The Trumpeter - Journal of Ecosophy (Athabasca University)

Caley, Michael T.

Devall, Bill

 
 
The Trumpeter  
ISSN: 0832-6193 
Volume 23, Number 2 (2007) 
 
Introduction 
 
Michael T. Caley and Bill Devall, editors 
 
Welcome to Issue 23-2 of the Trumpeter, the first of two special issues 
devoted to the life and work of Paul Shepard. 
Our intention in these special issues is both to illustrate Shepard’s 
personal influence and the continuing importance of his work to 
explorations into human psychology and communities. Shepard died in 
July 1996, and new generations of philosophers need to be aware of his 
seminal work. 
 
In the first issue, we begin with a poem written as a tribute to Shepard 
by Sam Moon, followed by a photobiography of Shepard with 
comments by Flo Shepard and Kathryn Morton and a bibliography of 
Shepard’s work. This essay introduces our readers to life of Paul 
Shepard, philosopher and activist. 
 
The essays in these issues were written by people who knew Paul or 
were significantly influenced by him, including Joe Meeker, Bernie 
Krause, Jorge Conseca-Sevilla, Eugene Halton, and others. This issue 
concludes with previously unpublished essays by Shepard, “The 
Biological Bases of Bear Mythology and Ceremonialism” and 
“Confessions of a Whistle-Blower” in which he explains the 
development of his own thoughts. 
 
The second special issue of the Trumpeter will include essays that are 
both critical of some aspects of Shepard’s theories and the continuing 
relevance of his work. This issue includes Frederic L. Bender’s essay 
“On the Importance of Paul Shepard’s Call for Post-Historic 
Primitivism and Paleolithic Counter-Revolution against Modernity” and 
Eugene Halton’s “Eden Inverted: On the Wild Self and the Contraction 
of Consciousness” in which he explores the patterns of modernity that 
contributed to widespread immaturity in contemporary societies. 
 
Volume 23 Number 2 1 
As Bender points out, “we live today on a planet undergoing abrupt 
non-linear change”—global warming. After some 8000 years of socio-
cultural development based on burgeoning agriculture in a period of 
relative ecological continuity, this non-linear shift has the potential to 
upset all of our expectations of “normal futures.” The human species 
will adapt, not because we want to adapt, but because we must adapt. 
 
Recurring periods of global climate change over thousands of years 
have provided periods when the human enterprise diminished and flora 
and fauna restored and reordered into new patterns of ecosystems. 
During the periods when the collective human enterprise is decreased, 
frequently called Dark Ages, various human communities developed 
new ways of thinking, innovation, new patterns of social organization. 
During the twenty-first century and beyond, humans have the 
opportunity to learn from our Pleistocene ancestors methods adapting, 
socially, politically, and ecologically, to global warming. 
 
Paul Shepard focused his life work on the adaptations of humans in 
hunter-gather societies. The cultures of these societies were and are 
focused on kinship, ceremonialism, adaptation, and intimate relations 
with wild nature. 
 
Shepard provides us a view of the interpenetration of mankind in the 
landscape and asserts that the social forces of modern society have 
constrained humans and encouraged what he called “preadolescent 
immaturity.” 
 
In Coming Home to the Pleistocene, Shepard wrote that 
We have been corrupted not only by the domestication but by the conventions of 
nature esthetics. The corporate world has drawn our attention away from wildness 
with parcels of wilderness that restrict the random play of genes, establish a 
dichotomy of places and banish wild forms to the enclaves where they may be 
encountered by audiences while the business of domesticating and denuding the 
planet proceeds. The savage DNA is being isolated and protected as esthetic 
relicts, like the vestiges of tribal peoples. The ecological relationships and 
religious insights of wild cultures, whose social organizations represents exotic or 
vestigial stages in ‘Our history’ or ‘our evolution,’ are translated into museum 
dioramas. My wildness, according to this agenda, can be experienced only on 
reservations called wilderness, but cannot be lived in ordinary life.1
 
We are pleased to present this selection of essays and narratives that 
explore the depth and relevance of Paul Shepard’s contribution to 
human ecology and human development, and contribute to our 
collective dialogue on our present condition. Perhaps as Shepard 
The Trumpeter 2 
 
 
suggests, appropriate adaptive strategies may be discovered in a sort of 
re-paleolithization of cultures. 
 
References 
Chew, Sing. 2007. The Recurring Dark Ages: Ecological Stress, 
Climate Changes, and System Transformation. Lanham, MD: 
AltaMira Press.  
 
Shepard, Paul. 1998. Coming Home to the Pleistocene. Washington, 
DC: Island Press. 
 
_________________________________________________________ 
 
I would like to take this opportunity to thank Bill Devall for his 
wonderful assistance in bringing this and the next issue “to print.” His 
insights into the arguments presented were uncannily accurate and his 
feedback to the authors helped strengthen the works herein. His 
unfailing kindness to me as a new associate editor was the support I 
needed to bring to completion my first issues. 
 
MTC 
 
                                                 
1 Shepard, 1998, p. 145. 
Volume 23 Number 2 3 


Introduction

Mathews, Freya

The World Hidden Within the World: A Conversation on Ontopoetics

Boland, Daniel

 
 
The Hermit Notices The Arrival Of Spring  
 
No calendar is needed.  
Water trickles and gushes. 
 
The redwing blackbird has returned to the riverbank  
to spasm its okalee mantra. 
 
Bare trees on the cusp of buds 
reach toward a vapour trail scrawled  
like fingerpaint across a blue canvas. 
 
And a young woman at the bus stop  
bites ferociously into an apple. 
 
Daniel Boland 
 
 
Volume 23, Number 1 95


The Hermit Notices The Arrival Of Spring

Hanson, Lorelei L.

 
 
The Trumpeter  
Volume 23, Number 1 (2007) 
ISSN: 0832-6193 
 
Book Review  
 
Review of Endgame: Volume I – The Problem of Civilization and 
Endgame: Volume II – Resistance, by Derrick Jensen. Seven Stories 
Press, 2006, 929 pp. 
$24.50 CDN each. 
 
Review by Lorelei L. Hanson 
lorelei.hanson@athabascau.ca
 
Derrick Jensen begins Endgame by asking do you believe it is possible 
that our culture will undergo a voluntary transformation to a sane and 
sustainable way of living? Having asked many this question and never 
receiving an affirmative response, Jensen sets out to examine the 
insanity, violence, and unsustainability of civilization and strategies for 
taking it all down or accelerating its eminent collapse. Interweaving 
accounts of personal experiences and conversations with a discussion of 
twenty premises, for over 900 pages he presents what is largely an 
anarcho-primitivist position: civilization cannot be reformed—there is 
no hope for this culture; the only moral response is to completely 
dismantle it.   
Jensen defines civilization as  
culture—that is, a complex of stories, institutions, and artifacts—that both 
lead to and emerge from the growth of cities . . . cities being defined—so as 
to distinguish them from camps, villages, and so on—as people living more 
or less permanently in one place in densities high enough to require routine 
importation of food and other necessities of life.1  
Drawing from the work of Lewis Mumford, he lists a number of the 
attributes that characterize cities: centralization of political power, 
separation of classes, lifetime division of labour, mechanization of 
production, magnification of military power, economic exploitation of 
the weak, and universal introduction of slavery and forced labour for 
both individual and military purposes. He argues that in order for cities 
to operate they must rely on the exploitation of resources and labour far 
outside of their land base and thus, are inherently unsustainable. In 
Volume 23, Number 1 99
contrast, he looks to indigenous hunter-gatherer cultures for insights on 
other ways of viewing and interacting in the world sustainably. Indians, 
for example, illustrate how one can participate in the larger-than-human 
community as a contrast to the contemporary exploitation of the natural 
world as resources; the Indians ate salmon and entered into a 
relationship with the salmon whereby they gave respect to the salmon in 
exchange for the flesh. As illustrated here and elaborated throughout his 
books, Jensen, like many environmental writers, posits the city as the 
antithesis of nature, and pits the organic against the artificial, and, in the 
process, a normative ideal is inscribed in the moral order of nature.2
To some extent the first volume is an elaboration of Jensen’s twenty 
premises; in the second volume he details strategies and tactics for 
dismantling civilization. Yet, as Jensen does not follow a linear style of 
writing, throughout the two volumes he jumps from one topic to the 
next with little connection between them, and then often returns to 
further explore many of these same topics later in the books. 
Nonetheless, there are a number of themes that can be highlighted that 
are woven throughout the two books including: civilization is abusive, 
exploitative and insane; there is no place for hope; violence in 
opposition to the injustices of the powerful is justifiable; we’ve 
overshot the planet’s carrying capacity; we are misguided in our 
separation of selves from each other and the natural world; we are 
delusional in thinking that the problems created by civilization can be 
fixed by individual actions or by piecemeal steps; we all pay to 
subsidize the corporate destruction of the world; and the crux of this 
culture’s problem is our belief that controlling and abusing the natural 
world is justifiable. As a means of illustration I will elaborate on a few 
of these themes. 
Using a Dear Abbey column that listed the warning signs of potential 
abusers as a springboard, Jensen draws strong parallels between an 
abusive spouse or parent and how civilization treats the natural world 
and how we treat each other. Quoting from some of the most respected 
writers in the fields of trauma and psychotherapy, he makes the case 
that the entire culture is so violent and traumatized that we operate 
primarily out of fear and detachment. As the work of Judith Herman 
shows that the effects of long-term domestic violence often manifest as 
amnesia, a sense of helplessness, identification with the abuser, and a 
belief that all relationships are based on force, Jensen makes the case 
that this explains contemporary culture’s failure to act to protect the 
natural world, come to our own self-defence against the powerful, and 
rally to help those among us who are the blatant victim’s of industrial 
civilization—indigenous cultures, other species, the poor, and so on.  
The Trumpeter 100
 
 
Because we have been inculcated by civilization to believe that 
belongings are more important than belonging, and that relationships 
are based on dominance, violence, and exploitation, we are driven by an 
urge to destroy life. Deadened inside we set up cityscapes where 
anything wild and free has been caged, we occupy and try to control 
other people and lands, and we blow each other up in fabricated wars of 
defence that are really greedy resource grabs. He argues that we fall 
into the pattern of abused children in response to this violence and 
destruction in that we internalize the responsibility. Hence, we focus on 
what individual actions we can take to ameliorate deforestation, climate 
change, or the loss of species, rather than focusing on the system that is 
responsible for the clear cutting, creating communities and 
transportation routes that depend on cars, and the investment of billions 
in the military. Jensen insists that while it is vital to make lifestyle 
choices that mitigate the damage we cause by being members of 
civilization, it is self indulgent, self righteous, and self important to 
focus our attention and efforts primarily on making ourselves better 
rather than focusing on the system and those in power. Moreover, he 
adds, it only serves the interests of those in power by keeping the 
attention off of them.  
But it would be a mistake to assume that Jensen is against all forms of 
violence. Throughout the books Jensen devotes pages responding to his 
pacifist critics who in responding to the violence he advocates address 
him with phrases such as “you can’t use the master’s tools to dismantle 
the master’s house,” or “violence begets violence.” Although, in the 
beginning of Volume I, Jensen is in search of moral absolutes, he later 
makes the case repeatedly that morality is contextual and hence, 
violence in some circumstances is warranted. Specifically, violence is 
an appropriate response to prevent the further destruction, torture or 
exploitation of those you love, especially when the perpetrators of the 
destruction repeatedly ignore you pleas and reasoning to stop. The 
pacifism Gandhi advocated was a death wish that fails to account for 
the kind of abusive and psychopathological dynamics that underlie the 
Nazi holocaust, domestic abuse, and the ongoing exploitation and 
destruction of the natural world.  
Jensen also writes about being criticized for hope-bashing. His position 
is that he doesn’t have much hope for civilization and thinks that is a 
good thing, for hope keeps us believing in the system: technology will 
save us, the system will change, God or Jesus will save us, etc. Jensen 
argues that hope serves those in power because “Hope is a longing for a 
future condition for which you have no agency. It means you are 
essentially powerless.”3 In contrast, when you stop hoping for external 
assistance, or believing that somehow the system will self correct, then 
Volume 23, Number 1 101
action occurs as you begin working out ways to resolve the current 
situation. Being hopeless makes you more, not less, effective because 
you begin to look for solutions to the problems you face.  
Jensen recounts how every morning he gets up he asks himself whether 
he should sit down and write or go blow up a dam. He writes a lot about 
blowing dams or taking down cell phone towers but has never done 
either. These are the rally calls he makes to dismantle civilization and in 
the process save salmon, sturgeon, songbirds, and many other species. 
While the title of his second volume is resistance, the second book is 
really more of the same from Volume I and does not provide much more 
detail about the appropriate structure of the resistance or the collective 
efforts for dismantling the system. Instead Jensen discusses locating the 
fulcrums, pivot points, and bottlenecks or kinks in the system where 
things get backlogged, as well as placing the powerful in situations 
where they have no choice but to change, for this is the only way they 
will do so. Jensen is purposely not prescriptive. Instead, he advocates 
that there is much work to be done and not everyone needs to be 
blowing up dams or taking down cell phone towers. Someone has to 
teach the people whose electrical towers will be dismantled how to 
cook over open fires, and someone to teach how to gather medicinal 
plants from the forest, and so on, and people simply need to listen to 
their landbase and their hearts to determine what they should be doing. 
The one exception to these general pronouncements is found in the 
short chapter, “Fewer than Jesus had Apostles,” in which he recounts a 
conversation with some hackers about inflicting serious economic 
damage on a corporation though messing with their computer systems. 
In this chapter are revealed some very specific fulcrums and pivot 
points in the computer and economic systems and how to easily access 
them with a little persistence, computer savvy, and creativity.  
Jensen’s shrill call to action is warranted. I share in being dumbfounded 
how, in spite of the glaciers melting more rapidly than most scientists 
predicted, an exponential rise in cancer to levels (one in two people 
being inflicted with the disease in their lifetimes), the mass extinction 
of species (including 90 per cent of large fish having disappeared and a 
third of the remaining mammals likely to be lost in a three decades), yet 
civilization seems to be busily churning on as if there is no imminent 
crisis. Throughout the books Jensen draws attention to a myriad of the 
absurd manifestations of contemporary culture to raise attention to this 
dilemma. A few examples he cites include: most of the rivers of 
southern England are so full of hormones that half the male fish—in 
some cases all—are changing sexes; and we produce PVS medical 
devices to treat cancer and then dispose of them in hospital incinerators 
that emits toxic fumes that eventually will be someone else’s cancer; 
The Trumpeter 102
 
 
and Shell Oil sponsored competition offering $20,000 for the best 2000 
word essay on the topic of “Do we need nature?”. Jensen’s key message 
is important: we need to fundamentally, radically, and immediately 
change how we conceptualize and interact with the natural world and 
each other. 
While there are snippets of insight throughout Endgame, overall I found 
these volumes disappointing; they fail to present a thoughtful and 
informed critique of many of the topics he raises or to provide a 
sustained, carefully constructed cultural, social, and political analysis to 
examine the ecological and social calamities that befall the planet. 
Instead, Jensen uses generalities, contestable statements, and naïve 
pronouncements to make emphatic judgements, and he fails in many 
instances to apply to his own thinking and actions the critique of 
contemporary society he constructs. For example, Jensen states that 
“the only sustainable level of technology is the Stone Age.”4 If as 
Jensen claims, central to the insanity of civilization is a belief about 
ourselves and how we should interact with the rest of the world, then 
reverting back to Stone Age technology seems to be a rather simplistic 
and naïve proposal. As philosophers and historians of technology like 
Ursula Franklin and Jacques Ellul have detailed, technology is not 
simply a set of tools but is a system: “It entails far more than its 
individual material components. Technology involves organization, 
procedures, symbols, new words, equations, and most of all, a 
mindset.”5 So while wiping out the electrical grid may result in many of 
us not being able to spend our days on computers, subways, and in front 
of televisions watching inane programming from places we know 
nothing about, it will not in effect stop people from building more 
machines that may be just as ecologically harmful. By extension, it is 
problematic to generalize about all hunter-gather societies as being 
exemplary ecologically-attuned residents of the planet. As Ronald 
Wright details, the Upper Paleolithic people were more than able and 
relentless hunters creating slaughter sites industrial in size: a thousand 
mammoths at one and more than 100,000 horses at another. Driving the 
animals across steep terrains, they pushed herds over the cliffs leaving 
piles of animals to rot.6 More alarming than Jensen’s broad brush stroke 
attempts to pinpoint moral markers is his disregard for the social justice 
implications of what he is proposing. He instructs people to buy land 
for this will provide them with a better chance to survive the inevitable 
chaos that ensues when civilization topples. While Jensen details 
repeatedly and in great detail how, when the powerful in society are 
threatened or their property destroyed, the powerful kill or destroy the 
lives of those below, it seems naïve to think that during the collapse of 
Volume 23, Number 1 103
civilization, he or anyone not in this powerful group is going to escape 
the reach of these elite or the horrific disaster that will follow this event.  
Jensen’s extreme position has its role in raising attention to the severity 
and insanity of the environmental and social crisis that currently exists 
and will surely worsen, however, his analysis and strategies for 
resistance are largely lacking in critical depth. Given his apparent 
popularity among some, a chapter or two from Endgame could serve as 
a catalyst for a lively discussion or debate about the current ecological 
and social crisis in an undergraduate class, however, reading the entire 
two books would not. Due to the repetitive structure of the books, his 
basic points can be gleaned in far fewer than 900 pages and reading a 
few chapters would keep his readers somewhat intrigued by his position 
rather than annoyed by his failure to save trees by not containing what, 
after several hundred pages, begins to read like a long-winded rant.  
References 
Franklin, Ursula. 1990. The Real World of Technology. Toronto: CBC 
Enterprises. 
Heynen, Nike, Maria Kaika, and Erick Swyngedouw. 2006. Urban 
Political Ecology: Politicizing the Production of Urban Natures. 
In the Nature of Cities: Urban Political Ecology and the Politics 
of Urban Metabolism, ed. Nike Heynen, Maria Kaika, and Erik 
Swyngedouw, 1–20. New York: Routledge.  
Wright, Ronald. 2004. A Short History of Progress. Toronto: Anansi 
Press.  
 
Notes 
                                                 
1 Page 17. 
2 This is a general characterization made about environmentally minded social 
theorists and socially minded environmental theorists by Nike Heynen, Maria Kaika, 
and Erick Swyngedouw, 2006.  
3 Page 330. 
4 Page 119. 
5 Franklin, 1990, 12. 
6 Wright, 2004, 38.  
 
The Trumpeter 104


Review of Endgame: Volume I – The Problem of Civilization and Endgame: Volume II – Resistance, by Derrick Jensen

Institute for Inquiry, IFI

As each of us steps up to the fact 
that humanity has become the primary force 
setting conditions for life on earth,
it is crucial to understand what, exactly, we are creating.
It’s time for a new kind of news journalism.
Presenting online news inquiries and a newsprint journal
with lead and network contributors.
www.instituteforinquiry.org
The Institute for Inquiry (IFI), a 501c3 non-profit organization, proposes a new generation
of journalism that forefronts physical, biological, and cultural life as the realities most at
stake and least understood. Please sign up for our e-newsletter –– and tell others about IFI.
We are also pleased to announce that a number of essays and interviews from past issues of
Wild Duck Review are now available as pdfs at www.instituteforinquiry.org
P O Box 335 / Davenport / CA / 95017 /  casey@instituteforinquiry.org
i f i
changing the news
 


Institute for Inquiry

Shepard, Paul

Confessions of a Whistle-blower

Krause, Bernie

 
 
The Trumpeter  
ISSN: 0832-6193 
Volume 23, Number 2 (2007) 
 
The Gift of Music: 
A Tribute to Paul Shepard 
 
Bernie Krause 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
T
l
s
T
a
t
VSince 1968, Dr. Krause has traveled the world capturing sounds of creatures 
and environments large and small. He earned his PhD in the field of 
bioacoustics in 1981 and has worked at the research sites of Jane Goodall 
(Gombe, Tanzania), Birute Galdikas (Camp Leakey, Borneo), and Dian Fossey 
(Karisoke, Rwanda), as well as others recording and evaluating the manner in 
which soundscapes (consisting of the biophony, geophony, and anthrophony) 
convey meaning to the biotic world. 
Dr. Krause also has an extensive professional music background.  After 
playing guitar for Motown Records, he replaced Pete Seeger in the folk group, 
The Weavers (1963), introduced the synthesizer to the fields of pop music and 
film and, contributed performances to over 135 films including Apocalypse 
Now, Rosemary's Baby, Castaway, and Shipping News, and over 250 
recordings with major recording artists and acts. Krause has recorded 55 
environmental soundscape CDs and creates interactive environmental sound 
sculptures for museums, zoos, aquaria, and other public spaces. His 
environmental sound sculptures can be found at the Smithsonian, the American 
Museum of Natural History, and can be heard on CBC/Galaxie broadcast.  His 
most recent books include Into A Wild Sanctuary: A Life in Music and Natural 
Sound (1998) and Wild Soundscapes: Discovering the Voice of the Natural 
World (2002) a book and audio CD. Krause lives in Glen Ellen, California with
his wife, Katherine, and cats.  
Who speaks of victory? To endure is everything. 
Rilke 
he clipping arrived in the mail with a note scrawled at the top: “You’ll 
ike this,” my then 83-year-old father-in-law wrote in large letters. As I 
canned the headline and introduction to the article from the Salt Lake 
ribune, two words immediately caught my attention: “controversial,” 
nd “cancer.” That was my introduction to Paul Shepard and one of 
hose curious moments that shapes lives. 
olume 23, Number 2 69
The subject was Shepard’s last book, The Others: How Animals Made 
Us Human, published just before his death. Peppered with a vague tone 
of journalistic skepticism and references to colleagues who found his 
views of the natural world threatening to their long-held positions, the 
article hooked my interest enough that I felt compelled to buy the book. 
I was not disappointed. Each sentence revealed a holographic world-
view that compelled me to look deeper and wider into issues of the wild 
and the meaning of “humanness;” subjects I had thought I understood. 
His solicitous narrative raised questions where there previously had 
been certainty. The words clarified concepts that had been ambiguous. 
The concepts challenged long-held views and shook them up like a fine 
dry martini. By the time I finished the first read (I’ve read it once 
almost every year since 1996), I could well understand how Shepard’s 
efforts could induce skepticism. His densely packed narrative is not an 
easy read and obliges initiates to think with very great care. While 
gentle and passionate, at the same time he cajoles and challenges and 
prods one to contemplate the world in new light. The result was and is 
luminous, revealing, and timeless. The Sherpas in the Himalayas will 
often stop and sit mid-trek seemingly for no reason. When asked why, 
their answer will be “We’re waiting for our souls to catch up.” Shepard 
asks the same of us.  
My path to Paul Shepard was oblique. Always drawn to the world of 
sound (I don’t see very well), I was a successful professional musician 
until, in my late 30s, I grew quite agitated and stressed. Deeply held 
fears of the wild natural instilled by my family while growing up in the 
midwest did nothing to quell my cryptic longing to be outdoors rather 
than confined to windowless air-conditioned studios. Ultimately, I 
recognized my conflict as a profound case of “nature deficit disorder.” 
The called-for remedy was swift and permanent. Dropping music and 
all the surrounding “noise,” I returned mid-life to academia and earned 
a graduate degree with an internship in bioacoustics. I wanted to re-
energize my life fueled by the harmonious and resonant critter voices I 
constantly dreamt of. I sought a different relationship with the world 
into which I was born. Like Ulysses, I was drawn to a different song. 
Aside from a few hints from fine writers like Loren Eiseley, Farley 
Mowat, and Arne Naess, I quickly learned that there was not much 
literature that explored the natural world from the combined 
perspectives of science, history, philosophy, sensibility, and experience, 
leaving the impression that there was so much more of the story that 
needed to be told. From any perspective, including that of the deep 
ecology movement, most writing avoided the subject of sound as a part 
of the natural experience. It was a void I hoped would be replenished. 
But how to do it?  Since bioacoustics, the recording of creature voices, 
The Trumpeter 70 
 
 
was an altogether new field introduced in the late 1960s—the time 
when I actually began recording in the wild—I navigated those waters 
completely without a compass or “guide.” There was no support. 
Alone and without direction, I knew fundamentally that I wanted to 
capture the sound of entire landscapes. This approach was not an 
obvious concept in the beginning and it met with no little resistance. 
Taught for years that the sounds of the natural world needed to be 
deconstructed, abstracted, and singled out in order to be analyzed and 
understood, I endured the gnawing feeling that we had only looked at 
the tip of the iceberg. The old model felt to me like separating the first 
principal violin part from Beethoven’s Fifth, recording it solo, and then 
attempting to grasp the entire symphonic experience from that single 
voice as if the rest of the orchestral parts were composed of unwanted 
“noise.” That thought, alone, propelled me in another direction: 
collecting an entire body of natural sounds in the context of time, place, 
location. I had the strong sense of the existence of far greater 
significance inherent in natural soundscapes on a much larger scale: 
recordings that would later become known as entire biophonies. The 
focus of this holistic approach seemed to me more calibrated to the 
ways in which the wild natural expressed itself. The method was more 
intuitively aligned with the spirit of life—the collective voice of still 
wild habitats—and the result was much more engaging to the human 
ear. The effect was the equivalent of adding a well-synchronized sound 
track to an otherwise vast collection of silent images. But as Loren 
Eiseley discovered and forewarned, and as Shepard found out, one does 
not risk of coloring outside the lines of established thought without 
some peril. 
When R. Murray Schafer, the Canadian composer, now Emeritus from 
Simon Fraser University, wrote his seminal book, “Tuning of the 
World,” in 1977, he introduced the concept of the soundscape. At that 
moment, Western languages began to incorporate words with specific 
meaning in the acoustic domain. And my mission took on new 
significance: Collecting soundscapes—natural, rural, and urban. 
For many years I worked in a fragmented way, noting bits of 
consequence in the soundscapes I was collecting worldwide, and 
accumulating scraps of information from a wide range of books, 
articles, and input from colleagues. Little by little, the biophonic form 
began to take shape.  
In the early 1980s, while listening and recording at a site in Africa, I 
experienced an evening chorus as the virtual “critter orchestra” I had 
imagined years earlier. But this time the chorus sounded clearly defined 
where insects filled certain frequency and temporal niches, and birds, 
Volume 23, Number 2 71
mammals, and amphibians filled others. Even though spectrogram 
analysis bore this out, few colleagues were ready to buy it. 
“Anecdotal,” was the almost universal response despite the evidence. 
“Nice aesthetic idea,” sniffed others. After several more years in the 
field and hundreds of additional hours of analysis, I tentatively 
introduced the concept of the “niche hypothesis” at a lecture given to an 
environmental studies group at the University of California in Santa 
Cruz in 1988. Despite slides and representative soundscapes, blank 
stares reflected back from faculty and students, alike. It was as if the 
voice of the natural world didn’t exist outside of a single birdcall or 
whale vocalization.  
During the subsequent eight years BTO (before The Others) I 
collaborated with Louis Sarno, an anthropologist who had left the 
United States with a one-way ticket to the Central African Republic to 
live with and record the music of the Bayaka (Babenzélé) Pygmies. In 
addition to the idea of the critter voice niches, Sarno’s work supported 
another observation experienced when working with cultures that lived 
more closely connected to the natural world: the Bayaka were using the 
forest soundscapes as a natural karaoke orchestra with which they 
created their music and performed. 
Yet, until I read The Others, none of these ideas truly coalesced in ways 
I could fully explain. You see, Shepard was one of the few who not 
only “saw,” but also “listened,” and had a grasp of the wildness that 
included much larger perspectives than most of his colleagues and 
peers. While the entire book dazzles with insight, the narrative in 
Chapter 12  of The Others, “The Gift of Music,” brought it all together 
for me during the summer of 1996. 
Why and how did we first dance, sing, and make instrumental music? . . . When 
humans uttered their first words, birds, frogs, and insects were already whistling, 
dancing, drumming, trilling.. . . Somehow, as we listened, all of this came to us as 
performances of rhythms in sound and motion, which we felt in ourselves as 
music. And some of our songs were about them, emulating their piping, treble, 
trumpeting, and modulation. We found that we could extend our song by blowing 
through their pithed wing bones and amputated horns, striking their stretched 
skins, plucking and scraping their dried guts, or shaking their sculls full of loose 
teeth. We incorporated their bodies with “singing” as part of our own.1 
By completing the circle, Shepard conceived of humans in a natural 
world continuum not only physically and organically, but culturally 
through sound as well as other constituents. Chapter 12, in particular, 
where Shepard broke the cipher I had heard and imagined instinctively, 
liberated me to explore the idea of the natural soundscape well beyond 
the boundaries I had earlier set for myself. It was music, after all. And I 
finally found a colleague and friend who truly understood the essence 
of that “voice.” But most important, Shepard was comfortable with the 
The Trumpeter 72 
 
 
idea that we may never fully know how the natural world works. And 
perhaps we shouldn’t. As my late colleague, Dr. Kenneth Norris 
(Director of the Environmental Studies program at the University of 
California, Santa Cruz, and the scientist who discovered how dolphins 
echolocate) once said while on a field trip to discover the secret of sand 
dune song: “Bernie, who cares if we learn how this system works? 
We’re having such a great time in the field exploring, I hope we never 
find out!”  
Paul Shepard died of cancer six months after I read the Tribune article. 
We never met. His publisher, reluctant to give out his contact 
information, acted wisely. Paul was too sick to receive visitors. I had 
too many questions. Nevertheless, his work continues to inspire mine 
almost every day. The descriptive elements of the soundscape—
biophony (the combined creature vocalizations in a given habitat), 
geophony (the non-biological natural sounds such as the effects of 
weather, water, etc.), anthrophony (human sound—mechanical and 
non-mechanical) are direct results of Shepard’s influence and his 
demand that we pay particular attention. The imprint left in the path of 
his many books, articles, speeches, and the few lucky students who 
found themselves momentarily in the light of his presence is no 
accident of genius. Shepard’s gift was generous and intentional. Paul 
was not a musician. But he was a person who probably knew more 
about music than any teacher I’ve met. That is because he understood 
its origins: In the end, as it was in the beginning, he reminds us that it 
was the animals who taught us to dance and sing. 
 
References 
Schafer, R. Murray. 1977. Tuning of the World, Toronto, ON: 
McClelland & Stewart Ltd. 
 
Shepard, Paul. 1996. The Others: How Animals Made Us Human. 
Washington, DC: Island Press. 
 
Note 
1 Shepard, 1966. 
                                                 
 
Volume 23, Number 2 73


The Gift of Music: A Tribute to Paul Shepard

 
The Trumpeter  
ISSN: 0832-6193 
Volume 23, Number 2 (2007) 
 
The Biological Bases of Bear Mythology  
and Ceremonialism  
 
Paul Shepard 
 
 
 
 
 
 
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7Paul Shepard delivered this paper in 1993 in Russia. It was published in Bears
of Russian and Adjacent Countries – State of Populations, Proceeding of the 
6th Conference of Specialist Studying Bears, Central Forest Reserve, Tver 
Oblast, Russia 2 (September 6-11, 1993): 126–130.  he widespread similarities of the rites and stories of the bear, Ursus 
rctos, in the circumpolar northern hemisphere may be an example of 
ultural diffusion. But if those stories and practices did pass by contact 
rom people to people—or by the movements of peoples—it is likely 
hat new ideas and behaviours were adopted because they found fertile 
round in common experience. Alternatively, even if these analogous 
spects of the cultures arose independently, it seems probable that their 
imilarities are due to their common origin in observations of the bear 
tself. Either way, the bear is the object from which an immense, shared 
ody of ceremony and myth arose.1 
ythologists rarely ask if there is an actual living referent to the myths 
hey study. It’s as though they see the phenomena, which they describe, 
s the product of sheer, creative imagination. This paper proposes a 
atural provenance for major features of bear myth and ceremonialism. 
t suggests that they arose as metaphors based on observations of the 
ear itself and its natural history.  
he logic of these “metaphoric enactments” or rites and stories that 
ersonify bears depends on what might be called primal epistemology. 
t its heart is the belief that the natural world is rich in signs, which are 
ignificant to humans—models of exemplary events. As such, they are 
eys to the meaning of a complex world that arose with the evolution of 
uman self-consciousness and the mental capacity to create a 
orldview.  
The Trumpeter 4 
 
 
 
Belief in the natural world as a system of cues and signs is 
characteristic of many tribal peoples who possess a structure of 
attention in which natural forms are observed not only for practical 
reasons but because they are perceived as intelligent and spiritual 
fellow beings. Such a cosmos is itself alive and watchful with a 
thousand eyes and ears, alert to what the humans do and say. On the 
one hand, the external world is a feast for the human mind; on the other, 
it is available for utilitarian purposes. Numerous authors have 
commented on how difficult it is for we, who are heirs of centuries of 
disbelief in the tutorial genius of the natural world, or who think of the 
animals as passive, mindless, and insentient, to understand the acute 
sensibility of people with a radically different metaphysics, who 
experience the world as a multifold, living presence.2     
 
It is likely, for example, that humans have long believed that the bear’s 
own experience is more like our own than is that of any other animal. 
This assumption has its origin in its similarity to humans in basic 
biology and appearance. Its large size, head shape and eye position, bi-
pedal stance, lack of a significant tail, nursing positions, and manual 
dexterity seem to outweigh and to transcend all those familiar, 
mammalian traits in which the bear is different from ourselves. Its 
deliberate movements of head and body suggest to us a life of the 
mind—of memory, deliberation, and purpose—based on some kind of 
inner model of the world. This impression is strengthened by the 
closeness of the bear’s niche and ours, that of large omnivores. Food 
habits dictate the pace and scope of its life, so that characteristic, 
periodic foraging alternates with rest and play in a way that we find 
reminiscent of our own lives. For us, bears have distinct personalities, 
reflecting our own 
 
Perhaps these two aspects of the bear—its anatomical and behavioural 
likeness to humans in body form, size, gestures, postures, and 
movements that indicate temperament, intention and character, and its 
food habits, linked much as our own to seasonal patterns of 
spatial/temporal distribution—are the keys to its power as an exemplar. 
At the same time, it is different enough from humans that a translation 
is necessary. The bear presents perception and consciousness with a 
degree of ambiguity (similarity with a difference) that is perennially 
stimulating to the imagination.3  Unlike the top carnivores of the 
ecological food and energy matrices, we and the bear are not so 
narrowly focused. As participants in all the consumer levels we are the 
slaves of none. The bear is like us in this as no other animal. Its 
ecological relationships are to the whole of the natural community, and 
Volume 23, Number 2 75
so, too, are its discernments of the whole, as though standing back like 
ourselves, to observe. Our kind has watched the bear watching, and 
recognized a being like us.  
 
Metaphors grow from metonym. That is, human proximity to bears in 
their shared habitat invites the imagination in all of its forms—dreams, 
visions, ecstatic trances, and the logical rumination of the sort described 
by Claude Levi-Strauss in speaking of tribal peoples as astute thinkers 
and logicians.4  Metonym is contact and contiguity; the presence of 
bears in daily life, the uses of its skin, fat, flesh, bones and organs bring 
it close. Closeness is also kinship. The metaphor of the bear’s 
interpenetration with human life is the poetic myth of genealogical 
descent. This is the context from which emerges the nearly universal 
bear mother story—that of the woman who, when the world was young, 
married a bear, a union from which “we” are descended.5 Human 
motherhood is profoundly saturated with this bear-ing. In the Haida 
carvings of the bear mother we see the melded image of the bear and 
the human form, a binary figure signifying a reverence for the bear as 
ancestor, whose family we humans married into at the beginning of the 
world. The result is that we and bears have important similarities and 
that the bearish part is a special wisdom.   
 
A different complex of myths and objects, Old European and Greek, 
also oriented to this intrinsic linkage, anticipates the Western world’s 
repudiation of our animal ancestry.  For example, the Vinca figures 
from sixth millennium BC Romania, part bear and part woman, and 
some of the Greek stories like that of Callisto who was turned into a 
bear as punishment, may depict a stage in the dissociation of human 
kinship with the bear on the advent of Greek humanism.6  This scenario 
invites further inquiry into the proposition that the bear-mother stories 
of northwestern American Indians combined the figures of bear and 
human in celebration of unity with the animal, while the binary figure 
of bear and woman in the Mediterranean world represents a stage in the 
emergence of the anthropomorphic deities from the animal powers, the 
shedding of their spirit.7  
 
In the northern story of the woman who marries a bear, she and her sons 
are returned to the human village upon the killing of her husband. He, 
knowing of his coming death, instructs the divine mother and her sons 
on the rites to be performed. The world’s oldest and best-known story is 
climaxed in this tutorial, an outstanding example of the natural 
ratification of cultural activities and evidence of the human sense that 
bears, like the sacred bear, have a special foresight.8  The story explains 
that the bear “told” us how to perform those rites that precede, define, 
The Trumpeter 76 
 
 
and follow the killing of a bear by hunters, ceremonies that 
acknowledge both its kinship to humans and its gift of meat and skin. 
 
Thus the story comes before the ceremonies of the slain bear—the 
complex set of social events, hortatory addresses, ritual dissection, 
cooking and feasting protocols, distribution of the bear parts, songs, 
chants and dances of exculpation and participation, liturgical acts, and 
formalized arrivals and departures that constitute the celebration of the 
bear’s presence in body and spirit. The spirit that accompanies the body 
of the bear and takes part in or witnesses the rites is given a formal 
send-off in its circular hegira through the spirit world and later returns 
as another slain bear. The bear spirit, is believed to be embodied in 
bears that come into the purview of people, departing at the end of the 
ceremonies toward the upper valleys onto the slopes of the mountain, 
much as the den-site-seeking bear does.9 If all of this sounds fantastic to 
our ears, it is because it is derived from a different psychology of 
interpretation. For example, among indigenous peoples wild animals 
are not usually regarded as individuals in the way that pets are, nor as 
mere objects, but are typically seen as temporary embodiments of an 
immortal spirit.10   
 
The imminence of the spiritual bear is attested in the sacredness of its 
name. Sacred beings are not carelessly invoked by their holy name. At 
one point in some versions of the bear-mother story the maiden, having 
stepped in bear scat, speaks its name, triggering her subsequent capture 
and marriage and the birth of the bear-sons. This occurred  because she 
was overheard by bears whose name was taken in vain. Taboos 
regarding the bear’s name may seem merely “superstitious’ to the 
outsider without a significant basis in naturalistic observations. And yet 
we know that the bears have very acute hearing and become agitated 
when disturbed by people, even at a distance. The safety of human 
berry pickers—a routine task of women and the initial setting in the 
story of the woman who married a bear—may sometimes depend on 
their ability to move unobtrusively and remain silent. The widespread 
custom of speaking of the bear only in euphemisms may not have 
originated simply in reverential feeling so much as people’s awareness 
that they are surrounded by visible and invisible beings. Even among 
religions that no longer regard animals as having spiritual power, 
caution about invoking the deity by name may have originated in this 
way.   
 
Apart from the ceremony of the slain bear, healing and initiation head 
the list of other rituals in which the “presence” of the bear is invoked. 
These enacted metaphors probably have their roots also in observations 
Volume 23, Number 2 77
of bears. Diet and baths are its approach to its own sickness. “Medved,” 
the Russian word for bear, may have origins in a term that is 
linguistically connected to “medicine” and to honey.  Honey is widely 
recognized as a major healing substance with many connections to bear 
lore and a rich symbolism as the sacred food given by their nurses to 
infant gods and goddesses.11 Bear doctors and bear elders in tribes as 
far south as Arizona in America and south to Greece in Eurasia control 
the rites of transformation, often using bear paraphernalia to bring the 
bear spirit into the occasion. These transformational events—from 
illness to health and from child to adult—draw their energy from the 
larger realm of the bear’s conspicuous biological powers for change. It 
enters dens just as we go inside our own structures. There some give 
birth, nurture the young and take them into the world as if their 
emergence in the spring were a second birth from Mother Earth itself, 
returning with them into the earth a second and third winter, before 
separating from them.  The inconspicuous sexuality of bears and 
delayed implantation are factors that phenomenologically conflate to 
“virgin birth.”  
 
Entering the earth, remaining there in a death-like state, coming forth 
renewed, and bringing with it newborn, may be the master paradigm 
upon which many human customs develop as the ritualization of 
transitions and permutations. Outstanding among these are the funerary 
traditions of burial, beginning with Neanderthal peoples, who had long 
experience with both brown and cave bears (Ursus spelaeus ).12 The 
ceremonies of all death and rebirth might be an example of a larger 
phenomenon, translated metaphorically (that extraordinary mental leap 
of analogy) for which an ursine object—a bear skin, tooth, or paw—is 
the talisman. Study of the objects placed in these graves may yet make 
it possible to ascertain whether the underground passage of the bear was 
taken as a guide to the formalities such as burial that would insure life 
after death.13  
 
Such stylized enactments of bear behaviour is a “kenning,” a word 
referring to both “naming” and “knowing,” coming from the same Indo-
European root as “cognition,” “connote” and “narrate.” Something is 
seen, named, referred to, and told first as a story. Modern tribal peoples 
often say that an animal “taught us” certain things. But “teaching” in a 
myth may actually have its origin in long, patient observation of actual 
events and creatures in the natural world.   
 
Many questions remain: How does its natural history relate to the bear 
in the sky as Ursa Major? Was the bear’s winter “sleep” a presentment, 
perhaps to be understood as an mimicry of death that confirms an 
The Trumpeter 78 
 
 
“awakening”? Why should the bear’s paw be so important a talisman? 
What specific implications do other anatomical parts have for their 
ceremonial uses? Are the many 40-day intervals of purification in 
modern religions related to the denning period of southern bears? Does 
the lack of human visual sexual identity of bears lend itself to the 
mythic uses of androgyny?  What difference in the observation of bears 
affect the nature of stories of the man who marries a bear as compared 
to those of the woman who marries a bear? 
 
This unexplored area connecting the natural history and the mythic 
concepts of bears offers a rich potential for interdisciplinary research 
into the meaning of bears in human culture.  
 
References 
Barbeau, Marius. 1945. Bear Mother. Journal of Folklore  59. 
 
Bullfinch, Thomas. 1973. Callisto. In Bullfinch's Mythology. New 
York: MacMillan. 
 
Dioszegi, V., ed. 1968. Popular Beliefs and Folklore Tradition in 
Siberia. Bloomington: Univ. of Indiana Press. 
 
Eliade, Mircea. 1967. The Rites and Symbols of Initiation: The 
Mysteries of “The Ainu Bear Sacrifice.” In Man and the Sacred. 
New York: Harper and Row. 
 
Gimbutas, Marija. 1982. The Goddesses and the Gods of Old Europe. 
Berkeley: Univ. of California. 
 
Hallowell, A. I. 1926. Bear Ceremonialism in the Northern 
Hemisphere. American Anthropologist 28: 1–175. 
 
Kurten, Bjorn. 1971. The Cave Bear Story. New York: Columbia Univ. 
Press,. 
 
Levi-Strauss, Claude. 1966. The Savage Mind. Chicago: Univ. of 
Chicago Press. 
 
Nelson, R. 1983 The Watchful World. In Make Prayers to the Raven. 
Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press. 
 
Volume 23, Number 2 79
Shepard, Paul, and Barry Sanders. 1985. The Sacred Paw, the Bear in 
Nature, Myth and Literature. New York: Viking Press. 
 
Solecki, Ralph S. 1972. Shanidar: The Humanity of Neanderthal Man. 
London: Allan Lane. 
 
Travers, P.M. 1982 What the Bees Know. Parabola  6 (3). 
 
Vasilevich, G. M. 1963. Early Concepts About the Universe Among the 
Evinks. In Studies in Siberian Shamanism, ed. Harry N, 
Michael. Toronto: Arctic Institute of North America. 
 
Notes 
                                                 
1
 Hallowell, 1926. 
2 Nelson, 1983, 292. 
3 Shepard and Sanders, 1985, 243. 
4 Levi-Strauss, 1966, 290. 
5 Barbeau, 1945, 231. 
6 Gimbutas, 1982, 390. 
7 Bullfinch, 1973. 
8 Dioszegi, 1968, 260. 
9 Eliade, 1967. 
10 Vasilevich, 1963. 
11 Travers, 1982. 
12 Kurten, 1971, 140. 
13 Solecki, 1972, 212. 
 
 
The Trumpeter 80 


The Biological Bases of Bear Mythology and Ceremonialism

Weis, Tony

 
 
The Trumpeter  
Volume 23, Number 1 (2004) 
ISSN: 0832-6193 
 
Book Review  
 
Review of The Pig Who Sang to the Moon: The Emotional World of 
Farm Animals, by Jeffrey Mousaieff Masson. New York: Ballantine 
Books, 2004. 304 pages, $14 US, paper. 
 
Review by Tony Weis, Assistant Professor, Department of Geography, 
University of Western Ontario. aweis@uwo.ca
Putting Farm Animals Back in Nature 
There are no more fundamental environmental issues than how we 
produce our food, which plays a critical role shaping the material and 
ethical foundations of human society. Of all the sweeping and speeding 
changes in global food production, arguably the most significant in an 
environmental sense is the steadily rising per capita consumption of 
animal products—the “meatification” of diets—that has tended to grow 
with affluence. Per capita global meat consumption nearly doubled 
between 1950 and 1990, and global meat production, by volume, grew 
by a staggering 41 percent from 1990 to 2003, more than twice as fast 
as did the human population.1  
At the same time, the colossal ecological “hoof-print” of animal 
agriculture has been increasingly well-documented, often framed in 
terms of the extra land space that must be devoted to agriculture as animal 
production expands (given the inefficiencies of cycling feed through 
livestock) and in terms of the burden on freshwater resources (animal 
agriculture is one of the greatest consumers and polluters of water in 
North America). The institutionalized cruelty of the industry also raises 
profound ethical questions with respect to our relationship and moral 
obligations to non-human animals, and it is this hierarchical sphere of 
concern, perhaps even more than animal agriculture’s environmental 
burden, that has so frustrated animal advocates about the low priority, or 
absolute neglect, of animal agriculture within much of the environmental 
movement. This frustration is encapsulated by a comment from cattle 
Volume 23, Number 1 105
rancher-turned-vegetarian activist Howard Lyman, who compared a 
meat-eating environmentalist to a philanthropist who doesn’t give to 
charity.2
Part of this disconnect, some have theorized, relates to a view that 
places farm animals outside of nature rather than in it, as a result of 
millennia of domestication and human rather than natural selection (in 
contrast to companion animals, where domestication reduced the 
emotional space between species as animals moved “out of nature”), 
which genetic engineering has recently amplified. For instance, 
prominent Canadian environmentalist John Livingston describes 
domesticated animals as “glazed, dulled, blurred travesties of their 
once-wild ancestors.”3 Accordingly, the billions of “unnatural” beings 
raised in artificial environments are widely seen as lower animals at best, 
inanimate objects at worst, a degraded status which has pushed their rights 
out of society’s moral concern (at least beyond minimal animal welfare 
laws).  
With this in mind, there was a great deal of anticipation in the animal 
rights community surrounding Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson’s latest book, 
The Pig Who Sang to the Moon: The Emotional World of Farm Animals 
(a companion video about Masson’s research was also produced). 
Masson had first marked himself as a self-styled “ambassador” for 
animals with the book When Elephants Weep: The Emotional Lives of 
Animals.4 There, he challenged the ways that scientific rationality—and 
what he describes as a form of evolutionary determinism, where all 
animal behaviour gets attributed to unconscious species imperatives 
beyond the individual—has misguidedly denied the emotional capacity 
of non-human animals, arguing that many animals are in fact capable of 
ostensibly complex “human” emotions such as love (for each other, and 
of life), sorrow, compassion, and joy.  
Blurring the line between how and what humans and non-humans feel 
has obvious implications for how we view and conceive the rights of 
other species. Thus, animal advocates hoped that Masson could help 
make people understand that farm animals too have a capacity to feel, 
and hence should be seen as individuals with minds and emotions 
worthy of respect—rather than a soulless, indistinguishable mass that 
can be bred, crammed, mutilated, and killed at will. But convincing 
people that domesticated or “charismatic” wild animals (the primary 
subjects of When Elephants Weep) can experience emotions is 
undoubtedly an easier task than convincing them that their hamburger 
or fried chicken has a life story that is full of suffering (and a more 
popular one, reflected in the fact that Elephants was a New York Times 
best-seller). 
The Trumpeter 106
 
 
To accomplish this objective in The Pig Who Sang to the Moon, 
Masson tries to break down the “higher” and “lower” animal binary. He 
does this by examining how similar farm animals are to their “wild” 
ancestors, and how domestication—however much it may have changed 
their bodies—has not deprived farm animals of other key aspects of 
their evolutionary inheritance, including their desire to interact with the 
environment and each other the ways their ancestors did and relatives 
do. Masson’s approach is to connect stories told by people close to farm 
animals, with both sympathetic and oppositional views, together with 
discussions of evolutionary biology and animal behaviour research, 
posing many questions and reflecting on them. While some critics have 
derided his approach as being too anecdotal, speculative, and 
unscientific, Masson does not hide the fact that he is presenting 
plausible hypothesis and suggesting important areas for new research 
(and in new ways) rather than a definitive account; words such as 
seems, suggests, possibly, could, and perhaps abound. Yet though he 
frames many ideas with caution, the weight of plausible ideas fit 
together into a compelling argument. 
In sharp contrast to Livingston’s image, Masson argues that farm 
animals “have the same capacity for emotional complexity and intensity 
as did their evolutionary ancestors.”5 Throughout the book, this 
argument is set against descriptions of the abuses that farm animals 
routinely face, where the imperatives of profit maximization overwhelm 
their most elemental rights. By weaving together discussions of farm 
animals’ bio-physical impulses and their expressions of love, 
playfulness, and friendship with the relentless stress, suffering, and 
sadness they endure in confinement, the net result is to challenge the 
reader to think about both the physical and emotional brutality of 
industrial agriculture, and how this relates to our food choices and our 
relationship with other species.  
As Masson puts it: “Not what you are eating, but whom you are eating is 
the question on my lips,” and this book and the companion film provide 
highly accessible entry points for stimulating necessary discussion and 
debates on animal agriculture and environmental ethics.  
 
References 
Livingston, John. 1994. The Rogue Primate: An Exploration of Human 
Domestication. Toronto: Key Porter. 
Volume 23, Number 1 107
Lyman, Howard. 1998. Mad Cowboy: Plain Truth from the Cattle 
Rancher Who Won’t Eat Meat. New York: Scribner.   
Masson, Jeffrey Mousaieff. 1995. When Elephants Weep: The 
Emotional Lives of Animals. New York: Bantam Doubleday. 
Weis, Tony. 2005. “Meat and Social Change.” Paper presented at Two 
Days of Thinking about Animals, Brock University, February 
24–25. 
 
Notes 
                                                 
1 Weis 2005. 
2 Lyman 1989, p. 122. 
3 Livingston 1994, p. 24. 
4 Masson 1995. 
5 Masson 2004, p. 221. 
The Trumpeter 108


Review of The Pig Who Sang to the Moon: The Emotional World of Farm Animals, by Jeffrey Mousaieff Masson

Prattis, Ian

 
 
 
The Trumpeter  
ISSN: 0832-6193 
Volume 23, Number 1 (2007) 
 
 
Failsafe in Consciousness:  
Gaia, Science, and the Buddha 
 
Ian Prattis 
 
 
 
 
 
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VIan Prattis is Professor of Anthropology and Religion at Carleton University in 
Ottawa. Also a dharmacharya in the Engaged Buddhist tradition of Thich Nhat 
Hanh and author of The Essential Spiral: Ecology and Consciousness After 
9/11 published in 2002 by University Press of America.  aia  
n The Revenge of Gaia (2006) James Lovelock extends the impeccable 
ogic that produced the Gaia Hypothesis to argue that the planetary 
ontrol system, which has worked to maintain conditions suitable for 
uman life, is now working against us. The dependent variable of 
emperature rise is now a product of this control system and implies that 
he interconnecting feedback systems will intensify and quickly place 
he situation beyond human control. The evidence for this is grim. The 
emoval of the snow and ice cover from the sub-arctic tundra permits 
he heat of the sun to be absorbed by the Earth, rather than reflecting 
inety per cent of it back into space. The huge and imminent release of 
ethane gas from the exposed tundra so accelerates global warming 
hat this alone is a major tipping point. The myriad interconnecting set 
f feedback loops that constitute Gaia all amplify temperature increase 
n a non-linear manner. Hence Lovelock’s dire prediction that: “Before 
his century is over, billions of us will die, and the few breeding pairs of 
eople that survive will be in the Arctic where the climate remains 
olerable.”1
olume 23, Number 1 85
 Failsafe in Consciousness 
In The Essential Spiral I coined the phrase “Failsafe in Consciousness” 
to describe how consciousness expansion will be held in abeyance by 
human ignorance until the global ecological situation deteriorates to a 
breaking point. This will then act as a catalyst, penetrating such 
ignorance and activating consciousness so it is propelled into 
expansion, deliberation, and change. This apparently naïve view 
requires more support than I provided in the 2002 work, but I must be 
very blunt about the context of current ecological, social, and 
psychological crises.  
There is an external environmental pollution crisis on the planet 
because there is an internal pollution crisis in humankind. In addition to 
the waste from industrial pollution, there is the suffering from wars, 
atrocities, dehumanizing discriminations, and our greed and neglect of 
everything around and within us. The industrial waste and pollution is 
readily visible, yet the suffering that rests deep in our consciousness is 
much more intractable and dangerous. Furthermore, the dominant 
worldview of our global civilization sees the environment and its 
resources in terms of how it can satisfy our greed and economic self-
interest. In claiming the world in this way, the environment has become 
an extension of human egocentric needs and values—an egosphere 
rather than an ecosphere. In this egosphere, our preoccupation is that of 
consuming mindlessly in a global economy, controlled by the collective 
greed and power of some 200 giant corporations, driven by equally 
voracious shareholders. There is little regard for ecosystem balance or 
concern about the creation of increasing inequality and poverty between 
and within countries. And so we forget that we are part of an 
interconnected global system. To become ecologically literate we must 
learn to think about the ecosphere in terms of interconnectedness, 
context and process—the basic principles of all living systems. In doing 
so, we can transform the accumulated garbage of hatreds, neglect, and 
anger so that they may become the compost for the garden of the 
twenty-first century. The three main components of Failsafe in 
Consciousness are: 
1. Innate Earth Wisdom 
2. Counter Culture 
3. Tipping Points in Consciousness 
 
The Trumpeter 86 
 
 
1. Innate Earth Wisdom 
Ninety-nine per cent of our evolution as a species has been predicated 
on a hunting and gathering adaptation known as foraging—a strategy of 
adaptation that rested on sophisticated ecosystem knowledge integrated 
into harvesting patterns and social organization though spiritual 
ideology. Foragers thus interfere the least with ecosystem resilience, as 
they know it must sustain them indefinitely. The combination of low 
energy needs, efficient management of the resource base and controlled 
population size, means that they minimally disrupt other components in 
their ecosystem. The fact that this mindset prevailed for ninety-nine per 
cent of our evolution may provide some cause for hope, as the 
subliminal memories of this adaptation are stored deep in our 
consciousness. Just as Gaia is a dynamic system of information circuits 
arranged in feedback loops, so is consciousness. It is the radical 
remembering of this mindset that will activate the feedback needed to 
prevent further degradation of the global ecosystem—the Failsafe 
notion.  
 
2. Counter Culture 
For the corporate world, Paul Hawken’s 1993 book The Ecology of 
Commerce led the charge of re-evaluating commerce and redesigning 
finance capital. The design wisdom of nature is built into Hawken’s call 
for a Restorative Economy, which an increasing number of 
manufacturers are implementing. This has prompted the emergence of a 
genuine environmental capitalism as opposed to the corporate “green-
washing” that followed the 1992 Rio conference. There is an emerging 
market for sustainable energy and those companies with the foresight to 
see it will be the ones that will succeed in the second industrial 
revolution, particularly as fuel cell technology—which produces no 
emissions—is drawing considerable investment. From Gregory Bateson 
we have the critical notion of the Ecology of Ideas.2 He demonstrates 
how our modern context has rules that need changing, based on a 
critical understanding of cybernetics and ecosystems. He shows how 
ecology is a set of interconnecting feedback loops that include 
everything. When we destroy some of the interconnecting loops we 
have an ecology of ideas which reinforce other bad ideas. Bad, that is, 
for the health of the ecosystem and its components.  
Volume 23, Number 1 87
 
3. Tipping Points in Consciousness 
In popular culture, the writings of Malcolm Gladwell—bestsellers Blink 
and The Tipping Point—have caught the attention of an unlikely 
audience. Business schools and corporate boardrooms are consuming 
his notions of simplifying agendas and making positive changes 
through small intuitive actions. His startling point is that social 
epidemics can spread when actions are placed within the right context, 
through the pull of certain strategically placed connectors. He endorses 
a form of instant mindfulness and changing consciousness in the inertia 
before a novel thought. Gladwell provides for pop and business culture 
similar ideas as Bateson, just in a different language. There are many 
others doing the same on the global stage.  
There are over 40,000 citizen’s groups, NGOs and foundations in North 
America that are addressing the issues of sustainability—ecological and 
social—in a comprehensive manner, and more than 100,000 such 
groups world wide. Civil society is mobilizing for environmental, 
peace, and justice issues. The most surprising factor is that no one is in 
charge of this movement. It operates almost as a consensual anarchy. 
The groups share a basic set of fundamental understandings about the 
Earth, how it functions as an ecosphere, the necessity of equity and of 
sharing the Earth’s resources for the good of all humanity. Are these 
simple ideas enough to refocus our attention and make counter culture 
advocacy a reality for global citizens? The wide variety of 
organizations that are part of the anti-globalization movement and the 
emergence of alternative World Forums also feed off these cybernetic 
loops constituting a loosely defined counter culture. Gaia as metaphor 
was an inspiration that sped through the feedback cycles of this nascent 
movement, which objects forcibly to the effects and agendas of the 
corporate paradigm.  
Civil society is waking up, and there is light piercing through the 
shadows of corporate paradigms. There are many more inspiring groups 
and advocates for consciousness change, but the question remains: is 
there enough of a critical mass that can be identified as a tipping point 
into a new level of consciousness? I remember many years ago in an 
audience with Sai Baba, the Indian sage, hearing him say that a 
transformation in human consciousness required at least two per cent of 
the population to meditate on a daily basis. I have no idea what the 
knowledge source was for his pronouncement yet I do remember the 
“buzz” of energy in my body and mind when I heard it. So the 
identification of the many intricate and powerful feedback loops surely 
The Trumpeter 88 
 
 
takes us closer to a tipping point in global consciousness. Gaia has 
entered contemporary discourse as scientific concept, metaphor, and 
movement in consciousness change. Lovelock has demonstrated 
unequivocally where Gaia as scientific concept takes us; yet he has 
neglected to adequately examine Gaia as metaphor and movement in 
his cybernetic model. I believe these latter two components have 
sufficient interconnecting feedback loops to justify a Failsafe in 
Consciousness. Using Lovelock’s own logic, we are fast approaching a 
tipping point with respect to inner ecology, the creation of a critical 
mass of humanity with views radically different to the corporate 
paradigms that currently regulate inter-human and human-planetary 
relations. Just as the external ecology of Gaia has tipping points so must 
the internal ecology of consciousness. 
With irreversible changes in the planetary web of life, and the dramatic 
and catastrophic environmental changes that are ensuing, it appears that 
there is now only one strategy available: change the collective human 
consciousness.  
Why? So that clarity, understanding, and compassion provide the 
bedrock for human response to the impending crises. How? By entering 
into a practice of meditation and self-healing that cultivates the energy 
of mindfulness in our consciousness.  
 
The Buddha 
The Failsafe in Consciousness concept and its components all refer to 
attributes of mind. They are seeds of potential stored in our minds, 
buried under a general amnesia from which, as a global community, we 
are just beginning to awaken. To exponentially nurture these aspects of 
mind it is necessary to draw on liberating teachings about the mind. 
Thus, I take refuge in the Buddha, whose understanding of the mind 
came from his awakened consciousness. The Buddha’s teachings are 
about the mind and what to do when the mind is so overwhelmed by 
suffering that there seems to be no way out. To institute lucidity and 
compassion as the basis of action, the Buddha provides guidance with a 
consistent set of teachings, all derived from his first dharma talk on 
suffering and how to get out of suffering. Thich Nhat Hanh sees the 
doors of psychology and ecology as providing suitable openings for the 
Buddha’s teachings to penetrate more easily into the Western world, as 
the Buddha was perhaps the first ecopsychologist. In The Diamond 
Sutra, the Buddha taught that humans and nature are totally 
Volume 23, Number 1 89
interconnected and that if we want to look after humans we have to look 
after mother earth. And just as important: if we wish to take care of 
mother earth we must also take good care of ourselves. The “taking care 
of” is through meditation, the practice of mindfulness, the actualization 
of interbeing and being aware of the consequences of our actions. These 
aspects of meditation, mindfulness, interbeing, and awareness with 
respect to the earth are found in many spiritual traditions, particularly 
aboriginal ones. Yet neglect, ignorance, and exploitation of the earth are 
the present order of the day, whatever the spiritual tradition.  
Much of our present consumption fosters violence—to our bodies, to 
other people, and to the planet. If we are serious about stopping 
violence and bringing environmental degradation to a halt, we must 
change our habits of consumption. Then, by generating compassion, 
refrain from creating internal violence to our systems—and to the 
planetary systems we interconnect with. We consume much more than 
edible food. We also consume with our senses, desires, and cravings. 
This consumption then feeds our store consciousness, which “eats” 
everything we put into it. If we fill it full of toxins, violence, and other 
negative energies, then it is this accumulation in our consciousness that 
drives us. On the other hand, if we feed our store consciousness with 
mindful nutriments, then a different energy occupies the driving seat of 
our lives, one that guides us to live lives full of understanding, love, 
compassion, and joy. This is the energy of mindfulness. The Buddha’s 
teachings about nutriments provide clear guidelines for the 
consequences of consumption.  
The Buddha continually asserted that mindfulness is our protector. We 
must use it to distinguish nutriments that nourish our organism and 
spiritual well being from those that do not. By eliminating toxins from 
our sensory diet we begin to cultivate an alternative consumption based 
on patterns that enhance mindfulness and compassion. But we cannot 
see deeply into the interconnection between nutriment and 
consciousness until we come to a stop. That is the first meditative step 
before deep looking and insight help us to recognize the toxic 
nutriments that pollute our bodies and mind. We then cultivate the 
sense impression foods that nourish us in a positive and wholesome 
way. We resist by waking up, by knowing what to do and what to 
refrain from. Mindfulness and spiritual ethics of practice provide 
guidelines to restore our freedom.  
There are three major conditions that permitted the emergence of the 
Mindfulness Trainings as a set of spiritual ethics so necessary for our 
time. The first is the awakened mind of the Buddha; the second is the 
great skill of the Buddha as a teacher; the third is Thich Nhat Hanh’s 
The Trumpeter 90 
 
 
insightful rewording of the Five Wonderful Precepts of the Buddha. In 
a language that would appeal to the consciousness of the twenty-first 
century, the Buddha’s mindfulness trainings were renewed, in tune with 
modern planetary, socio-economic, and cultural developments. So when 
we study and penetrate deeply into the mindfulness trainings, we touch 
all three conditions, in particular the awakened mind of the Buddha. At 
the same time we also touch our potential to be similarly awakened—
another aspect of the Failsafe premise. With the Five Mindfulness 
Trainings the Buddha communicated in a very precise way the ethical 
and moral basis of practice; of how to be with ourselves, others, and 
with the planet and society at large. There is an energy to the trainings 
that comes directly from the awakened mind of the Buddha: an energy 
that is continued through us. Once we grasp the extraordinary qualities 
and understand the power of the energy created by the mindfulness 
trainings, then something deep and very wholesome stirs in our hearts. 
From this initial experience, the seeds of awakening are nurtured within 
consciousness and distance is created between ourselves and all 
negative actions that can harm both us and the planet.  
In the dark times facing us the Buddha’s mindfulness trainings provide 
protection. Our world needs guidelines like these to live by. Embracing 
the Buddha’s awakened mind in the trainings is taking refuge in the 
Buddha. Extending it to our society and environment is the foundation 
of Engaged Buddhism. This is a statement of practice and is our 
greatest gift to the world—the deep practice of the mindfulness 
trainings. This enables us to live authentic lives and be free, at the same 
time ensuring that a future is possible. Our practice and actualization of 
the mindfulness trainings in daily life defines us as true revolutionaries 
for the twenty-first century, for we can transform both global terror and 
environmental degradation. 
 
Conclusion 
From my own experience, I know that as a species we must learn to 
meditate, or at least a critical mass of us must—otherwise the ethical 
imperative to shift to a new consciousness of our interconnectedness 
with everything will not happen. Without this shift in consciousness, we 
eliminate one by one all of our life support systems, and we will 
become totally alienated, not just from ourselves, but from the Earth we 
live on. Our evolution and cognition are intricately interconnected with 
all that takes place within the wider ecosphere of our planet. Our 
Volume 23, Number 1 91
consciousness is not separate from it, and we have to recognize this. We 
do this by moving to a radically different perspective, first towards 
ourselves and second to the incredibly beautiful planet we live on, and 
realize that the planet is changing. We have to realize that we are part of 
a changing web of life, and are not the masters of the earth. We need to 
relate to ourselves and to the earth with a sense of wonder and 
humility—in a spiritual manner rather than an exploitative one. In this 
way our knowledge will fuel wisdom rather than create structures of 
dominance and destruction.  
 
References 
Bateson, Gregory.1972. Steps to an Ecology of Mind. New York: 
Ballantine. 
Gladwell, Malcolm. 2000. The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can 
Make a Big Difference. Boston: Little, Brown. 
———. 2005. Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking. Boston: 
Little, Brown. 
Hawken, Paul. 1993. The Ecology of Commerce: A Declaration of 
Sustainability. New York: HarperCollins. 
Lovelock, James. 2006. The Revenge of Gaia: Why the Earth is fighting 
back – and how we can still save humanity. London: Penguin. 
Prattis, Ian. 2002. The Essential Spiral. Lanham, MA: University Press 
of America. 
 
Notes 
                                                 
1 This quote is from an interview that Lovelock gave to the Independent  in February 
2006, prior to the release of The Revenge of Gaia in March. 
2 Bateson 1972. 
The Trumpeter 92 


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