The Trumpeter - Journal of Ecosophy (Athabasca University)

Caley, Michael T.

Cover and Contents

European Ecopsychology Society, Amaranda

A m a r a n d a  
 
The Journal of  
 
The European Ecopsychology Society EES ® 
 
www.ecopsychology.net  
 
Amaranda is the official journal of the European Ecopsychology Society 
and is published three times a year.  The European Ecopsychology Soci-
ety (EES) is a non-profit registered society whose aim is to be an educa-
tional, theoretical, practical, research and informational forum for all pro-
fessionals interested in ecopsychological issues. Founded in Switzerland in 2005.  
 
Italian Representative  
Marcella Danon 
"Inventare il mondo" 
Centro di Formazione e Scuola di Ecopsicologia 
Via Marconi 18, 23875 Osnago (Lc), Italy 
039 9280269, 335 6052912, 347 3381150, ecopsicologia@ecopsicologia —www.ecopsicologia.it 
 
USA Representative  and Amaranda’s 2007 Editor 
Jorge Conesa-Sevilla, Ph.D. 
Northland (The Environmental) College 
1411 Ellis Ave. 
Ashland, WI 54806-3999, USA 
(715) 682-1284, (715) 682-1226, jconesa@northland.edu —www.northland.edu/Northland 
 
 
 
 
 
 
      European Ecopsychology Society 
      Società Europea di Ecopsicologia 
      Sociedad Europea de Ecopsicologia 
      Société Européenne de Ecopsychologie 


Amaranda

Moon, Sam

The Trumpeter  
Volume 23, Number 2 (2007) 
ISSN: 0832-6193 
 
Man in the Landscape 
(for Paul Shepard)  
 
At Houghton Point I once thought 
to walk through the woods without changing them, 
impossible, but to try, 
to reduce the flattery to a minimum. 
Would the flowers show themselves? 
It was the wrong question. 
 
Or take the landscape as a whole: 
there's nothing you can do for a rock 
except at the expense of beetles and grass. 
Hills need valleys, lakes rivers, 
where does the landscape end? 
 
                   Everything 
wants to grow according to its nature. 
Every place is itself a living thing. 
Where I am I am part of the place. 
Walking through the land I am looking for the land 
where my tracks will root and grow 
behind me. 
 
 
Sam Moon 
 
The Trumpeter 4 


Man in the Landscape

Schroll, Mark A.

Wrestling with Arne Naess: A Chronicle of  Ecopsychology’s Origins

Meeker, Joseph W.

Playing with Paul

Thomson, David

The Trumpeter  
ISSN: 0832-6193 
Volume 23, Number 1 (2007) 
 
Battle of Britain 
How it is that I’m not a vegetarian 
 
David Thomson 
 
 
 
For an American in Essex, this is as far in as you can get. In the village, 
in the allotments, in my garden, in the soil. I can sense Phil somewhere 
off to my right. He’ll be doing something to his already perfect runner 
beans, his Battle of Britain hat securely affixed to his head. Teresa is off 
behind me amongst her geometrically precise raised beds.  
  
Essex is the sunny part of a cloudy nation, and the spirit of 
contradiction is manifest. If you meet Phil at the front of his house, he’ll 
be happy to tell you, perhaps in more detail than is strictly necessary, 
about chasing Rommel, desert fox and worthy opponent, across North 
Africa in the war. Phil is a cripple who drives a little-old-man golf cart 
around the village. He’s a broken warrior. Behind his house, where the 
allotments begin, however, yeoman Phil walks with hardly a limp and 
The Trumpeter 58 
 
 
puts in seven-hour stints with heavy old-fashioned tools that, now that I 
think of it, actually do look like swords beaten into ploughshares.  
  
East Anglia, east of England, east of Eden: the idea of a better garden 
lingers in the collective unconscious. Things grow, history presses in. 
The pillboxes on the rivers and tidal flats were for fighting Germans, 
but the vines and the children have taken them over. With my boys last 
year, I found a pitchfork blade six feet up in a tree, and the tree has 
engulfed it. The month before, five miles away, archeologists unearthed 
the largest horse-racing forum outside of Rome. “When in Rome,” I say 
to myself, digging into my garden. Sometimes ten or fifteen pieces of 
broken pottery come up with each shovel load, but if these are the 
Roman shards everyone else finds, I won’t know it. I’m holding out for 
gold coins, and in any case this was a rubbish tip before it was 
allotments.  
 
 
  
The true Essex oldsters are still here, even if the East Londoners have 
crowded in on top. Brian, another allotment senior, is a young man still. 
He’s had one hip replacement but when he brings his shearing clippers 
into play, nudging his hedges in the direction of topiary, his triceps 
press out sturdily against the fabric of his button-down. When he was a 
boy, a German plane went in nose-first at the back of the allotments, 
and not far away in Langham across from the Ardleigh House pub 
where the American 8th Air Force aerodrome was, Brian saw a 
Thunderbolt pilot land but be unable to get out of his burning plane. 
Volume 23, Number 1 59
Brian actually lived in the pub, which for a kid was like having a front-
row seat.  
  
Liam and I climbed into the stinging nettle back of the allotments last 
week, looking for the downed Messerschmitt. Liam can tell which ones 
sting and which don’t, and he spent his time waving the non-stingers at 
me. Or at least the ones he said were the non-stingers. 
  
Phil is roguish out front on Rectory Road, and will offer class-based 
comments to strangers. English people really are reserved, but 
sometimes the exigencies of class will bring them out of themselves, 
just as in America it is race which is likely to make street scenes 
memorable. In back, Phil is kind, and without his help my garden 
wouldn’t work at all, though Teresa says that if Phil gets his Battle of 
Britain hat on, he is likely to be more assertive. So I keep a weather eye 
on Phil, and am careful to water the marrow plants he has given me. My 
garden is a disgrace, as if a number of horticultural and aesthetic 
theories had had an accident here. 
  
 
  
In truth the garden is a peaceful space but it has also enabled me to 
extend the range of my instinct for existential crisis. My vegetarianism 
has faltered in the face of the apparent necessity to fold, spindle, and 
mutilate thousands of sentient creatures. The English word for 
plowing—harrowing—is also the word for distressing, as in “the 
harrowing of hell.”  
The Trumpeter 60 
 
 
 
The other day the stray tom who sleeps sometimes in our kitchen left 
the perfect semblance of a rabbit in the back yard—the garden, as even 
the yard is called here—four paws and two ears but no body, as if he 
were teaching the bunny how to be a Cheshire cat. Tough love. But it is 
only today, when Teresa points to where the rabbits have been grazing 
on my allotment lettuces, that I understand why the lettuces just outside 
our kitchen haven’t been touched. The tom and I are in collusion, a 
lettuce protection racket, though I meant only to stroke her soft fur and 
admire her ears, notched in battle with Mary’s cats, in the house next 
but one. 
  
Brian used to keep ferrets, and set them into the rabbit holes. Now he 
uses traps, and when he gets a rabbit he holds it dangling as 
comfortably as he would a turnip, and I don’t look too closely to see if 
it is alive. “Little bastards,” says Phil, but he says it cheerfully and 
without the animosity he reserves for life at the front of his house, and 
for rich Londoners. 
  
In a part of my allotment which I meant for low tillage, where I have 
broadcast lettuce seeds in non-rectilinear patterns and discovered too 
late that straight lines are a way of arranging information to aid the 
process of weeding, I am now performing triage on the lettuces. Instead 
of pulling the weeds I pull the lettuces and set them up elsewhere. My 
original patch has been doing a good job of subverting the monocultural 
hegemony of the lettuces. Which is to say it’s been doing a bad job of 
being an English garden. “Weeds are a social construct,” I say to 
myself. But in the high street outside the bookshop I meet the 
formidable Celia O’Donnell, and she hints at the polycultural perversity 
of weeds and their reproductive stamina and gracefully dismisses it at 
the same time. “Don’t worry about your thistles, Fat Hen, bell vines and 
Flander’s poppies,” she tells me with alarming specificity. She shakes 
my hand and hers is strong and calloused. Unlike America, England 
still has bookshops, and villagers outside them likely to have noted in 
some detail your struggle—or insufficient struggle—with weeds.  
  
Today I stand here, my Stetson angled against the sun, weeds and 
grasses around me like recovered American prairie, the gentle breeze 
tossing thousands of random seeds into neighboring allotments, and I 
feel absolution transcending my shame. “Don’t worry,” is Celia’s 
message. It’s going to be okay. 
  
But as I splice small cones of black loam topped with leggy green 
lettuces into new configurations two yards away, orange ants bleed 
Volume 23, Number 1 61
from the soil cross-sections like thin streams of lava. If you don’t look 
too closely, you might not notice the interpenetration of these ant 
structures with those in the target patch. If you don’t think too hard, you 
might avoid the implications of your incursion: hours- or days-long 
struggles between the creatures of different nests. If you don’t think at 
all, you won’t be conscious of the maimings your trowel has caused. 
It’s all a matter of perspective. We think of getting food as a struggle, 
but in this case the struggle is all on the part of the small creatures. 
They do nothing to hurt the lettuces. For me, the unharmed lettuces, 
green battle pennants on a dark but verdant field, register less as an 
oversight than an active kindness, like the solicitude of the Essex 
villagers. It might make me feel better if the ants actually 
offered to injure the lettuces, but they don’t.  
  
I used to define my vegetarianism with a kosher clarity which kept 
rennet—bits of a cow’s body—out of my cheese, and left honey for bee 
babies. But a few square meters of English garden soil offer little 
clarity. Even to get there you’ve probably crushed several animals with 
your elephant bulk, and calling them insects defers the problem rather 
than solving it. No matter how closely you look in a spadeful of soil 
there is another event horizon farther down, another cluster of animals 
interacting, smaller and smaller, apparently approaching infinity, world 
within world. The capacity of a single vegetarian to wreak havoc is 
endless. It’s true that I don’t eat meat but I think it might be time for me 
to call a spade a spade and start thinking how it is that I am not a 
vegetarian, consider more fully the extent of my non-vegetarianness. 
  
The soil conservationist Stephen Lewandowski says that Darwin 
favored his treatise on worms—it features the activities of worms in a 
few square meters of English soil—over his other published works. If 
that’s true, that would include Darwin’s preference even for his study of 
Patagonia, which tells a tale of origins and is in one sense the ground of 
being for modern science. The back garden is the final frontier of the 
unknown, deep space, wilderness.  
  
My friend John, also a war survivor, says simply, “you gotta eat.” By 
this he means something very English, that your class affinity ought to 
be the strongest expression of your being. To eat, you need a job. It 
annoys him that pubs in England have fawning monarchical fantasy 
names like “Rose and Crown” or “The Stag” (upper classes hunt stags). 
“What about ‘The 1945’?” John proposes, referring to the year 
Churchill was ousted in favor of a Labour government. 
  
The Trumpeter 62 
 
 
If a spadeful of soil from the emerald isle is a microcosm of village life, 
it does rather look like class struggle, the tool-wielding gardener fitting 
neatly into the profile of the owner of the means of production, who is 
unlikely to have the welfare of the villagers as a central concern.  
  
Do vegetarians have to eat? Possibly not. If a vegetarian is someone 
who doesn’t hurt animals in order to eat, then the vegetarian doesn’t 
have to do anything, because he or she surely does not exist. 
  
Here in the allotments, I can tell without looking that Phil is making his 
way toward me, adjusting his hat as he comes. I thrust my blade deep 
into the earth. My eyes are runny from allergies, so I can’t see things in 
great detail. With allergies, if you were crying, you might never know 
it. 
 
Volume 23, Number 1 63


Battle of Britain: How it is that I’m not a vegetarian

Gamlund, Espen

Who Has Moral Status in the Environment? A Spinozistic Answer

Boland, Daniel

 
 
The Trumpeter  
Volume 23, Number 1 (2007) 
ISSN: 0832-6193 
 
Migration Of The Monarch  
 
A September flight of butterflies— 
unsteady, quavering 
yet relentless in their goal. 
 
They are tiny flags of independence  
unfurled in brilliant unison  
or perhaps the silk 
some ancient king might have worn. 
 
They are a field of airborne oriental poppies  
now on their way 
to join some unfathomably 
intricate tapestry. 
 
A huge release  
of new souls. 
 
Daniel Boland 
 
 
Volume 23, Number 1 93


Migration Of The Monarch

 
 
TWO MOMENTS IN WINTER  
 
The lacy shadows of the sumac's branches 
in the moonlight 
spread out delicately across the new snow  
like a nervously-executed line drawing. 
 
 
II 
An austere moment of balance  
as the red sun sets  
and the winter moon rises full  
over a dusky rose skyline. 
 
 
Daniel Boland 
 
  
 
Volume 23, Number 1 94


Not a member yet

Cover and Contents

Amaranda

Man in the Landscape

Wrestling with Arne Naess: A Chronicle of Ecopsychology’s Origins

Playing with Paul

Battle of Britain: How it is that I’m not a vegetarian

Who Has Moral Status in the Environment? A Spinozistic Answer

Migration Of The Monarch

TWO MOMENTS IN WINTER

Review of The Jain Path, by Aidan Rankin, and The Essence of Shinto: Japan’s Spiritual Heart, by Motohisa Yamakage

741

1,267