Mickey demonstrates how these concepts are relevant 
for multiple theories and methods for building alliances across differences (e.g., postcolonial 
theory, feminism, critical theory, environmental ethics, and cross-disciplinary  
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Kimberly Carfore  
 
92 
approaches to ecology). However, it sometimes seems as though all of the diverse ways of 
building alliances exist in harmony with one another, when in fact there are significant tensions 
between them, like those between the postmodern visions of Deleuze and Derrida or between 
the integral visions of Thomas Berry and Ken Wilber. As Mickey himself indicates, the risk of 
integral thinking is that it attains an inclusive and comprehensive perspective at the cost of 
differences and details. Mickey’s own advice would be to touch more tactfully when assembling 
multiple thinkers and schools of thought.  
This book is a call to action, but it does not necessarily carry an activist agenda. It provides 
concepts that can be adopted by activists and advocates as well as scholars and researchers. 
However, Mickey does not spend much time giving examples of how those concepts can be put 
into practice to address specific environmental problems. As Mickey notes, it is a perennial 
complaint against philosophers that they too often “have their heads in the clouds” (26). 
Although the book contains an entire section devoted to examples, it is actually focused mostly 
on the concept of example, deconstructing the dualism between ideal (theory) and example 
(practice) (63-72). While this is not unimportant, it leaves one wanting more concrete 
descriptions that would provide a sense of what a philosophy of integral ecology looks like in 
actual situations. Nonetheless, even when concrete examples are lacking, this book is grounded 
in the real challenges facing the Earth community. It is an accessible source of philosophical 
concepts at the cutting edge of environmentalism. As Michael Zimmerman states on the back 
cover, this book points towards an “environmentalism of the future.” Thinking on the verge of a 
planetary civilization is not easy work, but it is arguably the great work of our time, and Mickey 
graciously guides us into this work by thinking passionately and playfully through the 
complexity of beginnings, middles, and endings. 
Kimberly Carfore  
 


Mickey, "On the Verge of a Planetary Civilization: A Philosophy of Integral Ecology"

This paper identifies and evaluates the defective arguments and argument strategies to support claims that global temperature change claims are deniable. Initially the claims of global temperature change deniers seem plausible and perhaps even believable so it is important not to simply deny the claims of deniers but to counter them with argumentation

Gough, Jim Edward

Defective Arguments Denying an Inconvenient Truth

Cuellar, Maren Allison

The Trumpeter ISSN 0832-6193 Volume 32, No. 1 (2016) 
Maren Allison Cuellar 
 
35 
Ode to a Red Wheelbarrow 
Maren Allison Cuellar  
My favorite poet is William Carlos Williams. 
summer is simple; the lemonade is cool, 
chess games are long. I live 
to be an ant of a woman. Eternally 
small in the eye of burning stars. 
 
For in my red wheelbarrow, I 
compact piled dirt down. To feel 
the wet ground grind between 
my fingertips. 
 


Ode to a Red Wheelbarrow

Rindo, Ron

The Trumpeter ISSN 0832-6193 Volume 32, No. 1 (2016)  
Ron Rindo 18 
First Spring 
Ron Rindo 
That first spring in the country we had no lawn, no garage, and no gardens, just a rough 
gravel driveway and trapezoids of scrap sheetrock laid down in the muck for a sidewalk. 
Surrounded on all sides by farmland, we could follow the sun’s full arc from its pink 
arrival to its tentative dusk departure, when it balanced like an egg yolk on the western 
horizon before draining into darkness. At night, black skies unpolluted by city light 
entranced us, the Milky Way a powdered disk of stars. 
We’d moved in during the cold and snow of early February. By late March the snow had 
melted in rings around the dark trunks of box elder, maple, cherry, and oak trees, and in 
April, our five acres started to thaw. Bright green threads began to poke through the 
soil, and a few hardy black flies bounced against our porch window screens. Inside, 
Asian lady beetles and box elder bugs wandered the walls and ceilings. Just beyond our 
acreage to the north, Farmer Langenfeld’s thirty acres of furrowed earth melted clean. 
Turned over the previous fall after the corn harvest, the lowest end of the field had once 
been swampland. Now, as the snow disappeared, a spring melt pond a hundred yards 
across and nearly as wide glistened, the skim ice along the surface thawing during the 
day and refreezing each evening.  
Early spring is not Wisconsin at its most beautiful. Often as cold as winter, muddy, 
windy, and plagued by unwelcome snowfall, it is a season of hope tempered by 
disappointment: the inevitable delayed by the unexpected. Seed catalogues arrive in the 
mail when mounds of snow at the end of the driveway are still shoulder deep. 
Temperatures in the 50s will open up patches of grass in the yard, and children frolic in 
the sun without coats for the first time in five months, but the cold returns, and a freak 
blizzard will drop another foot of heavy snow, the kind that sticks annoyingly to snow 
shovels unless they are sprayed with vegetable oil.  
Of course, spring’s sensory symphony does come. If the musky, smoky odours of fall are 
like the dour scraping of horsehair bows on cello and bass strings, the sweet scents of 
spring—flowering crab and wild apple, hawthorn, lilac, and wild plum—arrive like a run 
of eighth notes on piccolos. Sunshine brighter than firelight warms our winter-softened 
faces. And after months of quiet, the white solstice silence gives way to a rich 
cacophony of sound. Nest building begins for the early birds, the cardinals, robins, and 
grackles. Early cavity nesters—chickadees, bluebirds, starlings, English sparrows, and 
nuthatches—begin inspecting birdhouses and hollow trees. And as April opens into May, 
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Ron Rindo 19 
the beautiful sun-lovers come back: brown thrashers, rose-breasted grosbeaks, 
Baltimore and orchard orioles, indigo buntings, common yellowthroats, and warblers. 
The chittering of house wrens competes with the watery gurgle of red-winged 
blackbirds and the bright, brassy song of white-throated sparrows.  
For thousands of years along the Mississippi Flyway in Wisconsin, spring has also meant 
the return of Canadian geese as they fly to nesting grounds in the Northwest Territories. 
Reversing the direction of their fall migration, their noisy skeins begin arriving in mid-
March. At times, the flocks appear as thin pencil lines drawn across the clouds. At other 
times they are so low one can see the white patches on their faces and missing wing 
feathers where hunters’ steel shot had come perilously close to bringing them to earth 
the previous fall. On peak days, scarcely five minutes will pass between flocks, so that 
one can spend an entire day watching and listening to this garrulous rite of spring with 
little interruption.  
Our first April in the country, that small melt pond beyond our field, surrounded by 
fertile cropland sprinkled with spilled corn and the freshest of spring grasses, proved to 
be an irresistible rest stop for thousands of geese. Flock after flock would spill from the 
sky at dusk, circling the pond as they descended, locking their wings and dropping into 
the wind with black feet outstretched before them, plopping like olives into a cocktail. 
We watched this noisy show every night with our five children, often sliding the patio 
door open in spite of the cold in order to hear it. Geese filled the pond for the night, 
protected by the predators’ lack of hiding places and by the sheer numbers of watchful 
eyes. 
The exhilarating beauty of hundreds of noisy geese flying over our house at sunset, so 
close we could hear the whistle of their wings, remains one of my fondest memories of 
that April. But that first spring—and for some reason only that spring—something else 
arrived that made those geese seem almost ordinary. 
We first heard the new singing at night. My wife, Jenna, and I sleep with one bedroom 
window slightly open because we love to hear geese passing over the house (as well as 
horned owls hooting in our woods, and the occasional pack of coyotes howling in the 
distance). But that one April night, the honking sounded higher-pitched, more clipped: 
goose-like, to be sure, but Other, perhaps as distinct as an oboe from a clarinet.  
In the morning, the melt pond looked as if it had been covered during the night by 
heavy snowfall. Larger waterfowl, hundreds of them, had arrived. We hurriedly 
consulted our field guides: tundra swans! And they kept coming. All morning they 
circled and landed in groups of two and three, 10 and 15, 25 and 30, their white bodies 
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Ron Rindo 20 
crisp against cerulean blue sky, wings flapping like bed sheets in the wind as they settled 
into the mud.  
Mingling with the smaller geese, the swans proved to be tranquil companions, and far 
less wary. When we walked into our field for a closer look, the geese would nervously 
waddle away, taking flight if we moved too quickly or got too close. The swans, on the 
other hand, went silent: frozen and still as marble statues. They seemed especially 
tolerant of our daughter Claire, who wandered alone to within 50 or 60 yards of them. I 
have a photograph of her standing in her bright magenta winter coat, 11 years old, arms 
opened wide, squinting through her glasses at the camera. Just beyond her is a 
ploughed field, whitened by hundreds of tundra swans, their feather-plumped bodies 
glowing in the sun.  
It is possible that before we moved to our land, and even before the Langenfelds and 
generations of other farmers tiled, ploughed and planted that lowland field, tundra 
swans rested in that melt pond every spring. It could be when they returned during our 
first year, they didn’t know we’d be there. We didn’t begin construction on our house 
until late the previous October, so if the swans passed overhead on their way south, 
they didn’t see a rooftop in the clearing. But we were here when they returned. 
Immersed as tundra swans are in the slow ebb of geological time, the sudden sprouting 
and growth of a yellow colonial-style house by spring might have seemed to them like a 
miracle. Inserting ourselves into their migration cycle, we greeted its beauty even as we 
disrupted it.  
But those swans stayed for several perfect, joyful spring days. One morning we awoke, 
and they were gone. We’ve had 14 more springs in our country house on Zoar Road, but 
the tundra swans have never returned.  


First Spring

Tompkins, Douglas R.

The Trumpeter ISSN 0832-6193 Volume 32, No. 1 (2016)  
Douglas R. Tompkins 10 
Turning Around from the Wrong Road Taken 
Douglas R. Tompkins 
This essay is based on Doug’s acceptance speech for the 2015 Global Economy Prize, 
awarded to Kristine and Douglas Tompkins by the Kiel Institute for the World Economy. It 
has been titled and lightly edited by Eileen Crist. 
Kris and I are certainly flattered that our conservation, land restoration, and agricultural work 
have been recognized by the Kiel Institute. So we thank the jury or the committee that decided 
on awarding this prize, and hope that we live up to expectations. I would like to start out by 
saying that whatever we have been doing and continue doing with our work in South America 
and around the world in the areas of conservation, agroecology, ecological restoration, and 
activism, Kris is 60 percent of the team. Just so you know.  
Today I feel a bit like the fox in the chicken house. I’m not a cheerleader for the standard 
definition of progress, but I hope you will listen to me and allow the images of the slideshow in 
the background to wash over you and sink in. These are images from a book that our 
foundation just published, a photo-format book with a few pertinent essays, titled 
Overdevelopment, Overpopulation, Overshoot.1 The images give a completely different view of 
what is called progress—of the condition we find ourselves in today.  And while these pictures 
are disturbing, they provide a context for the remarks I will offer in the next few minutes.   
What I propose in its simplest and broadest terms is nothing less than to imagine, as a thought 
exercise, that the present economic worldview that underlies our now global techno-industrial, 
free-market, infinite-growth capitalism is, briefly put, entirely bankrupt. It is taking the world to 
the brink of the precipice, into the virtual abyss of history. We resemble a runaway train 
speeding toward a massive rock wall, and we are bound to hit that wall in a relatively short 
time. Perhaps you are thinking to yourselves that you are about to hear some kind of doomsday 
scenario, versions of which you have heard many times before. To a certain extent you would 
be right, as doomsday scenarios abound. But I’m asking that you consider this first as a mental 
exercise, leaving aside all judgments for the moment—especially your most cherished 
assumptions, because as author Neil Evernden often liked stating, the real authorities in a 
culture are the unquestioned assumptions.2    
                                                     
1 Tom Butler, ed., Overdevelopment, Overpopulation, Overshoot (n.p.: Groff Books, 2015).  
2 Neil Evernden, The Natural Alien: Humankind and Environment, 2d ed. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 
1999).  
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Douglas R. Tompkins 11 
I would like to start by reminding everyone that it was less than 500 years ago that people 
believed the Earth was positioned in the center of the universe. Copernicus came on the scene 
in the middle of the 16th century, proving that the Earth was not the center of our solar system. 
And so the Copernican revolution and heliocentric theory were born. His perspective was 
enormously resisted, of course, especially by entrenched interests. It was a revolution in 
thinking that upset the status quo, and it took a very long time to become accepted as a fact of 
life. Today, no one questions the way the planets orbit. Paradigm shifts are always like this: 
they take a long time to happen and demand agonizing shifts in thinking.  
Now imagine the perspective 100 or 200 years out from now. The myth of progress has become 
just that: a deposed myth. The notion of ever-developing megatechnologies—including global 
capitalism as an economic megatechnology indispensable to development—has fallen from 
grace. We have made that paradigm shift to an eco-local, highly-diverse, healthy, and lightly-
populated economy. The Earth has recuperated from its dark times of biodepletion, the climate 
is now stabilized, beauty has returned everywhere, wildlife populations are recovering, and the 
evolution of much complex life has jump-started itself after being stopped dead in its tracks in 
the bleak times of the 20th and the 21st century.    
Engaging our imagination is often helpful in dealing with the seemingly unimaginable idea that 
our present way of life could change so radically. It is useful in calling forth a bright and glorious 
future ahead of us, and envisioning light at the end of the long, dark tunnel that we find 
civilization in today.    
In particular, I would like to flag a stubborn mental block that needs to be removed from our 
thinking—namely, the idea that “you cannot go back.” While this notion is rubbish, it works as a 
persistent excuse to wave aside the idea of devolving the techno-industrial culture that we 
have constructed, and setting off in another direction altogether. Consider an analogy: If you’re 
driving somewhere and find yourself lost, on the wrong road or having made a wrong turn, 
there are several options. One is to keep going, the hardheaded option of one unwilling to 
admit his mistake. Another tactic is to ask directions, which often results in turning and going 
back the way you came. Yet another possibility is to decide to make a U-turn, go back to where 
you were, and start over on known ground. That is a sensible alternative which many of us 
choose when we find ourselves lost.  The analogy is intended to loosen our resistance to the 
notion that we cannot go back. On the contrary, it is often by far the smartest thing to do.  
Now, I’d like to introduce a macro-question: Does anyone here believe that the techno-
industrial culture, of which we are all offspring, is a successful development model? I know that 
there may be many who’d promptly point out a number of benefits and successes that this 
mega-tech society has delivered. And also insist that we are so committed to this trajectory that 
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Douglas R. Tompkins 12 
it is impossible to turn around. My point here is that we are now back in the situation of the 
car-lost-on-some-unrecognizable-highway, and we have paused to check our bearings. If we 
maintained that we were now so far along that we had no choice but to continue, and we 
explained that to our spouse next to us, he or she would be giving us a lecture on our own 
stupidity. As one of the sharpest environmental thinkers today, John Michael Greer, writes 
“there is nothing inevitable in the way we do things in today’s industrial world: our political 
arrangements, our economic practices, our social institutions, our cultural habits, our sciences 
and our technologies all unfold from industrial civilization’s distinctive and profoundly 
idiosyncratic worldview. So does the central flaw in the entire baroque edifice: our lethally 
muddleheaded inability to understand our inescapable dependence on the biosphere.”3  
A question I want to raise is that if we are on the right road, if the techno-industrial culture is 
moving us in the right direction, and so highly successful—then how is it that we are immersed 
in the worst environmental crisis of the planet in 65 million years? We find ourselves in the 
midst of the Sixth Mass Extinction event, and according to climate scientists we have derailed 
the climate dangerously. What could be worse than this? I submit that these are clear 
indicators that we are lost. And what lies at the base of being lost, of having gone down the 
wrong road, is our model of development. After all, what else was it that drove us to this point? 
And the question is: How could we have gotten things so wrong? In my opinion, to invoke “the 
wrong road” metaphor, we should turn around and get back to a place of which we are surer. 
This imperative, of course, poses any number of problems, for we are already immersed in and 
dependent upon the techno-industrial juggernaut that shapes our daily lives. Agriculture now 
depends on an industrial brew of chemicals and complicated machinery. Gigantic confined 
animal feeding operations provide enormous quantities of chickens, eggs, hogs, beef, and milk 
products. Land, especially agricultural land, is concentrated in fewer and fewer hands—many of 
them gigantic corporations—and managed from financial centers far from the farms 
themselves, bringing all kinds of problems to soils, to human and nonhuman health, and to 
biodiversity. Communications are now dependent on satellites while unhealthy electro-
magnetic fields saturate our lives. Travel and trade are plugged into huge modern 
transportation networks of roads, airlines, trains, and ship lanes—all beholden to a complicated 
infrastructure not at all easy to change. Urbanization has redistributed once-rural populations 
into megacities and sprawling slums of dimensions never before seen in human history. The 
internet—at first touted as a miracle network of information that would liberate the underclass 
and democratize information—has turned out to be, more than any other invention in human 
                                                     
3 John Michael Greer, “The Era of Dissolution,” The Archdruid Report, June 10, 2015, http://thearchdruidreport. 
blogspot.com/2015/06/the-era-of-dissolution.html. 
 
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history, the most centralizing mega-technology ever devised, primarily serving the interests of 
transnational corporations, crime syndicates, the extractive economy, drug traffickers, porno-
purveyors, and a mass-consumer culture. The internet has served to ramp up, on every front, 
the economic activity that is pillaging the planet and driving climate change and the extinction 
crisis.  
Roll the clock back and you will easily see that without the internet we might not be at the 400-
plus parts per million of atmospheric carbon dioxide that we are today, setting in motion 
dangerous chemical processes in the biosphere and unhinging the global climate. The list of 
Earth grievances could go on and on, from antibiotic resistances, to acidification of the ocean, 
to overfishing by industrial fishing fleets, loss of primary forest cover, and dire water problems, 
including aquifer depletions and exhausted river systems. All exacerbated, if not propelled, by 
the accelerating force of the internet, whose most significant contribution to civilization has 
been just that, acceleration: like a giant flywheel ready to come apart as it is spinning too fast 
for its size and construction.  
In my view, systemic analysis—and I emphasize systemic—of megatechnology is the weakest 
link of today’s social movements and disastrously absent in the thinking of economists and 
other purveyors of “progress.” It would be healthy for society’s leadership—that is, the 
business class, politicians and other authorities, academics, the press, all professionals, 
churches, NGOs, union leaders, architects, urban designers, and so forth—to become far more 
critical of megatechnology, and to recognize that all technologies introduced into the culture 
come with inherent characteristics. And these characteristics oblige society to comport itself 
according to the dictates of that technology.  
We can see it clearly, for example, in nations that embrace nuclear power. The embrace of 
nuclear power requires society to be structured in a specific way: it is transfigured into a 
centralized society needing narrow specialists who lose touch with the larger picture. Nuclear 
power also calls for a high-capital society, a military of some sort, and a constantly-growing 
market. It demands the entire “scaffolding of civilization” as Wes Jackson has called it: the 
mining, the machines that do the mining, the machines that make the mining machines, the 
smelters, the roads to the smelters, the roads to carry the metals to their markets, the trucks 
needed to do that, the communications systems to support it, the list goes on. That scaffolding 
of civilization is exactly what is destroying the world: wiping out biodiversity, making the world 
ugly, taking the climate off known charts.   
Does that not give anyone with a few grams of commonsense the incentive to reconsider 
whether we are on the right road or not? Dismally, the bottom line is that we have ruined the 
climate and instigated the extinction crisis, the Mother of all Crises. We are thus called to 
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Douglas R. Tompkins 14 
rethink the notion of so-called progress and figure out an entirely different development 
model: one in which nature is the measure and not the reductionist Cartesian logic that puts 
human cleverness ahead of the workings of nature. We need to reinstate an organic model of 
the world and reject the machine one. We must rethink the worldview that humanity has 
foolishly adopted—the rampant sense of entitlement and arrogance that allows us to 
transmogrify the planet with our technologies.   
Somewhere, some number of centuries ago, we took the wrong road, forging on with false 
certainty and bullheadedness. We have driven countless species to extinction and continue to 
do so every day: extinct forever—because of our hubris. That does not seem at all intelligent. 
Economists along with the rest of the world’s leadership need, in my opinion, to reorient 
toward another worldview. One in which the primary ethical and ecologically intelligent 
position is to share the planet with all other creatures, and set our goals for a fulfilling life using 
different objectives than the format of the techno-industrial consumer culture.    
Let’s look for the right road—recognizing that we find ourselves lost and need to turn around in 
order to go forward. It is a big challenge, first to our thinking and intellect. But as Greer wisely 
points out, there is nothing inevitable about the future. We have made a mess, but we have the 
abilities to make it right again. To that end, I want to read a poem that was composed 2500 
years ago by the great Taoist sage Lao Tzu. I find it an amazingly prescient and a pithily distilled 
reminder that we can have wonderful lives free of the things that are undoing our world. Note 
how the poem’s subject matter of technology, population, meaningless consumption, vanity, 
war, peace, beauty, and simplicity remain our principal concerns today:  
Better to keep your 
Country small 
Your people few 
Your devices simple— 
And even those for  
Infrequent use. 
 
Let people measure life 
By the meaning of death 
And not go out of their way 
To visit far off places. 
With nowhere to travel 
And little care for the display,  
Great ships, fine carriages, 
And shining weapons become 
Mere relics of the past. 
 
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Douglas R. Tompkins 15 
Let people recover 
The simple life: 
Reckoning by knotted cords, 
Delighting in a basic meal, 
Pleased with humble attire, 
Happy in their homes, 
Taking pleasure in their 
Rustic ways. 
 
So content are they 
That nearby towns— 
So close, the sound 
Of dogs and roosters 
Forms one chorus— 
Folks grown gray with age 
May pass away never having 
Strayed beyond the village.4  
Thank you. 
                                                     
4 Lao Tzu, “No Place to Visit: Or the Diminished Returns,” in The Power of Peace: New Perspectives in Lao Tzu’s Tao 
Te Ching, trans. Thomas Early (Arcata, CA: Wild Earth, 2011), 55-56. 
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Turning Around from the Wrong Road Taken

Glasser, Harold

The Trumpeter ISSN 0832-6193 Volume 32, No. 1 (2016) 
 
Harold Glasser  1 
George Sessions (1938 – 2016) 
Harold Glasser 
Last winter, we lost a hero and passionate champion of ecocentrism. George Sessions, 
accomplished Yosemite climber, lover and tireless defender of free nature, and leading figure in 
the deep ecology movement, died of stomach cancer on February 29, 2016. 
For nearly 50 years, George was a philosophy professor and department chair at Sierra College in 
Rocklin, California. Next to Arne Naess, George was arguably the most significant figure in the 
deep ecology movement. He was certainly at the center of its emergence in North America. 
George was a subtle thinker with a beautiful mind and a superb attention to detail. His expansive, 
historically-rich understanding of the philosophical roots of ecocentrism was unparalleled. He saw 
both the forest through the trees and the fungi barely peeking through duff on the forest floor. His 
approach to ecophilosophy, based on a sweeping critique of the dominant growth-focused, 
anthropocentric orientation of Western civilization, was rooted in the ecological revolution of the 
1960s (much of this work is chronicled in his landmark 1995 edited collection, Deep Ecology for the 
21st Century). This critique is, perhaps, even more relevant today in our world with 1.8 billion 
additional consumers (7.4 billion people total). 
Exhausted by the expanding ecological crisis and its countless manifestations, but by no means 
defeated, George recognized that our ability to live in the present, with meaning and purpose, 
hinges on both our understanding of the past and our awareness of what brought our species to 
this sorry state. His focus, like Dr. Seuss’ Lorax, was to be a tenacious, unyielding voice for the 
ecological integrity of the Earth and the well-being of other species. George set his cross hairs on 
the flourishing of life on Earth, not simply its survival, recognizing that in its flourishing lies the key 
to our own. 
I first met George in 1991, after sharing a draft article on deep ecology and environmental policy. 
He graciously offered a thoughtful critique and kindly introduced me to the deep ecology 
community, which was no small undertaking because George was a gifted connector who knew 
everyone. We soon became fast friends and intellectual sparring partners. George was a warm, 
and at times demanding, mentor. He had a charming, puckish smile that could turn into a piercing, 
quizzical grin when he thought you said something outlandish or needed to be pulled back to 
Earth. We spent a lot of time together in the mid-1990s in Yosemite, Tuolumne Meadows, Santa 
Cruz, and sometimes in the deserts of California and Arizona with Arne Naess—although George 
never seemed to savour the desert like Arne. I think he felt most at home above the tree line in his 
beloved Sierra. 
The Trumpeter ISSN 0832-6193 Volume 32, No. 1 (2016) 
 
Harold Glasser  2 
One of George’s greatest contributions was publishing the Ecophilosophy Newsletter, which 
helped jump-start and nurture the academic ecophilosophy movement, which had a slow start in 
the wake of Earth Day 1 (1970). Starting in 1976 and continuing to 1984 (in six issues: 76, 79, 81, 
82, 83, 84), the Newsletter was distributed for free to 50-60 folks around the globe.1 In the 
beginning it contained postscripts to papers, book reviews, annotated bibliographies, and general 
musings about the state of the radical environmental movement. In its later incarnations it also 
included excerpts and short pieces from the works of others. The Newsletter predated and created 
the foundation for journals such as Environmental Ethics (initiated in 1979) and The Trumpeter 
(initiated in 1983). 
Volume 6 (1984) contains the first description of the “deep ecology platform,” which had been 
crafted by Naess and Sessions on a trip to Death Valley. The platform, which builds on some work 
that Arne Naess initiated in his 1977 “Notes on the Methodology of Normative Systems,” makes a 
case for the non-axiological intrinsic value of nonhumans, suggests key policy and lifestyle 
implications that flow from embracing this principle (reduction of human impacts, decreasing 
human population, emphasizing quality of life over standard of living, etc.), and puts forward an 
argument that embracing the prior seven platform elements commits its supporters to take action 
to effect the necessary changes.  
In a 2011 Inquiry article,2 I wrote that Naess offered a utopian, life-affirming meta-narrative, a new 
Weltanschauung that shifted the focus of inquiry to coupling values, knowledge, understanding, 
and wisdom to behaviour. The core of Naess’s approach is that sustainability hinges on developing 
more thoroughly reasoned and consistent views, policies, and actions, which are tied back to wide-
identifying ultimate norms and a rich, well-informed understanding of the state of the planet. 
While George deeply admired Naess and viewed him as a father figure, I don’t think this was his 
primary concern. It was almost inconceivable to him that people did not see the pernicious wave 
of destruction of free nature that was happening right before their eyes and stop cold in their 
tracks. 
George had a more circumscribed view of deep ecology than Naess or myself. He wasn’t driven to 
turn deep ecology into a coherent philosophy in the academic sense or to grapple with finding 
practical ways out of our daunting, species-scale dilemma. Instead, I think he saw deep ecology 
more as an impassioned plea, a rational effort to help us connect with our biophilic roots. He 
focused on clarifying what deep ecology is, outlining what it stands for, deciphering and shoring up 
its foundations, and clearing up misinterpretations and misunderstandings. The essence of his 
                                                     
1 The full collection is now available on the Environmental Ethics Case Studies website: http://environmentalethics. 
info/ecophilosophy.html; accessed 21 July 2016. 
2 Harold Glasser, “Naess’s Deep Ecology: Implications for the Human Prospect and Challenges for the Future,” Inquiry 
54, no. 1 (February 2011): 52-77. 
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Harold Glasser  3 
argument was that our survival and capacity to flourish as a species rests on scaling down 
production and consumption, stabilizing and reducing human population, protecting biodiversity, 
and restoring wild ecosystems. He thought we’d need to usher in a paradigm shift in perceptions, 
values, and lifestyles to bring on this monumental change. It should be noted that this approach 
presages some of the recent calls to action by the United Nations and UNESCO, which argue for 
transformative change and for improving quality of life for all. 
When it came to defending nature from short-sighted materialism, overconsumption, greed, and 
especially what he saw as ill-directed or insincere academics, George could become an unrelenting 
bulldog. He was the most stalwart defender of deep ecology’s core principles. If you have any 
doubts, check out some of his responses to perceived attacks from social ecology and ecological 
feminism. His efforts to enlist me as a co-conspirator in his intellectual pugilism, resulted in a few 
tussles and tribulations. I remember one with Warwick Fox that emerged from George’s urging 
that I publish what I intended as a friendly critique of his Toward a Transpersonal Ecology (1990). I 
won’t go into the details on that one, but for those who are interested, the argument appears in 
an Environmental Ethics article.3 He also set me up to take on the job of series editor for the ten-
volume Arne Naess Selected Works project4—a formidable task, which nearly did me in, but for 
which I’m grateful, too! 
George was exceptionally big-hearted and he loved to see people push themselves to strip back 
their relationship with nature, as increasingly mediated as it is by material culture these days. I 
remember one time after climbing Cathedral Peak (a bit too late in the day), we came across some 
folks who had come up the Mountaineers Route. They were unprepared and just short of the 
summit block. They desperately wanted to catch the sublime view and approaching sunset from 
the lovely triangular table, which tops the peak and sits four or five climbers packed like sardines. 
Ever the kind patriarch, George urged that I go back down and belay them up.  
George was also a romantic. He named his son after Dave Brower, who took him under his wing as 
a young climber, and he named his giant and calm Shepard-Wolf mix, Arne. He never strove to be 
self-consistent in Naess’s way of coupling our everyday decisions to our fundamental, bedrock 
assumptions. He liked to drink and smoke… and eat thick, juicy steaks, preferably cooked over an 
open fire. Speaking of fires, George loved big, roaring fires. Arne Naess loved tiny ones. Naess 
would experiment with making the smallest fire he could—a fire of just a few twigs—to boil water 
for tea. What a delight that our planet has been able to support such diversity! 
On his way home from backpacking trips on the east side of the Sierra Nevada, George also loved 
to frequent the casinos of Carson City. He was a very good blackjack player. I remember a few 
                                                     
3 Harold Glasser, “On Warwick Fox’s Assessment of Deep Ecology,” Environmental Ethics 19, no. 1 (Spring 1997): 69-
85. 
4 Harold Glasser and Alan Drengson, eds., The Selected Works of Arne Naess, 10 vols. (Dordrecht: Springer, 2005). 
The Trumpeter ISSN 0832-6193 Volume 32, No. 1 (2016) 
 
Harold Glasser  4 
yarns about how he came to be banned from several casinos. I suspect that he counted cards, 
which is yet another example of his keen analytical mind. George recognized that we act in so 
many ways that run counter to our desire to sustain free nature, but these actions need not 
demean or diminish our commitment. Resolving this dilemma, this failure to couple action to 
concern, is however, the central challenge facing our species. It’s one that George recognized all 
too well, but did not feel compelled to make his mission. 
His work and being chronicled the complexity and contradiction of living a good life—with grit, 
integrity, joy, and respect for all—on this wonder-filled planet, at this unique and pivotal time in 
our species’ history.  
Thank you, George, for putting pen to paper and enriching us all so deeply. 
 
 


George Sessions (1938 – 2016)

Shepherd, Kelly

Deane-Drummond, "The Wisdom of the Liminal: Evolution and Other Animals in Human Becoming"

Conley, Karen Tallkat

The Trumpeter 
ISSN 0832-6193 
Volume 32, No. 2 (2016) 
 
Karen Tallkat Conley 
 
191 
New Mexico Summer 
Karen Tallkat Conley 
 
Blue, blue sky 
mountain red rocks, 
Bright sky with no end to it. 
Soft breeze ignites bird  
on a tall pine tree top 
to sing 
a solo love song, 
calling her mate to join 
the lofty position 
she has chosen  
near the sun. 
 
 
We grew our own food— 
berries, tomatoes and greens. 
On our land    
wind chimes, like church bells 
called attention to the life within all things. 
 
 
Now 
I dream, as an elder  
with conscious imagination, 
deliberate intention applied to  
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Karen Tallkat Conley 
 
192 
the great adventure which lies before me, 
the life between lives. 
 
 
For the next generation 
I project my imagination to their future dreaming. 
Southwest memories 
of our earth's high desert sanctuary 
where we  
once lived. 
Of songbirds,  
wild things 
and blue cloudless mountain skies. 
 
Bushy ten-foot sunflowers 
that seeded and 
sustained themselves.  
They grew wild and tall, 
declaring their independence 
along dusty back roads, 
or 
in abandoned fields, 
as far as the eye  
or imagination could see. 
 
 
This strange magical land where  
bright desert flowers 
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Karen Tallkat Conley 
 
193 
and 
cactus fruits 
purple, yellow, and blue 
appear unannounced every 
summer 
just in time 
for the 
hummingbirds. 
 
 
Fat lizards napped, 
basking 
on hot, ancient jagged rocks that transform 
into  
shadowy, 
spooky 
by night rock formation 
creatures. 
Silent, in an out of balance, 
seemingly  
artistic arrangement. 
 
For the future, I hold a memory 
of  the uneven  
private places 
where we  
lived. 
 
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Karen Tallkat Conley 
 
194 
Lavender blending  
with peach tree 
blossoms 
on the hill.  
Original desert perfume 
released only after 
summer rains,  
combined warm earth,  
piñon, pine and cedar. 
 
This land 
where mountain sage  
rode the wind 
and  
grew freely, in between rocks 
like a blessing. 
 
Wild 
and 
untended 
 


English

New Mexico Summer

Pritts, Nate

The Trumpeter ISSN 0832-6193 Volume 32, No. 1 (2016)  
Nate Pritts 89 
A Local Habitation 
Nate Pritts  
After a time of struggle 
   I went under  was lost. 
My human reflex cancelled out 
was blinded. 
All that was left was a broken bridge 
between two far countries 
 which shimmered equally with primal force 
and which were composed of beautiful particles 
some inherent and some invented. 
I slept through an entire age of human memory 
 
dreamless digital haze 
while the fragile earth accelerated 
while every connection severed. 
 
Every city a wasteland 
overwhelming  awash in web noise 
spambots visualized as culture crash 
 ephemeral wreckage. 
 
All this junk data. 
 
Roads buried by the binary bones of every formerly living person. 
There was no violence 
As they all gladly removed the souls from their architecture. 
If I could only tell the horrors I saw in that land. 
 
The terminal energies of history  
the tree of woe 
the endless sorrowing clouds 
the inexhaustible fire 
which consumes everything 
even faith even the creative imagination. 
Somewhere there is a hill high enough 
remote 
or a mountain so alone 
     so stark. 
It will be all I need. 


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